EP163 - 5 Marketing Myths Smashed to Pieces
with Paul Green & Ian Luckett

INTRO

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we talk with the MSP Growth Hub, friend legend, the person that is Mr. Paul Green, as we smash the pieces, the five marketing myths.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1,000,000, and if already there get to 5 and go fast at the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN

So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today we've got our great friend back in the house, Mr. Green. How are you doing today?

PAUL

I'm awesome. Thank you so much for having me again.

IAN

No worries. That's absolutely brilliant, Paul. And we're going to have a bit of fun today. As usual, minimal prep, as anybody would expect. And we have no idea really where this is going to go. But we do know where this is going to go because as many of you know, we're marketing is one of the things that MSPs really struggle with quite a lot most of the time, if not all the time in every single business. So I thought I'd drag Paul in and I didn't want to do a, ohh Paul, what? How do we do this or what do we do that or what does this look like? So what I want to do is I want to, we're going to talk to Paul today and have some discussions around smashing some myths. Which will, which stop people from getting started with marketing. It stops people’s you know, it's going to help you to put a bit of a plan together so you know where do I start? Because a lot of the information we get in the growth hub is from people, okay? I don't know where to start. There's so much information. Do I join the tech tribe? Do I join you know the computer, do I come and join Paul? Do I come and join you? What is it we do? But I just don't know where to start. And when they get that brain fog, it just stops because I'm not confident to go and ask people, so we're going to smash some of those Mr. together today. Aren't we, Paul?

PAUL

Yes, we are, dad. We're going to do this.

IAN

Let's do it. Now before we go any further and just in case anybody listen to this podcast has been living under a rock or been dead for many, many years, Paul Green MSP's Marketing edge, who are you? What do you do? Who do you help and why are you so great at what you do?

PAUL

Thank you. That’s some, those are leading questions, but I like those leading questions. So yes, I'm an MSP marketing expert, I run the MSP marketing edge, which is a marketing subscription for MSPs and we give you all the answers to your marketing to make your marketing easy, quick plug. You can check out if your area is still available cause we only work with one MSP area that's at mspmarketingedge.com.

So what I do is make marketing easy. Not just the MSPs that I'm working with, but all MSPs I've been in the channel since 2016 and the problem with marketing, Ian, as you know and the thing that holds back MSPs and stops them from doing more marketing. It's actually our very first myth.

The myth is that marketing is a dark art, and it's not at all logical, and MSPs typically, who are techs who've got into the business cause they love tech and they love helping people and they love it's there's huge satisfaction, isn't there, in, in solving people's problems. It's a it's a wonderful industry. They're in for that. And the problem comes when you've done that on your own for a year and you're just a bit too busy and you take on a bit of help and you realise there's not quite enough cash for you and the help. So you think I need to do some marketing and that either happens then or it happens when you're at two staffs or three staffs. And that's the point when MSPs go and look at this marketing thing. And they realized there's so much. And you mentioned a whole bunch of communities there. And those are all great communities. The growth hub is great. All of these things, there's, there's very well, there's a few bad things within the channel, but the vast majority are great places. But the problem is everyone's got lots of opinions. There's a guy here saying doing pay per click, the adverts you do on Google, there's someone else over here saying. Search engine optimization, SEO. There's someone else here saying that you should be doing other lead generation here, there's someone saying you should be doing, they ask you answer which is a type of content market. You can literally find you could take any type of marketing and you can find someone somewhere in our little world who says you should do it and this is what makes marketing complex.

So let's buzz that first myth. Marketing is not a dark art at all. It is actually a very, very logical thing. And one of the things that I've been doing in the. What's this? This is my eighth year in the channel, so I got. I first got into the channel in 2016 after I'd run another business for 10 years, 12 years actually working with other business owners. We don't like to talk about because they're not as special as MSPs. But I spent eight years figuring out actually how to make marketing smaller. That’s the answer for you as an MSP unless you are a fifty person, 5 million turnover business, in which case yes, you need a more complex marketing answer. And let's put that to one side because that's not the majority of MSPs. If you're a 2 to 10 person business and you just want one or two more appointments a month because you know you're going to close half of those. Then marketing should be very, very simple and it can be broken down into a very very simple strategy. It can be broken down into a very simple set of tactics and most importantly, Ian and I know that you will be a big fan of this. You can get other people to do that marketing for you because if you as the MSP owner are doing your own marketing, it's an epic fail. You can hashtag that hashtag epic fail. You can you have to oversee your own marketing. You have to make sure it happens, but the actual doing the marketing and we're not talking difficult things. We're talking stuff that virtual assistants and people on Upwork and Fiverr can do for you. So yeah, that's my view is actually let's make marketing small. Let's break it down into a series of small actions. Let's turn it into a checklist, right? Wouldn't marketing be easier if it was a checklist, yeah.

IAN

Well, do you know what? That's a great point that you mentioned about that checklist because couple of things on that. Number one, I can't believe you've managed to get all the way through to two minutes, 47 seconds into this podcast before you put your first pitch in so well, Congrats. Congratulations on that. Second thing, if you are running a five and a half million pound MSP with 50 people, can you please get in touch? Because we could probably chop that workforce in half straight away. But yeah, the dark art. It's not logical, really, really interesting in this one. In the growth hub we've just, we've just started doing some implementation sessions. So people come and they bring your content and they bring you know all the other stuff that they hear and they and we help them kind of put the put it through the sausage machine on how it works and what it needs to do. And we had a call yesterday actually about 2025 guys on the call and it was really interesting. That they, they were all just come on, come on and go the call to just listen to see how it works. And I sort of thought, where is this going to go? Cause no one's got an example. So I started talking about what we were doing. I started talking about what, some of our other clients were doing. And I started talking about, you know, some of the methodologies around events and follow up and all of this sort of stuff and then when I asked them what was the big take away, they said real life's actionable examples of how this bloody stuff works. Because I'm working so hard with them at the moment on they're messaging, who they are, who their avatar is. And do you know what, Paul? We're going be talking about that for months. Because until you've done that, you can't write A blog. You can't put a meme out. You can't put anything out unless you know that key that key information, which is the first logical step, isn't it? And it's, you know, you can't just go and get a, you know, a blog off some website and then just post it out and expect people to go ohh. Ring you up. You've got to tailor it, and you've got to have that, that language and what you just mentioned there about, you know, give it off to somebody else it it's not, it isn't the MSP's owners job to do marketing. It is their job to know what good and bad marketing looks like and if someone's doing it is that the right thing to do? So it's like your sales and marketing director isn't I think so many times people get caught up with, I've got to do it and it's not my happy place because I'm a techie, so why should I be doing that? You must get a lot of that in your community, Paul.

PAUL

Ohh massively. I mean all. Almost everyone that we work with is a techie and you know you, you we as I say we give them the answers and we make it easy for them and the vast majority of that is helping them to find well either to use our teams we have an implementation team now or go and find their own people to just do it for them. And you right that it's the, the problem is you you've started a business doing what you're good at, right? This is this isn't just an MSP thing. This is this happens to architects. This happens to lawyers, right? So if you're a lawyer, God help you. If you're a lawyer, what a depressing way to spend your day, but right, right.

IAN

Exactly. Yeah.

PAUL

Look, let's just celebrate the fact that we're not lawyers, right? And this isn't a lawyers marketing podcast, right? But if you're a lawyer. So you're good at suing people and chasing ambulances. So one day you start your own legal firm. And so what you do of course is you do law stuff all day and you do the law and this is exactly the same as an MSP, as a technician who's good at tech stuff. So they start a business doing that and everyone reaches that point where actually you've got to transition from being the business to being the leader of the business and that that transition. And I know, Ian, this is this is a fundamental core of what you do in the growth hub is helping leaders turning to leaders, people who are leaders aren't leading turn into leaders, and everything else falls, falls into place, but that's a that could be a multi year transition. It's a difficult thing. You move from being a technician who's controlling their work into being someone who's leading other people and leading a business. And that's hard work, but it's the only answer. So you say you're absolutely right. You say you shouldn't be doing your marketing self, but you should be overseeing it. You know as the business owner we. Because I'm an owner of business, you're an owner of the business. So is everyone watching or listen to this, as the owner, we have to oversee everything and thetrick is overseeing the tech work but not getting dragged back into it while overseeing the marketing, the finances, the sales, the administration, the general efficiency of the business, the people all the other areas of the business but overseeing that and training ourselves up, getting training and this is why I love the growth hub. Because you guys just look at the holistically the whole business, everything in the business. And you've got to look at all of that and train yourself as a business owner to be good at that. And if we, if you would allow to sit and list the most successful MSP's that that we know and that are out there in the, in the industry and inevitably you and I would throw at a bunch of the same names, they're people who've been through this, aren't they? They're people who have transitioned from being a tech to being a leader and there's nothing to be scared of cause, actually they freed themselves from the hell of being dragged down by Oh my God. I've got to sit and put a blog on today and I've got to post my social media and I've got to do this and I've got to do that because they're actually able to take their dog for a walk, hang out with their other half for a few hours, go and have lunch with a friend, spend 3 quality hours on the business and make more profit by doing that. By working less and this is this is all of it. I love this stuff we could talk about this for hours quickly. Yes.

IAN

We could, we could talk about this for hours and it is around having that confidence and then when they start looking at, you know, the marketing thing, how's it work and. Then they start getting some interest from people and then people start warming up and then all of the, you know, one of our clients last week, it was hilarious. He put out the good old cable server photograph. The before and after a bit like the old diet photos back in the day. And literally, he had two prospects. He only just put it out to go, oh, my word look at this. And so they had two people on LinkedIn commented and ended up going is that is that bad then that your server looks like that cause our server looks like that and he's gone. Yeah, because of let's have a chat. Literally he's quoting now for two people cause he posted one that's marketing, that’s educating and that's sharing with people what good and what's bad? You know, it looks like.

PAUL

So what you've actually touched there is the second myth, which…

IAN

I know. Did you like that?

PAUL

Is that you, need you need. I did like that it was like you. You were hoping I'd pick up on that, wouldn't it?

IAN

Almost thought you planned it.

PAUL

It is. It's like I've written these in advance or something. You say you said at the beginning that you hadn't done any prep I've done all the work on this. Somebody.

The 2nd myth, of course, is that you need lots of cash to do marketing. You do not. So what you've just explained there, Ian, which in itself is not a fantastic piece of marketing because it's a bit of a tech thing of look how nice my cabinet is, but actually it sent a message and it sent a message to what happened to hit the right person at the right time with the right message, which is one of the fundamentals of getting your MSP's marketing right, you've got to let me say it again. It's so important. You've got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Now, this does not have to cost lots of cash. You need a tiny bit of resource that could be time as opposed to cash. But you don't need a lot of cash the. The big fundamental problem with marketing and MSP is that people stick with their incumbent MSP way longer than they would in any other industry. I've never known a sector where someone will say to you to your face. I really don't like my IT company. There's support levels have gone down. You know they never seem to answer the phone. I can't speak to Greg anymore. It's just not as good as it used to be. So I'm just goint to sign one more three-year contract and then I'm going to leave and you and I have both spoken to MSP's that have been the other company trying to steal them away, and they do it because they're because they don't understand tech. They come at it from a position that this is the business owner. They don't understand tech, they come at it from a position of fear and they are driven by inertia loyalty more than anything else, and inertia, loyalty is where is better the devil you know than the devil you don't. So one of the primary goals with our marketing is we've got to get the right message in front of the right place at the right time. But also we've got to build a level of trust with people. So your clients that put that server picture. That server picture might have been the trigger that got those two prospects to get in touch, but it will not be the first time that they will have seen that person. They will have been connected on LinkedIn, they will have. I bet your clients posting regularly on LinkedIn, maybe even sending out emails to them as part of an e-mail database, which is great because you if you can hit people with multiple messages delivered by multiple platforms, Yeah, big thumbs up for that. So they will have had a relationship with your clients. Now it will be a very low level relationship. They probably don't know he didn't know his name. They certainly didn't know his MSP’s name. But suddenly, for whatever reason, that picture triggered something inside of them, and it's a feeling. It's never a logical thing. It's a feeling, the feeling. Oh my goodness, my server looks like that. I should really do something about this. Which is wonderful and that your client is mopping up from all the hard work that he has done over the last X years or X months. And I bet, you know, he hasn't spent a lot of money on it, has he hasn't spent a lot of money at all, which leads on to myth number 3.

Myth number 3 is that you need to hire a marketing agency, which of course costs you a lot of money. Now let me say for the record, I am a fan of some marketing agencies. I'm not going to name names, but there are a lot of big marketing agencies in the channel and you hear good things and you hear bad things about them. There are two or three that I've got close to. I will mention wingman, run, run by our friend, Mark Coleman. Wingman is an exceptionally good agency, and we know this because we talked to mark sort of every other day, don't we? You and me and Mark and a couple of others were in a little chat group and mark is busting literally busting a gut every day to make sure that MSPs get great websites and great ways of driving traffic to those websites and so that that's an example of a great agency. There are lots of other good agencies. You can, if you're working with Ian, ask him. Just give him the name and say should I work with this agency because people like me and Ian, we hear, don't we? We hear the good and the bad. About these agencies. But here's the thing, you. If you can afford the, if you've got the cash, the spare cash, and when I say spare cash, I mean, let's say. It's $2000 a month, $3000 a month or pounds a month. If you can give that money away and get nothing back for 12 months, you wince. But it doesn't damage the business. That's when you hire a marketing agency because there are lots and lots of marketing agencies that will take your two 3000 lbs or dollars a month and you will get nothing back right that, that's the risk. That's the risk of any kind of hiring any kind of agency so you never, ever hire an agency if that two-three thousand must give a return in six months, must give a return in six months, or we're screwed. Or I'm going to have to make someone redundant. That's when you never hire a marketing agency. So my my opinion on that is very, very clear. Agencies are what you hire when you've got a glut of cash. And you want to reinvest back in the business and you pick very carefully and you agree KPIs, key performance indicators with them, but also you give them space to go and do what you need them to do. Marketing agencies need time and space. You cannot start marketing on Monday and get results on Tuesday. You can you can do it once, like once in 10 years when you get lucky, but actually, consistently, people that do this consistently, you need to give them 3-4-5-6 months to work their magic. You know, if you ask an agency to build your website and drive traffic to it. You got to work with them. If three months down the line you still haven't signed off the pages you haven't signed off the graphics you haven't signed the design, there's still no website, right? There's no point in doing advertising campaigns or SEO because there's no nothing to drive traffic to. So yeah, that's my third myth is that you need to hire a marketing agency. You don't. It's what you do when you have excess cash and you want to invest that into growing your business.

IAN

Paul, just on that one with the marketing agency, we've obviously got my own views on what this would look like but what, what would you, if someone was looking to or has or are recruiting a marketing agency, what would you consider to be the key metrics the measures of success? What would they, what would I be looking for on a monthly basis? Obviously you got a bit of set up haven’t you for, the first couple of months, but what would you be expecting them to do as an agency to drive, you know, results through their marketing?

PAUL

Yeah, that's a really good question. And do you know what? And I say this with the hindsight and benefit of I used to own a marketing agency outside of the channel and obviously now I, I, I work and talk with lots of different ones first.

IAN

I'll be good off then.

PAUL

Of all the. Yeah, the number one question I would ask, I would say to the agencies, what are you good at and what are you not good at? And I say this because. All agencies and they all offer everything right? So if I think about my marketing agency that I sold in 2016, we were really good at strategy. We were really good at inspiring business owners to do stuff. We were really good at writing things, but we were average at websites. We were average at where we were awful at search engine optimization and we were average at pay per click. So we tended to sell more of the stuff we were good at, but you know, as all good business owners do, when someone says, hey, can you do this? My answer was always yes. And then I figured out how to do it and towards the end of my ownership of. We, we, we, we sort of slowed down stopped selling the things we weren't good at because I realized actually they would be coming on profitable for us. So any agency you're working with you say to them what's your core competency, anyone that says everything, is a liar walk away right even if they're hired, even if they've got fifty staff, if they might have 20 people doing pay per click? But if the if the leaders of the business don't fundamentally love and want to invest in pay per click, it's just not going to be a core competency of the business. So you, that's the first thing I would ask and say to them be honest with me, tell me what you're good at. Tell me what your average at because you're just, I just want you to do the good stuff. And then the second thing is I would actually ask them what the KPI is and say, right, you've been doing this for some time. I, I've, I've had your credentials. I've talked to some of your other clients. You're going to build me a website. You're going to SEO it right. You understand SEO. This is my marketplace. This is how busy we are. This is were what do you expect to see when? Because the thing to remember is a marketing agency is no different to an MSP in terms of they want monthly recurring revenue, right? Yeah. They don't want a client for six months and then lose that client because actually in, the secret of a marketing agency is clients are unprofitable in the first few months because you do a massive amount of work to then to do the ongoing stuff. Kind of like if if as an MSP, if every new client you took on you did a project but didn't charge for it, so you'd lose money in the first few months, wouldn't you? But you'd make money in the and it's what we call sort front end , back end. You lose money at the front end, the back end. So marketing agencies don’t charge so much for those projects but they if, they can keep you for five years, which is insane retention for a marketing agency normal for an MSP, crazy good retention for a marketing agency, then they are very happy. So actually you would be one of their best clients if you said to them what are you good at what are you not? Good at what? When? When? What can I expect to see when and I think the Key question you asked me, was what metrics am I looking for marketing agency, this will BS you up with reports of, oh, we got 712 engagements on LinkedIn over a 16 week period. Who cares, right? All we care about is how many appointments are being set. That's the ultimate KPI, right? If I as the MSP, if I can close 50% of my sales meeting say then. And I want one new client of 20 plus users a month. Then I need 2 appointments a month. That's it, right? And when you start saying like, stuff like that to an agency, they relax. And when they relax, they do good work when you're when you're the idiot, that phones them up every three days because you've only had two posts on LinkedIn this week. Then you they don't relax, they do bad work for you. So I guess I'm saying you know what I’m saying Ian…

IAN

100 percent, 100%.

PAUL

I'm saying this for the partnership. Form a partnership. It's the same as you do with your clients, right?

IAN

Yep, Yep.

PAUL

The clients that you do the best work with you have a partnership with them, where you're both working together and it's difficult work, but you do it because the partnership produces results, right?

IAN

Exactly that exactly that. And you know and this whole thing always, it boils my blood to be honest with you, cause sometimes you kind of get to this position where they're spending all this money and they're putting the blogs out and they getting the impressions and they getting the likes and it's like no, it's like where's the middle of funnel? You know, where's the middle of funnel? How are we getting people onto the e-mail list? How they then booking the calls and that's the golden goose that you can, that you can create which is cool. Great. Thank you for that one Paul. Nailed it. As usual.

PAUL

I know. I know, right? But I've whizzed through the last two minutes.

IAN

Just did. You're so great. But anyway. Right number 4.

PAUL

Yes, number 4 is that marketing is all about the digital stuff. So we've just done it here. Haven't we talked about LinkedIn websites, SEO paper click and actually digital stuff is great. The problem with digital stuff is everyone is doing it. Everyone's on LinkedIn, everyone has a website, the MSPs that really stand out of those that do all the digital stuff, but also remember the non-digital stuff. So I have a service called the MSP Marketing Edge within the MSP marketing edge we give you a whole load of digital stuff you can do, but also a whole load of physical stuff. There's an IT services buyers guide, it's a 50 page document personalized to your MSP. And yes, you can use it digitally and you should, but you should also print it off. You give it to every prospect you take it to every networking meeting. Someone who's thinking of switching MSPs today. You give them a copy of it, and they may even flick through it, but your names on the front, as if you've written it and they'll think, oh my goodness, this person is so good at tech. They're the authority on it because they wrote the guide of how to pick a company like theirs, we have a book which is about business e-mail compromise. We have printed newsletters that you can send out every month. We have physical campaigns where you can send stuff and you put things in to make it lumpy mail and we do all of this because most MSPs don't. So the digital stuff is really important. But the offline stuff, it's hard, it's difficult, it requires money, it requires time, you have to hire people to stuff things into envelopes for you, and that's why print stuff offline stuff is the stuff that most MSPs don't do. So when someone isn't doing something, what should you do here?

IAN

You got to do it.

PAUL

You should do it. Yeah, that.

IAN

Exactly, exactly. And just on just on that point as well about the digital stuff that it's something that popped up yesterday and our scrum session we had was when you have one idea you know and about the digital the digital, you know when you get one great idea that it's something that your target market care about, this podcast by the way is going to be made into nine different pieces of content, probably minimum. It could even get out to 15 depending on how we chop it all up and cut it up and get it across. So, just because you have one idea for a blog, don't think that's just one idea and you've got to think of another idea to write a blog you know you can create a little meme. A one minute message you could talk about it. You could break it up into three points. It could be a three-point guide. It could be a PDF guide. It could be there's so many different ways you could put it in a newsletter. Put it in an e-mail, put it in a LinkedIn, put it. You know, there's so many different things you can do with just with those one idea is so you know, don't just think that you've got one idea for a piece of content and now got to think of another one, and that's got to be a blog because people consume data. We were talking about it just before we came on the call. Depending on, you know, potentially disk profiles, people will either read something or they want to watch something or they want to hear something and you need to make sure that your media is doing that and then yeah the lumpy mail, I love the whole lumpy mail thing we you know we use that as well and you're biased guy Paul is incredible. So very good very good there you go another little another little pump up there for is it was it called the marketing edge MSP, that was it.

PAUL

Mspmarketingedge.com. That's right. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

IAN

Dot com, oh you got dot com. you're welcome.

PAUL

Yeah. Also you can you can look for it in something called Google, if you've heard of that, Ian. Yeah.

IAN

Haven't no, I've no, I shall go and I'll go and I'll go and look that one up in the library now I'm showing my age. What’s number 5, Paul?

PAUL

Okay. Your 5th and final marketing myth is that you need to beat all of your competitors. Complete myth. You don't. You just need to beat a couple of your competitors so you know, MSPs, we all know there's… Well, here in the UK there's but what we reckon about 4,000 MSP something like that, the US, there's about 40,000 MSPs is an insanely busy market. We all know there's plenty of business to go around, but you don't want to be at the bottom of the market getting none of that. In most marketplaces you'll have a couple of MSPs that are doing exceptional things in marketing, they'll have salespeople all over the ground. They'll be all the networking meetings. They'll have great digital presence, amazing websites. They might be what we're calling a Super MSP super MSP. We're seeing these forming all over the world with lots of MSPs merging together and they become dominating. You don't have to be scared of these. You don't have to be the best marketer. You just have to be slightly better than some of your competitors. Some of the things we've talked about today, a great website, a daily presence on LinkedIn, sending out e-mail newsletters, maybe some SEO or some paper click. I say maybe because that's not right for most MSPs, but doing print campaigns where you send stuff out. That in itself is probably more regular marketing than 80% of your competitors. And what I always say to all MSPs everywhere is the trick is not to look at marketing as a series of one off activities. Doing a campaign now for three weeks, then doing nothing until September, is the worst kind of marketing you could do. You'd almost be better to do nothing. The very best thing is to turn your marketing into a system to every day we’re doing something every day or or every day we're adding something to social media, every week we're adding a new blog article onto our website. We're sending out an e-mail every month. We're sending out a printed newsletter to our Dream 100, our top 100 prospects that we most want to do with that kind of system, where you're doing daily, weekly and monthly activity, that is the best kind of marketing cause if you do that, systematically, forever. So until you sell the business. Then you will be. You will, you'd be surprised how much better than your competitors will be. And you we you see your competitor running a campaign. Or advertising at the local Sports Club and you and you fills you with paranoia, fear and you're like, ohh, no. Yeah, they've spent £10,000 sponsoring the local rubbish football team and having their logo on it. Ignore it. It's a distraction. Ignore it. Forget that they will never win with a big grand thing like that. Or hiring a box or putting an advert in a magazine. What wins is doing small amounts of marketing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And that's my final word.

IAN

And when you. I'm sure it won't be, but when you look at it. One client, new client a month will miraculously transform an MSP one new client every two months will make a significant difference. How many leads do you need for that? You don't need hundreds and thousands of leads. You just need a couple of high quality conversations. Maybe some local events you know, as Paul was saying, you know that experts guy. How are you proving that you're the expert, educate through your content. Please educate. Just people don't know what an MSP is, right. So we can we don't use that word outside of these four walls. But you know, educate why they need to have, you know, the reliable, secure, safe technology that you guys that you guys provide and yeah, don't try and boil the ocean and flick back to number, flick back to number 1 Paul. Since the pandemic's been a bit of a funny old place, isn't it? The world you know there's always something going on, isn't there? There's either.

PAUL

Recession…

IAN

Financial crisis or trouble in war and anything like that. What's your view in 2024, on what type of content and what type of buying patterns do you think people, they're going to need to adjust their marketing to for this year. What do what do you think's going to be different, if anything?

PAUL

It's a really good question and I think 80% of it is exactly the same you know, so you know I always think the simplest thing is the pandemic was an exceptional event because it changed behaviours, changed behaviour. And it has left a lasting legacy, but recession, economic woes, you know, like, dare I say, even wars. As long as you're not your country's not involved in a war. They're all they're horrible things, but they're distractions and you know, I try not to read the news because it's depressing. I say this is someone who used to be a news reader on the radio. Which is insane. And my life quality is so much better now cause I don't have to wade through all of that. But I think 80% of this year 2024 is just keep doing what you're doing. There is a bit of a change which is AI. And I think we cannot, you know, if you've used we, I subscribe to ChatGPT 4. So I've got like the Pro subscription because I just want to see what it's capable of and it's not quite there yet, but I say that with a big massive but it's not far off. So for example I use ChatGPT all the time to generate images and as long as there's no text in the image. It's fine right second. You put text in it does weird things with the spelling. But they'll fix that at some point, right? They're probably even fix it. We've recorded this a couple of weeks in advance. They probably already fixed that cause it's just, but isn't it? And you can, you know, use it to generate. I don't generate content for our clients, but I'll use it to generate content for our own marketing and just for ideas. And you still have to edit it. It's not quite good enough, but we we're getting to the point where it's you know, it's getting better almost every week and I think the, the, the, the smart MSP doesn't give it all the worst thing you can do is give it all over to AI. That's like giving it over to a chess computer right there. There's no one thinking and looking at it, they're not understanding your target client. They're not understanding what you sell and why you. Sell it and how and why? People buy it, but I think the smart MSPs are just as all the tech tools are integrating AI. You know Microsoft is putting copilot across everything because it's a way of just making things a bit easier. And I think AI is just going to make your marketing a bit easier, like something like image generation is so, so easy to get really high quality images through AI and they look AI driven, but is that any worse than getting a stock image and putting some text on it? I don't think it is, I really don't think it is.

IAN

It's just about stopping the old, isn't it?

PAUL

Exactly. So I think if you can use AI to help you be more productive with your marketing, that's a really, really great thing. But big caveat today and this may be different in 10 years time, but today you cannot just hand all of your AI all of your marketing to AI, I know of an MSP who's using AI to generate hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blog articles for his website. And for SEO purposes and it makes me just want to shrink down and hide when I hear that because that that's to me, I'm hearing the same thing as the guys 10 years ago. That said, ohh yeah yeah we've we've got some link farms and if you remember this, Ian, but ten years ago link farms were the big things where you could pay someone $10 and they would set up 1000 back links to your website. So your website, jumped up in search engine results. Until Google introduced, I think was either the panda or the Penguin Update which was exactly aimed at stopping that behaviour and anytime you're doing something to game Google, it's going to get reversed at some point because Google has more smart engineers than we have, you know, so I think using AI as an assistant rather than giving it responsibilities, the thing that I think. This year in is the big, big change, but also using AI, talking about AI with prospects the ordinary business owner. I've just, I've just thrown out there ChatGPT, Copilot, GPT 4 right concepts that the vast majority of ordinary people do not understand. And that's actually an opportunity for MSPs to talk about AI. So you may not really support AI you do because it's part of 365 and it's part of the tools you use but you’re not an AI expert, but compared to ordinary business owners, you are so actually using AI as a tool and talking about AI, doing webinars, doing lunch and learns, educating your audience about AI. They will naturally gravitate towards you when you explain something they don't understand in a way that's easy for them.

IAN

Brilliant. Brilliant stuff, Paul as usual. It's amazing talking to you. It's been great fun. A really good giggle bucket load of information and a bucket load of value. Dare I say it, would you like to let everybody know how they get in contact with you if they don't already know who you are, what you do and who you help.

PAUL

Yeah, sure. So the MSP marketing edge is place to reach me. I have another website, it's Paul Greens mspmarketing.com, so there's S in there, Paul Greens mspmarketing.com and on the contact page you can find my LinkedIn and my e-mail address. You can e-mail me. I would love to hear from you details and my podcasts on there as well, Paul Greens MSP marketing podcast come to every Tuesday on your favorite podcast platform and YouTube. And yes, in fact Ian, it's about when was the last time you were on. We need to get you back on again soon.

IAN

I yeah, we do. I'm just going to go and get a coffee, while you finish off.

PAUL

I'm done. I'm done.

IAN

Brilliant stuff, Paul. It's been a pleasure as usual wishing you and your business all the success for 2024 mate and long may it continue and we'll help together to work with all these MSPs. So thanks again thanks for your time. I'll catch up with you soon cheers.

PAUL

Cheers.

OUTRO

So I hope you enjoyed the show if you did, I'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to know more about how to take your MSP to a million or if you're already there go faster. Then come and join Stuart Warwick and myself in the scale with confidence Facebook group the link is in the show notes. You go enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to connecting with you soon.