EP209 – How to Create Scroll Stopping Content with Nigel Moore from the Tech Tribe

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we are talking to Nigel Moore about how to get consistent with your content.

INTRO: Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. The only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million 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 day, good afternoon, I think, and good evening, whatever it might be. In today's show, welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today we have the man, the myth, the legend, the leader of the tech tribe all the way down in Australia. Good morning, evening to you, Nigel. How are you doing today?

NIGEL: G'day. I am doing good. Thank you. I'm doing good. I've got to keep up appearances. Although now that you've handed me up as them, whatever, now I'm going to have to try and show up with some wisdom on this thing.

IAN: Well, I was talking to one of our clients yesterday and I said, I've got a podcast in the morning with Nigel and they said the man, the myth, the legend. I went, let's just use it. Let's just go with it.

NIGEL: So I'm just a weird guy that sits behind a computer creating things and nd yeah.

IAN: We'll get some AI capes or some tech tribe capes. That's probably one of the, one of the pieces of the...

NIGEL: Funny enough, we just had our first conference over in Las Vegas, three weeks ago, whatever it was. And I originally wasn't able to actually make the conference. And so someone came up with the idea of sending Nigel Wiggs over there. So these weeks, black hats and Hair out. Oh, that would've been, I found a place and sent out like 20 of them over there and then I ended up being able to make it now and we had some family stuff going on. I was able to make it. So I turn up and there's all these people wearing these Nigel wigs walking around. No way. It wasn't the cape, it was the wig and the hat. Which was awesome.

IAN: You were lucky. You're lucky you didn't get elected as president.

NIGEL: Oh my goodness. Jeez. Someone actually wanted said something like that. And I'm like, politics is the last thing you'll see me. And that's the last arena you'll ever find me.

IAN: Absolutely. And a very good choice at that. Anyway, today we're going to be talking about the subject of Content creation and being consistency. Cause we know that is a major issue for MSPs. Generally, as we know, kind of techie business owners, and we asked them to be a bit inspiring and a bit out there and to do some great stuff. And Nigel has just actually been running through a video just before this show. On their growably platform, which they've got within the Tech Tribe, which we'll talk on, talk about a little bit later on in the show. So I thought I should dive into Nigel's amazing marketing brain around MSP marketing and pick the bits out that we want for the podcast to help you be consistent and help you create great content that resonates, educates and drives new leads. But unless, andnd I think there's probably might only be like one or two people who are listening to this podcast of like 400 downloads a week. And there's those two people don't know who you are Nigel.

NIGEL: Come on now.

IAN: Look, we just got to do it as part of the protocol as part of the as part of the process. Can you please explain to our listeners who are you, what you do and who do you help?

NIGEL: All right. I'll be quick. My name is Nigel Moore. I founded the Tech Tribe, which is a community of MSPs that we help and serve all around the world with all sorts of different things like marketing and sales content and training and education and a community. We've got about four and a half thousand MSPs in there around the world now. And our job is to just help them. That's all it is. And that's as simple as it is. One of the features that we give all of our members in the Tech Tribe is growably, which you spoke about before, which is a, marketing and sales automation platform for MSPs that's got landing pages and email marketing and sales CRM and all that sort of stuff in it as well.

IAN: Brilliant stuff. Brilliant. We're going to get straight into this now. Why do MSPs because, you're a former MSP recovering former MSP. I think that's one of the things Ben Spector says, which I just find hilarious all the time. I like that. Why do MSPs find it so hard to create content? Brilliant, cause the content, let's put in a bit of context around this. The content is the lubrication that keeps people connected to you, whether they're going to buy from you or not over the next one, two, three years until they're ready to buy. And if you're not putting out educational content, value based content that people care about and that people are interested in. They're never going to phone you up and say, hey, I saw that blog, hey, I saw that video, hey, I saw you at that event sort of thing. So why is this top of the hour? Why is this such a hard thing for MSPs to get their heads?

NIGEL: We operate in what we call the nimble MSP space, which is a, my word for the small MSPs. So we like to serve the small MSPs, which is anyone up to 20 to 30 staff. And in that space there, if you're a, you're typically the founder or the owner of the MSP even the, all the way down to one human bands, and holy moly, there's a lot of things to do to run an MSP that creating marketing content is like the four, 4, 000, 654 thing on the list, right? Like it's always, and it's just a matter of priorities in there. And so I get that like crazy. When you're a small MSP and you don't have the resources to build a dedicated content team or a marketing team, you struggle, you absolutely struggle. But so that's one of the main ones is people are just so darn busy. You've got cyber security issues happening all day, late every day. And you've got clients ringing up about this and that and all sorts of stuff. The second one though that's one of the bigger challenges is that people like MSPs, especially we're introverted nerds. We're fearful of putting ourself out there into the world. And marketing really is putting ourself out there into the world, creating content is sitting down and putting our views and our opinions and our thoughts and ourselves out there into the world. And for introverted geeks, that's hard, that's bloody hard. And so that's another one in there. I think the two of those two combined together just make this perfect storm that makes content. Especially if you're taking a content approach to your marketing strategy, it just makes it very incredibly hard for that nimble MSP to do. So I get it. I was in that space for many years and to a degree, like I'm still in the space. I'm a founder of a small startup where we're a small startup still. And it's hard to create content out there the way I'm sure we're going to get into some of the how's later on, but there's a few ways to solve that out there. And there's more and more ways popping up that help you solve getting from zero to something. The key is getting from zero to something that's the hardest leap of all. If you can get from, if you're doing nothing at all, the hardest thing is going, all right, what am I going to pick? First. And what am I going to become consistent that first, whether it's a blog or an email newsletter or a videos on LinkedIn or even LinkedIn prospect, or whatever the heck it happens to be. It doesn't matter what the methodology is. It's getting that first marketing tactic up and running and getting consistent at it. That is by far the hardest part of all. Once you've got them from zero to one, it's much easier to go from one to two to three to four to five different things and maintaining that consistency, but the hardest part is always zero to one I find with everybody.

IAN: Let's got a great question here. So let's not worry too much about the mechanics of what sort of, piece of content it is, whether it's, you just have to blog a video or white paper or whatever it might be. How do MSPs think about the first piece of content that someone's going to care about? What does that, cause that's the blocker, isn't it? What am I going to write about? Who cares about this sort of stuff? How do we overcome that? How do we find that first thing that somebody finds it?

NIGEL: Listen to your help desk. That's the easiest.

IAN: Oh, straight into that one. Well done.

NIGEL: What's the Marcus Sheridan, right? That wrote that book. They ask you answer about his marketing strategy to just turning every question that you ever get asked into some sort of marketing asset. And it's such an amazing strategy and easy to use strategy. And I know when I had my MSP, this is marketing to internal clients is that anytime a client would ask us a question that we could. We had any sense of that another client would ask us the same question, we'd go and record a video for it so that we could just send them the video the next time around rather than having to go and create that piece of content again. And we didn't do heaps of it, but we started that process as I was exiting out of my MSP, we were just starting to get the balls rolling on that and it was working really well. And so the biggest thing that I was looking for, like people go out and try and create all these elaborate marketing campaigns around all these crazy, fancy ideas that they've got that they came up with while they were sitting on the lounge at night watching TV. The reality is 90 percent of that is crap. What you really need to be marketing about is the pain points that your clients have. And the best way to find the pain points that your clients have is to listen to them. Listen to them ask, what's popping up on your help desk. What's popping up in the quarterly business reviews. When you're having chats with clients and you're talking about their business level pain points, what are they complaining about? What are they struggling with? And start to create or talk to content about that. And content doesn't have to be fancy, big white papers that are a hundred page bloody things and books and all this stuff. It can simply be a, you talking to a a camera about. An approach to solving that particular problem or a way to think about that particular problem. And I've seen in the UK, I'm seeing a bunch of you, you guys over there that are doing that and following that approach or not a bunch, but at least a few that are doing it really well. And they're being consistent with those short, sharp one, two, three, four minute videos. And they're getting them out and it's a great way to get started. It's a great way to get, start to get confident on a camera as well, which is a highly important skill or highly valuable skill in the marketing space is being confident, being able to talk in a one to many format and scenario like this.

IAN: Absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. And what a great simple answer as well. So within the Tech Tribe, you are, as you say, you've got thousands of MSPs there, massive lead and focus on the marketing side of things. What are you hearing is working for formats of content you mentioned there, just don't write a 100 page white paper. No one's got time, our attention span as humans is going down and down and down, right the way down. So what are you, okay. So here's let me rewind a minute. I'm doing a Nigel Moore, let me rewind.

So there's not one piece of content that you're going to put out there that someone's going to look at and go, I need to buy from him. It's an ecosystem. We need to create lots of content over a long period of time that's varied in reading, watching, listening, all of this type of stuff. Don't get too overwhelmed with that, but there's not, you're not going to put one thing out. So I heard a great thing the other day that when you're on LinkedIn or Facebook, you're renting their platform and you need them to go and consume more. So spend more time on your content, on your blog, on your video, which is all hosted on your website. What are you hearing that the members of the tech tribe are using in terms of format for content. That's resonating and popping quite well at the minute.

NIGEL: Videos are working really well. So I've just mentioned that one, but you set that aside the, you hear the old school term lead magnets still everywhere, all around the place. Lead magnets being anything that is some sort of tangible asset that attracts a lead. And the ones that I'm seeing the most traction out there are things like guides, like cybersecurity guides or cheat sheets or checklists for things like new client onboarding checklist or Microsoft 365 security poster checklist, or those sorts of things that can be wildly helpful to any small business out there wondering about how to deal with that particular problem in their business. Again, look to your client like your help desk issues that are coming through and think, what are some guides I could create for my current clients that, that could be helpful to help them navigate the world of multi factor authentication and why it's important or password managers and why they're important or phishing and how it works and all of those sorts of things and just creating basic checklists, cheat sheets, guides, 5 pages, 6 pages, 8 pages. They don't have to be crazy, even videos or infographics. They can be very simple things. And there is so much amazing so many amazing freelancers that you can get access to very easily on places like Upwork.com that can just help create this stuff like a fire hose for you if you really want to. There's also platforms like, like in the Tech Tribe, I'm going to have a shameless plug in here, we create a marketing pack for our members every single month. We just got social media posts and blog posts and what else do we put? I printed newsletters in there, printed newsletters, a great one to go on and give to people. I don't have an example on my desk at the moment. Yeah, we should have but those sort of things. And because if we go all the way back to that, what's the biggest pain point that stops people from doing it as the time. And so we can say, hey, go and create printed newsletters and go and create blog posts and grow and create all this stuff. And there's still yeah, but it's still 4, 362, 000 down on my check down on my to do list that's sitting in that spot. And so my encouragement there is go and leverage the MSP content platforms that are out there. Now there's some free stuff that come from a lot of vendors out there. So some of the large vendors that are serving the MSP space have marketing portals in there where you can grab tons of marketing collateral and rebrand it very easily, the downside is a lot of those large vendors don't create amazing quality stuff because they just go and hire a marketing intern that just came out of university that doesn't really understand marketing didn't just give them the job to create stuff, they don't really put a proper thing on it. So you've got to separate the wheat from the chaff if you go through that process, but there is some great stuff out there that you get for free from your vendors. So go and check with all your vendors, what they've got and just work with that. Otherwise there's platforms like can I mention some of the platforms you've got Paul Green over in the UK, you've got Tahir over at MSP camp over in the U S that create higher quality content for MSPs. And they do it on a monthly basis. They're very cheap platforms. And that's another great way just to get access to some basic zero to one content stuff to get you started so that you can start posting stuff out there. My biggest encouragement for every MSP that's going down those routes though, is again, you're a busy MSP owner with a hundred million things on your plate or 4 million things on your plate. The best thing you can do in those instances is hire a very part time marketing intern. That's going to go and do that work for you and give them a spend an hour, maybe two hours, giving them a checklist. And giving them access to the marketing pack that you get access to every month. And just saying each month, all I want you to do is bill me however many hours it takes and go and just post all this stuff on our social medias and send the emails and upload the blogs and do all whatever it happens to be in there. Because if you in, I'm going to say in 95 percent of cases, if it's going to be left up to the MSP owner, I ain't going to get done in there. And you can find some amazing marketing interns for. For 10 an hour that they love doing that sort of work out there and take it off your plate. So you can focus on a couple of 100 per hour of work that you really need to be focusing on.

IAN: Let's overcome a fear at the minute. We know that many prospects of MSPs, they don't know what they don't know. Okay. So they're scared of moving. They're scared of what does good and bad, Service look like what does good and bad security look like support etc. So our job as MSP is to educate and you can pretty much tell them exactly what you're going to do apart from the SOP because they could go and get that from everywhere else and people buy from people. So what a lot of MSPs we find get fearful about is, oh, yeah, but if I tell them everything, then they're not going to come and buy from me, which is absolute, rubbish because they need someone to help implement. So how do we turn an idea into an educational piece of content where we just need them to say, wow, I need what they do. Let me move them in the sales process.

NIGEL: One of my favorite positioning tools in that specific thing is when you're in a sales scenario, say you're out bidding on an MSP an MSP deal for a prospect who's looking for a new IT provider because they're sick to death of their current one, for whatever reason, speed cost, whatever it happens to be, they've lost the trust. One of my favorite things is that, what it's like, they might go out to market, they might get two or three MSPs that they ask for quotes on obviously get the quote get your pricing and do your discovery and get through all that process as quick as you possibly can, because there's never like they're very hot prospect at that point in time. But then what normally happens is they've got these two or three or four or five. Proposals in their hand. And most MSPs then go into that, oh crap. Now I've got to follow them up. And so there's two camps that happen there in MSPs. The first camp, send it to them and then just leave it. And then they think there's no follow-up involved and they just go,ohh they never got back to me. So they're not interested, the reality is that we're probably just busy as well, because they've got 4 million things on their to do list. And a few follow-ups never hurt. But then there's the second people that follow up like the desperate, Partner, ex wife or ex husband, right? And they're going, have you checked my email yet? I just want to check. And they're ringing every day and they're sounding desperate and nothing turns off anybody more than sounding desperate. And so one of my favorite positioning tools in that thing is the anti-sales follow up piece, which is instead of being that person that's chasing up and sounding like the desperate ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, you're you go and send them a little piece that says, Hey, I know that you're in this phase where you've got a tough decision to make and you're, you've got all these, you're not sure whether you're going to make the right decision or whatnot. So instead of being the, everybody else that's going to be chasing you up and just wanting the deal, here's a little asset that just gives you the nine things to make sure that you consider when you're picking a new IT provider or the 10 things that you should consider when you're picking a new IT provider. Obviously you want to make sure that the 10 things that you're writing there are things that you do, whether like a 24 by seven support or phone calls answered by a tech in 60 seconds or less, or whatever it happens to be, you've got to make sure that you do those things. But just that as a positioning tool is a great way to be able to go and speed up that sales process and not, and create some great fast, easy content, like that can just be a one or two pager can be branded very well. As you, you get a brand, get your graphic designer to throw it together in a nice little thing and send that over as an educational piece, rather than being that slimy, slicky, desperate sales follow up, be the anti sales follow up and educate them through the process, help them make a better decision. And by helping them make the better decision there, that's going to elevate you as the person they're going to pick through that process.

IAN: So one of the things that we hear a lot of the time is the most powerful tools that we get. And I know that you've got this in the Tech Tribe as well is the buyer's guide is educating the buyer on what poor it looks like. Cause they're scared of moving, right? Cause it's difficult, it's clunky and they don't know what good it looks like. So if you educate them in how they feel and how it looks when it's bad and then how they feel and how it looks, what you're going to propose, then they're going to go. Company A is not doing that and company B is not doing this. And how does this work and how does that work? And you're educated. It's exactly what Nigel says. You're educating them. And that's we hear that all the time that we've given them a buyer's guide and they go, wow, I didn't know that's what it was.

NIGEL: Super powerful. And there's a bunch of platforms out there. Like those ones we mentioned before that have Templateable buyers guides in there, ready for you to go, ready for you to knock out without having to put it together. And what, one of the few points that I see MSP struggle with that point on is when you're talking about what are our points of difference or what do we do better or whatever you want to pitch it as, is that they sit there and go, but in their own heads, they're still in that mindset of, oh, but we just do IT. I don't do anything different to everybody else. When in reality, what they don't realize is that, that when you look out there, there are still so many trunk slamming sharks out there that have delivering a horribly bad service to their clients. And the MSPs that are worried about that they're not doing anything good. They're typically the ones that are doing the good job. They're just too timid to own it and to live it. And so don't be fearful that you're not doing better than others. There's hundreds of millions probably of businesses out in the world, or at least hundreds of thousands or millions of businesses out in the world that are getting such crap service from their existing IT company that just giving them, you Faster support, more personalized support is going to change their world. And that's not much, right? It's going to change their world.

IAN: Exactly. Just before last point, just before we start to wrap up, Nigel is I want to talk about the importance of tailoring the content, tailoring it to your niche. Your niche, whatever you want to call it, your specialism to make it stand out more in the marketplace. So by now, if you're still listening to this podcast, you would have got an idea, you'll know how to get started. You've got some ideas on what to do and how to find those pieces of content. How do we make it stand out so that it pops on the feed and it really resonates. And when people, when your potential prospects read it, they go.

NIGEL: Yeah, that's like it's the whole thing with marketing to a broad market, versus marketing to an individual person. And the analogy that I love to with that one is that you've got to, let's say your prospect is walking into a, like a conference or whatever, and they walk into this room and they walk into the vendor hall and they just see all these vendors and all these vendors have got these loud signs and they're all like, like bowls out the front of lollies, like trying to entice people over and they're like, holy moly, like all of these people want my attention and I don't know what they're all like, they're all trying to have a broad market and they're going, Oh crap but yeah, Then someone just walks slowly up behind them and just whispers in their ear. Hey, I hear you're struggling with X. Would you like me to solve it? Like it's so much easier for them to turn around and go, oh yeah, hang on. Now I'm ready to have a conversation with someone that's just whispered in my ear. Exactly what I'm talking about versus seeing all this broad based marketing out there. And so that's the broad 20, 000 foot analogy that works really well is you want to be the person that's whispering in the ear that their pain points to them, not the one that's standing out the front with a loud sign like Coca Cola, just trying to be trying to do branding marketing, branding works in business, but at a certain point, and most in the MSP space and not at that point, like you're going to have budgets of the Coca Cola's and the MX's to be able to go and do branding. You want to be the person that's whispering those specific things in their ear. And there's lots of variables that come into how to do that successfully. A lot of it comes down to. Who are you actually delivering your marketing to? Have you curated your list of people that you're delivering your marketing to? Have you got an email list or a direct mail list or whatever it happens to be? And have you scrubbed and built and created and formed that list based on your exact ideal client profile? Who's the person that you're exactly trying to target and. What is the exact pain points that you're trying to target for them. And if you're really narrowing down your ICP or ideal client profile and then building your marketing. So it's really talking just to those pain points, not saying, hey, we do business it cause every man and their dog does business it like we do business it for architectural firms in New York city. And like the deep you can go on those niche points are better. Now I'm not saying that niching down to a particular vertical don't get me wrong. It's not something you have to do and there's pros and cons to it out there. But when you're doing my favorite approaches, MSPs that work with three, four, five different verticals and then, but then they tailor their marketing campaign to the particular vertical. So if you're, if you work with architecture firms, for instance, you go and do your direct mail pieces. And on the first one, it says, hey, I could like, if you're doing one around. Cable monster which is one of the campaigns that we've got, then you might say, is your architectural firm struggling with the cable monster on your piece? And you might send the exact same piece to lawyers that says, is your legal firm struggling with the cable monster in there? And as by sending it out, if the person gets that in the hand, instead of just, seeing it as a generic piece of marketing, they're going, oh crap, these guys, no architecture firms, these guys, no, no legal firms, whatever it happens to be. And it's sometimes it's just as simple as just changing the two words on them on a campaign, just to make it so that it's whispering to the right person, not screaming to everybody.

IAN: And to remember as well is that a niche in, a niche target market and an ideal customer profile, you can have many because the niche is the marketing campaign, remember Resonate, get them to pick the phone up, have a call with them. Serve them everything that you want to serve them. But, and you can do that with three or four different people, but just don't do it to all of them at once. Correct. Say this is more expensive. Yeah, that's right. This is your marketing. It still works.

NIGEL: There's still many MSPs being very successful using things like direct mail, where they're just being generic and they're not picking a niche to focus their direct mail things on, but you pour fuel onto your results when you do start to narrow them down to the niches, whether it's A niche of a vertical like accountants or lawyers or doctors, or a niche of a job title, like CEO or CFO or COO or a niche of a location, like the boroughs of New York city or whatever it happens to be like one particular borough in New York city or whatever it happens to be. Sorry, I was speaking to a UK audience here. So one particular regional area in the UK. So there's many different areas that you can niche your marketing down into as well. It doesn't have to just be specific to a vertical, like an industry vertical out there.

IAN: Nigel being a brilliant show. We didn't really know where this was going to go about an hour ago. Now we know where it's gone and we've created a great show about content, which is absolutely fine. We love the Tech Tribe. We love everything you're doing. So you just fill your boots with a shameless plug, yeah!

NIGEL: Thank you. These two are, I don't like plugging our own stuff gone shy.

IAN: No. Yeah,

NIGEL: Because we never do the funny, the cool thing is that like I operate the tech drive from this philosophy that we need to create a product or, and a service that is so darn amazing. There's, this is based on an old Walt Disney quote and Walt Disney said something like, and I'm going to butcher the quote, but it's something like. You in businesses, you create a product that's so darn awesome that your customers can't help but tell their friends about you. And in the tech drive, I've taken that on since the day we started and I've increased a little bit. My mantra in the tech job is that we need to every day be creating a product and a service that is so darn valuable that our members feel guilty if they don't tell their friends about us. And that's what happens. And so we don't actually do a lot of marketing and a lot of marketing. Promoting of our own product. Our members do it for us. And we get five to 10 new members a day, every day. And we've grown since every single month, we've got bigger since January 2017, because of that approach. So I don't actually don't have an elevator ready to go. If you want to try out the tech tribe, head to the techtribe.com it's the thing I call it lately is the most stupidly priced MSP program in the world. Cause I keep getting kicked up the butt that I need to increase the pricing, including from our clients that tell me that they want to increase what they pay us because they feel guilty that they're paying too little, but it's everything's at the tech tribe.com. You can go and find it out there and maybe we'll see you in there one day.

IAN: Brilliant. Look thank you for your time today. With our clients before, and also with this great podcast which I think we just hit some really great points and resonated on some support there for the MSPs all of us here at the growth hub continue to love to work with our clients who are working with the tech tribe and you, Nigel, wish you all the greatest success over the next 12 months and beyond. Thanks again, and look forward to catching up with you soon, mate. All right. Thank you.

NIGEL: Thanks for having me on.

IAN: No problem. See you soon.

NIGEL: Bye.

OUTRO: Oh, but one last thing, just before you shoot off. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage and align your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple, just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating, review on Spotify or iTunes or your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best now.