EP131 – Getting Started with Marketing - Powerful Platforms - Part 3 with Ian Luckett

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we wrap up with Part 3 of our ‘Getting Started with Marketing’ in your MSP mini-series, and today we're talking about ‘powerful platforms’.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSP scale to £1M, and if already there get to £5M 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.

Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. For the last three weeks, we've been blasting out a bit of a mini-series here, which is all called Getting Started with Marketing, particularly for your MSP. Now, the reason that we've done this is because we know that this is an area where people really struggle with marketing in your MSP. How do I stand out from my competition? How do I differentiate myself? How do I get more leads and stop becoming a referral business? These are the kinds of things that we hear on a daily basis at The Growth Hub. We cover these questions and more in the last three episodes we've put together and I would urge you to go and check the last two out. In Episode 129 we talk about the ‘perfect process’, so getting together and really understanding what it is that makes marketing so simple, and yet why we make it so hard as MSP business owners. And the next show is Episode 130, where we talk about ‘magic messaging’. Now messaging is absolutely important to build that rapport, to build that trust in your business. In that episode, we went through and helped you to understand who your avatar is, what sort of language you should be using, how to put messages together, and all this kind of great stuff, it's a jam-packed show! Finally, today we're going to be talking about ‘powerful platforms’. What gets measured gets done, what platforms should we use, which ones do we use for the best reach, which ones do we use because I can't be bothered to do any marketing? This is all bringing it together in the systems...when you look these days at social media and you look at the different platforms, probably by the time that I've finished recording the show, there'll be another platform popping up! It used to be all about Twitter and Facebook, and now we've got Instagram and TikTok and all of these other platforms that are coming out and obviously the good old favorite, the steady one, LinkedIn. What's really important, particularly with the messaging as well as understanding how you're marketing and how you're going to digitally market in this new world that we live in, I suppose, is the different types of messaging you need for each platform. So, to go into LinkedIn, you're looking for something to enhance your business, whether it be your own business or whether it be the business that you work for. To go onto Facebook, you'll probably want to get away from the distractions of business and you wanna watch a cat falling off a telly or you wanna see how wonderful everyone else's holidays are! Now the messaging is very different, because if I'm purposefully going on to LinkedIn and I want to look at something to help me grow my business, for example, what will help me keep my tech stack safe & secure, I'm going to want to go and learn. Whereas with Facebook for example, if you were to do a Facebook campaign or post or anything like that, then you're going to need to interrupt because they're not going there to look for IT support. They're not going there to look for what you do. You're gonna have to kind of interrupt which is why Facebook is always a little bit more difficult. Instagram is very visual, there are some people who post quite a lot of pictures around servers and all of that kind of good stuff on Instagram, which some people love because it's very visual and they look at it, but then there are other people on TikTok, there's different platforms for different purposes. And I think at the top of the show, you need to pick the platform where your target audience is. You need to pick the platform and understand the messaging that is going to resonate, and that’s going to encourage them to take the next step. You also need to understand what analytics are available, what posts are resonating with people and what posts are not resonating with people. I always kind of repeat the story of one of my best LinkedIn posts I ever did, probably about five years ago now, where I went out for a run and I came back and I was feeling pumped up and adrenaline was running, and I took a selfie and put it out there and said, “hey, this is how I've started my Monday morning, what are you guys up to?” and obviously you get half the people going “Ohh I'm still in bed, what are you doing out there at this time of the morning” and others are going “Yeah, I've just done a run”, and it resonated because it was not just about business, it was a personal post. People were learning about me and what I did and that was interesting...so you gotta mix up the content. You've gotta mix up the messaging and you've gotta make sure that you really understand otherwise what will happen? - (and we see this an awful lot) - you'll pop along to your local marketing agency who typically don’t know anything about MSPs or how people buy from MSPs, and the journey that you need to go through and they'll say to you - “hey, yeah, no problem at all, we can do that for”- you will put some blogs out (ohh great, I hate writing blogs but thanks very much for doing that) and six months later, you'll be paying for them, I don't know anything between £500 and probably about £1,500 per month and you'll have no results. And the reason you won't have any results is you haven't listened to this podcast, and you haven't gone through the whole sales process and understood what the purpose of the top of funnel content all is about. Why the content in the middle of the funnel needs to be different, and why the content again at the bottom of the funnel needs to be different and you need to understand some of the things around that marketing and some of the things around that process that you're going to take people through...because social media is an absolute minefield, it's like shiny ball syndrome. So, when someone brings out a new PSA, I can see you all licking your lips now going “Oh my God, there's a new PSA. Do we need to go onto this one? Why is this one better than the last?”, but it can be very, very confusing, it can also be very distracting, and it can also take a long time to get the results, which is why we're gonna run through some of those systems today. So, as I mentioned to everyone, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, they're all different. And if you think about the ideal journey that you need to take them from, it's got to be getting them from a social platform and onto your website. This has got to be the journey. Once they're on the website, we wanna get them on the phone. It's as simple as that. You need to qualify them in or qualify them out. So someone seeing you on social, whatever you're doing, if you're plugging in the server on TikTok, or whether you're on holiday on Facebook or whether you're putting out a content rich credibility building post on LinkedIn, understanding what's going on there and then understanding where you want to drive them to. We get messages from people directly on LinkedIn, but we also get people who message us through the website and then, we get people who message us through emails. So it's a multi-level marketing, it's multiple audiences that you need to be building as you're moving through. But websites are a really important part of the process because this is where you build that credibility. Make sure your website is talking in the same language as your prospects do, make sure that it includes content that's interesting, that they care about, that bothers them and that covers some of the issues and challenges they are having. Use the language that they're using and that make sure that you're answering some of the questions that they're asking, it's really as simple as that. But more importantly with the website, because this is a big part of the system as well, it's got to have a really simple journey - What you want me to do next? Do you want me to hunt around for the ‘contact me’ button? Have I gotta go all the way to the ‘contact page’ and then go down there and find your form? Do I need to submit an enquiry, is there a phone number? - We've got to make it easy for our prospects. If you've got a quiz or a survey or an audit, pop it on the home page right at the top of the header - “Take our audit and work out how your maturity using your MSP”...or whatever it might be - “Click this button to book a call with one of our experts.” Make it really, really simple. Remember that everybody who's looking at your website is not the same as you. You need to make it really clear and simple and put yourself in the shoes of your buyers as well. So, once we've got your website in place and prospects have hit your site and think “wow, this is just for me, I'm gonna call you or get a form filled out and move through”, how are we connecting them with e-mail/marketing CRM? What platform are you using? You might be able to use Calendly or other platforms for booking the call, but how are you then connecting them to your CRM so you can send them a welcome e-mail sequence? Encourage them onto the e-mail list because if they're not ready to buy now, then the most important thing we can do is marinade them and we keep them nice and warm and educated so that they start to know, like and trust us, building that rapport with us, even through digital marketing, which obviously e-mail is one of those digital tools. Make sure you've got that connected properly so it sends off automations and good content. But what's really important with the e-mail CRM is that we understand how we're measuring it - who's opening up how many emails? what emails do they care about? what emails do they not care about? what are the best e-mails and who are our biggest fans, who are the people who are really watching every e-mail and consuming your content now? - thinking about it, you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of people in your e-mail list. When we boil it down, if we put one new client in every MSP that we talk to every single month, most of them will probably be overwhelmed because the structure of the business is possibly not set up in the correct way. Let’s say that your conversion rate is 50%, how many leads do you need? We're talking single figures here, right? So how many leads do you need to get to that point? If you had a properly qualified quality e-mail list, you could probably generate a bucket load of business from 50, maybe 60 - 70 leads – how do you get those people signed up on your list? What events are you going to go to? So you're going to start to get them signed up on your list and give them value based content, a newsletter for example. So understanding how you are going to use your e-mail system is key and and then the last key piece here really is around content planning and creation. There is no point boiling the ocean and producing 15 blogs and thinking that everybody just wants to read a blog. Think about the four key pillars, the four key things that your clients come towards you about. So here's the thing. At The Growth Hub, we know that most people want help with sales and marketing because that's what they think they need to grow their business. However, once we start running through some of our processes and systems and tools we soon see that there's not a lot of capacity in the business if you start to drop in a whole load of new leads. So firstly, we sort out the growth strategy...and then we can talk about sales and marketing. However, if sales and marketing is the thing that's going to make it all a bit salty and they're going to be the things that's going to make you interested, then that's the content that we need to put out there. So in your world, if it's around cybersecurity because prospects are unsafe and they're not secure and they want to be compliant or they need to be compliant cause they might be either in healthcare or legal or whatever it might be, then you gotta put content out, that talks about things that they really care about. The fact that if they come into your world and they say “yes, yes, yes, we need cyber security” and you start doing an audit and realize that all the laptops are actually broken, the network's the most unsecure thing you've ever seen in your life, and the infrastructure, is an absolute farce, then you're gonna need to work on that first before you even start thinking about what systems you're gonna need to to connect them with. So hopefully you can see kind of how we're linking this together, that what might be the initial thing that they're interested in might not be the thing you actually end up selling them. So making sure you've got your content planned and I'm going to drop a link in the show notes here of a Sales and Marketing Masterclass webinar we did a little while ago, you can click the link and then you can get access to the recording. But if you've written a blog you could quite easily record an audio message or a podcast. And you could record a little one-minute message, you could do a 10 page cheat sheet, you could do a little meme or LinkedIn post, all sorts of different things just off one idea. So what I don't want you to do is to get into content overwhelm and think you've gotta create all these pieces of content and instruct an agency to write a blog a month, blah blah blah. Because if you correctly structure the blog properly then you should be able to get three or four different pieces of content out of each blog itself anyway...so write four key blogs, with four key messages then get three points on each of those blogs, and before you know it, you've got 12+ pieces of information already! Making sure that you've got a clear content process is really important...but don't make it so complicated that you're disappearing because it's that big. So let's talk about analytics. Right, who's doing what? So every journey, every process, every system that you're using, whether it be tracking your impressions and likes, the comments and clicks and the shares on LinkedIn...that's nice and it's lovely and it strokes our ego and it makes us all feel rather good, but what I really want to know is how many people have then visited the website from there? So what does the website performance analytics look like? Have we got heat maps on there? But what I really want to know is how many people have booked a call? And then what I want to find out is all those people who booked a call, how many of them we qualified into our sales funnel and let them into our world and how many people are now going through a strategy call or a further detailed qualification process. So making sure that you're not just faffing around again at the top of the funnel, getting all excited about your likes and your impressions, because it really only matters when someone rings you up. So what does that journey look like? I just mentioned it a minute ago, you need to be able to see the posting and the analytics on who's doing what and making sure you're reviewing that weekly. Really, making sure you're putting more content out there about topics that are resonating, but also don't kill yourself with it because in the month of May, which is when we're recording this podcast right now in the UK, we’ve had three bank holidays, so it's an absolutely crazy time. People could be on holiday and and that's why there's a really good run time so that you can make sure that you've you've got enough time and enough space between campaigns and between different types of content that you've got going out...and that enables people to absorb the content as well, so make sure you're reviewing it properly. The next section I want to cover is events. Events are possibly one of the most important, powerful armouries to sit in a MSPs marketing toolkit. The more time people spend with you, the more chance they've got of buying from you. So holding events with your local Chamber of Commerce, or it could be local police station, a local local business, networking group, whatever it might be...getting a really succinct message, a keynote speaker or you could even use the four key topics you came up with in your content creation plan, those four key pillars because if that matters to your people on social and digital, then I'm sure it's gonna matter to a lot of people who are actually sitting in a room with you. Give them a little something to take away after the event and keep the message alive and keep your keynote or your conversation alive. Everyone's always looking for people, for podcasts and presentations. So get yourself those nice little succinct message and get yourself out there, get your name out there, get to be known to be as the experts in your area or niche. You can also run direct message campaigns as well via LinkedIn or Facebook – if you have a list of contacts who you might want to put a direct message campaign saying “hey, we've just written this new white paper, do you want to download our findings“ etc. To put this into a bit of context we had a client who worked with us for nearly two years now, he works with construction companies and what actually happened was a massive result and in actual fact it's funny you should be listening to this podcast right now because about four days ago he messaged me and he just signed a deal (and he's a multi 6-figure business) closing his ideal target market on £6,000 a month. We were like super pumped to hear that but the reason he did that is because #1 his sales conversion rate is ridiculously high, it's way north of 60% because he's tailoring his decks around the messaging. He's using the process, he's understood the sales journey that he's going to take people through, but more importantly, he's not gonna accept everybody into it as well because not everyone's gonna fit into his world because his business is set up to suit a certain type of businesses. Now some of you might be thinking - “Yeah, but I service every business and I'm doing all right out of it” - well, you might be and that's great, but if you want to get super relevant and you also want your clients to feel cared and cherished, then by having a niche and having a target market that's really, really clear is actually gonna mean that you're going to build more expertise in that area, you're gonna understand what's going on in their sector you can talk to them easier and resonate with their pains really simply as well. And then, you can tailor the content towards them - opinion pieces, white papers, checklists, surveys - all of this kind of good stuff, and as I say, he’s got a ridiculously high conversion rate, so he doesn't need that many people in his sales funnel. This is what I'm trying to get across, is that you don't need to have thousands and thousands of people on your e-mail list to run a 7-figure MSP. You really do not, it's just about being super targetted, super relevant and having the process in place that's going to help you automate a lot of this as well. So getting the right systems and the right message in the right platform is going to supercharge your results. I've never been a fan of scheduling tools. Why not? Well, because I've heard various people saying “ohh, it kills your reach. It doesn't do this. It doesn't do that.” People wanna keep you on the platform so if you go start posting YouTube videos on LinkedIn guess what? Your reach is gonna die because they're not gonna wanna promote you going off that platform and somewhere else. And it's kind of as simple as that, and organic, I really do believe that organic quality content posted by your team on a regular basis to keep you consistent and relevant is how to win. Yes, you could use all these scheduling tools and yes it takes a lot of the pain out of it. Does it affect your results? I don't know. I'm not really willing to risk it. I don't really know. In actual fact, no I do know, because we did test this for one of our clients and when we used one of the scheduling tools, there was a real drop in impressions. So just be careful, and what I'm saying is just test it, test it, test it, test it and just do a week of not of not using the tool and then a week of using the tool and see what the difference is. No one's gonna ring you up and say “ hey, I saw a great blog of yours and it really resonated with me” if they don't see it, right? So even if you get 50% reduction, but it saved you a bit of time, what would you rather do? Have 10 absolutely perfect prospects who you're just gonna nurture over the next few months and close them in? Or 100 people you're putting a bucket load of energy into giving them a bad message and some of them might come in, they might not even be educated and qualified enough anyway to make a decision, so I'll let you ponder with that one. But making sure you've got the right system is really important, understanding your sales metrics, how many leads do you need a week, how many new clients do you need a month? It isn't normally that many, so don't try and boil the ocean on these massive systems and big costs and having all the stuff that the marketing companies want you to have, because that's what you need to do. So actions in terms of other podcasts, as I mentioned before episode 129 was all around the ‘perfect process’, your perfect marketing process for your MSP. Last week's episode 130, which was all around that ‘magic messaging’ to make sure that you're resonating, you're really hitting the sweet spot with your messaging and your copy, and then today around the ‘powerful platforms’. And if you want to see some of this stuff in action then what you need to do is click on the link in the show notes, and we put the link in there to our recent Sales and Marketing Masterclass, (only about half an hour, 40 minutes long) but it will really help to bring it all together and really understand what we've been talking about in the last three episodes of the podcast and how we're connecting it all together and why certain things matter, and why certain things you just do not need to fill your head with. So look, I've really enjoyed putting these three shows together, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it's actually spawning me on to maybe do some more little mini-series. I'll get my brain working and see what we can come up with in the meantime. On that note, that's the end of the show, hope it's been a great value to you. As I say, we've got the last three available so go and listen to them all over again and see how you get on with that. And yeah, download the latest Sales and Marketing Masterclass. You can also pop over to mspgrowthhub.com and check out our events section and see where we'll be popping up and a on a screen near you real soon. So that's it for me today, you go and enjoy the rest of your day. Be good, take care and I look forward to connecting you soon.

So I hope you enjoyed the show, if you did, I'd love it if. You could leave a rating and review. On your favourite podcast. Form if you want to learn more about how to take your MSP to 1,000,000 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 are in the show notes. You go and enjoy the rest of your day. And I look forward to connecting with you soon.