63 - MSP Marketing Masterclass

Speaker A: This person just graduated from Marketing University. So we're going to bring them in and we want them to come up with a marketing strategy, influence all the 40 year olds that they're working with even though they're 21. Um, we want them to then write all the content. We want them to create video content. Oh, could you read these 10 books about marketing and absorb those? Oh, and also can you do some internal cons? And um, it's the analogy I always give for that is that's like hiring a level one tech and saying, oh, um, you know, here's the level three tech work and the level two tech work. And can you do all of it? Because, uh, you just finished your Microsoft course, right? So you must know what you're doing.

Speaker B: Welcome to Insights as a service. My name is Brendan Richie. I'm the Chief Customer Officer at Lightwire. And uh, as you hopefully know, Lightwire is all about selling to the channel. That is of course MSPs and telcos. So we do this thing, this podcast if you're tuning in for the first time. The whole point of this is helping MSPs and telcos in the Australia and uh, Australian and New Zealand markets get ahead. And today we're going to make that happen or assist in that effort endeavor. I'm doing a terrible job of this. Anyway, we're talking about marketing and we've got Paul Green, who is an MSP marketing expert, uh, author and podcaster joining us to really, uh, fill in the gaps and uh, and help make marketing make sense in the MSP sector. Paul, how are you?

Speaker A: I'm wonderful, thank you. I say that despite the fact it's 10 at night here thanks to the amazing time differences between Australia and the uk. So you're bright and early in the morning with your coffee. Me, I just want to take my contact lenses out and go to bed. But before I do, I am ready to hit you with whatever marketing magic you want to help grow msps.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Yes. Uh, I don't know if I'm bright and early here. I'm very much, yes, contacts in and coffee on. But I do appreciate you taking the time over there in England to uh, to make this happen at 10pm your time. Very, very good of you. Let's, let's set the, set the scene. I, um, came across you on LinkedIn. Obviously we're talking to the same kind of end users, those being MSPs. Uh, how did you end up here, um, being a marketing expert, podcast and author.

Speaker A: It's a really long story. So I'm going to give you the 62nd version. Uh, I started originally as a newspaper reporter, um, on a, on a newspaper. Then I moved into radio. I did 10 years on the radio which was awesome, you know, like music radio. And in fact actually all of my bosses were Australian. It was like the whole of the Australian radio industry moved to the UK about the time that UK radio was deregulated. So that was fun until I was around about 30 and I got married and it stopped being fun. So in 2005 I had what um, is uh, Michael Gerbert calls the entrepreneurial seizure in his book the E Myth Revisited. And I thought I've got to, I've got to run my own business. So I started a PR company like public relations that became general marketing. Then I discovered niching and Verticals and I turned it into a company that worked with dentists, opticians and veterinarians, uh, or vets. And um, that was a great business and we built that up and I sold that in 2016 and the company I sold it to, they put in place a 5 year non compete which in my haste and you know, I got to get this deal through, I just signed off a five year non compete and, and then about three weeks later I thought I'm like M. That means I can never, all the, all these years I've spent building those relationships, I can never really use those because they'll be stale within five years. So I looked around for a new market. I found IT support. I'd worked with a couple of IT support people along the way and of course in that time I'd been away it had turned into managed services. So that was 2016, uh, and I sort of set myself up and I've been here ever since. And I have to say this is an amazing M market. It's a great business model. The people are fantastic, the product keeps changing. There's a like four new major services launch every week. Everything is constantly changing and I absolutely adore it. Every single thing about the channel, apart from the word the channel, that's the only thing I don't like. But the rest of it I love.

Speaker B: What do you, what do you, what do you hate about the channel? As, ah, a, as a, as a phrase.

Speaker A: Term the phrase. It's um, there's something cold about it. And actually you know, you talk to MSPs all the time, so do I. MSPs are great. They're, they're, you know, they're people who genuinely care, they genuinely want the best for people. It's A very, very warm thing. And when you talk about the channel that drags in all the massive companies where it's a lot of faceless employees and not, not the kind of people that I talk to and I, I find as a catch all world catch uh, all word, it's like saying the, the industry, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's too faceless for me. But that's just, that's a mind.

Speaker B: What should we use instead? What's a better uh, what's a better way to phrase it? Instead of saying, you know, we, we sell through the channel where the channel at target market. What should we be saying? Uh, the.

Speaker A: So I was going to say the collective but that sounds like the Borg from Star Trek, which is sound.

Speaker B: That's not right more faceless to me.

Speaker A: Yeah, it does, doesn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's also the collective here is like, everything is like, you know, the insert word here. Collective. Um, it's kind of like what every new place calls itself. So I can't, I can't jump on that train. But we'll park that.

Speaker A: We can figure out by the end of this interview. We'll figure something out.

Speaker B: Yeah, but please don't make that promise. We're definitely not going to nail that. But that's okay. Um, all right, so uh, I was just going to say with that, ah, five year non compete, I'm going to assume that the buy price was good enough that at the time be like man, that's fine, we'll work around this. So probably well done anyway. Um, okay, so let's start with a leading question which is um. Actually no, I've got one more qualifying question which is um, the people you work with, the MSPs you work with, what size are you typically engaging with? Whether it's headcount or revenue, whatever you prefer.

Speaker A: Yeah, good question. So we work with 700 MSPs. We've got loads in Australia and New Zealand, um, even more in the us in fact that's our biggest market now. And uh, here in the UK we've got a couple of hundred as well. And obviously the size varies from one man band startups. We try not to work with startups because I think that you can grow your business through pure energy when you're just starting your business. But we do work from one man bands right up to one of our clients is the uh, equivalent of US$20 million. Um, and you know, and everything in between. But my sweet spot that the MSPS I talk to is it's let's talk about number of staff or number of technicians at ah, the point it's you and two other people, that's a great place for, for us to start talking. And, and I think once the point you get up to you and like 10 technicians, it's a different kind of business. Right? And that's the point. You start getting professional, you start getting in managers, proper marketing people. What we do is a, we have a service called the MSP Marketing Edge and we make a ton of really high quality marketing sales every month and give it to all of our members. That's why we only work with one member per uh, area so there's no clash. But you know that's, that's really good for you know, let's probably say 80% of MSPs. But at the point you've got the resources to go hire proper marketing people, go do that, it's a sensible thing to do. So, so yeah, that's a uh, that's a really good question. No one ever asked me that question by the way. So that's a really smart one to ask.

Speaker B: Well it's either smart or stupid and that's why everyone else went not necessary but thank you. Um, the, the question then is, is in that range, uh, are people aware of the importance in your, in your view of marketing but simply not capable of executing or are you actually having to do an education piece around why it's important as well?

Speaker A: Yes, so that's a really interesting question as well. We, we started off just offering the service and, and very quickly found that I don't think not capable is the right thing. I think it's just so overwhelming for, for techs. So if you, I'm not a tech so uh, as you heard me say, I was a journalist, I was a radio guy, I've been a marketing guy. So marketing is, is it in my blood? I found my thing. Took me 30 odd years to do it but I found it and I love it and I can't ever imagine not doing it. And I look at the world now through, through a tech's eyes and a tech, you know, you talk to the average uh, MSP owner or tech about technology and they light up, don't they? Like I am now, you know, even at 10 or 10 something, whatever it is, 10, 10 oh, nine at night. I've just got this passion for marketing because I love it. And they're the same with technology. They love talking about the cloud and how it can make you more efficient and how they can protect their clients and all of that. And then you want, and to, to. I think, to the average tech, technology is very straightforward. I know it has its complicated things, but they know what they're trying to achieve. There are, there are set routes to do something, there are standard operating procedures, there's best practice. Sure, there's billions of different combinations, but it's, it's a workable entity. And then in comes with marketing where some people will say, well, search engine optimization, SEO is the way forward. And others will say it's pay per click and others will say it's building a list. And, and then even if you take each of those things and you break it down, it's, it's, there's just a fl. It, it's the least scientific thing you've got. And I actually disagree with that. I, and I spend a great deal of my time trying to educate my, my members, my clients to actually break it down into a small number of parts and do, do a small number of parts really well rather than try and do, do all of it. So yeah, education is a massive part and it's, I think it's more confidence building than competency. There's nothing that we recommend to our members and in fact I'll recommend to any MSP that couldn't be done by the MSP or better still by someone on their behalf. And that's the level of tasks we're talking. You can find a virtual assistant or people on fiverr or upwork that will do these jobs for you. If you need to go and hire experts, branding experts and marketing experts, then you've got it wrong. You're trying to bite off more than you can chew, unless you're that, uh, $20 million size business.

Speaker B: But I guess if you go into a business, they go, hey, I just want you to get marketing working for me. But they can't, uh, articulate their value proposition. They don't have a clear niche, vertical or anything. That's not just. Can you please get people clicking on my AdWords, uh, you know, listing for um, Office 365? You're going to find it very hard to deliver for them. Right, so at what level does your sort of engagement commence? Because I would assume you've got to say, okay, well, you know, you can't market nothing. You've got to have a clear proposition. You've got to have a clear target market. You've got to start with that positioning piece. So, yeah, do you start there or do you find that most of the time now people are sort of starting to talk about tsps and niching down and a lot more operators have started to really kind of understand that.

Speaker A: So what, what you just described there is 80% of MSPs. They don't, they have a differentiation but they don't know what it is. They don't know how to use it. They, they've heard of that word buyer Persona but they don't know really what it is. A buyer Persona is where you figure out the, the average person that would buy from you and, and it's, it's a part of a whole set of processes of, of you know, figuring out who would buy, why would they buy, where do we sit in the market, what would the position be, what would the price be. And um, most msps just sit. Certainly the level that we speak to which you say is, is the vast majority of MSPs, uh, they, they just don't have time or the inclination. They, they've heard about this stuff but it's, it's never as urgent as Paul, we need leads, we just need leads. So what, what we've done and I have, I have a team of 10 by the way. So it's not just me in the business. There's, there's have a whole bunch of people and I have one guy whose full time job is to think about this stuff so that I don't have to. So my job in the business is keeping our clients happy, delivering to our clients, doing stuff like this. And James is my right hand guy. Um, his job is to go off. We pay for quite a lot of research every year. We have UX researchers and we just, we have other marketing consultants that we get to consult with us and we, we talk to our members, constantly talk to our members and we use a piece of software to compile research. And the reason we do all of this is to do exactly what you've just said there is. To figure out what should people be doing and how can we get them to do it. If I started a journey because our service is so cheap, you know, it's deliberately cheap because we've got 700 members. So it's us $129 a month and you can cancel any time there's no contract, we don't tie you in um, because we only work with one person per area that works really well for both sides. But if you joined on Monday and the first thing I said to you was hey, let's talk about your buyer Persona, you'd just say oh, what is this? I don't understand. This is too Difficult. It feels a bit tree huggy. So what we actually do is we get our members engaged with marketing, hard marketing that is more likely to deliver results than doing nothing. And we do that on day one. So we actually have something called the weekly marketing system. And it's a simple set of activities that you uh, repeat every single week. And just by doing that you have better marketing than just doing a campaign once a year or twice a year randomly. I'd very quickly tell you what the weekly marketing system is because any MSP can copy this. First of all, you put a blog onto your website. So a new blog post. We actually give people a blog post and we give them a video. So we have like live presenters presenting the video, the same subject and they both go on a page on your website. That's step one. Step two is then you send out an email to your email list and when they click on the link in the email, it drives the traffic back to the blog. So you can see instantly those, you've got two separate elements that are working together. Be a small number of people that open the email, a tiny number of people that click. But those that do end up back on your website, which is what we want because we, some of the, the latest stuff we do is with uh, our members is about engaging uh, people on websites. So that's step two. Step three is you post some social media content every day. LinkedIn. Other platforms are optional, but LinkedIn is the one you do. One of those posts drives traffic back to your blog again. M and then the fourth one is you repurpose that blog into something called a LinkedIn newsletter. And which I can go into detail if you want me to, but uh, I'm sure most people have heard about LinkedIn newsletters. Now algorithmically, LinkedIn newsletters are uh, the sweet spot. They are perfect. LinkedIn emails your subscribers. So it emails people who are subscribed to your LinkedIn newsletter. It emails them with your newsletter as well as putting it in their newsfeed. It's absolutely beautiful. So you've got four very small, easy to do activities that can be outsourced to virtual assistants or other people. But they all work together, they're an integrated system. And what we find is when we get an MSP who typically comes to us doing very little marketing or sporadic marketing, and if we get them getting that system going, suddenly there's something tangible, is it in itself going to win you a new client? No. Is it going to fix your rubbish website? No. Is it going to make your LinkedIn profile presence better? No. Is it going to differentiate you or build trust? No, but it's a start and it's tangible and it shows that it's really, really easy. Can you tell I'm so passionate about this, which spent so many years trying to figure out how to get MSPs to actually do marketing is, it's become like a personal challenge for me.

Speaker B: It's either that you're really passionate or meth's a hell of a drug. It's one of the two. And I. No, I wish I had your level of enthusiasm at 10pm uh, but no, look, everything you said, that made sense and I love the framework approach and I want to dive into that whole, um, ecosystem of effort and the whole 7114 and however you want to frame it. But you know, multiple touch points, multiple platforms, you know, rapidity, repetitive, the repeating tasks. Anyway, thank you very much, uh, very much for that. Uh, the key thing for me though, going right back is when you have MSPs engage, how does their understanding of what marketing is aligned with yours? Do people actually, can they quantify in any sort of concise fashion what marketing actually is?

Speaker A: Let me give you, uh, an analogy. So that's a hard word for me to say, an analogy. Um, do you have a, do you have a, do you have a pet Brendan, dog cap, something like that?

Speaker B: I do. It's a, it's a dog called Fang. Yes.

Speaker A: Okay, so great name. So you take Fang to the, to the vet. Do you say vets or veterinarians in Australia?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay, so you take Fang to the vet and uh, you say Fang, something's wrong with Fang's paw. And the vet looks at uh, Fang and says, okay, I've um, I think the problem that uh, Fang has got here is abc. And uh, and nine times out of ten you just go, yep, okay, thank you, I understand. What are the treatment options? What do we need to do to make Fang better? The, the one time out of ten you might say, I want a second opinion. And that, that's, that's, that's down to the, the relationship you have with your vet. If doesn't matter what the condition is, but do you, the chances are that you're not going to understand exactly what that condition is because you, you can operate Dr. Google, of course you can go and look it up, but your understanding of it is going to be that 10 second summary on Google. Right. So your fang has hurt a tendon. Fang's got tendonitis. I don't even know what a tendon Is it's a, it's a bit in your foot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What we're going to do is put Fang on steroids, give him an injection, bring him back in two weeks time, right? And actually what we've just done is we've just done a surface level skim of something that that vet had to train for seven years to understand because they need to understand how Fang's paw works. They need to understand how the different parts interact. What are the implications of this, uh, how if you, if they give Fang that steroid, what other complications could it have? Do you see what I mean? So there's that whole deep level. We don't need to understand any of that to go to Fang and try, uh, to go to the vet and say, I trust you to fix Fang, please fix Fang. And I look at my relationship with MSPS as similar, which is that they're bringing me their fang. Their Fang is their business. And uh, of course I, I try my hardest to, to um, uh, come down to a level of understanding that they're at. And we do do tons of education. What we find is most MSPs, once there's a level of trust and they trust me and my team because it's not just me, it's my team giving them advice. And we've got very, we have systems to make sure we're all giving the same advice. Once we find there's a level of trust, we do find that the questioning comes down. Just as your vet fixes Fang, next time Fang is a problem, you don't go and question the bet, right? Because you've got a level of trust. So we try very hard to build trust. This is exactly the same that an MSP should be doing with their leads, their prospects and especially their clients. One of the things I talk about with my MSPs is when they, then they get a new client, They've got a 90 day honeymoon with which to bond with their client forever. And what I mean is what happens in that first 90 days is directly affects how long that client's going to stay with you, how much more they go on to buy from you, and whether or not in three years time they'll, they'll think, do we want to sign another contract or should we just move on? It all happens in that 90 day, that 90 day honeymoon is insanely important. And we have a whole uh, process that we give to our MSPs and say, look, this is a pain, this is a pain. This involves getting everyone out the office for a day. But it's worth it because you're Investing in a 20 year relationship with your new client that you've just won. Um, and again, all of that kind of stuff has just come out of looking at it and saying, right, how do we build trust psychologically? The psychology of how is the client feeling at this point? And it is all about feelings. It's never to do with what they think, it's all to do with what they feel. And so the work that we do building that with our members, it's exactly the same as we suggest. The MSPs build with their prospects and clients.

Speaker B: Just thinking that, that analogy there, um, with the, with the vet. One of the things there is, is there's no choice. You've got to have your dog fixed or ask you the worst human in the world. When someone comes in to talk to you, they've got to feel like this is an imperative, this is a business imperative. They don't have a choice but to find a way to engage, go, or to create greater levels of growth. Right. And then in having that trust they go, right. I may not understand it all, but you know, I've got confidence in this person. I don't have a choice. I need to get growth. And this seems like the most likely way to do it. Um, yeah, so yeah, I think that's the, that's the commonality. There is that, there's got to be that, that strong need for that company to grow for whatever reason. Maybe they've, maybe they've got backers that expect a certain run rate. Maybe, you know, they're, they're just stagnant. Maybe costs are increasing and they need to figure out how to set that with new levels of growth. Something. There's got to be some fire up their ass to just go, let me

Speaker A: make this what we see a lot. Sorry to interrupt you. Tell you what we see a lot. Um, because we, we, we, we talk to um, our members and we ask them questions because I'm always constantly looking to understand what drove you here today. And it's, it's more often than not, uh, it's the desire to earn more money. So you know, you know what it's like. You start your business the first few years, you bootstrap it, you do whatever you can. You take home $10,000 a year and you're, you know, that's not going to be forever. But then what happens is you, you acquire typically a wife or a girlfriend or a partner and then you acquire some children and they need a bigger house and then Suddenly you need a bigger, interesting term. I acquired a wife. Wait, you know what I mean? Subtract things. Yeah, well, exactly. They're expensive, right? I've only, I've got a 13 year old who's asleep upstairs and she's expensive. So. But, but what happens is, typically we find it's, it's, um, it's pure life. Life is becoming more expensive. And also, as you and I know, if you can generate more profit out of your business, you can spend that money not only to, uh, make your life more comfortable from a financial point of view, but also to buy back your time. You know what makes the happiest people I know are the people who've got both money and time. The unhappiest people I know are the people with too much time and not enough money, or too much money and not enough time. And you've got to get the balance of the two. And I think for MSPs, um, again we have a wonderful framework around tracking your time for two weeks.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And color coding. Color coding, things you're doing around a traffic light system. So green. I'll give you an example. This is a green task for me. So even though stupidly late at night, I will do as many podcast interviews or, or anything because it's a, it's, I enjoy it, I love it, and it's good for business. Right? Because I'm speaking to someone today who's never heard of me before. That's a good thing. A yellow task for me is, is talking with clients. I like it, it's good for the business. But there's a finite amount. If I spend too long talking to clients, I'm working in the business and not working on the business. And then red tasks are admin invoicing, dealing with stupid problems. All of my team does that. And every week. And uh, uh, I don't track my time by the minute now, but every week I look back at my week and I say, right, where did I get stuck on red tasks this week? And why, why did I get dragged into that? How can I eliminate that next week? And I'm not saying I've got it perfect, but, you know, it's harder for MSPs to do this because the very nature of the job is emergency work coming in, know, blue lights flashing, got to go and help with this. It gets in the way of the priority work and it gets in the way of building the business. So yeah, tracking your time and being aware of that is really important.

Speaker B: It's kind of a nice segue because I uh, want to talk about the evolution of the marketing function within msps, but just the evolution of MSPS in general. What you touched on there is so true. I see it time and time again, which is just a very technically capable person starts a business, um, they employ some people but they're, they themselves are the value proposition as they see it. Um, you know, they haven't had the time to work on, on business processes on a less um, individualistic value prop. And so they are still in the business even when they've got a relatively large number of staff. So yeah, I see that a lot and it's definitely sort of a problem across the industry that I still see only they can fix that problem. You know, they are the go to for all escalations. You know, customers will ring them directly when there's an issue and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, that aside, yeah, marketing in the MSP function, I, I've seen it play out typically that a company will get to, I don't know, 20, maybe staff, maybe less than that, but they will get a marketing coordinator on who somehow is supposed to magically fix and strategize everything to do with marketing and it's, it's, you know, not only come up with a plan but execute. Is that the typical evolution you see the step one in a marketing strategy for msps?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I'm laughing because you're, you're describing a scenario that I must come across once or twice a month. Uh, which is um, right we've got to a certain size. We need a marketing person. This person just graduated from Marketing University. So we're going to bring them in and we want them to come up with a marketing strategy, influence all the 40 year olds that they're working with even though they're 21. Um, we want them to then write all the content, we want them to create video content. Oh, could you read these 10 books about marketing and absorb those? Oh, and also can you do some internal cons? And um, it's the analogy I always get for that is that's like hiring a level one tech and saying oh, um, you know, here's the, here's the level three tech work and the level two tech work. And can you do all of it? Uh, because you just, you just finished your Microsoft course, right? So you must know what you're doing. I mean marketing's so many, it's like technology, perhaps not as broad but there's so many different functions. Now I know very little about SEO, search engine optimization. I know the headlines. I could talk about it competently. You start asking me a best practice question or a technicality question, I couldn't even tell you what a citation is. Someone's told me 50 times. I can't remember because he bores me.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: But I'm, I'm good at strategy, motivation and, and big picture and a very, very specific set of marketing things for MSPs. And we, we need to treat our marketing people the same way. So, you know, the other route that people go, Brendan, uh, is they go and hire a marketing company and we're not going to name names, but there are some incredibly good marketing if we just look at use the C word, that channel the channel specific marketing companies. There are some very famous names. There's lots of different people out there doing the marketing in different ways. There's some very, very good agencies, um, that I've spoken to the owners. They care. They care so much that sometimes the problem is that that care gets diluted as it goes down different levels of people. Ah. The bigger the agency, the riskier it is for you to join as a client. Um, I've also seen some appalling agencies, and by that appalling, I mean I'm judging them by their work. You know, we tend to see a lot of stuff that people put out. Um, I, I had the caveat that I am not a. Done for you. I, I would. In fact, my last business, the one I sold, that was done for you, and that was a stress and a stroke. And one of the reasons I was so glad to be so short of it was because we, you know, when you're, when someone's paying you $2,000 a month for you to do all their marketing for them, they delegate the responsibility, uh, as well as the actual marketing. And it's, it's horrible. And I, I swore I'd never do that again. So I think, yeah, people go to

Speaker B: an agency, jump in there. Sorry, sorry. No, you carry on. I'll come back with that question after you finish.

Speaker A: Okay, I was. So people either go to an agency or they get someone in house. But yeah, they try and place everything into, into one, one basket. When marketing just doesn't work like that.

Speaker B: No, no, no. Two, uh, things. I was going to say that one is in that scenario where you have to do everything, the definition of success must be so critical in that, you know, is it sales, qualified leads that's the metric? Or is it simply we have to hit these sales numbers and that's all on you particularly, I guess, if it's probably more of a lead gen type thing, but, um, you know, whatever it is, but that would be quite intense. Um, but I mentioned that about the marketing coordinator in part because, you know, we did that when I started. I was like, I'll get a marketing coordinator in. This is seven years ago, whatever. But, you know, now we've got a, um, digital lead, content lead, a research and design lead. I do content, um, uh, in terms of the content creation, PR and brand. So we still got four of us doing very different parts of the marketing puzzle. Um, and that's, that's been sort of our evolution and I suppose, you know, we're probably lucky we've got a relatively biggish headcount, um, nowadays. But for those with sort of, you know, 20 to 50, I guess in your view, does it make sense to scale past that? That person with responsibility internally for marketing, they can then delegate to external parties or whatever, um, and start building out an internal team? Or is it in your view, is it, is it just outside of their core expertise?

Speaker A: Um, that's a really good question. Um, I, I think it depends. The answer is it depends on the capabilities of, of whoever's in charge of marketing. So whoever's responsible for delivering results, um, if I, if it all went wrong for me tomorrow, God help me. And I had to go and get a job and I got a job as a marketing director for an msp. I would build an external team based on, because I know people. You know, I've been around long enough that uh, I've been like, right, this guy's exceptionally good at video. This is, this lady's a great writer, this woman's a great editor. Whatever, whatever we needed. Um, and actually in, you know, now remote work is standard. Um, do we need people in an office? No, we don't. Which is great because that means we're, we open, we have mean most of our team are in the uk, but you know, we're actively trying to hire outside the UK to extend our customer service hours, for example. So someone, you know, it's 10 o' clock at night, no one in the UK is going to be doing customer service. But someone in Australia, you know, could we, we could offer 24 hour, uh, customer service just by hiring an ex hire in Australia. So, and, and that kind of thinking changes, changes the way you look at things. Um, I forget the first part of the question you asked now. So, yeah, I think, I think it, it depends. I think, I think the um, big business, like big, big, big businesses like, you know, uh, Procter and Gamble for example, I, I and Unilever, those kind of massive companies that have multiple brands, they will, they will often delegate the actual function of advertising and marketing to an, to an agency, to an advertising agency. But there's always someone in house who is responsible and that, that's how they deal with it. And I suspect that's the right model. So there's a, there's a guy or a girl who has to go and sit in a board meeting and justify spent 20 million here and sales went up by 2 million. Uh, and they get fired as well as the agency. So, so it's like, what do they call them? Product managers? I think they call them, um, so you, you could do the equivalent within an msp. I would argue the owner of, of the MSP should, should always be the one with ultimate responsibility for the marketing. Because I was, I was saying with, when we had the full done for you agency when we were dealing with business owners and they would give us their, whatever it was, their 2,000 bucks a month and you could see in their eyes, as far as they were concerned, marketing was my problem. Well, that makes things harder. You know, we were generating leads that weren't being picked up for five or six days, by which point the lead is dead. And this is, this is for like a veterinarian, a vet or an optician or something. But even there, if I was doing it for an msp, I felt, I know I've spoken to marketing agencies, uh, where the client gets on the phone, the MSP gets on the phone and says then where are my leads? And they say, well we sent you three last week. And they'll say oh yeah, oh yeah. So you did. I, I didn't, I didn't open your email. I better call them now. There's no point. You can see how frustrating that would be when, when it might take 30, 40, 50 touch points, 20 phone calls, whatever it takes to generate that.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, that's it. And that's. Marketing is not a standalone function. It's, it's built around uh, you know, an ecosystem of actions and hopefully, um, you know, SLAs and exception triggers and stuff like that on your ticket systems, et cetera. But um, uh, aside from that, next question I had for you was in your view, what percentage of revenue should go on marketing expenditure? Because I've heard 10%, 20%. Yeah, it's tough, right? And I know it depends. Everything depends. But maybe we talk about a minimum

Speaker A: maybe so I'm not going to commit to A figure, uh, in the same way that I am loath to commit to open rate figures, click through figures. What percentage reach should I have on LinkedIn? Because the second you set a benchmark, um, you, you've got people who are saying, who will say, hey, we can do much better than that. And you've got other people saying, well, we're never going to achieve that. So I'll be completely honest with the, with the msps I deal with, what should my budget be will be. Look, spend what you can afford to spend with, with, with, with the bigger picture that the average lifetime spend of a new client might be $250,000, but you've got to work for 20 years to get that. Yeah, that's, that's the caveat of that. So what would you get? I guess the question would be, um, what would, what would you get in the first year and how many of those can you sign up a year? So let's say you sign up four clients in a year, which, which to some MSPs, that would be a great year for fudge over the use the number of users. But four new clients, and let's say each of those is worth 100,000 in the first year. Or sorry, um, worth um, 10, 20, 30,000 in the first year. Um, you know, what would you spend to get a $30,000 client? Would you spend $5,000 yet? Would you spend 10? Actually, yeah, I probably would because I know I'm going to keep them five, six, seven years. That to me that's what the budget should be. Now that, that doesn't scale up when you've got 40, 50 people in the business. Of course the marketing spend should come down in that respect. But for the average, you know, 80% of MSPs that I work with, that whole. What if you can spend more than your competitors but spend it in the right places, then then you will typically see faster results. Typically.

Speaker B: Uh, uh, well, well answered because a bit of a gotcha really when I think about in retrospect, because yeah, a percentage is, is the wrong approach to having some mandated. You should spend this or at least that it's about the return on the customer acquisition cost. Like you said, if it costs you 5,000, but it takes you two years to earn that back, that's too much in my view. If it takes 12 months to earn it back, great. Um, also your customer acquisition cost is one thing, but you have to be hitting budget. And, and I think something that I still see time and time and time again is that people keep working on revenue as a budget, it's got to be gp, in my view. Uh, it's got to be. You got to be looking at the actual underlying profitability of each customer you get, and then use that as the basis to calculate your return on that. That acquisition cost. So, yeah, agree. If your marketing is at a level where you're comfortable with the return on the cost of acquiring that client, and you understand how much that client's worth due on a. On a GP basis, then you're looking at it the right way. And that's exactly what you just said. So go you. Um, okay, let's talk about something you said to me. Nailed it. Good, uh, team. All right, so, uh, you said something when we caught up for our little intro chat, which is a thing we do on the podcast behind the. Behind the, um. The. The magic here, we usually, before we get a guest on, we sit down for 15, 20 minutes, whatever, have a chat, make sure that we've got some good, worthwhile talking points, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and when you and I caught up, uh, you mentioned something about, uh, head marketing and not heart marketing. What did you mean? Because we did not drill into that.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, sure. Uh, you can also call this Kirk marketing versus spot marketing. So head marketing, which is. You are in the other way around. I am. I am a total Star Trek nerd.

Speaker B: I really am.

Speaker A: Um, the. The. The. In fact, when. When we're done on this interview, I'm off to watch the latest edition of Strange New Worlds, which is amazing. Anyway, head marketing. Didn't you know? There you go. Oh, yeah, yeah. So it's. It's. It's set before the original series. Save that for later. So head. Head marketing, Spotlight marketing. It's. It's, you know, the normal people you want to reach. So normal business owners, normal decision makers, they're not techs. They like technology, but they don't really understand technology. They can't explain the cloud. They don't know what a malware attack looks like, and they're not as scared of it as they should be. So they think they're technology savvy, but they're not. And the problem with marketing to these people is they think they're making brain decisions, head decisions, spot decisions. Because, you know, Spock is a Vulcan. He doesn't have emotions. They think they're picking an MSP or not picking an msp. Yeah, yeah. With their, uh. With their head. But they're not someone who doesn't understand the thing. They're buying delegates. They don't Realize they're doing it, but they delegate the decision down to the heart. So if you're selling co managed it and you're dealing with an internal IT manager, it's, it's uh, yes, it's a head thing, it's a Spock decision because the, the internal IT manager understands the thing that you understand. You might have differing levels. We all know that MSPs are better than internal IT managers. But you've still got a, uh, you've got an ability. They can figure out if you're any good at what you do or not. But ordinary business owners, CFOs, operations managers, they cannot. So the delegation goes down to the heart. Heart is Kirk decisions. Captain Kirk, the original series of Star Trek, love interest every week. It's brilliant. It was all very much emotionally driven. This is how ordinary people pick an msp. They look at them, they think, is this going to be the, is this, is this the right one for our business? Their emotions say I like this guy or I like these people. And they, they, they take that into account without realizing they're doing it. And they basically, they pick you or they reject you based on whether or not they like you. So the questions I often get asked are about uh, accreditations, qualifications, core competencies, partnerships. Should we put the Cisco logo on our website? All of this is completely irrelevant. You will win more business if you put a photo of you and your team on the website where you and your team are smiling. You've got clean T shirts on, everyone's shaves, everyone's brushed their hair, it's well lit and uh, you've got an intro. Uh, don't use these exact words, but you're.

Speaker B: Shame in the shape I feel attacked. But.

Speaker A: Right, no, it's, it's. You don't, don't feel it out. But I, I've seen so many photo shoots ruined by, you know that, that tech hiding at the back who didn't shave, he's, he's got marks down his T shirt. Anyway, Photoshop can fix all of these things. Um, but you know, if, if you've got something which says hi, you know, with, with. And don't write in and say, but Paul, this is marketing about the business and not the prospect. Because of course it should be about the prospect. But if you start right from the get go with engagement, hi, this is us. We're here to make your life easy. We're here to help you grow your business. Growing your business is hard. Not when you've got us on your team and the whole of the page is, is about the people and it's about the warmth. And we do not mention the Word server, we do not mention the Word cloud. We certainly do not mention Microsoft, Cisco, Datto, Casaya. Uh, they don't know what any of those things are anyway. Let's not mention any of those things. Let's talk about them and their business. And you know what, if you're big in your geographical town and there's a landmark, get a photo of you at that landmark. You, if you're a family person, get a photo view with your family. If you, if your family are okay being on the website, they will get more holidays out of that. If you're a big fan of the baseball league down the road, get a photo view with your scarf and your hot dog. And, and you know, this, that actually what we've just discussed there is great differentiation. It's not scalable differentiation. When you've got 20, 30 employees, that's when you need to have some branding help. But for, for you know, an up to 5, 10 employee business, that would be epic. And you brand it around you and yeah, that would be a great way to get started with that.

Speaker B: I think. Uh, agree. People buy from people. B2B, B2C doesn't matter. That's, that's just the reality. Um, a little side story and really one of the reasons we got this, this podcast started was, um, when I came on board, uh, with Lightwire, it was basically on the business side. It was basically me and then it was me plus one person, then plus two. But, but the people we're engaging with, um, and a lot of them are really good friends of mine now who run or the exact level of the MSPs that we work with or the telcos, Um, I got to see them less and less as we grew because I stopped being essentially the default AM or bdm. Um, and so the podcast was a way of going, well, I still want to be present at least peripherally, you know, and sort of be putting out content. And we thought, well, if we did that, it's a way of sort of keeping that personable. Um, I'm still here even if you're not dealing with me directly anymore and you can still get in contact m with me if you need to. So, um, that was quite intentional. But I think, um, and you know, it uh, could be that maybe depending on someone's, uh, view of me, that might be a bad idea. But uh, I, you know, I think the thing for me is, is just people do buy from people, how you can create a personality to your brand as long as you're the kind of person who should be put out front and still on the fence on that with me.

Speaker A: So I've got two very quick thoughts on that, and, um, the first is building marketing around. There's a concept, and it's called, um. I, uh, can't remember the exact phrase because it's late, but it's something to do with an attractive personality. So you take someone such as yourself. I do this in my business. I. My business has my name in the title, and I'm not a narcissist. Right. This is. This is just. I know this is good branding, but you take an attractive personality, and you put them at the heart of your. Of your marketing and your branding, and it gives you a differentiation just by being yourself. So this is me being me, because not, uh, we've got lots of competitors, but no one can be me. It is impossible. If you tried to be me, it would be the worst thing you could do. And the same goes for what you're doing with your podcast. I have a podcast as well. Exactly, exactly. We've just celebrated 200 episodes this week. It's exactly the same. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you. What. What Cadence. What cadence do you run with you weekly? Fortnightly? Monthly?

Speaker A: Yes. A week. Every. Every Tuesday for the last 200 Tuesdays. And, um, because I have a radio background when we.

Speaker B: I know.

Speaker A: Oh, it is. It's. It's a nightmare. But we work, um, we work sort of, uh, eight to ten weeks ahead. Um, and I said right from the get go, um, you know, like a radio show. We're never going to not do one of these. You know, I can be in a coma for six weeks, and I got to hope I'm not, but I could be in a coma for six weeks, and theoretically, the podcast won't be, uh, interrupted in any way. Um, I sort of come back to the other point, which is in Australia, you have a tasty snack called Vegemite. Are you familiar with it?

Speaker B: I'm very familiar. Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay, I'm going. I am going somewhere with this. So. So in the uk, the Vegemite equivalent is called Marmite. Uh, it's the same product. Same in New Zealand. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm from New Zealand originally.

Speaker B: So we're Marmite. Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So you know Marmite, then? In the UK for. For decades, Marmite has run an advertising campaign which is Marmite. You either love it or hate it, and I love it. My daughter Hates it. And it's, you know, like all advertising, it's an exaggeration of the truth. But I always say you should be a Marmite character. So, you know, I'm, I'm being me right now because I know that many people will be attracted to that and a small number of people will be, will be repelled. And that's great, right? Wouldn't it. Isn't it better to be loved by many, repel, you know, hated by some rather than no one has any opinion about you at all? And this is where, by the way, a lot of MSPs are terrified of putting themselves into a podcast or a video because it is them. And they'll say things like, oh, my voice sounds funny. Well, that's the same for everyone is to do with how we, how we, how we hear our own voice through the jaw and stuff like that. I look terrible on camera. It's like everyone looks terrible on camera because again, we're, we have a mind image of ourselves when we were in our 20s and we were sexy, and now we're not. We're in our 40s or 50s and we're old and gray and tired and, you know, coming towards the end of our useful years and that all of that, you're battling with all that. But everyone is right. Hey, I've just turned 49, so, you know, I'm feeling that every, every day at the moment. But being a Marmite character and putting yourself out there, it's so powerful. And if I could get every MSP to do it, it would be wonderful. Because even if 100 MSPs in the same marketplace did it, they're not in competition with each other because each one of them is a unique personality.

Speaker B: I like that. I really like that, um, that mama analogy. And I'll come back that in a sec. Just a quick, grim side story about getting old. I went to the doctor's little, uh, a few weeks ago basically, and was like, hey, I've got this really sore back. And I don't know, just running hurts. Everything hurts. And I was hoping they'd say, yeah, you've got this thing, we can fix it. But he said, uh, when he got all sorts of scans, CT, whatever, and he said, yeah, so look, you're getting old, uh, everything's breaking down and you just have to deal with it. It's like, that's the absolute worst scenario. So I got like arthritic hips and stuff. I'm 43. Anyway, never mind. Uh, so back to the, um, less grim news. You're absolutely right. But it's terrifying I think to go out for all the reasons you touched on but, but two, particularly for me. Um, in this part of the world there's a lot of tall poppy syndrome. People are terrified of putting themselves out there. But I really like the idea that, well, yeah, you just have to accept that you're not for everyone and you aren't going to win them all. But that's okay as long as you're not a massive douchebag. You're going to get quite a lot of people that think you are worth listening to and you know you have some value. I um, think another one can be. If you're a business owner and you are ah, delegating the responsibility of someone else to be the face of your organization, that can be quite nerve wracking I think as well. And sometimes that can be in bigger organization maybe a touch problematic. I think the third one is it's terrifying to commit to something as intensely as you have. We started with um, and look, podcasts aren't the be all and end all that. They're part of an ecosystem of efforts and we'll come back that in a second. But weekly was Remain's idea over there and it was hard, like it was so intense. And in the end we're like, you know what, fortnightly, that sounds doable. Let's do fortnightly. Because the opportunity cost was there were too many things I should have been doing that I wasn't. And we had to go, what's the return on the podcast? Um, is it eating away at other things that would have potentially a greater return? In my view, yes, let's make a fortnightly. So but either way, even fortnightly that is a commitment. So it's scary. And I think none of this stuff works without the commitment, without the consistency it is. People need to know that if they are interested in your podcast on a Tuesday, in your case, they will, they will get that update that it's been released. They will listen to it. It becomes part of their routine. If you are start, stop, start, stop. People are just not going to get that shit 100%. Um, yeah, that's all of my big rent there.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, no on podcasts for um, for MSPs. Most uh, MSPs shouldn't do a podcast. If uh, they're going to do something, invest it into YouTube. A uh, podcast only really works for an MSP if you've got a vertical because podcasts themselves. The whole reason that podcasts are so big. And now m. I don't know how big they are in Australia. They're kind of, kind of big here, but not that big in the uk. The US Podcasts are massive. And the reason is if you're into uh, let's see if you're into uh, speaking uh, Klingon. Right. Which I'm sure there's a podcast out there. I haven't looked because I'm not that much of a nerd, but there's, there's bound to be. There'll be a podcast.

Speaker B: Sounds like you're running it.

Speaker A: Close, but. Well, yeah, but there'll be a podcast about speaking a specific dialect of Klingon from, from a specific series. Right? Because that's the beauty of podcasts. Like the whole of the Internet, it's you, you take whatever interests you and you can follow it and follow it and follow it down a rabbit hole. So if you're doing a uh, I know um, an MSP in the UK who dominates the veterinary industry. He's the top MSP in veterinary and he has a podcast and he has a blog and he has, he speaks at all the shows and does everything and he's always about the technology of veterinary and for him a uh, podcast is a smart thing to do because he's got a very specific audience who are interested in the technology that affects them. M. A day to day basis. Guess what? He gets a ton of referrals off the, off the back of that podcast and a ton of work. But if he was just doing it for his geographical area, no one's, no one's. You know, I'm uh, not, I'm not sure where that's your base but like no, no one's going to sit and listen to a podcast about business in this city because it's too broad.

Speaker B: Yeah. Too, too much of a chance that, that has no application whatsoever and people aren't going to listen for 10 minutes before realizing that this episode's not for them. Um, so we're the Gold coast by the way now south of Brisbane. Great place. Um, but uh, the, the other important part if you are going to have a content led strategy is the platform for us. We started with uh, Spotify and itunes and the usual podcast platforms. Uh, and then eventually got on to um, and we, we did video on Spotify as well but then we eventually went onto YouTube. Can't really remember why it took us so long to think that's an idea. But anyway, um, you know that's where we're getting thousands of views per episode. You know we'll get, get 2 or 3,000 per episode where Spotify and itunes are pretty consistently significantly less than that. So it seems like you find your platform and video is still king it seems. And then it comes down to um, like you have, you've got a great setup there. Your AVs, top, top shelf. Um, are you going to invest in what you need to make it a pleasure to watch and listen to? Because there is nothing worse than bad audio. Like it is just punishing and you'll immediately lose people.

Speaker A: Interestingly as a, as a side comment we have completely opposite to you in that our AH YouTube we've only got like 700 subscribers on YouTube. Our YouTube viewings of the podcast are like 4050 a week. Whereas ah our Spotify and we're on all the platforms wherever you can listen to podcasts, uh, we're on every single platform and that was the goal from day one as well because. And we do see a real divergence across different platforms. Uh, but most of our uh, consumption is done through listening and I do wonder if that's because audience is busy there. I know that msps listen to our podcast during, while they're working. So it's a back, it's a background thing. And actually when I was in radio that was what we were taught about radio is that radio is the only medium that you or the only media you can consume while you're actively your active attention is on something else. People listen all day at work, don't they? And yet they manage to get their work done unlike having the television on because you glancing up and looking at the screen. So, so we kind of designed the podcast from day one to be like radio but we happen to do a video version of it. So maybe, maybe you and I maybe remains your secret weapon in your organization. And he's done a video first look it definitely is.

Speaker B: But I think also um, what you can promote and how well you can define your target audience on which platform to actually put some money behind getting out there and being seen and retargeting people have been to your website and blah blah blah that that definitely helps to it for us on YouTube. But um, I want to push ahead if I can. Um, talk to me about how ordinary people buy. I touched before in the whole Google 7114 thing in your experience with talking podcasts isn't going to get you sales. Not, not in isolation. Um, what, what, what's the magic sort of uh, either sequence or, or combination of efforts to drive the kind of consumer behavior your clients want to see.

Speaker A: Yeah, so, so just as you tried to get me to a figure earlier, um, there's no magic sequence. Uh, what there is is understanding how ordinary people, um, think and act and feel. And, um, the hardest, there's a series of problems to overcome. So number one is that they don't know what they don't know, like we were saying earlier, so that they're oblivious about their low level of technology knowledge. Um, the second thing is, as we were saying, they're making the decisions with their hearts, not with their minds. Um, but the third thing is you've got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. The reason the sales cycle is so slow for msps is because of all of that unknowing stuff. It creates a level of fear. Every msp, more or less I've ever spoken to has had the experience where they've sat down with the prospect, they've talked about their business, they've put a proposal in the, the product is right, the price is right, everything seems to be right. And then the prospect rings about two weeks later and says, yeah, you know how we were telling you we hate our incumbent msp? We've just signed a new two year deal with them. And so why, why would you do that? And they've done it because. Better, uh, the devil you know. So when you don't understand something, ah, and you look at it and you say, well look, these guys, you know, they don't answer the phone so much anymore. We can never get rid of the owner and never get hold of the owner anymore. Uh, you know, it just, it feels like we're not for them anymore. But you know what, these new guys, they're, they're, I like them, but what if, what if these server things go wrong? What if we lose access to our data? What if we can't get online anymore? And it has a, it's that fear, um, the potential fear. So, so the answer to your question is what you've got to do is try to build a relationship and try to build trust with people before the point they're ready to, ready, willing and able to switch. And that's really hard. I always suggest a, uh, very simple three step marketing strategy. You build multiple audiences of people to listen to. So like your email list is an audience, your LinkedIn is an audience. Next step is you build a relationship with them. That's, that's the content marketing. That's the one that goes on forever. Social media, every day that you can do a daily, weekly, monthly cadence, social media, every day, seven days a week. Uh, once a week you send an educational email and once a month send them a printed thing, something like a printed newsletter. Not enough MSPs do this. Printed newsletters are amazing because something printed in their hands, they will hang around for years. So a daily, weekly, monthly relationship building. And then the third step is to commercialize the relationship. And easiest way to do that is you get someone like a back to work mom picking up the phone, making outbound phone calls to your audiences. And I, uh, say about to work mum, because it can be two to three hours a day, two to three days a week. It's not selling. She doesn't need to know about technology. She doesn't need to know about the business. Her, uh, only job is to pick up the phone, speak to people in your audiences, uh, kind of figure out where are they at the moment. So, hey, just, um, connecting. Because you connected to my Boss Dave on LinkedIn. Not an exact script, but that's what you'd go with. And, um, can I just ask, do you, do you have an IT company that looks. Yeah. Do you have an IT company that looks after you right now? Oh, you do. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is awful and 10 is world class, how would you rank them right now? And if it's like a 10, 9, 8, move on, they're happy, they're not going anywhere. If it's a seven, six, you know, there's, there's an opportunity there. And if it's anything below that, there's an immediate and urgent opportunity. Maybe because the company, the incumbent, screwed something up, or maybe it's just dissatisfaction. Levels are down. But that's what we mean about the timing being right. And even from someone who's deeply dissatisfied, they may have a year to run on their contract. They may have all sorts of other things. So the MSPs are best at this. Just constantly doing activity. They're constantly adding people on LinkedIn, getting their email addresses and putting their email addresses into email and doing other activities to build those. They're constantly, well, doing the daily, weekly, monthly cadence. And they have, you know, at the very least, one person. Even if you just do 50 dials a day, $50 a day can be over in as quick as 20 minutes. Because when, when we say a dial, we mean literally pick up the phone. I mean, do. You don't even dial these days. Do you press a button on, on a computer? And it does for you. Uh, but, you know, you can do those $50. They're not in. We can't talk right now. There's no answer. You know, you, you can be through 10, 20, 30 like that, but $50 every single day.

Speaker B: Guess what?

Speaker A: You get really lucky now and again. You get hold of someone and they say, I'm so glad you called. We've got this problem. Or, or I've been meaning to call you guys have been following you for years. We've been meaning to call you. And typically the more activity you undertake, target your activity. But the more target activity, the luckier you get, the more often you get lucky as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's definitely a numbers game to that, but. And we actually had, um, James burgle, uh, from PAX8 on, uh, how two episodes ago, I think it was. Can't remember now. So going fast. But anyway, he was talking about the same sort of thing, just that cadence and just that repeating of that sales process. But I do like your very fast qualifier. This is like, hey, are you happy? Yes. No. Cool. That, that, that is the rest of this conversation worthwhile. Just cut to the chase. People are busy. Um, last question I'm going to hit you with. I think because we've gone almost an hour and don't take up too much. Your time is getting towards 11. There for you is, um, you mentioned there the content piece. Creating the, the, the, the content continually. Um, demand gen is something I always talk about just that educate people about the problems that are there to be solved and position yourself as a subject matter expert that can help them solve that problem once they've got to grips with the understanding of it and the opportunity this year, whether it's revenue growth or efficiency gains or whatever, um, how do you talk to your clients about that and how do you assist in creating that kind of content as part of that constant, you know, um, supplying of information to the market.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we make it easy for our clients because we write all their content for them. So we write, you know, we've got a good solid production team. We just do it all. Some of them just use it as it is because we, we don't split to their competitors. Some of them change it and they have my blessing, whichever is the right thing for them. So let me, let me tweak the question a little bit to do. You see, I got in a sneaky plug again for my business there. Let me change the question to how can an MSP generate great content? Um, the answer is, listen, uh, to your clients and make it relevant so you should be in the habit of always having, whenever I go, wherever I'm doing. And if you're watching this on video right now, you can see I've got a yellow pad. And I always have a yellow pad with me because anytime I'm talking to an msp, they'll say something and I'll think, oh, that's the third time I've heard that that's a piece of content. Uh, and uh, so I constantly generating content ideas because my mind is open to it. And I say to MSPs, do the same thing. Quarterly business reviews or strategic reviews, which are better. Uh, even just reviewing tickets. You know how sometimes as an owner you have to just do an hour on the help desk. Great. Don't think of it as uh, oh, I've got to do an hour on the help desk. Think of it as, oh, I get to talk to normal, normal clients and users. What are they asking? What, what are the trends that people are coming in at? Uh, and you've got to look at it not from the trends of, you know, of like oh, what's the setting on my Windows 2012 server? Uh, blah, not technical stuff, but what are ordinary people saying? You know, I mean basic things like um, uh, uh, sticky keys on keyboards. Right. And printers. I know MSPs hate printers and hate having to fix printers, but actually on printer problems, one of the biggest sources of frustration for clients. Right? So let's talk about printer problems. Let's talk about what causes them. I think you have to get a mix of. Because that, that's just kind of low level. You've got to get a mix of that and high level strategic stuff, but not strategic stuff in terms of here's your, here's your cloud architecture because no one cares about that stuff. What they clear up. What do business owners care about? The strategic level. They care about growth. They care about uh, getting things done. They care about their staff not complaining. They care about sleeping at night essentially. What, what turns them on, what turns them off, what are they scared of? Those are the things you want to talk about. And I think the best content is a mix of those, of those two things, you know, and even, even someone who's the CEO of a company with 20,000 employees will now and again get dragged down a rabbit hole of why is my computer so slow? Or why, why, you know, why is my WI fi connection so bad at home? Or something like that. And uh, all of this, the commonality between all of this is it's ah, relevant. Relevancy is the Single biggest test for content. And this comes right back to something we were talking about earlier on. That whole buyer Persona and understanding the person you're selling to, is it relevant to them? This is easier for most MSP owners than you think because actually that you certainly, if you're selling to business owners, you have something in common with them, which is you're a business owner too. So take your tech head away and say what, what my business things I want. Well, I want to make more money, I want to cut my costs. I want my staff to whinge and complain less. Uh, I want them to need me less. I want to spend more time with my family. I want to spend less time doing this. That's the same as all business owners. All business owners have exactly these had the same problems. So actually. But under this wraps up the whole interview very nicely. Coming back to the beginning and which wasn't planned, and I still can't think of a better word than collective, so don't even go to me on that one. Uh, but, um, that, you know, you, you understand business owners and you understand their buyer Persona more than you realize because they're like you. You just got to suck the technology aspect out of it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And nicely done there on the full loop. I, I was going to make this the last question that, um, when you're creating the content for your clients, and let's take your Vetmate as an example, right? He's, he's very clearly got, um, a clear target market, a clear niche, as it were. And we've had a lot of guests on this podcast talk about the need to niche down. It makes marketing easier because you've got a clearly defined market and more clearly defined talking points. Uh, does it make it more difficult for you to, uh, create content on their behalf the more that your individual clients niche down? Or is it that you can still create that, that quality base layer you just talked about there, and then they contribute to some of that more niche specific kind of content for that, for that top level. Top.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's a good question. And we, we produce material that's designed to be used in a geographical area. And we say, because that's what we lock, we lock geographical areas. And then we say to them, look, if you want to use that in a niche or a vertical, that's, you can do that, it's absolutely fine. But, you know, you just need to adapt it. The reality is adapting content to a niche is, is understanding the tiny little things that make that niche, that niche. Let me give you an example. So my last business, we were working with vets, dentists and opticians. They all are pretty much the same kind of people. It's just they do different things to different species, right? Vets fix animals, dentists fix teeth, opticians fix eyes. If you, if you drill it down. And they've got very similar language sets, but slightly different. So this may not be the case all around the world, but here in the uk, for example, the vets, uh, the vets, it's been a while now. The vets and the of all of them call the business the practice, right? So it's not a business, it's a practice. Don't know why they're practicing as they're qualified, but that's the way it is. So in the emails that I send to them, I wouldn't say, here's how to grow your business, I would say, here's how to grow your practice, right? And if I sent an email and I said, the problem with being a busy dentist is you want to grow your practice, I don't have to personalize any of the rest of that content. It is now, as far as the dentist is concerned, it's now utterly relevant to them. Um, then we'll take the dentist one. Um, they would call, call the room where they do their torture, they would call that the surgery, right? So, so if I said to them, oh, so they call it the surgery. And then they talk about something called chair time. Because dentists only make money when they're with a patient by the chair. So it's known as chair time. So again, I now have got three definitions that I understand. I can personalize any business growth content or marketing content to dentists just using those definitions. Fed up, fed up being dragged away from chair time by trying to grow your practice. Here's the solution. Instantly that's relevant to dentists. Now I can make it relevant to, uh, opticians. Fed up trying to, fed up being dragged away from, uh, um, uh, site tests where, uh, you're trying to grow your practice that now seems relevant to opticians and you get the idea. So actually when you, when you're taking content and adapting it to a vertical, the worst thing you could do is try to super, uh, super make it relevant. You only need to feel relevant near the beginning. The MSP that I know who works with, uh, vets, he has gone one step further in a way that no one can ever copy, which is he's taken, he now knows the names of all the software platforms that all the Vets might use. So any vet that's thinking about using uh, like a C C, would you call it like an MRI system? Say that there are, let's say there are 10 MRI software suites. He can now say, uh, hey, whether you're using ABC or xyz, um, these are the things you need to be aware of. And instantly that's super relevant to them. And at the point they're coming to look at that software, they'll see him as the expert, which is great because it's driving traffic to his website and enhancing his position.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's the example I was going for. That sort of example is at that point you really need that subject matter expert inside the business who can contribute some level of, hey, you know, proprietary software. A has now released feature X and it compared to whatever, it's superior, inferior because of reasons. Um, and that genuine demand gen, I

Speaker A: think you need that for delivery more than you do for marketing. So if you're going to say, hey, we're an expert at lawyers, uh, right. And then you start working with the lawyer and they use case management software and you're like, oh, what's this? What is case management software? You've blown it. You've blown it on day one. You're never going to keep that client. So you know to, to, to say to lawyers, you need to pick your case management software. You need a cloud based solution because. But then yes, research in the market is absolutely critical. But I think that comes in more for delivery than anything. What I say to most msps is you already have a secret niche in the business. Look at your clients. The chances are, uh, you've got at least two of the same kind of clients because you might have won an accountant, a CPA and then that accountant might have referred their friend who's also an accountant. And maybe you picked up another accountant because those two accountants are talking in the meeting. You've got three accountants, uh, you've got 15, 20, 30 clients overall, but three of them are accountants. You've got a niche, you've got a vertical and you understand their world because you've already had to go through configuring Sage servers or whatever you have to do for accountants. Brilliant, right? Why now go out and try and find a niche when you've already got one. You just now need to embrace it. And you know, m, as you said, the marketing for a niche is super easy because it's easy to find them and it's easy to put a message in front of them. That is more relevant to them.

Speaker B: And I think, um, with the vet one, if you're trying to get new vets, uh, I still think that, you know, a good way to, if, if you can get that message in front. Here's some subject, quite detailed subject matter that, that relates to your business and how you can get ahead, framed in sort of a particular way. I think. Yes, absolutely. Delivery, it relates to that. But I still think there's a way to get, um, educated buyers aware of who you are and, and thinking that you can potentially solve a problem from there and come and can't if you position it in a certain way and with enough, you know, um, enough of a cadence that they see you more than just once. Um, but we, uh, can fight about that another day. That's fine. Um, so, okay, hey, look, let's, let's wrap that up there because it is 11 o' clock your time. Uh, Paul Green, where can people find you? Is there anything you would like to plug before we let you go?

Speaker A: Yes, um, we have a podcast which we mentioned earlier. It's called Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. On any podcast platform, out every Tuesday, a fresh episode. Uh, and also we have a, uh, blog at Paul Greens MSP marketing.com We've got about 500, 600 articles in a learning hub. And if you haven't done so already, do go to MSP marketingedge.com if you're in Australia, there is, there's a little Australian flag you can click on it, put in, I think it's postal codes. Isn't it in Australia? Pop your postal code in and it will tell you if your area is free or if we're working with, uh, some, one of your competitors. We won't tell you who we're working with, but it will tell you if the area is free. And if you, if the area isn't free, please do join the waiting list. You can ease, you know, you can even drop us a message and say you've heard me on this podcast and I'll happily reply to you as well.

Speaker B: Nice. I like that, uh, sense of exclusivity you're building there. All right, mate, thank you again very much for making this time slot work. I do appreciate it. Uh, be great to have you back on again at some point and keep diving into this whole marketing space. Uh, but for now, uh, I'll just say thank you very much. Uh, good day.

Speaker A: Thank you. Good day. Have a good one.