The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 303 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• How to market your MSP to accountants: Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. Learn how to speak their language to win over their hearts and minds to give your MSP the competitive edge.
• 4 huge marketing problems that damage your MSP: These marketing problems do massive amounts of damage to MSPs, and yet they’re so easy to overcome when you understand them. Are these damaging your business? Here’s what to do.
• MSP insider’s lessons from 18 years of marketing: If you want to grow your MSP by attracting new clients, the chances are you’re making some fundamental marketing mistakes. My guest today shares his 18 years experience working at an MSP and reveals what really moved the needle.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you sometimes find that your team makes the same mistakes over and over again? Well, this is actually your problem, not theirs, and here’s the process to eliminate the problem.

How to market your MSP to accountants

Dream client alert. For many MSPs that target verticals or niches, they find accountants (CPAs) to be a very attractive sector. Are you targeting accountants? If not, you really need to hear this, and if you already are, then this is going to make things so much easier. Let’s deep dive into why accountants switch MSPs, what they’d want from you and how to grab their attention.

Accountants are a perfect fit for MSPs. They have a business that’s dependent upon technology. They’ve got compliance and regulations, and they’re often very stable businesses with lots of recurring revenue. So imagine this, you are sitting across the table from a busy accountant and they’ve literally got piles of tax returns and spreadsheets and calls with their clients all lined up. What’s the one thing that you know that they don’t want? More hassle. And understanding that is the first step in marketing your MSP to accountants.

Get inside their head and their heart and really understand what drives them and what would drive them to pick your MSP instead of someone else.

Accountants live in a world of rules, a world of deadlines, a world of compliance, and a world of absolute attention to detail. They value accuracy, speed, and security above almost anything else. So if you want them to even consider working with your MSP, your messaging has got to show that you understand their world. Talk about what matters to them, not technology. Instead show them how you help them keep their client data safe, how you help them to meet deadlines without system crashes, and how you help them eliminate the panic of last minute tech issues during tax season.

I mean you can literally paint them a picture, you can say, imagine your team working flat out in January (or whenever your local tax season is) and instead of the WIFI dropping in and out or your software slowing down or freezing, everything just works because in the background we’re monitoring everything, we’re fixing problems before you’re even aware of them, so you can focus on your clients and tax returns and getting things done while we are focusing on your technology.

Now that’s the kind of language that really gets into someone’s heart as well as their head. And then you start to think about how to influence them and get them to influence each other because accountants really do talk to each other. In fact, most people in any sector talk to other people in that sector. They ask for recommendations,...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 302 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google: This is one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Make sure you’re getting it right to get the most out of it for your MSP.
• Why MSPs should send personalised videos: Discover how these videos really can help to secure new clients for your MSP. And how when you open your mind to it you can spot opportunities to send them every day.
• What does great marketing look like in a mature MSP?: If you want to be successful, find someone who’s achieved the results that you want and copy what they do to achieve the same. And my guest this week has 25 years of MSP marketing expertise to share with you.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wanted to know your MSP’s true search position in Google? Find out how in one simple step…

3 mistakes MSPs commonly make with Google

There are three mistakes that MSPs commonly make with Google. And when I say three things, I really mean four things because the first is assuming that AI is now your new focus for getting search traffic. Well, it’s not. It’s currently sending only about 1% of traffic to your website. So the focus right now still has to be doing better on Google. But why and how do you do this? What are the three other things that MSPs are getting wrong?

We’re talking about one of the most overlooked tools in your marketing toolbox – your Google Business Profile. Now, before you skip this or zone out, do stick with me. Google Business Profile isn’t just for coffee shops and hair salons. Your Google Business Profile shows up when someone googles your MSP’s name or even if they just Google MSPs .

Your Google Business Profile is like your digital shopfront and it can make you look trustworthy… or not, if you get it wrong.

So let’s look at three common mistakes that I see MSPs making and how you can fix them quickly and easily:

The first mistake is to have a boring generic business description. If your profile says something along the lines of “We offer IT support and services to businesses”, oh, you’re not alone. Loads of MSPs do this, but it’s bland and it’s costing you clicks. So here’s the fix. Speak like a human and not a robot. Use the first sentence to make it clear who you help and what problems you solve. So try something like “We help businesses worry less about IT with fast friendly support, bulletproof security and advice with zero jargon.” I mean that alone, just using that sentence instantly sets you apart from other MSPs.

Mistake number two, no photos or photos from the year 2005. Did you know that businesses with photos actually get more clicks and more calls from their Google Business Profile? You don’t need to go and hire a pro photographer, just pull out your phone, grab a team photo, maybe grab some photos of your office, your vans if you’ve got vans, you could do a behind the scenes look at your setup, it could be your help desk, someone answering a phone, it could be your security dashboard with obviously the sensitive stuff blurred out. People just want to see people, they want to see who they’re dealing with. And even one new photo added like today or this week can boost engagement. If you added a new photo every week or at least once or twice a month, that could be huge.

And then mistake number three, letting your reviews go stale. Google Business reviews are like gold...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 301 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review: The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your MSP, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So, is Hubspot the right choice for you?
• Free Windows 10 end of life marketing materials: Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away and this could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you.
• How to run your MSP by the numbers – and which to track: If I asked you about the most important marketing and growth numbers in your MSP would you know what those numbers should be? My guest works with MSPs to help them understand just this.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group:

Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review

Whatever you do, don’t pick a CRM for your MSP until you’ve heard this, and especially if you’re looking at HubSpot. The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your business, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So which is the right CRM for MSPs? Have you been considering systems like MailChimp, MailerLite, Growably from the Tech Tribe or even HubSpot? Eight months ago I switched my business to HubSpot, so let’s review it eight months on and see if I’d recommend it for your MSP.

On the 14th of April 2009 I committed to my first serious CRM. It was called Infusionsoft. I know the date because I’ve still got the welcome email. Now, back then I owned a different business, actually one I sold in 2016 just before entering the channel, but even back then I knew that finding and committing to good software that sat at the heart of my marketing was critical.

At the time, Infusionsoft was the hot property. In fact, I’d say it was instrumental in our success building that business. It allowed me to build up a large audience of prospects. I had 12,000 of them in that last business and using Infusionsoft I could grow a relationship with those prospects using content marketing all sent out in that CRM. And I had a telesales team whose job was to call those prospects and book them in meetings with our salespeople, and that allowed us to convert the relationships from prospects into clients.

I look back now at that 2009 to 2016 period and realise that was kind of a golden time for Infusionsoft, because since then it really has gone off the boil. First, there was a focus on not just being a CRM and a marketing platform, but becoming a payment platform as well. And then the original founders left and then the new people that took over, the new management team, they rebranded it as Keap, and they created a second CRM, which seemed to do the same things as the first CRM but in a different way. And then the original founder took control again and then they tried to bring those two products together as one, and I’m not quite sure how successful that was. And then they were trying to turn themselves into an automation business, but there was no clear roadmap of what that meant or how they were going to do it, and they also massively hiked up the prices.

Now I’ve been using Infusionsoft (or Keap) in the MSP Marketing Edge since day one, since we opened back in 2017, and I’ve been feeling for a while up to last year that we needed to change our CRM. But our use of it was so extensive, I mean, it was weaved throughout the whole of the MSP Marketing Edge that the thought of migrating to something new made me feel sick inside because...