An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention

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Welcome to Episode 272 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention: Doing this means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work.
• Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much: Don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit they will bring you.
• Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a profit centre: It’s very powerful to send a message to a business owner talking about a specific problem they have because of a regulation, and exactly how they can fix it.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Could gamification be what you need to motivate your team?

An MSP marketing tactic guaranteed to grab attention

Imagine doing some marketing for your MSP that’s so relevant to the person who sees it, they immediately stop what they’re doing just to listen to you. And yes, it is possible for your marketing to be this powerful. It means you can reach more people and persuade them to talk to you with much less work.

Let me tell you the surprising secret to this kind of marketing and you won’t believe what I’m going to ask you to Google. Now, I should start by admitting that this isn’t really a marketing tactic that you can use for a general audience. It only works when you use it for a vertical. Your MSP doesn’t have to only work in this vertical.

You can have lots of different clients doing lots of different things in lots of different sectors, but this specific marketing idea only works for a vertical audience, and you can’t just reuse it across different verticals. You have to do some research for each vertical that you are using this tactic to target people in. But the payoff is immense because targeting to a vertical is already a beautiful thing to do.

It’s so much easier to send a message that’s highly relevant to an audience within a vertical.

So for example, if you’re targeting lawyers and you use the phrase legal practice, the part of their brain that filters information, which is called the reticular activating system, it decides that what you are saying is relevant to them. So they ignore stuff that’s aimed at general business owners and managers, and they listen to stuff that seems to be targeted at lawyers. And that works across all verticals.

Now, this new marketing idea that I have for you right now is even more specific. Okay, enough teasing. Let me tell you what it is. So you pick a vertical that you want to win more business in, and then you do some Googling. And what you’re looking for on Google is specific regulations regarding cyber security or data retention, or in fact, anything that you touch. Specific regulations that affect that vertical. So for example, let’s say you work with healthcare, there’s going to be tons of regulations or laws specifically aimed at healthcare businesses. Lawyers will have them, CPAs/accountants will definitely have them. Manufacturers will probably have them as well. So go and find that regulation.

In an ideal world, you would then talk to someone who runs a business in that vertical to ask them what pain that regulation causes for them. Because don’t forget, these are not technical people. So some kind of regulation around data retention for example, it’s easy for you to think, oh yeah, I know how I’d fix that, I know how I deal with that. But for them it’s a pain. And that’s what we’re looking for here. We are looking for regulations that create pain and are annoying to specific verticals. Because then you are going to target that pain with your marketing.

Imagine how powerful it would be to send a message to a business owner in a very specific vertical, talking about a specific problem that’s caused by a specific law that only relates to them and exactly how they can fix it. And we’re not trying to use fear marketing here, we’re just educating them about a problem they already have and how you have got some possible solutions. Because you know that almost any technology headache can be made easier or taken away, and that’s what you want to talk about.

So how would you actually use this in practice? Well, it will definitely be content on your website. You might do a report or a guide on it, you might put that on LinkedIn. You might even just send it out to people or people who work in that vertical. You may even turn it into a piece of direct mail. Imagine how powerful it would be reaching out to someone, everyone in the vertical in your area to say, Hey, you know that headache that you’ve got, which is explained here, I know how to solve that headache. Can I send you some information about this in the post? Can I mail it to you? And I know that that sounds very old school, but old school physical stuff works very, very well in our modern digital age.

So some research for you then. What’s the vertical you most want to win new clients in? What’s the regulatory headache that they have that you can solve? And what’s going to stop you taking action on this right away?

Want a new client? You can afford to spend this much

With what I’m about to tell you in the next 60 seconds, you might think I’ve lost the plot. But what if there’s a marketing move so daring it could completely reshape your MSP’s future? Let’s talk about the surprising way top MSPs outsmart their competition and the bold strategy that could change how you grow forever.

Anyone who’s ever made a serious attempt to grow their MSP organically knows that it’s an expensive process. It’s not uncommon to find a business that’s winning loads of new clients and at the same time experiencing a cash flow crisis, because of the cash cost of attracting, winning and onboarding those new clients.

Now, typically we learn this as business owners the hard way. Normally at four in the morning lying awake in bed wondering how are we going to make payroll. And this is why when I’m advising MSPs on their growth, I teach them to get their cashflow sorted or any funding in place before they embark on a serious round of new client acquisition. I believe it’s the cost of acquiring new clients that encourages MSP owners to do it on the cheap.

Most people are always looking for ways to reduce their marketing spend, and yet that is completely the wrong approach in my opinion.

Of course, you should always look for value for money, but rather than looking at ways to reduce the amount you spend on acquiring new clients, you should be willing to spend more than your competitors to win the right kind of new clients.

And here’s the secret, don’t be distracted by the short-term costs of getting a new client. Instead, focus on the long-term revenue and profit that they are going to bring you.

Let me ask you some questions about this. When you win a new client, on average, how many users do they have and how much do they pay per user per month? And how long does a client stay with your MSP on average? Now, let’s say your average new client has 10 users, and just to keep the numbers easy, let’s say you charge them a $100 per user per month, and your retention will be excellent because of course it is for most MSPs most of the time. So let’s say you keep a client on average for three years, I realise it’s probably going to be a lot longer than that, but we’ll just go with three years. So 10 users times $100 a month equals a $1,000 a month. A 1,000 times 12 months equals $12,000 a year, and $12,000 times three years equals $36,000. You with me so far. So without doing any projects, without selling any hardware or licenses, that new client that you’ve just signed is going to be worth $36,000 to your business over the next few years – $36,000 of brand new revenue. And if you wanted to get even more excited about that figure, now work out the gross profit of that new client. Let’s say you had a 75% gross profit margin. Well, 75% of $36,000 is $27,000, so that’s 27 grand of gross profit. And you can take this a step further. What’s your net profit margin? Let’s say it’s 15%, so 15% of $27,000, and I know we’re doing lots of figures here, but 15% of $27,000 is $4,050. $4,050, you pay tax on that and that’s your personal money to spend.

Can you see the power of thinking this way? Because while most of your competitors are thinking about the $1,000 that they get from the client in the first month, you are focused on the revenue, the gross profit, and the net profit that you can collect from your client over the next few years. That $36,000 revenue figure is known as Average Lifetime Value, and it’s the value of the average client over their lifetime with your MSP. When you know this figure inside out, it allows you to make some very, very sensible spending decisions. Spend $50 a day on quality traffic, a $1,000 on a powerful piece of direct mail, $30,000 on a high quality salesperson. These are all costs your competitors will not be willing to spend because they’re not thinking the right way.

One caveat with this, and it goes back to what I was saying right at the start. To make this way of thinking work, you need to make sure you have adequate cashflow or funding in place to spend this money today, and then of course to reap the benefits down the line. Never ever do marketing that puts your business’ cashflow at any risk.

Compliance isn’t a headache. For MSPs it should be a prof