(Best Of) MSP Marketing Baby Steps

Hey Stephen, we gotta figure out an intro to the podcast. Hello everybody and thank you for listening to another episode of the No Fluff MSP Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Tahir Homet, got my co-host here. Stephen Bador, welcome back. Yes, welcome back to another episode. Super excited about this episode. And generally right now is a human. I'm just excited. I mean, I just really. Everything's clicking right now. You know, we'll keep updating everybody on MSP camp and whatnot. But like, right now, I know things change. There's always ups and downs and whatever. I just feel like we are flying. Yeah, I would agree. Like, the podcast is gaining traction. Our members are happier than ever. We just rolled out grow groups. Like, things are just popping up. And I just so grateful for everyone that's listening. Because it is like. This is kind of like mind blowing at the moment. Stephen's got a tammity of people doing team right now. Yeah, kind of. It's like five or six, right? At least six, right? We're going to the content team, yeah. Yeah, just in the content team. And so like, Stephen's now able to create campaigns. Like, we had an idea for a co-pilot campaign. Was it like a week ago? Yeah. And now we're going to roll it out in what a week? Yeah, we have everything steadily coming out. So by next week, we'll have it basically finished. Yeah. We've got custom content we're creating for partners and members. Like, the. The quality and pace of content right now is epic. And then on the agency side, like, we're building the inbound service, which is like the website development SEO, we're not rolling it out. Sorry, not yet. Just a pilot program. LinkedIn lead generation thing, like, I don't know. It's just cool. How much stuff is happening at MSP camp right now? And honestly, you guys are the reason. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. Just overwhelmed with work. But also, like, gratitude and everything else. So we did a survey, probably six months ago, when we were still using the Facebook pages, the main community forum. Six, five months ago. Because I wanted to know, I was like, okay, what is the members. What do they want the most? Because we had our ideas. But we're like, okay, well, what do you guys want the most? Number one was content variation. And to me, that was kind of surprising. I felt like we had a ton of content. But that was the number one thing that the members wanted. They said, no, we want more content, which is a surprise to us. But that's why you do surveys for clients, right? Like, what do they care about? Number two was peer groups, which again, surprised me. Like, I mean, I know peer groups are important. I love peer groups. But that was what. Second place. And then third place was the agency services. So in those six months, we have completely changed gears to be content first. How many of you put in a day right now? We're hitting four a day. It's a day every day. Every single day. It's the past few weeks, yeah. And the quality today is better than I've ever seen anything coming out in MSP camp. I'm a big fan of everything that's been created. It's insanity. And number two was peer groups, which we call grow groups. Because I don't. There's so many peer groups in the MSP space. I didn't want to just do another peer group. These are specifically grow groups. So growth centered peer groups. And those rolled out. We're already getting so much engaged on that. Thank you, everyone. That's participating. You know what? There are people that applied for grow groups. They're not really engaged. That's cool. No worries. You don't have to be engaged. You can. We'll remove you from the grow group. You're still leader, remember? All good. Because I only want engaged people. And we're going to condense it. We have eight grow groups. We're going to condense it to like six, right? Just to make sure it's just the most engaged people. Because I don't want this to just be a thing where I put people in a. A little thing. And then hands off. Nothing happens. And then we're going to continue refine this thing. So number one, number two, you know, in progress or done. Number three, agency services. We're spending $20,000 a month right now on building out just two different services that we have a pilot program on. So I'm not selling. You don't worry to anyone listening. That's getting defensive. There's no sales going on here. It's just. I'm just stoked. I'm amazed. I'm happy with the team. And we are moving. So thank you. This is not a sales thing. I know a lot of our listeners are already members. Thank you for letting us do this. I promise we will not let you down. Thank you. Okay. All that to say. The prologue. All right. The prologue. I know it's a no fluff. So we try and keep out the fluff. But I hope that was helped. A little bit of a lot of people today. Yeah. This is the fluff. MSP marking podcast today. All right. Cool. So we're on our new mics. So hopefully you hear the difference. A little bit clearer. Yeah. I'm very happy with the difference. But we'll see if we get another two-star view. Which is all good. I'm moving on. I'm buddy salty. I know. I should not. I'm not going to respond to an anger at anything ever. Nothing good happens. All right. Move on. Today, we are going to be talking about marketing baby steps for MSPs. I think when people see our campaigns, they're like, oh my god, there's like 12 different things here. Or when people get started in marketing, they're like, holy crap. There's so much. Because for sure, there could be so much. And today we're actually going to like relieve your anxiety a little bit around what you're doing with marketing and what you should be doing with marketing. And I'm kind of surprised we haven't done an episode like this before. Yeah. You know, I was thinking that too when you brought the subject. Yeah. Essentials. Essentials to everything we've done, especially with MSP campaign these past six months. Dude, totally. And all tech. And I think that was the epiphany moment. We're like, okay, cool. I think this is what people need to hear. And I think it'll be very helpful. So please stick around. Grab my water bottle real quick. All right. So the reason we want to cover this is we want to start building momentum. We've heard of say the flywheel and if I will doesn't happen overnight and momentum doesn't happen overnight, you know, when marketing is marathon, not a sprint. So I want to give you some really specifics about what we did at all tech. And then I want to directly compare that to what we did with MSP camp. We're very blessed in that both of these situations, the marketing worked. And it is not because we're doing all of the things. That's not why it worked. It's because we were very intentional about what we were going to do for incremental. That's such a good way to put it. So let's start with all tech. So I started all tech eight years ago now. We have officially we've all I took everybody to go marketing team with me. We've been with the DJ left all tech, which actually Tom doesn't even care because he got all of it that off his payroll. And now he's paying us. You know, it's a benefit. Yeah. And now he's just a client that he's paying all along. That's for. So what we started with like I failed failed failed failed miserably. And then I started being a little more intentional. And what number one the number one thing I did before really doing anything else when I was really starting to be intentional is I just started to really look at the website. Like I really started to critique the website, the content on the website, how we're ranking locally. I found Google my business early. I think that was a lucky thing. It was before everybody was really on Google my business. I put a lot of emphasis on the website and improving SEO in house. We didn't even have a Google my business. We were in business for so long we never even have it. So I went through the process of getting the Google my business set up and with the process of writing a bunch of custom content on the website. Like I was writing a lot and maybe a much better writer because I was constantly writing stuff, not everything worked, but some stuff really hit. And especially when it came to local stuff. So we started ranking locally. And then it was like we got our first inbound lead. And I was like, whoa. Like this thing just closed like $600. Yeah. It's like this baby. But it's like you're not just writing this content and putting this up for no, like you see that there's a return for it. That's changes everything. It changes everything when I saw that return money coming in from that. A lot of effort. So then I started feeling comfortable because we started getting a couple, you know, a couple you leads, you know, through the website. So then I started putting a ton of effort and you've heard us say this a million times, but let me just show you how it worked. Back, we put a ton of effort into getting social proof. Like I just went on a rampage, getting reviews on Google, clutch. I don't know if there's clutch back then, but up city, like I was just getting reviews. I was getting a lot of case studies. We need a board that's like amount of days without mentioning reviews. I never speak every behind us. But there's a reason it keeps coming up. Yeah. It will always be at zero. And the case studies were great because like we worked with like these massive local clients, like the citrus connection in Lakeland, like they do the buses for the whole city. And I'm like, nobody even knows we work with them. And they had like four IT people. They were spending like a quarter million dollars on a tee outside of salaries. Like they were just blowing money. We came in, we fixed everything. They went down to two IT people. They're spend with us. They're spending an IT went way down. Their life was way better. I'm like, wait a minute. What? Why are we not drawing attention to this yet? Why are we not drawing attention to this company that lives in these days? We're not even like the nose. Complete case study. Yeah. It's written for you, basically. We're written and we got a video. It's still on our website. It was a great way. And when I was talking to another like the housing authority prospect, I would send them that video. Because it's like, now I'm getting smitten by leads. And now I've got these wonderful case studies and testimonial videos to say, look, somebody like you chose us. The company you really know. You know it. You see them every day. their life is better. And I have a video of the person that hired us talking about how great we are. Everybody to listen to this podcast right now, every single one of you has a story like that, or you'd be out of business, I feel like. And it's like, oh, but that's, you know, it's going to be so much time and effort. It's going to be worth it. I know it's not one of those things that you do. And it's like, oh, cool. I did this. And now I get a lead a week from it. No, that's not going to happen. A lot of things in marketing aren't going to be like that. But now you just elevated your entire presence. So that was number two. Number one, we really got obsessed with the website. It looked like absolute shit. I'd ever saw the old one. Yeah, still gives me PTSD. But you know, I had to learn like how do websites work? What is the builders? Like what is WordPress? How do I post the blog? Like there was a lot of learning there. But then it started to get results. And then I got fired up. That was when we first early on after these two things were happening. The third thing came in. This is when we really started putting emphasis on campaigns. And so a lot of campaigns would be to clients into prospects. And at the end of the campaign, this is why we became obsessed with campaigns because it was a designated time. We never didn't have a campaign. Like I see this in the zeitgeist. Now people are like, you don't want to run campaigns because those are one off. No, no, no, no, that's not what a campaign is. A campaign is it's you have your marketing that you're doing every week, monthly, quarterly. But the general message and campaign is going to change. Like you can't be doing the same thing. Like so this quarter, we talked about VoIP and at our concert on VoIP and upselling clients to VoIP and everything else. And then we did Microsoft 365 Business Premium, right? And then we did cybersecurity. So each quarter was a campaign. We really honed it on that early. And I have Tom to thank for that. I really do. Like I think back. And it was always Tom early on pushing campaigns. And I was an early baby marker. I didn't really understood what, understand what that meant. I just wanted leads. But when we defined it as, okay, this is a 12 week period of time where we're going to be discussing this one topic at Nazim with really good content in that service level. Exactly. And then at the end of this, this is the thing that really started hitting for us at the end of the quarter. We would do a webinar or a lunch and learn. Early was the lunch and learns. And you've heard our podcast on nobody wants to attend your data backup event. You can see how we did lunch and learns that actually got people to show up. And it just built that community with our clients. It started bringing in prospects. Pretty big prospects. And when they came in, now I get to nurture them and send them emails and tag them on LinkedIn and just build that relationship. And we did it at Lone Palm. This really nice golf course in Lakeland, where we did the quarterly things with all tech. And yeah, a lot of people showed up. They loved it. Got really good food for free, really great presentation. And we tried to do it fun where it was like, you know, back and backup health where we got our physical therapist client to come in and talk about backup health and these stretches because we sit at computers all day. And then we had our backup provider come in and kind of associate that with like backing up your servers, right? So like, it was a way of being engaging and interesting enough to actually get people to fill the room. And the cheat code was we always invited our clients, these lunch and learns, and our prospects. So even if only three or four prospects showed up, we always could count on 20 to 40 clients showing up. So it's like, cool. I mean, obviously I did that because I want clients being engaged, but selfishly it kept me from being a loser that nobody showed up. That's a sheet code for webinars too. That's a cheat code for webinars too. Exactly. And then you put in the webinar like, hey, make sure you invite your friend or whoever else. All right, so that was number three. Like, this is how we started to get the thing rolling. And the whole point in this podcast is it's like, baby steps. If I started with all three of these things were off the bat, it probably would have been overwhelming. I wouldn't have understood. I wouldn't have been focused enough to have the right processes and really expertise to add another thing on. And I think this is all, I don't want to say haphazard, but this was all serendipity as we found these baby steps, but you're going to see on the second part of this podcast, how me and Steven have done this extremely intentionally with MSP camp and how we all learned that from these baby steps with all tech. All right, hope you're with me. Hope this is exciting. I hope it's relieving your anxiety around. I got to do all the shit because you don't one step at a time. All right, not last. There's like 10 things here, but the fourth thing we did is I really started to focus on email campaigns. I was in infusion soft at that time. And I really like spent a shitload of time like identifying like, how does someone go from here and then what happens to make him go here? Infusion top was really intense. And I actually spent the time and effort understanding that CRM. It was the first and only time that I've actually figured out a CRM. All the sequencing. Yeah, wait, I got you. I haven't done it since. Right. And we've succeeded in marketing in both companies that I still don't do the CRM sequencing stuff. But I did back then because I really wanted to keep increasing our leads. But then once we started getting leads and consistently getting leads, that like really tough stuff I did kind of honestly just did not keep up with. And I didn't have help to keep up with that. So like, don't feel guilty about that either because if the stuff is working, that's fine. Not everything has to be 100% effort. Probably bad advice, but worked for me. All right, so we started emailing campaigns to current clients as well as to prospect. So we did do a lot of cold emailing back then. We are going to start rolling out cold emailing for our peer groups, peer group as well. And like I've said in the, I wish, cold calling or cold emailing didn't work episode. It's like, it does work. It just takes time, effort and value. So we did consistently do cold emailing to prospects. It has absolutely provided an ROI over the years. So I added cold emailing in. It wasn't something I started with. Cold email, cold calling, I started off really early and just shot myself in the folks I didn't know what I was doing. But with cold emailing, now we've got the reviews. Now we got a really good website. Now we've got something to invite people to in these cold emails, inviting them to the lunch and there were so many people that showed up to lunch and learned from a cold email because I'm not trying to sell them right away. I'm often even free food in a cool engaging event at one of the like really well-known golf courses. So cold emailing absolutely worked and that was kind of the next thing I added in. And then we moved into remarketing. So that's when I figured out remarketing probably like four or five months into the journey, which we still use a lot. Like that's one of the only ads we do from SPCance remarketing. I guess it's called retargeting and I may have been saying remarking long, like this entire time. It's funny, Andrew from CheckTrap. It's like, hey, I think it's actually retargeting. I'm like, I've been saying remarketing for years. It's funny as we still call it remarketing. We know we're saying change it. I don't know. And it must be camp members all call it remarketing too. It's like, all right, that'll be our that'll be our inside baseball. Cool. So then we started remarketing, which absolutely helped to convert more of that traffic over time, definitely a long play there. I've explained remarketing as like, it's like a billboard, right? Remarketing is not necessarily going to be something where you see a ton of conversions come in from those ads because very few MSP prospects are going to click the ad on Facebook or Google or LinkedIn and then fill out the contact form. That's not necessarily what we're trying to do with remarketing, retargeting, and the MSP space. Although I've seen some people have success with that. That's awesome. What I'm trying to do is pay whatever. It's like $500 a month. It's like nothing to stay in front of that prospect that landed on the site because they were angry, but then they left. Well, guess what? Over the next month or two months, they're going to get angry again with their current IT provider. And if you're the one that every day they've been seeing on Facebook and on Google and on YouTube and on LinkedIn, you're going to be the one that they go to. That's kind of how it works. Yeah. You changed the stuff from them googling IT providers in my area to googling directly to your page, which completely flips it around. That's exactly it. And you know, if you're listening and skeptical on that, I want you to think for a second. How many times have you been targeted by ads? And you've bought. Maybe never. Maybe you're the kind of buyer that that has never happened. But for me like displate, they followed me for like six months. I finally bought a couple of them, right? They made 300 bucks off of me off of probably $2 an ad spend over the course of two months or whatever. And then Masterclass recently got me with the Mark Cuban ad. I mean, I was just seeing this Mark Cuban ad over and over and I'm like, man, I would like to see what he has to say. And so I bought Masterclass for a year. They made $130 bucks off of me. You know, again, off of five or $10 of ads. So it works on me. And if you're listening to this, it might work on you. And so it's just something that we added in and absolutely helped. All right. Cool. We got a couple more things on the MSP side of things. And again, I want to reiterate the point of this episode is the seat show. We didn't start with all the things. This was the baby steps we took. Once we got comfortable with the website and SEO, then we added in more social proof once we cut comfortable with that. Then we started adding these quarterly campaigns with a big event at the end of it, like a lunch and learn. Then I started putting a lot of emphasis on email campaigns because I felt really confident and comfortable with those three steps. And then we started doing the remarketing because I really had us, you know, really firm foundation, SOPs and processes for these fours than we had the fifth thing in. It would have been so much harder. to gauge the effectiveness of each thing if you juggle the malt at the beginning. Totally. I think you'd also have increased scrutiny towards like, "Oh, I'm running email campaigns along with SEO, along with Facebook ads, like, out of putting in money to these things." So if the email campaigns aren't converting like immediately, you're going to be much more like, "Oh, I got to cut this off. This isn't working. Get more stressed." So one by one, like, it's much easier to kind of test it out and then know, "Okay, this is working. I've got it dialed in. I'll move on to the next thing." I mean, remain assured that this previous process that I set up is running correctly. Yeah. That's spot on and each one of them complements the other where like, if I started cold emailing before, we had really good social proof and everything else. When someone Googled us like, "Who the hell is emailing me?" They can see, "Oh, this is actually a legit local business." So it really helped build on each other. All right. Last couple things on this like early stage kind of baby steps to kind of get all text flywheel going. We started holding bigger events. So we did like this really big cybersecurity event. I had like 100 people there. Lots of prospects. It was big. We put a big budget towards it because we knew based on baby steps that lunch and learns work for us. So I was like, "Let's go bigger and better." We got MDF funds for that. We got vendor speakers for that. It was great. I then started getting pretty confident in what I was marketing. So then I actually started going to a networking event like every single week because now I felt confident what we were doing. I felt the taste of getting a lead and having that lead close. Yeah. And I was like, "Oh man. It's kind of nice. It's kind of nice." Like, you know. And so once you get that and anyone listening to this, if you're the owner or the marketing salesperson, the first time you get your first closed deal from marketing in the MSP space, especially because it's like, "Oh, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars a month." You're like, "Oh shit." It's been a relief, like instant relief right there too to know that, "Oh wait, the things I'm doing are working like I said earlier, yeah." It's instant relief and it's also, I just paid for all of that. I'm not spending three thousand dollars a month on marketing. This came in from marketing. All of my monthly marketing expenses, except for maybe like the salary of the person, are now covered. And it might cover the next few months year, etc. Depending on the type of deal closed. Exactly. And I was talking to Aaron Fox over at GlobalQuest. He's a MSP camp member and someone at a period, we've been doing SEO for a while. And he was like, "I was on the call with him." He said, "Dude, you guys, we got a lead from the website from what you guys are doing." It was just a Google search. He said, "It was 25 computers and it closed in 48 hours." You guys, he's like, "I have no need to ever think about moving because you guys have paid for yourself two times with that one thing." Now we've already paid for self multiple times after that. But the point he was trying to make is how he thinks about marketing. I love this and I'm the same exact way is like, if you're investing in something in marketing and that something has paid for itself and then some, he's like, "I'm just going to keep doing it." And I'm like, "Dude, yes." That's it. Facebook ads have paid for themselves for us a million times over. So it's like, "I'm just going to keep doing that forever." And now I can baby step into another thing. If that starts paying for it, perfect. I'm going to keep doing that and then these things get to compound. I love that perspective. And for anybody right now that I'm not trying to sell you because again, we're not doing in my house. We're not rolling it out. I just want to give you an example of how he thinks of his baby steps. Like, SEO, my website was one of his baby steps that we were now checking the box for him so he can move on to the next thing. All right. So, yeah. So then, start doing a network event a week. That was great. You know, I got a word of mouth, go listen the episode on building your word of mouth that you were on that episode. Yes. Right? Yeah. So that means Stephen and I did. And then really started putting effort into social media marketing. So social media marketing was not early into what I was doing. Like, I actually started being intentional about my personal LinkedIn. You know, I got like a thousand plus connections of local business owners and whatever. I started posting content that I thought would be unique and interesting and over time that has added a nice ROI, but it took a lot of time and effort. If I had put a lot of time and effort into that really on before I started building the rest of these things with baby steps, I don't know if it would have been fruitful. Like, or as fruitful, right? Like, because if I wasn't going network events to actually meet people to connect with on LinkedIn, who's going to actually care about my content, right? Like, you got to kind of build the audience and that's why that baby step before the social media was so important. All right. Kind of last thing here before I moved MSP camp, this is not an exhaustive list. I just felt like these were the baby steps I took that really complimented each other and helped us get that flywheel going. So the last one is this is when we really started adding in telemarketing and direct mail. And this is obviously a bigger investor, right? You have to hire an SDR and you got to manage out direct mail campaigns with stamp or everything. You know, it's just a little bit more of a commitment. And again, the inbound helps the outbound. And this is a fact. I promise you this is a fact. Like, if you don't have a solid inbound, you don't have reviews, you don't have a good website, you don't have case studies, you don't have like a presence online personally and as a company, your outbound is not going to do as well. Fact. It's just a fact. Like, trust me on this one. Don't spend a shitload of money on outbound without also making sure you look good in your website can convert. So that was like kind of the last piece that we added in. And that's what I realized, like, absolutely cold calling still works. Like cold calling definitely still works. And you know, it's a lot, a lot more effort. You got to manage somebody. You got hire salary. You got to use something like contact science to keep them on board. That's why I like, I don't really recommend doing that early on because it's like, you don't want to get exhausted doing this or you don't want to outsource it and spend, you know, five to nine thousand dollars a month and still not have an inbound presence, right? So like once you have the inbound presence, once the website is really good, once you got this foundation built, then you can invest in the outbound and it's going to be so much more effective at least from my perspective. And he thought it's on that Stephen. Yeah. I mean, I'm already a bit of an MSP camp, but I was just thinking in a sense of like, yeah, if you zoom out from this, it's like, oh my god, like it's just so much stuff. If you were to start a marketing, I think it's also like with MSK, he'll talk about like how we structured the camp journey as a module by module process, you know, stepping up because like if I was coming in marketing to an MSP and you came in and they're like, okay, do all of this stuff. Mm-hmm. A lot of it wouldn't have gotten done as well as it did by maybe stepping it. Yeah. So I mean, I agree with the process completely. And then I keep alluding to talk about MSP camp next because we are, but I think in the same episode, right? We'll cover both. Yeah, we're going to cover both. We're moving on MSP camp right now. And don't bail out because I already covered the MSP side of things because I just want to show you what and why we did things on MSP camp. We're going to announce something crazy at the non-stick. Yeah. No. So it's like, trust me on just sticking through it because we're going to show you how we took that exact same process of baby steps, did it with MSP camp and you'll see, you know, why it was effective versus trying to do the same thing we did at all tech, even though it worked for a channel company. All right. So. And then yeah, last thing I want to say on on telemarketing, it definitely worked. Cold calling, telemarketing, absolutely still works in MSP space. It's just a little bit more time, a little bit more effort. And when you do get a lead, they're a lot colder, right? Like that's why I loved what I was doing early on. And still doing is inbound because when somebody Googles you, they find your website and they reach out to you, they're hot. They're super hot. They're almost as hot as referral. They already checked you out. They already like your stuff. They have submitted their contact form, which today is like giving away your first born. Yeah, it just doesn't happen. And you know, it doesn't. So it's like, they're super hot. Like think about Aaron's example. I just covered like he got that inbound lead. He closed it within 48 hours. They're a happy client. Onboarding is going well. That is what I put all of my emphasis on early on because it's just, it was just, it was easier. They're warmer. I didn't even have to be good at sales. Now, same example. Aaron has gotten, I think 30 leads now from his cold calling campaign. And we might be very excited to hear, you know, things like that. Wow, 30 leads. Not one of those is closed yet. But he's got one that probably will close out of that 30. And that's great. And it's going to pay for itself. And so he, you know what he's going to do? Keep doing that thing. Yeah. Is that casting a wider net if that one comes through? Yeah. But that thing just paid for itself. So now he gets to just keep doing the thing. Even though it's expensive, it's like cool. But yeah, it's now paid for itself three times over. So like I can just keep doing that. And so those 30 leads though has kept him pretty busy. And there's been a lot of tire kickers and a lot of people are not ready to move yet. And so that's when it's like, oh shit, we really do need to have our sales skills on point. We better have drip email campaign. So it's just almost like a different type of mindset when you start doing outbound. And we do have an episode coming out on inbound versus outbound. So I just wanted to kind of cover that before we move into MSP camp. All right. Let's keep going. Keep going. Yeah. All right. So we're going into here. Just getting out. No. All right. So now we're going to kind of get into MSP camp and how we have baby stepped our own marketing in-house. Just to really hit home on this point. We are a marketing company. MSP camp is a marketing company filled with marketing people. I'm a marketing guy. I'm surprised. Like, I'm a marketing person. Stevens a marketing person. They everybody went to school for marketing. Like, Maddie, we are a marketing company. And guess what we did to a market MSP camp? The only thing we did at first was this podcast. Just wild to think about. That is right. We knew a whole lot about SEO. I knew a whole lot about ads and you know a whole lot about a lot of things. And the only thing we did was the podcast because the most important thing was building an audience. Why didn't I start with SEO? And the website like I did at all tech. Like the MSP camp site was really nice at first, but it wasn't anything crazy, right? And like we didn't have any domain authority. So like, why didn't I start with SEO? Because all tech to rank stuff like IT services, Lincoln was a lot easier to do than trying to rank for MSP marketing or MSP marketing content, which a lot of people aren't even searching. So it made way more sense to try building an audience through a podcast than to even think about SEO yet. And so that's why our baby step as a new company that started marketing for the first time was one thing. Talk. Yeah, talk. That was it. Yeah. And we weren't even good at it at first. I mean, maybe we were. I don't know. But not compared to now, I don't think we're healthy audio definitely wasn't as crispy. Yeah. Thanks for that. Two-star review. All right. Cool. And then once we started, you know, getting some clients, which is amazing, I'm so grateful that we got clients back then. Like if we didn't like this whole thing could have just. Yeah, dead on arrival. Oh my god. Yeah. It could have easy but dead on arrival, especially the way the site used to be and how little content we had. Like I'm just so grateful for those like OG people that were like. Yeah, they were kind of like, look, your thing kind of sucks right now, but I like what you're saying. So we're going to give you a shot. So thank you. Then we started adding in SEO. And we start adding in SEO. Do you think we went after MSP marketing? Nope. Didn't do that because like the competition was so high there, then I'm like, now, no, no point in doing that. So we started going after longer telekiewards. For instance, within like a few months of the site, being a site, zero domain authority didn't do anything. We ranked number one in the world for MSP sales presentation. Before we even had an MSP sales presentation to sell, number one in the world on a site that has zero domain authority and a site that was a membership site, which means 90% of the tabs were locked. People couldn't even see them. Yeah. That in we ranked number one because it's like that was an underserved keyword. And there was a lot of people writing Contro and MSP sales presentation, but I just wrote one that was like very long still brings number one today and really good examples and everything else. So like perfect. Now we started getting some leads from that blog. We started writing more blogs on social media marketing, website design, everything else. Those started bringing leads in cool. So now we got podcasts, which is consistently bringing leads in every week. And then we've got SEO, which is bringing, you know, maybe one or two clients a month, right? Just like just adding it into the mix. Cool. That's all going good. We've got a nice process for SEO. I'm going to write a blog every now and then we're going to optimize the pages. Let's baby step it into the next thing, which was Facebook ads. This is going to be the best example of why baby stepping is so important right here. The podcast was going, we were recording like four to time and scheduling them out. The SEO was a gift that kept giving maybe not a lot, but it was giving. Then we started Facebook ads. And for three, four months, I was blowing $1500 a month on Facebook. Yeah, it's really easy to be like, this doesn't work. It would be so easy to say this doesn't work. And you know, I did almost like, maybe this doesn't work. We talked about it a few times, I remember. But it always ended up on, let's keep it running. Yeah. Yeah. And then we tweaked things. We changed the called actions. We changed the creative. We changed the targeting. And then it was just like, I remember one month, we added 40 members from the ads. And it was like, oh shit. Oh, yeah. And so baby steps, podcast, SEO, Facebook ads. And here's the thing. Sometimes SEO doesn't hit. And sometimes the podcast doesn't hit. We don't sell on the podcast really. And so sometimes people don't drive on the podcast. So these things are now hitting at different times, but it keeps a consistent flow of adding one or two members a day every single day because of the baby steps. All right. Now we have these three things that are going well. And in your case, from the MSB, it might be SEO. It might be, I'm going to do a bunch of networking events, whatever the first baby step is. Okay. I'm feeling confident about this. Add the next baby step in. So then the next one was I started appearing on other people's podcasts and other people's events. I remember when me, you know, anybody listened to episode podcasts for a while. We talked about when we were going to the acronis event and like we had zero budget. So we got a stupid blow up. I still remember that. Oh my god. It was like our first event that I spoke at. Shout out to Cameron May over at Silver Eye Tech for for hook and a sup man. That was awesome. But he just gave us a free just speaking spot, like a really good speaking spot for like hundreds of people. I was like, wow, this is wild. And so like, yeah, we got the blow up. Cool. We're fishing. This is crazy. I think that was so cringy. But it worked. People loved it. Yeah. All right. Cool. So then I started appearing on other people's podcasts because these things are all rolling, bringing leads. That's our bringing leads. We are now starting Google ads and Google ads. You know, I'm spending $3,000 a month right now in Google ads. And from our marketing, we're spending probably like $78,000 a month. Our total revenue is only like 70 grand a month right now. We're spending 10% of our monthly revenue on on marketing. And now I've just increased how much we're spending on marketing. But why? Because the baby steps that we put in place are slowly but surely adding to our revenue. And now I get to supercharge it with another baby step, which is Google ads. And in Google ads, I don't know what as well as I know Facebook, I have hired somebody that I like and trust and they're running it for me, right? And I'm going to scrutinize it and make sure things are going well. But hopefully in the next three months, that $3,000 is paid for from memberships. And if it is paid for for memberships, guess what? I get we get to just, you know, keep doing it. We get to just keep doing it. Because it's like, well, this thing has paid for itself. Like so we are everything from here is gravy. So we're just going to keep doing that. Like every other baby step we have taken. And then, you know, to kind of follow up as exactly what happened in all tag, we put so much, sorry about that. Let me talk much on this. That's good. I'm kind of for support on this one. Because a lot of it's actionable pieces of, you know, all tag MSP camp kind of stuff. Yeah. I'm the guy who gives you the content. Yeah. Steven is a huge part in this. Like the wizard boss. Yeah. Exactly. And exactly like all tech, how we put so much emphasis on inbound earlier on that's exactly what we did at MSP camp. I want, I want members to come to MSP camp because they want to come to MSP camp. Like I don't want to have to force it. I don't want to try and sell you on something. And then you get there and say, this isn't what I was expecting. That's why we don't do contracts. That's why we do trial. Like I only want people coming if they want to come. And that's where inbound is so important because we show exactly what it is. We show content examples. We show this is what you want. Is this what you're looking for or not? Same thing we did with all tech. And then once you've kind of tapped out the inbound, then you do start adding in the outbound. But we don't want to do too early to shoot ourselves in the foot. Exactly like all tech. So just now, just now are we starting to even get a list. And I don't mean a cold list. I mean, like just now are we offering these MIFKies and lead magnets like we talked about in a couple episodes ago where a prospect that doesn't know who MSP camp is can download an entire campaign that we're going to build for this for this marketing campaign. Right. And all we get is their contact information. So this is somebody that's not as warm as inbound. Right. Our whole call to action MSP camp is sign up. It's not book a call book a demo talk to us. It's sign up. And now that we're doing well with inbound and growing there. Now we can start adding in these other things. We have so many reviews. We got a lot of social proof. Our product is very good now. Awesome. Now we can actually start getting more that cold traffic where we're offering this something for them to download or get for free and exchange the contact information, which will then do drip emailing. And then we can get that list into retargeting on LinkedIn and everything else. We are actually trying to convince somebody to come in. But just like the MSP space, you're going to have to get a whole lot more of those leads to convert because they're just they're colder. They're not a listener of the podcast. They're not a watcher of the YouTube videos. They're a little colder. We have to really educate them on what we're doing and try and get them to move closer to us over time. Yeah. And imagine if the first step was drip email instead of the podcast, right? Like if you don't really assess what would be best for your company, it would shoot us in the foot. That's exactly right. Like assess what is best for your MSP in your market, what you're interested in. It doesn't even just have to be exactly what all tech did. All tech did. Maybe you're way more interested in video than another MSP, or maybe you're way more interested in copyrighter, or copywriting, so you do wanna focus on SEO. Maybe you're, maybe you love networking, and that could be your baby step. Like I see MSPs at network that go to B&I, whatever, and then they say they don't do marketing. It's like, yeah, you do. I see MSPs, they send out a monthly newsletter to clients, and they're starting just an apprint newsletter to prospects, and they say they don't do marketing. It's like, yes, you do. You're doing marketing. That is marketing. Like, think about MSP, we did one thing, and then we did two things, and then we did three things, and now we do four or five things. Yeah, we don't do marketing, we just do a podcast. Yeah, exactly. And so you can rest easy in a couple of ways today. Like, one, I hope this is helpful, and kind of gives you some good ideas, but rest easy understanding. Like, if you're doing one thing, awesome. Keep doing that one thing, and when you're comfortable, add one more thing. Without rushing. Without rushing. (silence) Patience and persistence. Like, patience and persistence. Like, keep it moving. I did the rant last week on like, everything works. Everything works. Some people, they might wanna do a webinar a week. That'll work. Some people might just wanna do cold emailing. That'll work. Tom Lawrence specialized in YouTube. Now he's making a effing killing. That'll work. We could have just kept doing the podcast. If we really started doing the podcast, where it's like, okay, we are gonna do the podcast. We're gonna do three episodes a week. We're gonna look up what people are asking on forums. We're gonna answer it thoroughly. We are gonna do three episodes a week. We could blow this podcast up, where all of our leads came from the podcast, right? But it would just show that all of our marketing effort is kind of in one basket. And we'd rather be a little more diversified. But my point is, it'll work for you. Just get it going, get something going, and then add something else, and just keep the persistence. And if you're an MSP camp member, like don't look at the 12 things that make up a campaign, get scared and not do any of it. Don't do that. We put it all there, but it doesn't mean you have to do all of it. Like you can just say, okay, I'm gonna post a blog a week. I'm gonna change up the one they have on the site. I've got a really good idea here. I'm gonna post a blog a week. I'm just gonna start doing that. I literally had, I think it was a Rona on MSP camp. He or she, I actually don't know. They don't have a profile photo, but they said they changed the blog and posted it, and they ranked number one within a week, within one week. They ranked number one from this keyword that they're trying to go for. So, and again, I'm not saying that's because MSP camp is awesome. I'm saying that it was just somebody that executed on the one thing, which they wanted to start posting blogs. Cool, you got some blogs posted? Awesome, maybe now you start adding some social media and your confident country, you're building an audience. Let me go to this one. Oh my God, I think it's Jonathan. Let me see. I have an MSP camp member. He joined like three months ago. I wanna call him out on this podcast 'cause he deserves it. So, he joined. Yep, there he is. Number one, he's the first one that came up. I just love my LinkedIn. He's the number one first that came up, and it was a content that Maddie scheduled out for him. All right, that's amazing. That is it right there. So, this guy, Jonathan Cable from Titan Technology Services, he joined MSP camp just a little bit ago. He signed it for social media management, but you know what else he did? He's been posting his own, his branding looks incredible. He's imposing his own content and his stuff is blowing up. Like he is getting a following on LinkedIn. I love following what he's doing. So we're posting for him, and then he's posting his own goodness, like every day or every other day. This one he just did 200 likes, engagements, 19 comments, like that was last week. Jonathan is a perfect example. He wanted to get things going, and he absolutely is getting things going. This is probably the fastest ramp up I've seen on a LinkedIn page, and that was him not relying on us to just do his social media form. He wanted us to supplement what he's doing, and he kept going hard, and now his LinkedIn is blowing up. And so, Jonathan, good job. Hope you're on the fireside chat today. I definitely wanna give you some applause and shout out because over time, this is gonna continue to build your awareness as you connect with people. If you deal with prospects, they're gonna see you're more legitimate. You're gonna get leads from LinkedIn over time. It's gonna work out. And this is one of Jonathan's baby steps. Hope that made sense. Does that a good example? - Yeah, I like it. - Cool. - That's pretty wild though. That's great engagement for LinkedIn. - That's amazing. All right, cool. Well, just wanted to do that today to let you know you're doing fine, you're doing great. It's okay if you're doing one thing. Let's add two things. Yeah, like thumbs up, you're doing great. Then add three things. And if you're doing one, two or three things, you are doing marketing. - You are doing one thing. - Maybe if you're doing marketing. You are doing marketing. Marketing is not this crazy, technical, black magic race, thing in the world where it's like, oh, there's this thing that somebody's doing and figuring it out. And nope, it's activity towards a bigger strategy persistently. I'll talk into a new member who is he's in Ireland, Alan, and he was at an MSP for a long time that didn't do marketing sales. And so he's starting his MSP, we're helping him with his website, everything else. And he's like, I knew what they did wrong, which is marketing sales. He's like, I don't want that to be me. And day one, his branding looks amazing. He spent the money to get a good brand. He's getting a website done correctly with SEO and everything else. He does a LinkedIn automation, not to sell anything. He does a LinkedIn automation just to connect with local people in his community, owner to owner. And now he set his social media presence is growing because of that automation to connect with people. And then they see his organic content, which we're now going to be helping him post out. Like it's, he understands from day one, like he has to have a marketing mindset, which just starts with making sure he's got a website. And just making sure he's starting to build his audience. So he might think, I'm not doing marketing, which he doesn't. But I'm saying someone similar to that might think they're not doing marketing. That is marketing. Just keep adding the baby steps in. And it's gonna pay off. I promise. Just keep at it. - Guarantee from Tucker. - Guarantee. No. Yeah, like I said a million times, it took us 13 months to start getting return on our marketing. And then it's just kept hidden. So, cool. Steven nailed it. Anything from him? - Let's conclude. No, feeling good. I mean, I agree with everything he said. I mean, we've seen it in real time. Obviously not the whole thing. I wasn't there for that. Like MSP camp has been exactly that incremental process. So, we're gonna keep doing it. It's not like you're saying with, it's not like we saw Facebook ads returning. We got to a profit point that we liked and we turned them off. It's like, no, we know this is working. So it's like we're gonna continue maximizing the steps there. - Yes. - Rather than like doing everything at once. And obviously you can see the stats on Facebook, but like doing everything at once, kind of half-assing it and then just being like, oh, this doesn't work, turn it off. Instead of finding out, oh, this works. We're gonna wait three to four months, which would be very easy. Like you said, just shut them off and give up about it. But you take those baby steps one thing at a time. You do them well rather than just doing them to do them. That's why if you're only doing one thing for marketing, as long as you're especially on that one thing and doing it well, then it makes it so much easier to build on top of it. So spot on. - Good topic choice. - Yeah, that was a good wrap up. - Stuff Stephen. - I guess I was listening. - Yeah, that shows you actually worth listening. - Yeah, Stephen was here for supporting good wrap up today. - Oh yeah. - There's things I do well. - It's that. - That's just the wrap up. After every podcast I'm gonna bring Stephen in. - Does this sound good? - Do the wrap up. - No, I don't know. - One of those is gonna come through. - Yeah, there it is. (laughing) - If it comes through, we're gonna have to overuse it. - Yeah, yeah. - It's a really long cheer. - That is a really long cheer. So now we got this road, roadcaster pro. So good upgrade because now we can do sound effects. (laughing) I hope it comes through. - It does it too. - Because if not, it's gonna look like we're just a bunch of jackass. - Oh no, I guess we have to conclude for the week. (laughing) That's my favorite one. - I don't even know what we have. - All right, cool. Well, oh, challenge this week. All right, let's move to challenge the week. And I'm gonna let Stephen do the challenge on this spot because he's so good at wrap ups. Go ahead, Stephen. - Test your might. - So you're saying we can't actually play the Mortal Kombat theme song? - No, I have the budget. - All right, Stephen, it's up to you. - Finish him. (humming) - Challenge of the week. - Don't don't don't. - Excellent. - Well, yeah, I mean, based on this, I would say the best thing to do would be like find that one thing for your MSP. So like, as you said with all tech and MSP cap, we didn't say, if it was the other way around, we're like, oh, I'll take it through to a podcast 'cause it worked for MSP cap. - Exactly. - And for MSP cap, it wasn't flipping around like that. So if you can take some time to really specify what you're probably already doing like an MSP who specializes in, oh, I go to a lot of networking events. Okay, that's your thing you're doing for a marketing. You may already be doing it great. Think about that. the next logical step and use these ones that we've talked about today, kind of as a guideline of how we would follow it and what worked for us and then think about, okay, what would I do next? And then after, so maybe you're doing networking events, perfect. I'm connecting with a lot of people at these events. Now I'm jumping on social media. That's my next big thing. I'm getting five posts a week, good engagement, making sure I'm really showing up in the local space and then what do you add on next to that? So I would say my challenge and our challenge will be could just be to yeah, find that thing that makes your MSP kind of stand out in the marketing sense, do it great and then think about the next two or three steps and start enacting them. Yep, with the MSP, you can't contact me. Maybe maybe. And you might even do like a ladder like me with MSP camp. I already knew what the baby steps were going to be. I guess I should probably should have been specific. It's not like I have hazardly started adding these things in. I knew from the get go exactly what the next steps were going to be. Like I knew it was going to be the podcast. Then I knew it was going to be SEO. Then I knew it was going to be Facebook. I knew the ladder before I started on it. But I just I just started the one thing. And when I was comfortable with that one thing, then I added the next single ladder. So it was all there from day one of MSP camp. It wasn't haphazard. And but you're not rushing to type of the ladder. Exactly. Yeah. If I wanted to because the opportunity was all there, league madness, that opportunity was already there. Google ads, the opportunity is all these things are opportunities. I could take advantage of right now. But then that would do a disservice to the things lower on the wrong. I was going to say it takes himself control to it. I'd be like, Oh, I'm ready to do Google ads, but like waiting until it's time to do that rather than just jumping into them because you see other people doing what Google ads. It's like that ramp up does pay off. In fact, it's funny. So that's because I did jump in a Google ads about four months ago and and called them off after a month, even though they were providing some value because I just, I wasn't ready. And I was like, no, no, no, instead of trying to jump into this, like, let me pause that. And that's okay to do too until I'm ready. And now that we're firing the new site's amazing or, or, you know, Scout Plus is where it needs to be now. I feel more comfortable adding that that, that wrong in cool. Awesome. Great challenge. Good job, Stephen. Have I? Oh, yeah. All right. Thank you so much for looking at the soundboard by Mark and touch it. Especially if the sound's not coming. All right. Really appreciate y'all listen. Thank you so much for letting us do this through just insanely grateful for every day. And we have a lot, lot, lot on the way. So stay tuned and thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks for listening. Slice watching if you watch. Yes. You too. All right. Bye y'all. Bye. [Music]