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Eric Anthony:
Hey everybody. Eric here on behalf of myself and Justin, we really want to thank you for six months of podcasts and you guys listening to those podcasts, we really appreciate the audience and you taking your time to listen to us, rant, educate, whatever it is we're doing in any given week. Now, this podcast and the rest of the things that all Things MSP does is to promote the IT services channel. That's what we're here for now, in order to grow, expand, produce better content, we are going to be doing some things over the next couple of weeks, months so that you can contribute, you can support. Now as an MSP, we're going to be offering merchandise. Now it's probably going to be on the pricey side because you're not buying a shirt with a logo on it. You're supporting this channel. So whether it's a cup, a mug, t-shirt, hoodie, whatever it is, you'll know that your money is going to raising the standards for this channel, raising the amount of content we produce. Now, if you're a vendor, we also have sponsorships and advertising packages available. So just reach out to me, Eric, at all things msp.com and we'll get you all the information you need and look forward to that. All things MSP merchandise very soon. Again, thank you very much on with the podcast.
Justin Esgar:
By the way, what's really funny, I'm listening to the past couple episodes, right? I never know how you're going to edit me and I always think it's really funny when for what you decide to be in the beginning clip before the do whatever. And there's been multiple times where you have bleeped me once out of four times. Really? Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm a little sick, so I'm a little coffee today and there was one where I was listening where I said something and I said, you're going to bleep me. And then you said the exact same word within four seconds of me saying it and you didn't bleep yourself. And so it's just funny to me that I guess I need to
Eric Anthony:
Pay more attention when I'm editing.
Justin Esgar:
No, no, no, no. I think it's fine. I think the listeners are mature and old enough to understand that in real life people curse. I have this with clients too where I have to feel out the client, right? I don't curse in the very beginning and then I'll say something, but I'll be joking about it. If I were to say something like, I'm like, oh, that piece of software is here. You can bleep me. Now that piece of that piece of software is like it's a little and they think that's funny and so that helps and then you're like, okay, the client gets it. I curse and then the client curses back at me and I'm like, okay, we're cool. But you have to know the client. There are some clients that are primm and proper and do not like that. My mother, I'm the only client who still promotes my stuff from the desk of Justin Esgar. Love you mom. What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things MSP podcast. I'm your host Justin Esgar. With me always is my good friend, podcast producer extraordinaire, kind of Mr. Eric Anthony. For those who think that I'm just being mean to Eric, if the thing that I said five minutes ago doesn't make it into the episode, that joke will just make it me seem really mean.
Eric Anthony:
Well, that's okay because I'll go ahead and fall on the sword and admit that it was totally my fault that we were a day late on last week's episode.
Justin Esgar:
We can talk about consistency in today's episode. I want to preempt
Eric Anthony:
Pre, well, that's actually next week's episode.
Justin Esgar:
We'll talk about that next week. I do want to preempt the listeners coming. I am sick so I sound a little different. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see the bags under my eyes. You may hear me cough from time to time. I really apologize that you'll be driving in your car and every now and then you hear, I'm sorry it's not so that's good.
Eric Anthony:
Although
Justin Esgar:
I
Eric Anthony:
Know you're saying that, but I'm just going to edit it out.
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, I do find it funny though that every time I did finally get to urgent care yesterday and they were like, do you want to take a covid test? And I was like, alright, let me just for sake of sakes, and they're like, we'll contact you if it's positive. We won't contact you if it's negative, but you can go online and check. And I was like, why do I need to do that? And they were like, oh, we think it's viral. And I'm like, isn't viral? They're like, it's a different viral. And I'm like, I'm not a doctor. I have two forms of liquid death that I still not a sponsor today. I'm rocking the convicted melon. This is watermelon flavored. I think I had this on the show once before and just their normal grim leafer iced tea. I just ran out of Snapple.
Eric Anthony:
How is the tea? I haven't actually gone to the store to look and see if they have it yet.
Justin Esgar:
The tea is good. It's got agave, which I think is Spanish for sugar.
Eric Anthony:
It's sugar from a different source.
Justin Esgar:
It's sugar from the agave plant. Yes, it's honey, agave, sugar, all different things. Yeah, it's got agave, apparently it's got vitamins. I can't imagine which ones B six and B 12. Flavorful though this psychotic can of iced tea will use agave and B vitamins to savagely murder your thirst and turn its insides into balloon animals to book gigs at children's birthday parties. I got to give it to their marketing department. Let's talk about marketing today. This is why I drink liquid. Nothing in the show because they have a great marketing department and a lot of our ATMs P shows are marketing driven. Today also will be a little bit marketing driven and there's a reason why I think we do a lot of marketing here and we do cover other topics, but there's a reason we talk about marketing is because the listener are not doing it and should be
Eric Anthony:
Well and if they are, so a lot of them, a, don't know where to start and B, a lot of them, they just don't know what to do because as much of a science and math and numbers you can put to marketing, it is part craft as well and experimentation a lot of it. And who has time for that stuff?
Justin Esgar:
It's so funny you mentioned this because I this past week and I like sharing my tales of woe because I am also at MSS P owner. This past week was rough for me. I happened to have been solo parenting this week. My wife had to go to a conference. I'm also sick. I have two kids, I have two dogs and I had three major projects that I had to get through and these are writing projects. I had to do a full audit for somebody. I had to rewrite an I R P, I have to do some prep work for ACEs and I had to write a proposal for a new client and I found myself every day running out of time. And finally I called an emergency meeting of my directors, which is our president Lauren and our director of IT and our director of customer engagement.
And I openly, I would say near wept. I didn't cry, but I was on the verge and I just said, listen, I don't come to you asking for help very often. I am the one who has to eat the dirt when the team needs help, but I've been dealing with the team all week and we've been having problems with some clients and trying to figure out issues and I have new client calls and recordings and we're doing this and whatever. And I was like, I need your help. And I delegated that work to them, which that's a big step for me. I'm not big on delegating to my team, not because I don't think that they can do it, but because I feel like if it's falling in my lap, it's that level of importance that I need to do it. But in reality, the only one that was really important was me getting the proposal out to this new client and I was like, I need to focus on this because this could be a game for us.
So the thing was I had to figure out how to manipulate my time to free up my time. And that's what the listener need to do also when we're talking about these marketing techniques and these marketing plans is we all say, oh, I've only had a couple extra hours in the day or whatever it is. You're not going to get more than 24 hours in a day and let's be honest, you're not really going to get more than eight hours of those 24 hours because you got stuff going on. You have to sleep, you have to eat, you have to go to the bathroom, whatever. So what you need to do is you have to learn how to manipulate those hours and maximize them by delegating certain things off, not doing certain things, pushing them back or just getting rid of things altogether. They're not important.
And that way you can figure this out and if you don't have time for marketing, you have to calendarize it and book it on your time to be able to do this. So that's what we're talking about. I went on a little bit of a tangent and I apologize, but you mentioned something about time and I want the listeners to understand something because someone came to me and said to me, they were like, oh is the show, Eric's the PC guy and Justin's the Mac guy. And I'm like, well, Eric's not an M MSP anymore and I don't want to be the Mac guy. I do run an Apple consultancy and for you the listener, I run an MSP. I'm a business owner much like you, I'm an entrepreneur, much like you and I feel your pain. So I want this episode, especially because we're talking about marketing and scheduling and planning and things like that, Eric's going to be the guru and I'm going to be the MSP you who's going to question the things that he's saying. This is kind of the setup we had for the show. Alright?
Eric Anthony:
In fact, I believe I used the word heckle when we were texting earlier,
Justin Esgar:
But I'm not going to make fun of your wife or your mom or anything like that while we're talking.
Eric Anthony:
Well, that's good.
Justin Esgar:
So today we're going to talk about why MSPs should do content marketing. So let's start here. Eric, what is content marketing?
Eric Anthony:
So content marketing is when you try to bring together content that's going to be valuable to your audience and you're doing it so that you can do a couple of things. Number one, you want to educate your audience because you always want to be educating your audience. You want to be positioning yourself as that trusted expert, an expert in the community, an expert on the topic, whatever it it's. Now, the other thing that it does is by consistently creating this content, it allows you to stay in front of your prospects. I've used this example before in previous episodes of this, back in the day I managed a retail business and that retail business sold pool tables. The best marketing that we did were billboards along I four. And if you're not familiar with I four driving through Orlando, you don't know what you're missing. Those of you who do know about I four in Orlando, sorry, I had to do it too.
It was a parking lot. So a lot of times you were sitting in front of these billboards for a long time, but the point was you saw it every day. You saw it on your commute to work or you saw it on your way back home and the minute you were buying a house or building a game room, you knew where to go to get a pool table to get game room furniture. If you were playing pool, you could also come in and buy pool cues and accessories and stuff like that, but it was consistently in front of you. Now, there's not a lot to be said in terms of expertise. There is technical stuff that goes into making a pool table and maybe someday I'll talk about that, but not today. It's mainly about how the furniture looks and how well it's made and that kind of stuff and just the quality of it.
And that's very easy to get in front of somebody in a billboard. In our situation as technical experts, as business experts, we need to be presenting content to our audience that solves a problem of theirs. So what we're looking for is a problem to solve in your target market. Now of course, this means ahead of time. You need to know what your I C P is your ideal customer profile so that you know what the common problems are for that particular type of customer. Now, Justin, I would imagine that you being an Apple consultant or servicing a certain market, you have a pretty good idea of what some of those common problems are, right?
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, for sure. And for us, we built our avatar I C P. The key element there is that they have max in their office. The key element is that they're 30 to 50 people. They have don't have a C T O or IT department. We know what that is and we've talked about the avatar thing before because that's highly important, figuring out who you're targeting, right? You can think about this. If you are an M SS P in let's say a suburban to rural area, your marketing efforts are going to be different than if you're in a major metropolitan like New York City, for example. I was actually while you're talking, I went to Google. Google, how much does it cost to advertise on a billboard plan to spend anywhere between 700 and $1,500 a month for a physical billboard in a rural area, 15 to 2000 in small to midsize series and then 14,000 and up for larger cities.
So yeah, don't do it if you're in New York City, but if you're somewhere between let's say Iowa and Columbia, Missouri and you're targeting a very small area, a billboard might actually work. But again, knowing your audience, because one thing I've told people in the past when they go, how do I get more clients is who are you helping now and what are they looking at? What are they reading? What kind of blogs are they reading? What kind of magazines are they reading? What kind of YouTube channels are they looking at? Right? For me, for this show, for example, we're targeting MSPs. So we have a Facebook group, facebook.com/group/all things MSP that has over 5,000 MSPs in it. Actually, what's funny is I started inviting a couple people from my Facebook friend list and one of my friends, Jeremy, love you Jeremy, he's like, I'm not an MSP, but he is, but he's not because he's an Apple consultant, but he doesn't do the MSP model and he's like, I'll join because you told me to, but you do belong here, Jeremy.
And so we talk about things that are targeted to you, we're targeting and we we're honing in. We know what we're looking for when it comes to that stuff. So you have to do the same thing. Are you someone who only, I always go back to this one guy. I know this guy Tom, who was in Ohio, but he's not there anymore. Tom is the Mack guy for lawyers. He has really honed in on his business, his avatar being lawyers who use Max, who don't have IT support, and he crushes at that market because he knows exactly who to target, he knows exactly where to advertise. He doesn't come to ACEs, he doesn't go to the other Mac conferences. Why he doesn't need that stuff. He goes to law conferences and sets up a booth there.
We try to do that actually for nonprofits, but we can't really find, there's no nonprofit conference to be honest, for us to do that with. But he hones in and advertises directly to them. So when you're stuck in traffic on, what is it the I nine, i four, I four, I four, and you want to get in front of people's eyes and you know that their homeowners, because I four goes from city to home area in that part of Florida, you know that you're going to hit them there. You know what I love? I always love you ever go to a well outside of the northeast, diners are a little different. Up here we have 24 hour diners like actual diner, not like Denny's like an actual diner, and all the diners have place mats and on the place mats are advertisements for local businesses and they're always ridiculous. There's the travel agency, there's the crematorium, there's the guy who wants to buy race car pieces and ho trains and things like that. But you go to any diner, they're not doing it for the sake. They're doing it because the people who they want to call them are the people who will go eat at a diner.
And so that's what it's about. It's again about getting in front of that audience, in front of their eyeballs because a lot of the time when we do marketing as MSPs, we tend to just throw spaghetti to the wall and hope that some of it sticks when in reality you could properly get a triple double with a dartboard if you hone in and you pinpoint what you're looking for. I think triple double is the right
Eric Anthony:
Expression. Something like that.
Justin Esgar:
Dart enthusiasts comment below.
Eric Anthony:
But your point is valid, although I will say you're probably ruining our chances of Denny's ever being a sponsor.
Justin Esgar:
You know what? Don't care. Sorry, Denny's not
Eric Anthony:
Our target audience.
Justin Esgar:
Sorry, not sorry.
Eric Anthony:
So it works, right? But the thing, look at what we do. We have a Facebook group. Now, it doesn't have to be your Facebook group, but if you are active in a certain geographical area, go to the Chamber of Commerce or the city or whatever, probably has some type of Facebook group for entrepreneurs, business owners in your area, it's a perfect place for you to just start putting advice, just put advice, and then have some kind of way for them to contact you. If you want to get more sophisticated about it, have an actual call to action that leads to a landing page, something like that so that you can actually push them along in your sales funnel. But that's one of the nice things about content. It's a very easy point of entry for them to engage with you. And if they really like the content or they're feeling the pain of that problem that you're describing and you're describing the resolution or the solving of that pain in the article, the best way for them to solve that pain is to reach out to you and take that next step. And so it's low barrier to entry. They have no commitment, but if they're feeling that pain, now they have somewhere to go to solve that pain, to get rid of that pain. And that's a lot of times what the buying situation looks like, especially for businesses. Most of the time they're trying to do one of two things. They're trying to solve a pain point or they're trying to make more money. And if you can talk about how they do one of those two things and then give them a way to reach out to you,
Justin Esgar:
If you can do both, that's even better.
Eric Anthony:
Correct?
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, I always,
Eric Anthony:
I will point out here though, that solving a pain usually reduces an expense, which yes, does increase profit, but increasing revenue is kind of a different conversation than solving a pain point. And that's why I kind of keep 'em separate.
Justin Esgar:
It's funny you mentioned pain points because my sales technique when I'm working with a customer, when a new customer reaches out is I do a 15 minute brief and I get them to schedule a second call and I say, I'm giving you homework and your homework is for the second call. I want you to come to me with all of your pain points, everything that's bothering, because usually when they're calling, they're calling about one specific thing, we want to be able to do this or we want to be able to do that. And I say, okay, cool, we can help you with that, no problem. But when you come on our second call, bring me everything. Tell me everything that's going on because I want to solve all of your pain points. I want to become your general doctor. You know what I mean? And handle that.
So pain points are very important. The other thing about pain points is that marketing in general, you have to remember something that marketing is not a golden bullet. It's not a magic bullet. It's not going to solve everything right away because most of the time a client is not going to see or recognize your marketing until they're actually having a problem that is related to what your marketing is about. This a human. This has nothing to do with us being MSPs or crappy marketing or talking about the dark web for 400 time. This is a human trait. This is a physical thing in your brain. I forget what it's called, but this is the same reason why, until you're ready to go buy a red Hyundai Tucson, you have never seen a red Hyundai Tucson on the road. And as soon as in your head you're like, I'm going to go buy myself a red Hyundai Tucson, all of a sudden everybody and their mothers are driving red Hyundai Tucsons, right?
It's not you everyone. It's a human thing. So when you're putting out marketing and you're talking about cybersecurity or the dark web or making sure M F A is turned on, a lot of the times people are going to just have blinders on, not because they don't want to hear it, it's just because they don't recognize it. But the second something happens, or the second they hear it multiple times or someone they trust that is like, oh, did you turn on two-factor on your Gmail? All of a sudden that thing in their brain opens up, oh, two-factor, two factor two factor two factor two factor. And then they start to see your things, your ads. Have you enabled two-factor? I would love to see, by the way, now that I'm doing this, I would love to see a billboard that just says, have you activated two-factor recently? That should be the billboard. You know what? Billboards still work. I'll tell you this much. There's a billboard here in the New York area, I want to say. It says, I hate Steven Singer, and that's all it says. And if you go to their website, I hate steven singer.com, and it's literally a jewelry website, but the billboard is just a painted script of I hate steven singer.com. You would never know what it is. And it's literally, why hate Steven because his diamonds are cheaper than the rest or whatever it is. So billboards still work
Eric Anthony:
Well, and that plays on the psychology of nobody can pass up a train wreck. They want to see what that drama is. And so they're going to go to the website and find out. But getting back to content marketing, one of the reasons why I really like content marketing, by the way, is that it doesn't take a lot of money, takes a little bit of creativity now, especially now that we have things like chat GPT or Google Bard or whatever. Creating this content is a lot easier. Now, I will say you do have to be careful, but the good news is you are a technical expert. What's right and wrong? And so if chat GPT spits out something that's off the wall, you can just fix it.
That's the benefit that we have using a tool like that is we can actually look at it, know that something's technically not right, go back in, change it, make it technically, but then we still didn't have to write the whole article. So easy to do. It's also you can take one piece of content that say chat GPT, spits out and create a blog, create some short form posts, create some little short videos of you just standing in front of your iPhone and recording you talking about that subject and then you can put it everywhere
Justin Esgar:
For free. Can I interrupt? I want to interrupt. The thing about chat G B T is if you use chat G B T to write, it's going to come out like a C plus sophomore student.
Eric Anthony:
But
Justin Esgar:
While you were talking, I decided to do a live experiment because I liked doing lifetime demos and so I pay for chat G B T for not as I'm on the paid version. And so all I gave it as a prompt was, by the way, I'm saying these out loud because the listener can go use these, do whatever you are an outsourced IT provider and want to 10 blog posts about computer security, please write 10 topics. Now, the key element with chat G B T is to feed it information. You have to tell it what it is in order for it to spit back out. Alright? And it came back certainly. Here are 10 blog topics about computer security. One, the importance of strong passwords, two, phishing attacks, and how to spot and avoid them. Three, endpoint security, protecting your devices from malware. Four, two-factor authentication, enhance account security.
Five, data encryption, keeping your information safe. Six, network security best practices. Seven, securing your home office tips for remote working. Eight, social engineering attacks, protecting yourself from manipulation. Nine, patch management, keeping your software up to date and 10 cyber securities for small businesses. Now you are listening to this live. You cannot tell me that these are not solid topics that you as a technical expert cannot write about. Even if it's a thing. And it gave me a little bit more on each one, I wanted to shorten it just for the sake of speaking. But these are solidly 10 good ideas that you can write about and they can be evergreen if you write them the right way as key articles on your webpage or key articles that you record a YouTube video, which then you take the audio out and make a podcast like you can do this so easily. I'm not all about chat G B T writing the whole thing. You need to get in there and do your own thing, but you 100% could use chat G B T to help you spawn ideas and get you 75% of the way there.
Eric Anthony:
And that's my favorite use of it, right? My favorite use is using it for ideation, going and asking it. Give me 10, give me 15 topics I should talk about in terms of cybersecurity because some of those I may not like. Some of 'em I do, but then I can write about 'em and I can say, okay, if I'm going to write an article about two-factor authentication and why you should turn it on, then I can ask it to give me bullet points. Because here's the thing that you don't want to do. You don't want to take your personal voice out of the content that you're creating because it'll get caught. People will realize it as soon as they actually start engaging with you or your business as a person, they'll realize that the person that they're engaging with is not the person who wrote that article. And that's disingenuine. And I believe personally that marketing should be genuine, especially at our level. We're not dealing with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of potential customers. We're not. And so there's no reason for us to mass produce content like the large companies do that address those size markets. It's much better if it's more personal
Justin Esgar:
With chat t b T, because if you give it an instruction, it may spit out things that don't. Going back to talking about your voice, it won't spit out the right things. I saw the other day, somebody was using it to write some policies and it spit out, and here's what you should do at your company. And the person blindly copied that into their policy and submitted it. And I was like, why is the company's policy? Here's what you should do at the company. That doesn't make sense. So yeah, you can use it for ideation. Ideation. Sorry, I'm sick. I've got brain ideation. And then you could even use it to help format some stuff. I've actually written things in my own voice and then throw it into chat G B T and say, Hey, rewrite this as, because it's actually really funny. I wanted to do a motivational speech for my team, and I wrote, rewrite this as a manager, who cares? And then I rewrote it as a manager who doesn't care. And then I said, rewrite this as a TED talk. I just wanted to see what it would spit out. And it was really funny how the differences were like, come on, team. And they were like, let's go everybody.
Eric Anthony:
Well, and that's the point, right? You can try so many different things by asking chat GPT that you wouldn't have time for. If you're just writing something, you have time to iterate more. And that's an important part of marketing that we should point out is a lot of marketing is iteration and making it better every time, making it more targeted to your audience every time. But we're probably closing in. I haven't kept track of time yet. We're probably at a point we need to wrap this one up because this one was really about why you should do content marketing. And so this is the teaser for next week is make sure that you join us next week because we're going to talk more specifically about the tactics and exactly how you should be doing content marketing. That doesn't really, we're going to do it on the cheap. You don't need lots of budget dollars to do this. You just need time and some inspiration. And we're going to talk about both.
Justin Esgar:
So join us next week, same bat time, same bat channel here at the All Things MSP podcast. I'm Justin, that is Eric. Check us out facebook.com/group/all things msp youtube.com/at all things msp like subscribe, hit the bell, leave a comment, go to your podcast, tell us you love us. Tell us who you hate us. I promise next time we'll get better. That's it for us. Bye
Eric Anthony:
From your host, Justin Esgar, and thank you for listening to the All Things MSP podcast. Join the All Things MSP Facebook group or follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. The all things MSP podcast is a BizPow LLC production. And even though we drink a lot of it, this podcast is still not sponsored by liquid death.