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Justin Esgar:
So I know that we were talking the other week about how I was sick. It turns out I was infected with Joker Venom from reading too many Batman comics.
Eric Anthony:
Okay.
Justin Esgar:
Did you like the new Batman, the one with the Twilight Vampire in it?
Eric Anthony:
Not familiar with that one.
Justin Esgar:
You haven't seen this one? It's Edward Dumping or other. And I want to say Josie and the Pussycats, but that's not her name. There's a
Eric Anthony:
Great movie, by the way, Josie and the Pussycats.
Justin Esgar:
Lenny Kravitz's daughter plays Catwoman, I think. I don't remember who else was in it, but it was pretty good. It was pretty good. It was really moody. I think the director was like, I listened to the Nirvana sounds of Teen Spirit album 14 times and then wrote a script. The only thing I have about Batman is they need to really expand out some of the bad guys that make it to the mainstream. By the way, one of the worst Batman villains of all time, and you can Google this is a man named Calendar man, and he's a fat little man with a calendar around his top hat. And I have no idea what his powers are. I just know he exists. There was something of rejected Batman.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah, I think that we need to bring calendar man into the episode where we start talking about time management.
Justin Esgar:
What's up everybody? Welcome to the All Things/MSP podcast. I am your host, Justin Esgar, as always with me is my good friend and podcast producer extraordinaire, and the man who makes me laugh probably most often, Mr. Eric Anthony.
Eric Anthony:
Oh, if they only knew how much fun we have outside of what gets published.
Justin Esgar:
If we ever make it to being super famous and we get to do the podcast live in front of people, they're going to really question a lot of things about how this show happens.
Eric Anthony:
Yes, absolutely. Although that opportunity may come sooner rather than later. We are hoping to be at IT Nation still finalizing some details for that. Not sure exactly how it's going to work yet, but we are working on it and we will want to create any and all content that we can while we're there. Alright, Justin, we started last week talking about why MSP should be doing content marketing. What are we going to talk about this week?
Justin Esgar:
Well, I figured we'd try to take over the world. Naf. No, we're going to talk today. We want to talk about how to do this content marketing. So again, All Things/MSP, we're talking about all things, and we've been kind of focusing a lot lately on marketing because that is the biggest struggle for a lot of MSPs. We understand as MSPs, how to fix problems. Restart your computer, hang up the phone, press the power button, hang up the phone. How to get from A to B, right? Simple things. But marketing uses that creative part of our brain that sometimes doesn't make sense for us because it's not as logical as it is when we're fixing computers. And again, a lot of us became MSP owners because we were good at computers and therefore we started a business. We never thought about the business aspect. So we started talking a little bit about why we should be doing marketing. And today I want to dive into how to do marketing. And here's the thing. I'm going to set up the stage here for Eric.
How can someone do content marketing and not spend a lot of money? Now before anyone decides to comment? Well, time is money. Shut up. We're talking about actual money. Yes, time is money. We understand this. We understand there's only so many hours in the day, and one day we'll have calendar man from Batman and we'll explain how that works. But right now, your time is the only resource you have to put towards this. And so we want to figure out how you can do things by just using time and not using actual dollars or a lot of actual dollars to spend toward marketing. So we dove a little bit into chat G B T last week. I'm sure we'll hear back about that. But Eric, what are we going to do here? Because we're broke, right? Let's just imagine we're broke and we need to become subject matter experts. We want to get some content out there. What am I supposed to do? How do I start? Where's step one? Man? I need a manual. Where is step one?
Eric Anthony:
So first I want to say that you gave me a great segue into this. I just ran across a quote from Guy Kawasaki, I think it was maybe even yesterday, and it's about marketing. It says, if you have more money than brains, then do outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, use inbound marketing and content marketing is inbound marketing. It is attracting clients, prospective clients to call you. So how do we do this? How do we start doing content marketing? And of course, how do we do this on the cheap? Because we're going to go with the more time than money rather than the more brains than money. Things we can do to substitute the brainpower just a little bit doesn't diminish the fact that we're subject matter experts because that we are, but there's a lot of other creative stuff that sometimes we're not and we're going to get into that.
But anyway, you have to figure out what you're going to write about, what you're going to create content on. And I think there's three really good answers to that. Number one, and we kind of discussed this last week when we introduced the topic, and that is what are the common problems that your target audience has that you can solve? So that's the first thing you can create content on, and that should be relatively easy for you because you're an expert on that. Otherwise, you wouldn't offer services that solve those problems. Okay, number two, what are the new things that are going on in their industry that maybe they don't know about yet? We have a lot of this going on just in privacy compliance from state to state because we have a lot of new states adopting privacy laws recently that the constituents in those states don't even realize they have to comply with.
And in addition to that, you have a lot of neighboring states to states that enacted privacy law that are affected because it typically depends on where the resident lives, not where the business or the transaction takes place. So there's a lot around that. You, as a subject matter expert, should know, should understand and can share with your audience. And this is again, going to position you as an expert in their eyes and it's going to make you the first person that they call. So that was the second one. The third one is, is there any social proof trending? Is there anything in their industry that's trending right now? And the reason why we want to look at this, it's kind of a little hokey, but this is the way the world works. Now, virality is a thing. So if you can ride the wave of two-factor authentication or the M G M breach, something like that, that's something that you can create content about.
I released a video, what was it yesterday, the day before on what you guys think about authenticating end users when they call your help desk, right? Because this is how the M G M breach happened. They got to a help desk agent to do something they shouldn't have done. And so my question to you guys is what do you do to authenticate those users to make sure you are not doing something on behalf of a threat actor, right? That's a great example of watching those things that are trending and creating content that match those topics so that you can ride that wave of whatever's going on in the industry right now. Those are my three favorite sources. You could probably do some keyword searches and find some other topics that might be relevant. In last week's episode, Justin brought up chat G P T and said, give me 10 topics on cybersecurity that I can talk about to small businesses. Boom. And you don't have to use all 10. Use the ones that you think are relevant. Actually, Justin, you want to do another chat, G P T one real quick?
Justin Esgar:
Yeah, man.
Eric Anthony:
What's another topic that we could give them or give chat G P T to spit out some topics today?
Justin Esgar:
Well, so for this one, what I wanted to do is I wanted to come up with more how's, and I'm going to modify my search in a second, but I said, you work for a computer service company as its head of marketing. What are the top 10 ways you would reach out to customers to purchase IT services? And what I should have done, and I'm going to edit this right now, I'm going to say that don't cost a lot of money. I wanted to generate a different solution because I know we talked about being on the cheap and some of the answers that it gave could potentially get costly. So here's the top 10 before I said cheap website optimization, which we'll get into in a second. Content marketing, which is exactly what we're talking about. Social media engagement, email marketing, pay per-click advertising, that's where it gets costly.
Networking partnerships, client testimonials and case studies. Also not that expensive. Webinar and workshops, online reviews and reputation and targeted direct marketing. Actually all those are pretty cheap. I just wanted to throw in the cheap thing just to see what any differences. And it came out with optimize your online presence, which is SS e o, leveraging social media, email marketing, content marketing, local s e o, networking referral programs, free workshops and webinars, leveraging customer testimonials and d I Y marketing. So actually it came out with the same 10, right? So that means that the top 10 ways a chat, G B T answer of a marketer would do things at these. So let's talk about these for a second. Website optimization. Ss e o. You should be optimizing your website regularly, right? There are things that are coming up in the day in the news, there are changes in your thing. If you still have on your website, we take care of Windows 98, you're going to fail, right? Fair content marketing, that's kind of what we're talking about here. Come up with idea. Have chat, G B T, come up with 10 blog posts, write them, make them evergreen, which means they will last forever. They're not about a specific topic. That's an article about the M G M breach is not going to be evergreen by nature. You could make it that way and refer to it, but it won't be on its own. And
Eric Anthony:
That's why a blog tied to your website is a good idea for the non evergreen content,
Justin Esgar:
Right? Social media engagement, engage with the social media engagement. So here's the funny thing about social media engagement, and I know that it's ironic because we're at facebook.com/group/all things msp. Engaging on social media only works if you're engaging with the right audience. So unless your customer profile, your target market, your avatar is teenagers. TikTok is not where it's at. If your target market is business professionals, LinkedIn is where it's at. If your target market is people who don't know how to use Facebook, Facebook is where it's at. So figure out where they are and engage. You don't need to do what Gary Vaynerchuk says and be on every platform all the time. Email marketing, we've talked about this. Have a list. Curate that list, clean that list email, that list. Pay-per-click advertising. I would say most of you, most MSSP should not do that right away.
That could lead to a lot of trouble if you're not sure how to properly handle both Google's insane interface and also what to do with those incoming leads. So let's skip that one. Networking partnerships. Join your Chamber of Commerce, join a B N I group, join every networking group you can find. This one's big client testimonials and case studies. Now, this one kind of leverages for us a little bit because as an Apple consultant and being a member of the Apple Consultants Network, apple kicks you to the consultant's locator. And on there we have clients who leave reviews for us. So a review on our Apple Consultants locator listing carries a lot of weight towards how good of a business, and that has actually gotten us 95% of our business.
And that material that they write there, you should be putting on your website as well, webinars and workshops. You know what I heard a great story? I think I told this in the last call or two episodes ago, where this guy, he did a workshop, he did a murder mystery party for a bunch of CEOs, and instead of it being a murder mystery party, he made it an incident response party. And he had the CEOs go through what it would be like if the formed company of all of them was breached in what they would do, and he walked away with 43 new leads and he generated $123,000 a month in recurring revenue. That is actually a brilliant idea. I don't know how he did it, and I want to repeat, but yeah, online reviews and reputation management, it's kind of the same as the testimonials and targeted direct marketing. Direct mail can get expensive. So I would skip that one, but I mean these are all pretty solid. I do. In the cheap version, the targeted direct marketing became d I y. Marketing materials create materials such as brochures and hand them out to local businesses, community centers and events by hand.
Eric Anthony:
But here's the thing though, you have to have content first, and that's why I wanted to talk about content today because you have to have content for those things. The only one that's the exception to that is the customer stories and testimonials, which is content. By the way, I was kind of assuming with my top three sources that you didn't have that many customers that would do testimonials yet. But if you do, we're probably going to do a whole nother session. We referrals and testimonials, and we'll talk more about that then in the last couple of minutes, I do want to cover a few more things though. Number one, you should take every single one of these content ideas and create text, audio, images and video text obvious. You can type it up, you can post it anywhere, audio, you need to start a podcast at some point when we perfect this thing, which will be never. But anyway, we can give you some tips. It's not that hard to start a podcast. And by the way, it's that much easier to be recording it on video while you're recording the audio so that you can release it in video format as well. And we're learning stuff like I started using, there's an AI tool, and the name is escaping me at the moment, but it allows us to take the entire podcast and it chops it up into segments and creates little vertical social media videos out of it, and it's like $115 a year.
That's nothing. Now what I have figured out is we need to not take this video that you guys are seeing on the podcast, but take the two separate recordings
Justin Esgar:
Because my name gets cut off. It says,
Eric Anthony:
So that's the main problem, right? Is there's texts that gets cut off and it just looks weird with the borders and the background and stuff. But what I've learned is take the two individual recordings of just Justin and I slam those together side by side, and then submit that to the AI and it produces much better results, and you guys will probably see those results in the next week or so after this recording. So create different types of content that you can post all over the place, right? And you're going to be posting this to social media. You're going to be posting it to YouTube, TikTok, if it's applicable, right? If your audience is watching TikTok, which it's almost hard to say that nobody's watching TikTok these days. I personally don't like it, but that's just me.
Justin Esgar:
I love TikTok.
Eric Anthony:
So see, you should not have excluded TikTok because you watch TikTok.
Justin Esgar:
I'll tell you this much. I only know this. My wife happens to be in marketing. The TikTok search algorithm is damn well near perfect. I'll leave it there. We'll talk about that.
Eric Anthony:
They have a lot of people working on it, but the last thing I want to talk about is I want to talk about process because processes, one of the things that helps you take all of that content, split it up and present it in different ways in different places. I use Buffer personally as part of my process because it does two things for me. It allows me to schedule posts across multiple platforms at once. That's not cheap, but I am operating in a place where I have a little bit of money to do that, and I have less time.
Justin Esgar:
You can use buffer's. Cheapest plan is like $10 a month and it will. It is,
Eric Anthony:
But it's priced per channel. Yeah,
Justin Esgar:
But you proposed with Buffer. I think you could do up to three channels for that $10 one.
Eric Anthony:
Yeah, I think you're right. So it's not expensive, but there is a cost to it, right? Canva, you don't need anything else to produce your images and your video than Canva. You can do all the editing you need to do in Canva. You can do your voiceovers, you can do the recording of your face on Canva, and it just works. I know there's a lot to this. If you have more questions, reach out to us in the group. We'll be more than happy to answer the questions. I know, Justin, that we are again out of time.
Justin Esgar:
Why do we keep doing that to ourselves? We keep running out of time. Do you know why? Because we want you to listen. We want to leave you hanging, wanting more. Look, it comes down to this. If you're not doing any marketing start, if you're doing some marketing, do more. And if you're doing a lot of marketing, if it's not working, rethink the entire plan because you need to do something better in any of those three cases. If you want help with your marketing, reach out to Eric or I, tag us, dmm us on Facebook, hit us up in the post. Hit us up in the group, facebook.com/groups/all things msp, and look, we're always around. Eric welcomes all the new members every week, and I try to write something funny underneath them, which by the way, if no one catches on, welcome, welcome, welcome is totally sold from John Oliver, but hit us up and let us see what we can do to help you.
That's what we're here for. That's what this whole thing is about. We're here to help. We want to see you grow. We want to see you. So do a little bit of marketing, play with chat, G b T, play with Canva. Get some ideas. Don't be the one who's not doing anything because the people who do nothing will fail. If you do nothing, you will fail. There is no if, ands, or buts about that. That's it for us today. Go to facebook.com/group/all things msp youtube.com/at all things msp, all things msp, on all of your favorite podcast apps, which is weird because you're probably listening to this on a podcast app, but find us on the other ones. Don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a comment, let us know whether you'd love us or you're hate us. Read the show notes. Send us a nice card. Eric's got a PO box that you could send us gifts to do all those things. We love to hear from you. We love you all promise. We'll do better next time. That's it for us. Bye.
Eric Anthony:
Alright, I really got to run.
Justin Esgar:
Okay.
Eric Anthony:
I'll talk to you
Justin Esgar:
Later. Later. I'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.
Eric Anthony:
From your host, Justin Escar and myself, 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 biz POW L L C production, and even though we drink a lot of it, this podcast is still not sponsored by liquid debt.