To mark our 350th episode I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. By the end of this you’ll know exactly where to focus your marketing efforts to create a stronger foundation.
Welcome to Episode 350 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) – Do you have these fundamentals?
It’s episode 350 and I can’t quite believe that we’ve actually made it here. We’ve been doing this every single Tuesday since the 5th of November 2019 and we’ve not missed a single week yet. So to mark this big anniversary, I’m going to do something a little bit different.
Not just today, but over the next three episodes, I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. We’re not just talking about theory here. I’m actually going to go through a practical numbered checklist that you can work through right now, so that you can assess where you stand with your marketing.
Before we start, grab a pen and paper because you’re going to be scoring yourself as we go along. Actually, the score is simply yes or no. Yes, we’re doing this or no, we don’t. I’ve got 40 items to go through today and there’s going to be more next week and more the week after.
So today we are going to look at the foundations of your marketing. We’re covering things like your ICP, I’ll explain what that is in a second, your USP, we’re going to look at your website and we’re going to look at your LinkedIn setup. And as I say, there are 40 questions in total across this episode. So count your yes answers as we go and I’ll tell you what your score means at the end. Let’s get started.
SECTION ONE: ICP – Your Ideal Client Profile
We’ve got six questions in this first section and your ideal client profile means that you have a very strong grip on exactly the kind of client that you would like to work with. So I often ask brand new members to our MSP marketing edge, tell me about your ideal client profile and they’re like, “yep, yep, we’ve got all of that sorted out, we know exactly what we want.” And actually their idea of an ideal client profile is, businesses round here that’ll spend at least $400 or $500 a month or whatever the case is.
Actually for a good ideal client profile, you need to go more into detail with that. The more you have a real grip on exactly who you want to do business with, the more relevant you can make your marketing. Because one of the biggest tricks and secrets to marketing is making it seem really relevant to the person that you most want to reach. So I’m going to go through six questions and as a reminder, you’re answering yes or no. So just write these down. You can just do like one, two, three, four, five. And at the end we’ll go through what it means depending on how many yeses and nos you’ve got.
Question 1: Have you actually written down a specific description of your ideal clients?
And if you have, have you included these kind of things? The size of your ideal clients, the kind of sector that they’re in. I mean, it could be that you’ll work with literally any business or you might just prefer professional services, for example you might like manufacturers. Have you written down the location of where the ideal client is? Now, you and I know that you can look after clients all around the world, but you may choose to have clients that you can physically visit at least once a year just so you can show your face because we all know there are benefits still of meeting people in real life. And do you know what the job title of the decision maker is? For example, if it’s smaller businesses, which is typically up to 50 staff, is it the operations manager, the CEO, something like that? So that’s the first question is have you written down, literally in writing stuck on the wall of your...
