Laura Johns:
0:00 Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. This is an exciting next hour or so. I do have an hour and a half slot for today. That’s going to be most of the critical content we’re hoping to cover off in the first hour. I know that you are busy, but we will allow some time at the end for questions. Also, this is recorded.
So if you registered for this today, which if you’re here today, you did, then you will receive the recording of this. So if you do have to drop off, we will certainly get that to you. So thank you so much for joining today. This is the ultimate 2024. Digital marketing plan for maintenance services providers.
We’re going to do something really exciting. We’re going to build our 2024 digital marketing growth plan for the year. We’re a couple of weeks into January, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that all is lost. It is still early in the year. We did this toward the end of December, but it was near the holidays and we felt like it was important to do another one so that folks could join.
It’s not too late to get your year planned out. We’re going to start the year strong, have a clear plan on what we want to accomplish this year as marketers that we can hit the ground running and gain momentum in the new year. So a couple of housekeeping things; I want to make this interactive.
1:17 You know, I’m sitting here looking at a camera. You’ll see my slides, you’ll see me, but please make sure your webcam is on. I know that you’re probably working or might be doing some other things, but I would really love for you to commit, to commit to these next 90 minutes, specifically the next 60 minutes, hopefully the next 90 minutes, but I’m going to be checking in and asking things like, what are your goals?
What are you working on right now? What are your thoughts on this? I love to see comments. Grace on my team is manning the comments. I’m going to have Anna on my team participate by giving you the links. To our workbook worksheets and some other resources. But I’d really love to hear audibly, just like you’re in here, the room with me in Jackson, Mississippi, I’d love to hear you audibly.
So Grace is going to take a second and allow you to unmute yourself. And if you’re okay with this, just put a one in the comments or give me an audible, yes, if you are here to participate with us today and you are going to give us the next. hour to 90 minutes and engage today. So give me a yes or put a one in the comment.
Speaker 2:
Yes.
Laura Johns:
2:21 Thank you. Yes. Extra credit for whoever said yes. Thank you. So here is the plan for the session today. Again, it’s a workshop. I made it clear it’s a workshop style, so we don’t do anything else. But if you’re able to set your goals and targets for every quarter and every month this year, then I will consider this a success for everyone.
So we’re going to look at a couple of things: key performance indicators and determine how many clients you need to land. This year what your average cost per, per unit or cost per customer needs to be from a marketing standpoint to spend to get to your goals and how many leads you need to make that a reality.
I think that one of the things that we fail to do sometimes is we have big lofty goals in our head, but we don’t back it down and realize what is it gonna take to get there? And then we end up in July or August say, and we really haven’t gotten where we want to be. And that’s because we don’t take the time right here in January to set those goals.
3:24 So we’re going to be very specific on getting some measurables in place today for your business. And I also want to spend a little bit of time auditing your current business model, lots of MSPs out there. And this again, just to kind of back up, this is for maintenance services providers, IT companies, if you’re in B2B tech, it applies to you as well.
But specifically for MSPs and IT companies, we’re going to look at the type of business model that you might be serving your customers with. So whether it’s break fix project work, some of you have very specific verticals that you work with. So we’re going to talk about that, but I found a very specific model that I believe works really well for MSPs to accelerate their growth.
So we’re going to spend a little bit of time talking about that. And then any tweaks that you might need to make from a business model standpoint to look into the new year to accelerate your growth. And then we’re going to map out a plan. So you will actually leave here today with a workbook and a worksheet.
So it’s not just me talking again. It’s really working on that plan. We’re going to talk specifically about what you need to be doing month over month, week over week, day over day to make 2024 a great year. So give me a yes in the comments. If this sounds like a good agenda, if we can get this done and make this a productive use of your time, give me a yes.
4:42 All right. Okay. So quick ground rules. Here’s what I’m going to ask from you. I’m here. I showed up. I’m going to ask that you be here right now. You put this on your calendar. You registered. You showed up today. 2024 is here. Give us your undivided attention. Again, got an hour and 30 minutes. Let’s shut everything down.
Let’s try to close our tabs, the cell phones and give us a hundred percent of your time. Also I’m going to ask you to put on that participant hat. I know that we probably have people in this room today in this workshop that are at different parts of their business. Some may already have your year planned out, which is awesome.
You already have your strategy planned. You may have already gotten your whole year laid out and you really don’t need a whole lot of help, but you’re here today. So that’s great. I would say just think of this as an opportunity to dig deeper and really flesh things out further in your business.
So plan to participate fully. I’d love to hear from you again. So just be sure that you’re interactive. And let’s get ready. Okay. So thank you. I appreciate everyone being here today. We are digging right in with who the heck am I? So who am I and why listen to me? Some of you may know me on this zoom today.
6:01 So if you don’t though, I’d like to start out by telling you a little bit about me. I have served in telecommunications for the last 20 years, both on the wireless side, and then as the CMO of a managed services provider for about eight years before I started The Business Growers. So I’ve been internally as a marketing leader for managed services providers.
And the last one that I worked with helped them see a 60 percent increase in revenue during my time there. And I really began to look at a couple of things that taught me how hard it is as managed services providers, leaders, whether you’re the owner, whether you’re in marketing, whether you’re in sales, just revenue generating roles, it is really hard to stay focused because there is so much going on.
There’s product packaging, there’s pricing, there’s the grind and sales and I understand that. And I also saw that a lot of times you’ve got these founder led managed services providers or tech companies You may not have an internal marketing team. You may have one internal marketing person, but there is a whole lot to get accomplished.
And you don’t always have what we’re all looking for. We’re all running lean. We’re all looking for more resources, but you don’t always have the resources that you need. And so I started the business growers a couple of years ago. We started supporting B2B tech companies.
7:25 Now we’re strategically turning to serve managed services providers and help support them with a tech marketing dream team and allow them to experience revenue growth consistently, map out plans for them and execute so that they don’t have to hire an internal team fully. There’s a lot of different roles in marketing we know.
So that’s what we do at The Business Growers. I was in, again, the marketing department and worked for an MSP that worked with a lot of different agencies, so I understand the struggle if you have five or six different vendors. I really was having trouble finding an agency that understood the industry and understood how managed services providers work.
It was always tough for me to find a partner that wouldn’t require me having to babysit them constantly or pretty much spend time doing it myself. And then finding a team that worked more like an in-house team because of the way that we operated, it was just really tough to find a team that really felt like part of our team that I could trust that new leads were coming in without having to be completely hands on.
So again, I created this business. I’ve had a really fun time building this team. So that’s who I am. In case you’re wondering now, let’s get straight into the workshop. If I started to talk about your business model, can I hear a let’s go or type it in the comments? Let’s go. All right. So here we go.
We’re gonna start planning. The first thing we’re going to talk about just to get this out in the open. And I know that some of you have potentially hybrid models, but we want to talk about the type of business model that you might be using today at your company and the pros and cons of each.
8:59 So if you are working strictly in break fix, pros, low barrier to entry, you can pretty much sell to anybody. Less responsibility on you potentially. But the con, obviously, is that unpredicted revenue stream. Very labor intensive and very tough to stay focused because you’re constantly putting out fires.
So everyone probably knows the stress of break fix. Sometimes you have to start out that way. There’s also monitoring only where you’re charging a flat fee per device or to monitor systems or maybe a flat fee per user to monitor systems which is great for predictable monthly revenue, but sometimes low profit margins there and it can be a commoditized service.
So that’s that monitoring only model. Then there’s that per device or per user flat fee. Again, great for predictable revenue scaling for growth. But sometimes the customer could reduce devices to lower costs and you’ve got that fluctuation.Then of course, there’s that all you can eat, predictable revenue, great pro, increased utilization by customer as they grow.
But it is very difficult sometimes to control your calls there. And then customers sometimes if you’re not very diligent on your time tracking and cost analysis, it may be easy for your customers to take advantage of the a la carte option. Your customers are only paying for what they need.
10:23 That’s a con there– unpredictable fluctuating revenue, again, very labor intensive. The model that I recommend for my clients, and this is how I run my business is that predictable. That tier pricing where you’ve got that good, better, best, or A and B, whatever you want to call it, bronze, silver, silver, gold.
But you have that predictable, scalable revenue via your three tiers or your good, better, best. And it is a bit more of a complex pricing model, but it does allow your customers to get what they need based on what they choose. The tier pricing stands out because it allows you to standardize your core service packages again into that good, better, best, based on the customer’s needs.
It’s a really great model for predictable scaling. And I do feel like we’ve got a lot of our clients that start out stuck in the middle between a little break fix and a little of that tier pricing, but your model is something I’ve definitely and we’re going to look at a worksheet today that’s going to allow you to envision if you’re not already doing the tiered pricing kind of envision or go ahead and give us an estimate on a monthly price that they’re paying you per client.
So you’re going to have to be able to build out your year and to be able to predict what type of growth you want to see. That tiered model really does help with that. So, as you’re going in 2024, just something to think about that’s clearly a business decision, but it also plays very much directly into marketing and how you’re able to scale your business.
So I want to make sure we cover off on that first. All right, I’d love to know who’s doing what. So if you are an IT company MSP, give me a one in the comments if you’re doing anything other than a tiered pricing model and a two if you’re doing the tiered pricing model.
12:16 So my suggestion would be if you are not doing tiered pricing, take a couple of your clients this year, go ahead and try to set it for this, maybe early February, end of January, take a couple of your clients that you trust their opinion, sit them down and do some brainstorming. Sometimes focus groups help understand what needs they have that need to be met.
And that’s a good way to segue into what those tiers might look like. It’s just a great way to, if you’re looking to get to that tier model, transition into that. So, if you don’t currently have a particular type of client that you serve, I have some clients personally that are looking at particularly just healthcare, some are just in legal, some are just serving professional services.
If you look at your numbers and let’s just say you’re serving a little bit of everyone right now, if you see that 30 percent or more of your business is already in a defined vertical, then it might be time to consider going all in. And what that means is when you do niche down, and many of you I’m sure have already had this conversation, thought about this.
It is scary. Of course the fear of niching further down and then not having as much opportunity can be frightening. But it really does allow you from a business ops standpoint to streamline things. And again, if you’re looking at your numbers and you’re already seeing that trend, it might be a good time as we look into 2024 to think about it.
14:04 Should we go all in with our marketing? Should we get really specific about who we serve and that will help provide clarity both for your potential customers externally so that you can become the thought leader and the resource there. And also your from a business alignment standpoint and internally will help your employees stay focused on the task at hand.
So really something to consider. And then, why a specific vertical? Here are a couple of reasons. Targeted expertise by specializing in a niche. MSPs can really build highly relevant expertise that tailors specifically to the needs of that particular customer type. You can become the expert, get the systems, the regulations, the constraints within that industry nail down and it really helps establish you as that elite expert.
14:54 Also increased referrals. I’ve experienced this personally, very much so word of mouth, that deep knowledge of that industry that you’re serving makes it a lot easier to get referrals because all of these people already know each other, whether it’s a bank, healthcare, law firm, trust me, I’ve seen it personally for 10, it will help fuel that organic growth.
And then it gives you that premium pricing power. So industry expertise carries more value than just being a generalist and specializing in a specific industry versus being general, just gives you that pricing power, the ability to increase your prices when you need to. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about of course, I will say we did this, we did this workshop in December.
I did not know that Nick Saban at Alabama would not be victorious, but, at the time, I was a student at the University of Alabama during Nick Saban’s very first year. I also did not know that he was exiting when I did this. It’s a little different this go round but during Saban’s first year at Alabama, he finished seven and six when I was there.
He’s gone on to win six national titles at the University of Alabama. This year they were 8 and 0 in conference, 12 and one overall. Of course they went on to compete and did not quite get there. But here’s the point. There is no way that Nick Saban year after year had the success that he had without goals.
16:16 So let’s set some in the next few minutes, clear business goals for your business. If you’re not clear on where you want to take your business to 24 percent, then you’ll never make the progress you need to make. I’m a hundred percent confident that Nick Saban didn’t get to his goals that he met without some checkpoints in place.
And we’re going to create those checkpoints. And, a lot of MSPs I work with come to us and just wonder why they haven’t been able to gain momentum. Maybe it’s their pricing model, but typically it’s just no focus. It’s really hard to focus. There’s no model, no clear goal set. So we’re going to do that today.
So if you’re ready to set some clear goals, please type goals in the chat. Would love to see some goals in the chat and we’re going to start setting goals. I would be interested to know if you have already taken the leap to niche down and have selected one particular industry that you’re serving, type me in the comments.
Would love to know if you’ve already been successful in kind of establishing that one particular client type. So I hope that this has given you some thought provoking points, and as you get ready to set your marketing up, I just really think it’s important to think about the way that you’re pricing the way that you’re packaging and then who you’re serving. So very important. So we’re gonna set some goals.
17:37 I’m going to Anna on my team has got a link that she’s going to provide you right now. You’re gonna hear me refer to two different things. One’s gonna be the workbook. One’s gonna be the worksheet.
So let’s get started by downloading the workbook right now. So Anna put in the link right now. Make sure you get your copy. And what you’ll need to do is just make a copy of that, please. I don’t think you’re able to type in the document, but make sure you can. I don’t think you can. So go ahead and make a copy, and when you get done making that copy, just start putting a yes in the comments, or one, or ready, or something.
Let’s just do yes. If you’re ready, tell us yes, so we can go ahead and start looking. We’re going to go to the very front of that workbook and start putting in some information about where we are today to help us plan the year out.
We’ve seen some yeses.
Laura Johns:
18:51 All right. Getting some thumbs up. So make a copy. And you might want to go and create a folder in your drive Google Docs or Google Drive, whatever, that just says 2024 Marketing Planning, and you can stick this document in there. When you have that copy made, give us a one in the comments.
When you have your own version name and you’re ready to press forward, if you have any trouble with it, just let us know in the chat.
We’re going to do the same thing. While we’re in here making copies of things, we’re going to do the same thing and now download the worksheet. So, a link is coming to you in the chat. Go ahead and get some of this downloading and saving out of the way. We’re going to do the same thing with the worksheet.
Again, this is something you’ll have to make a copy of and put this in that same folder.
20:01 This will be something you’ll reference back to or should reference back to all throughout the year. So, we want to make sure you have it somewhere you can find it.
So, go ahead and make that copy. Give me another one when you finish downloading the worksheet. The second download you’ll need to grab, we’ll get into some goals that give you guys a, just a couple minutes.
You don’t know you have to start where you have to know where you’re starting to get to where you want to go. Kind of like Nick Saban, got to know where you’re starting to get to where you want to go. So we’re going to start by documenting where we are today. Remember, go ahead and give us a one.
If you have downloaded the worksheet after the workbook, copy it, put it in your folder. Let me know if I go too fast. So start seeing some thumbs up coming in.
21:24 If you are having any trouble, feel free to unmute yourself and let us know. These are very critical pieces of the rest of our time together, so I wanna make sure you get it. Give us a one when you’re ready. I am seeing some ones.
And ideally, you would have your workbook and worksheet side by side in your browser. This would definitely be the time where you’re not gonna be able to do any work on the side, so you’ll have to pay full attention. Workbook and worksheet. Get both of those side by side. Give me a one when you’re ready.
We’re going to start working on your workbook. Actually, we might be doing some toggling back and forth.
22:26 All right. Okay. So let’s go ahead and look at your current snapshot today. So if you don’t know these details, if you’re not the right person in your organization for these details, it’s okay. You can put some estimates or you can take this workbook and go schedule a meeting with that person who does know and work this out yourself.
What I’m giving you right here are tools that you can totally do on your own and come back and look at this recording and work through it together. So let’s start with where you are today. So what. Is your current number of clients. So this means how many clients do you have right now, today? Want to put an estimate?
That’s fine. Let’s go ahead and document this in your workbook. There’s a little spot to be able to fill that in the current number of clients or estimate the current number of clients. And then what’s your average monthly recurring revenue total. So what’s the total monthly that you’re bringing in in recurring revenue.
Estimate and for those of you that are only doing projects, then you probably won’t have much recurring revenue. So, that’s why you’ll see this next question is what is that monthly recurring versus project breakdown. So a lot of us are coming out of 2023, but as you’re coming out of the year, you probably looked at your year end numbers and you know, how much is that non recurring, how much of the year was recurring.
24:01 Let’s look at it from a monthly standpoint on average, how much monthly recurring revenue are you getting in and then project?
And what’s the percentage breakdown at that of your total revenue per month is a hundred percent, 75 percent or so of that monthly recurring and 25, is it reversed? What’s the percentage breakdown look like? It’s good to document that because you definitely want to look at this at the end of the year, especially if you make any tweaks to your business model or make changes there.
And then how many new clients per month, on average, do you get or have currently? So on average, how many new clients per month are you acquiring?
And then it is really important to know that monthly recurring number average per client, because we’re going to actually, in a minute, switch to our worksheet. And so you’re going to need to know, again, if you don’t know, best guess, but those of you who own the business, you should certainly know if you don’t, then give us your best guess, but what’s your average monthly recurring per client.
And then, if you are the owner that’s also the salesperson, then you’ll definitely know, but we’d love to know because this is going to very much impact the goals that you set for the year. What’s your sales conversion rate? If you don’t know that I would say we have a tendency to get a little ambitious on what our sales close rate is.
25:38 I would say, conservatively, in most cases, you would want to look at 10%. If you’re the owner of the business, you might, and have a sales skill, it might be better than that. But if you don’t know, you could always put 10%. But we’re going to need to know about what your close ratio is so that we know how many leads we need and how much business we have to do this year.
How much from a marketing standpoint effort we’ve got to put in to get those closes. So let’s make sure we’re very honest with ourselves here. I would say if you’re not sure, go conservative.
All right. So all of these things should be filled out on your workbook.
Yeah. Question. Yes. We have a question.
Speaker 3:
Can you elaborate what is an RR versus project percent breakdown?
Laura Johns:
26:31 Yes. So we’ll go back to this slide. So let’s just say monthly recurring means that you’ve got somebody in a contract that is paying you the same dollar amount every month. And then your project breakdown would be, for example, if you are more on the break fix model, the question was, what’s the difference between the MRR, the percentage breakdown?
So ideally you would say, hey, I know every month I’m getting of my total revenue, a hundred thousand a month in monthly recurring revenue, and I’m getting 50,000 in projects. So the percentage of the hundred thousand and the 50 as a total of a hundred percent. So how much is the project value bringing in and how much is your monthly?
And this is just really so that you can see, okay, if I am more interested in that predictable revenue so that I can scale my business, because you really can’t hire people based on project estimates. You can’t build your team effectively based on what’s going to come in as a project, like you can monthly with programming.
So we just kind of want to know, on a monthly basis, out of every dollar you get in, what’s the percentage of your monthly recurring contracted revenue, and then what’s the percentage of your project revenue? Okay, and now we’re going to look at future vision. So let’s look at 2025. So looking at the end of 2025, so we’re in 2024 now, two years from now, full year this year, full year next year, how many clients do we want?
28:07 So your total number of clients that you have. You told me what it was today. I want to know what it’s going to be in two years. I think it’s really good. A lot of people look at 10 years. That’s good too. But we want to look at something that we know is attainable. So how many clients do we want?
What’s our average? We already said what our average monthly recurring revenue is now. So what are we on a monthly basis that contracted revenue coming in? We know what it is now. What do we want it to be in two years? And then this is where you start thinking, do we want to continue to do the break fix?
Do we want to continue to do project based revenue or things that just come in that we aren’t really sure of or can’t really plan for all the time? Or do you want to, as I was mentioning earlier, go into a strictly tiered model or a model that allows you to only have that monthly recurring revenue?
So think about what you want that percentage to be. Do I still want to have 10 percent coming in every month that 10 to 20 percent coming in that’s project based, or do I want all of my revenue to be that monthly contracted revenue? And obviously your business model plays into this. So, not all of this applies to every company here.
29:23 So we can certainly point off if we need to, and then some other key metrics, your average again, in if let’s just say your average monthly recurring revenue per client today is a thousand and you want to make sure that in two years we’ve built that providing more value for our clients and charging them more.
What does that look like? What’s your average per client monthly recurring revenue number? And then what’s your ideal sales conversion rate? If we don’t know where we are now, let’s just say, okay, we know we’re at 7 percent now, close ratio percentage. What is the desired fudge ratio? You have to have something to work toward.
You can certainly do that with a motivated sales team.
All right. So for this year, we’ve looked two years ahead. Now let’s look in our workbook and determine what are our goals for this year? You actually can, if you’re toggling right now, let me just see. I want to make sure I don’t have, yeah, that’s right. Okay. If you’re toggling right now, you should have your worksheet open and we can go ahead and plug some numbers in.
So if you have your worksheet open, I’m actually going to attempt to open the worksheet on my own here.
So I can see as well, just a second.
31:03 So get your worksheet open because we’re going to start plugging in some numbers. I want to do it with you. All right. So you’ve already told me what your 2023 recurring revenue is monthly. Go ahead and put in the worksheet what your total recurring revenue for the year is. So that means if it’s this much per month times 12, whatever that total number is, whether it’s a million, 500,000, 10 million, you see in the step one revenue and new customer target in the worksheet, you see 2023 recurring revenue.
Go ahead and put that number in. Give me a one real quick if you’re with me. Just want to make sure everybody’s following the other worksheet.
We’re getting into the work. So I want to make sure we’re all on the same page. Okay, good. Okay, so put in your annual recurring revenue for 2023. Now that target we’ve already said in 2025 what we want, we want to look at just for 2024. What’s our target recurring revenue for the year? End of December, where do we want to be for the year?
Annual recurring revenue. So go ahead and put that number in right there. And then that will auto populate. What your new revenue goal is for the year. So we’re not too far into January, plenty of time to get there, but that tells you what your new revenue goal is. And then it will also auto populate based on the rule of 78s, which we won’t get into, but basically what your sales target needs to be in monthly recurring revenue to hit your target.
32:52 If you look at that monthly sales target and you say right now there is no way that my current team can hit that, then you might want to change your sales targets. Or if you think you can go more, go more always. But that will basically tell you what your sales target needs to be. And then if you go down, you’ll see what’s your average total MRR value per client.
Put your number in that we just discussed. So per client on average, what are we making in monthly recurring revenue? And that’s going to tell you in that very last part of step one, that’s going to tell you how many new clients would be required to hit your monthly goal. So I’m very interested.
Start putting in the chat how many new clients based on your goals that you set are required to hit your monthly goal. And we’re about to get real fun in just a minute. Talk about leads. We all want more, so put in how many more clients you need to hit your monthly goal. And then we’re going to move to step two, which is the leads required to hit your target.
You told me earlier what your average conversion rate is, or is today, and you want to be in 25. So maybe somewhere in between, go ahead and put what your conversion ratio percentage is from sales calls or lead to a new client. And then that’s going to tell you right here, how many leads you need per month to hit your target.
34:33 So I just asked you to put how many big clients you need to meet your goal. How about putting them in chat now, or the leads that you need now. And if you’re like this doesn’t look right, or there’s no way, we’ll discuss that in a minute because you also want to look at your budget estimate.
So put in your number of leads that you need per month to hit your target.
This might be an awakening for some people. But this is really the best part. So if you look at step three, you’ll see estimating your budget. So benchmark now this lots of factors when we benchmark, we know that, but of course, geography, current brand awareness, lots of different things that factor in, but your benchmark costs per lead for MSPs on average, we’d like to say about 300 a month that can be high or low, depending on lots of different factors like geography.
It’s fairly typical 300 cost per lead and then your monthly budget to hit the target. That’s going to tell you what your monthly marketing budget is or should be. And then you’ll also see below, it will auto populate the impact to your business based on customer lifetime value. So this is just a really great, and for those of you specifically, I’d love to know if anyone on this, workshop, if you’re in a marketing role, or a support, if you’re really the person responsible for generating these leads, this is a great, great tool to take to your CEO, to take to your maybe it’s a sales leader CRO, and sit down and work through this together.
36:17 Because if you are starting with totally different mindsets in terms of what it’s going to cost the business, to acquire the type of new business that is desired or the goals that are set, then this is a really great tool to use.
And if you look at, we’re going to talk through this in a minute, but this, the second tab, we actually go ahead and talk through in that second tab, we work through. If you look at the budget allocations tab in this workbook, and I’m kind of going off my slides real quick. Great. Sorry. If you’re trying to, we’ll get back on.
But if you look at your worksheet, you’ll see the revenue target that you’re trying to hit. And then you’ll see right there in the percentage rule of thumb, 6 percent on marketing, as far as what you want to budget for. I love to say 10%, but I know that’s aggressive for some MSPs, but this gives you your total marketing budget and really what your average monthly budget should be.
37:19 And I don’t recommend going all digital. I know that, especially in the line of business, many service providers are in it. Companies have a lot of low hanging fruit for you. Is that repeat business? And I understand that. So if that’s low hanging fruit for you, why would you not dedicate a portion of your marketing budget to repeat business to make sure we’re accounting for that online marketing, obviously what we do day in and day out here at The Business Growers.
We recommend about 70 percent of your total budget for that. And then offline marketing, that means things like event sponsorships. It’s a necessary evil. You’ve got a local business, you’re serving local or regional markets. You’ve got to be in the market. So I recommend about 20 percent of your budget to go to offline marketing.
And then you can see month by month. And again, if these numbers look off to you or there’s no way, or we need to scale this up some, then you can make those adjustments on the first tab and it will carry over to the second tab.
38:17 How are we feeling about worksheets? Thumbs up? Anybody give me a thumbs up? I don’t know if you can do that in Zoom, I think you can.
And real quick, while we’re in the workbook, I mean worksheet, excuse me. You’ll also look here at your marketing calendar, that third tab. Now, these are by no means recommendations. This is just me filling it out as a template to show you, but certainly if we know what kind of goals we’re trying to hit and we also know what our budget is, then this is a way that we can very easily, especially in pay per click and SEO, we want to make sure that we understand, which we’ll talk about this more in more detail in a few minutes about your marketing mix.
But this is just a really simple way that you can kind of go ahead and plan out your content, plan out your promotions, plan out what your emails are going to say, plan out what your pay per click headlines are going to be. So we’ll talk in a minute about keywords, and I’ve got a resource for you guys on that, but then you can also very easily plan out right here your campaigns, special offers, what promotions you’re going to do.
39:33 These are again, just some simple ideas but are hopefully helpful for you. But this is just a really great way to say, okay, now we’ve broken down how much we want to spend. We’ve broken down our topics that we want to focus on. And here’s just a quick little special offers by month tool that you can use to do that.
But again, we’re going to talk about really getting into specifics. And what matters when it comes to SEO, keywords for MSPs, things like that. So we’ll talk about that in just a minute.
Anybody having trouble? You can unmute. Let’s talk through this. Let’s stop for questions. It’s a good time to stop for questions. Unmute, ask questions, workbook, worksheet questions. I know it’s a lot to work through, so I want to make sure we have made the most. You can ask the questions audibly, ask them in the chat.
No questions? Everybody’s with me? Everybody’s got their whole year planned out. Great. Awesome. All right. Lead is an actual lead coming in. A lead fits into your funnel, but there are lots of different tools, um, to get the lead into your funnel we’re going to talk about.
So lead is not necessarily the same thing as your funnel. Lead is the actual person that fills out the contact form on your landing page. That’s the lead.
Speaker 2
41:23 Hey, Laura. It’s Brett, is your cost per lead. Does that include internal hours spent actually with the prospect?
Laura Johns:
No, that’s the amount of marketing.
That’s the amount of basically marketing spend cost per lead.
Speaker 3:
Okay.
Laura Johns:
Not headcount hours. No, that’s a very good question. So the question was, does the cost per lead count the headcount hours that you’re spending? Negotiating, talking to doing the demo, things like that, that is not included in cost per lead.
So there’s, and I will say, I’m a big time tracker, my whole team, including myself, we track time and that’s obviously when you have a ticketing system, that’s a big part of what MSPs and IT companies do as well. But from a sales standpoint, typically sales people do not track their time.
So it’s very hard. I know a lot of times it’s a big challenge to get a good handle on that time per lead acquired, but the cost per lead is strictly what’s the marketing dollar to get that lead? What’s its cost? That’s from SEO, if digital, how much did we spend on an event? For example, did we have an event where we met this contact?
42:40 That’s the marketing activity. It goes into that cost per lead, the software, things like that. So if you go back to the first, I hope that answers your question. If you go back to the first tab, I would love to know again, how many leads you need. Just think through that. Think about what’s realistic.
As we get into your marketing strategy, we want to make sure that the goals that you are setting right here is something that’s attainable. So if you’re not sure again, continue to listen to the rest of this, but that’s a tool to take back to your sales leadership to take back to your CEO. If you are the CEO to sit there and think about, does this make sense?
Do I need to make some tweaks? Because before you start developing your marketing strategy for the year, you’ve got to know what your goals are. So I would say if you’re not sure about any of these goals, stop right here, have conversations, get that dialed in, and then we’ll talk about implementation next.
But take those numbers that you have. That’s why it’s editable, so you can make those changes after the fact, but we’re going to talk about marketing strategy now and how to take your goals and align them with your marketing strategy. So I’m going to try to finish this up in 15 minutes as best I can. It took me longer last time.
44:00 I’m going to do my very best because I really want to offer some time at the end to kind of hash out any questions. So, I will show a picture of this plant. I took this around Christmas time and my mom. This is Marsha, my mother. When I started the business several years ago, every time my mother would come to my house, she would … She has very much a green thumb that I do not have.
She has the patience also that I do not have. But she noticed that this plant right here, this was several years ago when I lived in Laurel, Mississippi, but she noticed the plant just looked a little unhealthy, which I had not noticed. She started digging around and realized that the plant was, she told me, root bound, which again, if some of you have green thumbs and this is your, your thing, then you understand what that means.
I did not know, but basically the plant was killing itself. And what, as I started to learn more about what rebound means, first of all, but also as I started this business, I understood that tech companies, particularly in this line of business, if you’re an IT company, it is hard to stay focused, easy to get in the weeds that a lot of times we miss out on a lot of things at the foundational level.
So underneath what I thought was a healthy plant, a thriving plant was actually a plant that was killing itself. It was dying. And it was because I had not put the attention into what was below. The surface and really spent time on the foundational elements of the plant. So thank God for my mom. She got the plant.
45:48 You can actually recover from being rebound. So if you feel like you’re a little rebound in your business today, you’re going to be okay. There is a way out, but we often miss out on the most important foundational part because we can’t see it. So maybe all we’re thinking about is the Google ad or all we’re thinking about is the conference we need to attend or those things that might seem flashy but really we need to make sure we’re paying attention to some of the things at the foundational level.
We always focus on, at The Business Growers, with our clients, the roots. That’s why I named the business. Actually, that plant and that story was the reason I named this business, the business growers and the reason that we have a plant in our logo. So it’s because we believe that the most important thing you can do if your business is focused on the foundation.
First, a lot of MSPs again, never can accelerate growth because they’re stuck in break fix. They’re stuck without a vertical or niche. They’re stuck on figuring out who they are. They’re stuck in the weeds of the work. They’re not willing to make an investment in the right marketing to move the needle.
They’re stuck because they’re scared of what they don’t know. There’s lots of reasons to be stuck. And so this is our “know, gross, scale” framework and really how we got our clients through the right path for the most success for their business. So we start at the foundational level with logo, branding, and messaging; and we’re going to talk about that in a minute.
47:03 Just a quick sample of a piece of work from one of our clients. No one wants to start here because it’s often the most painful, which is proper branding: making sure that everything looks and feels the same. I always say there’s a reason that my son knows the minute we pull up into Target or McDonald’s, as much as I’m ashamed to say we frequent McDonald’s.
There’s a reason that he knows where we are and it’s because the brand is strong. Proper branding creates recognition and awareness. If you are serving a local market, put that truck wrap on your vehicles, make sure that you are recognizable in your region. It is proper branding that establishes credibility and professionalism.
It differentiates you from your competitors. It helps align your marketing efforts for greater impact. If you’re just doing this a little bit here, and then something looks different there, it all matters. And I know that it’s very hard for a lot of companies to go back and focus on that when there’s so much to do, but it is very important and it supports those customer relationships and retention.
48:02 When a brand experience is reliable and aligned with expectations, customers feel more connected and inclined to remain loyal to the company when they feel like they know who you are. So reinforcing that brand identity keeps those relationships strong. So a question to ask is, and this is go back to your workbook, excuse me, I did not mention this first, but we’re actually in your workbook walking through all of these elements.
So there are some questions that you’ll see. I think I’m asking them potentially, I’m not in the workbook, so I can’t say, but you’ll see some questions that I’m asking. So I just want you to check these things off. If The answer is yes. If you do not check those, those questions that you cannot say for certain that you’ve got that handled and you may have your branding dialed into a tee.
And if you do, that’s wonderful. But if you don’t, I would say leave it unchecked because these are the conversations again, you need to have internally with your team to understand how far you have to go this year in 2024. So do your business cards, social posts, company collateral website, does it all have the same look and feel?
And then, another thing that’s not super flashy, but super important is your messaging and I will say having been in technology for I would say just three months shy of 20 years. Tech companies are the worst with our messaging. We are really bad about sticking to our story. And one of the books that I love to recommend: Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller.
You can get it on Audible or Amazon, whatever you listen to books. But it’s just a great reminder that especially in tech when we try to make things really, or things are naturally complex. It is very important for us to stick to the message in a simple way. So what Donald Miller teaches in this book is that typically your business customers want two things.
50:06 They want to survive and thrive, and they want to conserve calories. That means they don’t want the architecture diagram. That means they don’t want to know how it works. They just want to be able to get to work and turn on their computer, or they want their email to be sent. If you’re in health care, if you work with doctors, you know that’s it.
They just want their stuff to work. So, when you are messaging your company saying everything that you do, whether it’s on your website and your company collateral, whether it’s in a conversation, all their brain wants to do is keep them alive and does not want all of this information, especially in 2024.
We got a lot of information coming at us. It wants to conserve calories. So when our brains are bombarded with information that isn’t relevant to our survival, human nature to survive, it completely turns out. It does not want to use up the calories considering something that’s not going to help them. So if you start your brand story in 1920, my great great grandfather, yada, yada, yada, and start telling the whole story.
They don’t care. I always like to ask the question of my clients, who cares? And I’m that person in the room that’s going to challenge them. When you start talking about your company, you want to make sure that the way you lead, and this book just is a great opportunity for you to kind of understand how people’s brains work, but really they are the hero of the story.
51:19 Your customer is the hero of the story, not your brand. And if you can learn to challenge everything that you say in the way that you say it in a way that makes your customer the hero of the story, not your brand, things will start changing. The needle will start moving for your company and your business.
And this is something I think is really important that Donald Miller said, “we are so close to the nitty gritty details of our products that we can’t zoom out enough to think how our customers might encounter them for the first time.” And, in other words, we know too much and that knowledge can do two things.
It can lead us to make assumptions about our marketing. If we’re not asking our customers, sometimes we never spot the language and terminology. That confuses our customers because we’re not asking questions and those things are second nature to us. So really challenge yourself on that as you think about your branding.
I always say we operate at a 7 to 10 on a 1 to 10 scale internally, but we really need to be more like at a 1 to 30. So making sure you get your messaging dialed in is super important. So branding and messaging. So take a few minutes, look at the branding messaging portion of the workbook and just check things that you feel really good about.
If you don’t, we’re going to be able to use that here in just a minute. The “grow” part of our framework addresses things like your website, SEO, organic social media.
52:40 I’m actually gonna just really breeze through these slides, but it’s in your workbook. You’re going to see, I believe there’s some exercises on your avatar. Just make sure we talk about your ICP ideal customer profile. It’s called a lot of different things, but kind of going back to the industries that you serve, if you have a niche that you serve, you need to make sure that you have very dialed in who that person is, not only for things like paid ads, because the more generic you are, then the more low quality leads you’re going to get. You want to get really dialed in on their problems, their frustrations, some people call it an avatar, but the desires that they have, where do they shop?
What do they do? Geography, demographic details. So make sure that you’ve spent time, that your team has spent time. This is something that’s really common in like a brand messaging exercise to do that you’ve spent time on. What are these traits and values of this person? Because if you don’t know who they are, then they’re certainly not going to come to you, right?
If you’re not speaking to that person and all these different things, I’m going to go back one slide to the framework. In this “grow” portion of our framework, you’ll see website, SEO, organic, social, all of that is content driven. So if you’re not talking to the same person in all that content, and over here, you’ve got messaging that appeals to this person.
And over here, you’ve got messaging that appeals to this person. Then again, just like your brand and your actual visuals, you’re going to be really confusing. So let’s just make sure we have our avatar dialed in. Looking at your website, we have again some check marks here in the workbook.
54:18 Give me a check, read all the line items. Let us know on your website, do you have authentic images of your team on the home page? If you’re an MSP that’s local, that’s huge,or regional even, you want to make sure that you are showing that you are real humans, working with B2B because especially in this industry, it’s very machine driven.
We want to make sure we put some personality there. Do you have video elements, your owner on a video, your customers on video, welcome video? There’s just a checklist right here. Just go through, take a few seconds to go through the checklist. Let me know what you have and don’t have on your website.
Some really basic things like phone number in the right hand corner, web form, credibility, authority symbols.
And I just put some snapshots of our website but take a few minutes again. You can do this outside of this as well, but want to make sure you take a few minutes to audit yourself. Chat is huge. Some people tell me I don’t have time to manage a chat. Let me tell you something when you close the lead that comes in through chat, you will make time.
Are you leveraging marketing automation? Is that too overwhelming? And then I like to just make this note. And again, this is a topic for conversation internally, but does your website convert visitors, leads, callers, chats, forums, everyone that’s coming in at 25 percent or higher? If not, that’s your KPI right there. You’re working to get toward that this year with your website.
56:09 That’s the minimum 25 percent or higher. And if you have a marketing team or have someone who understands marketing, you can most certainly look at web traffic and determine how many visitors did we get every month? How many form fills did we get? What’s the ratio? So, that’s certainly something you should know.
If your website’s not working for you, that’s important. I’m going to show this really quickly, trying to run through this and wrap up the checklist again, and continue to go down. Do you have your service page for each of your services? If you’re not sure, just put a question mark. Cities that you serve pages for the tech brands that you install.
I hope I’m not going too fast, but just give us a check or no, you don’t know the question mark for consistently creating new content and blogs. Google does a scrub about every 30 days. We want to make sure Google knows that you exist and that Google knows what you do. So make sure you’re creating fresh content for your Google business profile.
Google. My business is the former name of this. Do you even have the login? Have you claimed and verified your Google Business Profile? This is huge. This is how people know where you are. It’s a client of ours, some reviews, making sure that you have a review. Check these things off under the Google Business Profile section of the workbook.
Online reviews are huge, so make sure you get that.
57:43 And as you’re wrapping that up, the next action I’m going to do, Anna on my team, is going to put a link in the chat for a little free resource here for you today. It is our custom list. Now, this is a national list, so this is not specific to your local market, obviously, but it’s what we have pulled the most important keywords today for MSPs.
You can either go to the link here or Anna’s putting it in the chat right now. This is just a free resource that you can grab right now. As we talk about developing content for your website, it is extremely important to make sure that your content is not just content that you think is important.
We want to put content on your website that search engines think is important so that you can get ranked top of search. So fill out, again, those website checkpoints. And then we’re going to move on for the sake of time to the scale section of our framework. So this is when you have built the solid foundation.
You have your messaging, your branding, right? You have your web SEO strategy set up? You’ve got your content per engine purring.? You know what type of content you need to be putting out there? You know what your audience listens to? You’re also developing social media content frequently, but we’re going to move into what we consider scaling, which is really tapping into that pay per click.
And remember your PPC campaigns, your Google ads, whatever you want to call it, those are only as effective as your foundation is healthy. As your foundation directly ties to your SEO, the health of your website. So if you are experiencing poor results there, that’s why the foundational work is very important because it certainly directly affects your paid campaigns as well.
59:30 So, again, the hardest part for a lot of MSP is they’re ready to scale and they think they’re ready to scale and they really aren’t. So I encourage you to take a really hard look at whether or not you put the first two foundational layers in place before you move into this, but, if you’re running Google ads, here’s your little checklist on the ads component of the worksheet.
So just take a few minutes. Again, add a check mark if the answer is yes. Are you running Google ads? Are you retargeting those unconverted leads that people that have visited your website? If you don’t have a pixel on your website, that means you’re not able to get back in front of them. Are you targeting specific ad groups targeting keywords that we know they’re searching for?
Are we doing conversion tracking? Check mark. If you know you are leave it blank. If you’re not, question mark if you don’t know.
Back in the organic social media section, you want to make sure, again, with that content strategy that you’re already using for SEO, you can certainly lead that right into your organic and paid social media, so you want to make sure there should be a checklist for social media as well. Make sure you’re running down those things, checkmark yes, if you know you have them for social, paid social, organic social. No, if you’re not sure or you don’t have it, question mark. If you’re not sure, leave it blank if you don’t.
1:00:55 All right. Going a little bit fast, but we’ve got one last link to put. I have a link that I want to provide you. A lot of folks really get overwhelmed with the price of something like a zoom info. If you have zoom info and it’s not too costly for your organization, love zoom info as a resource for a database to get your ideal customer profile that it dialed in and actually get those contacts so your sales team is able to go find them.
If you don’t or can’t afford that, Coldlytics is a great resource that we’re using at The Business Growers that we love. I’m leaving a link here. You can actually just pay like a monthly fee for a certain number of contacts.
You want to make sure you start building a good database. You may already have this internally, which is great, but you want to be sending out that monthly– email newsletter, something that’s informative to your ideal customer, not about you. Remember, they are the hero. We want to make it about them.
What can we do to serve and help them? Just go down the checklist and tell me if you are utilizing these email newsletter resources, are you leveraging email in your business? There are a couple of little check marks in your workbook for that
Question mark if you don’t know, check mark if yes, and leave it blank. Here’s some fancy emails that we have sent, some fancy text messages. Examples.
1:02:33 All right. And then I want to make sure we address something. The lowest hanging fruit for your current customer base is your current customer base. So is referral. So making sure, again, we talked a little bit in the budgeting, the worksheet, but making sure that you are utilizing a portion of your budget.
This is the number one thing that I believe goes on just as far as untapped. In your business, you’re not sending those maybe credits on account incentives form or some sort of link for your clients to work. Is your business communicating frequently about them?
Maybe having a dedicated person and all they do is communicate with your current client base. Work on this as a sales team, work on this as a team. What incentives, what referral incentives can we give our current customers to gain more business? Because I tell you, it is way easier to get a lead from these people who love you already than it is to go completely cold.
So I very highly recommend tapping into that referral resource. And then make sure that your team, whether you’re using HubSpot, we have our own CRM in house, but two things that are really critical for connecting the dots between sales and marketing, that CRM that becomes your source of truth for all things marketing and sales, and then tracking the data.
Without data, you just have activity like I was mentioning earlier. From an SEO standpoint, if you know how many form fields you get, but you don’t know how many people are on your website, then you don’t know how well your website is doing. So, a couple of things as it relates to tracking are Google analytics, keyword rank, tracking dashboards that are showing your critical KPIs and metrics, and making sure that you have this CRM to track those leads and source the revenues that’s happening this year and you’re building that in a way that you have all the information you need to make good business decisions.
1:04:20 And getting that data is very important. So that was fast and furious. But now we have an action plan. If you did not have enough answers to fill everything out today, that’s okay, because you can do this on your own.
But what you can do right now is look in the workbook, what you’ve accomplished so far, and you can actually see anything that’s not checked or anything that has a question mark, that tells you what you need to focus on this year. So if you have a highlighter or a pen, or you want to go circle those things, but you’ll see in your workbook, I’ve actually left you with some top action item lines.
So you can look at this and assess. My recommendation is if anything in the branding and messaging portion was left unchecked, that’s where you start. That would be a priority, obviously, everything and all in all of the different sections that we covered off on is really important, but now’s the time to prioritize.
It’s January. It’s a new year. You’ve decided what you want your goals to be from a sales standpoint. We know what it’s going to take to get there from a lead generation standpoint and budget standpoint. Now we know what we need to spend it So this is what I have provided you with basically your top three.
Let’s go ahead and prioritize those. Let’s sit down with our team. Let’s use this workbook, this worksheet and prioritize your year. I want to leave time for questions. So I’m going to end with everyone in this workshop today. I’m offering a free growth acceleration session. And this is not just a, it’s actually where I will in advance go and pull some things for you.
1:06:02 I’ll take a look at your website. I’ll take a look at your keywords that you should be targeting and I’ll actually come to the table on this growth acceleration session with information that you need to get your digital marketing plan in place. So I would love to do that for everyone who attended today, who gave me an hour and eight minutes plus of your time today.
I’d be more than happy to do that. I would say obviously I can’t do it tomorrow, so don’t book for tomorrow, but there is a link provided. Anna, I think the last link, if she’s still here, it’s just go.thebusinessgrower.com/growthsession. My calendar is available. You can go ahead and start booking now.
I would love the opportunity to meet some of you face to face if we haven’t met before and really just plan out some of these things that are going to be really critical for the growth of your business this year. Some things that take a little bit of time for us to pull, but will really help you start on the right foot this year.
Yeah. And if you registered for today’s webinar, that means that you will be hearing from me about future webinars that we’re going to be putting on one a month. So next month is one that you do not want to miss. I’ve learned so much from Jonathan Mast. He’s the founder of Whitebeard Strategies, and he is an AI expert and is going to be bringing tips next month on how to modernize your MSP with AI.
He’s going to give us some practical ways that we can leverage AI in our business to save time. We’ll increase productivity and revenue while offering your clients more value. So be sure that you sign up to join us in February so we can learn a lot about how to be a modern MSP with AI. Thank you so much for joining today.
1:07:35 I really appreciate you taking your time today to join us and we look forward to seeing you again in the future.
