Mastering MSP Marketing: Priorities, Outsourcing, and Growth Strategies

Mastering MSP Marketing: Priorities, Outsourcing, and Growth Strategies

Tim Fitzpatrick
We've got a marketing mashup for you today. We're going to explore whether you should be outsourcing your marketing. How to grow without a full-time marketing team. What to do when your marketing isn't working. Get ready for some actionable insights to elevate your marketing engine. Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thanks so much for taking the It's time to tune in. I am super excited to have Laura Johns from The Business Growers with me. Laura, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Laura Johns
Thank you, Tim. I'm so excited to join a fellow MSP marketer. I love talking about all things marketing, and you're a great friend to do it with. So thanks so much for having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm looking forward to... Thank you for having me on your podcast. We're just switching sides of the mic.

Laura Johns
Yeah, I love it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, this is awesome. So to get things started, I want to ask you some rapid fire questions. Are you ready to jump in with both feet?

Laura Johns
I'm ready. Let me take a deep breath. Almost feels like the Olympics a little bit.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Wait, those are over, aren't they? Yes. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Laura Johns
With my family, two young boys and my husband.

Tim Fitzpatrick
How old are your boys?

Laura Johns
Four and eight. Just turned eight, so they are wild.

Tim Fitzpatrick
They grow up fast. What's your hidden talent?

Laura Johns
I can clap with one hand. Don't ask me to do it, but I can do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.

Laura Johns
I'll do it all fine.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's good. I like that. What's the best piece of advice that you've ever been given?

Laura Johns
My dad always has said growing up, I never understood it until I got older, but he always says, Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon. All the things that in your brain can make you resistant to do something or cause you to be hesitant to do something, just load the wagon and the rest will take care of itself.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love that. It reminds you to just start.

Laura Johns
Yeah, just do something.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Once you take those first few steps, there's a much higher likelihood that you're going to continue with that momentum.

Laura Johns
Absolutely.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Laura Johns
I think that I'm married to a worship pastor. I'm the bigger personality of the two of us. He's a quiet guy, and he worship. I actually live with him on stage on Sunday.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So cool. Very cool. I love it. What success mean to you?

Laura Johns
Really, at the end of the day, I believe success is spending time with the people that you love and doing what you want to be doing. I think that a lot of times we have great ambitions that lead us to be consumed with things that we really don't want to be doing. And what's that? What's the point?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Where's your happy place?

Laura Johns
My parents house. Their house backs up to a huge pasture in Mississippi. Pastures are plentiful, but they are very peaceful. And there's a sunset you can see every night there. So that's a happy place. They're back porch.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Laura Johns
I think when someone is able to look you in the eye, first of all, that means that they're invested and not have an agenda when they're with you, just to be able to be with you and spend time with you. That's true quality time for me. And I think that anyone without an agenda who's willing to hang out with me is worth the time spent.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. Tell us more about what you're doing at the business growers.

Laura Johns
I started The Business Growers a little over three years ago after being a Chief Marketing Officer for a managed services provider business. I realized that as the Chief Marketing Officer there, I was oftentimes having to juggle managing agencies, getting agencies up to speed on the services that we offer. My job truly became, instead of chief marketing officer, I felt like I was chief agency wrangler. I was constantly having to do the job of making sure that I had the support I needed in managing that. After nine years, actually, at that managed services provider business, I just had been in the industry long enough, been to events and conferences and just seeing that they really weren't the only managed services provider out there that really needed a team that felt like in-house. I wish every day that I had a team who knew the industry and who could be present and really help support me versus me having to constantly tell them what to do. So I built The Business Growers from that pain point, I would say, really wanted to build something that felt like an in-house team, but that was outsourced because truthfully, not every and not many small to medium-sized MSPs and IT businesses need a full in-house staff. It's not either can't afford it or you don't really need it. I don't know that at what point in employees, you justify a full-time SEO person or a full-time web developer, but it's not until you get pretty big. So we meet that need for our clients. We have three growth programs that we offer for different stages of their business. And we really are turnkey in-house, both marketing ops and lead generation for managed services providers and IT companies.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You said something that I want to pull out. So when you were a chief marketing officer for this MSP, and you were full-time, right, how big of an MSP was this?

Laura Johns
At the time, they were probably 20 employees. Now, they have almost 40, so around 20.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, so they early on made the choice to invest heavily in marketing, obviously. But you said that you felt like you had to manage agencies and these outside providers.

Laura Johns
That became my job. Yeah, I was doing far less strategy and far more babysitting is what I felt like sometimes.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I'm curious how you feel about this, but I think maybe there's a few exceptions, right? Maybe you guys are the exception, right? But as a business owner, I don't think you can fully abdicate the management of marketing to anyone, right? And most MSPs, when they outsource, they feel like their management responsibilities are done. And I think that's where things can start to come off the rails.

Laura Johns
Right. Well, I think that when you compare it to a service that an MSP is offering, so let's just say you're comparing marketing services to IT services. You in IT, you don't want anybody that you need access, and that's about it. You don't want anybody to bother you or touch anything or do anything. But when you think about marketing, there is a lot of intelligence and understanding that you do need to know. And an agency, unless they're local to market and they agree to be on site for a period of time, there is no replacement for someone who can grab a photo at the local town, at their town hall meeting or whatever. That's not going to always be achievable with an agency. But in the reverse way, it's very unlikely that that one person, I do believe in a good point of contact that's not the CEO or not the founder or your marketing partner or marketing agency. But in the same regard, you can't really expect that one team member to have this full, broad skill set. They can create a graphic and create content and understand AI and do SEO and run an ad campaign successfully. So I think it's a management of expectations and really just thinking through what's most important. I do firmly believe that if you are using a marketing partner or you're looking to grow your marketing team, having that one central point of contact that's not your founder, because especially working with MSPs, everyone is busy and there's always a fire to put out. We know that, right? So that good communication, having somebody who's not in the fire drill role is helpful.

The Most Important Marketing Priorities for an MSP or an IT Company

Tim Fitzpatrick
So let's dig into this. What are the most important marketing priorities for an MSP or an IT company? Great.

Laura Johns
So the priorities is the keyword because there's lots of things you can do. Plenty. Lots of things you can do. I believe, and I think the two of us are on the same page here. But I believe that dialing in who you're going after, who your target customer is. I think a CRM for a sales team and your pipeline can look very different if you are not dialed in versus if you are dialed in. I'm actually hosting a webinar later today to talk about this a little bit, but you need to really not only understand who they are, where they shop, what they do, what they're like, who's our target customer, but also consider, do we want to serve a particular industry, which I'd fully support, or are we going to hone in on a specific market? What is our territory? Where are we willing to drive? So dialing all of those things in and then as phase two, digging into their characteristics, where they are, how to get in front of them physically, making those decisions, and then around that, shaping your message so that you can build assets like your website, your social media. But if we're talking about the most foundational priority. If you're, and this happened to me actually with a client of ours, but if you have a business card that says one thing and a website that says another, and your salesperson says another whenever he goes to sell, and your owner says another thing. If you aren't sure of what you do and how you say what you do, then how in the world do you plan to convince a potential prospect or buyer to jump on board and get on the bus with you? It just seems like it would be next to impossible. So you really have to have a very solid understanding of who you are, who your buyer is, and what that message is before you do anything else.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I agree with you 100 %. I think when most MSPs think about their marketing priorities, they're jumping immediately to the tactics or the view.

Laura Johns
Well, that's the sexy. Like doing it. Google Ads is way fancier than doing a brand messaging session or identifying your buyer persona type session. So, yeah, that's certainly... I think that they want to see new leads generated, and I don't blame them 100% of the time. But the quality of your tactics is greatly influenced by your ability to help your message.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. The way I think about it is the tactics are the vehicles, the strategy that you just touched on, your target market, and your message to that market is the fuel. So if you just jump to the vehicles and you got no fuel, you can push it down the road, but it's not going to work very efficiently. At some point, it's just going to crop out, which is why a lot of MSPs are like, Oh, I'm doing marketing, but it's not working. Sequencing is out of whack. You need to... Look, I understand it. A lot of MSPs and entrepreneurs in general, we have a bias towards action. And they feel like, if I take time to do strategy now, I'm just wasting time not doing anything. And the way I look at it is you're taking time now so that you can move faster later.

Laura Johns
Absolutely. I love that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Whereas if you just jump to the vehicles, you end up wasting time and money. You feel like you're going faster in the beginning, but things slow down dramatically. And then you're like, what the hell is going on? I love that. And you touched on this a little bit, too, when you talked about when you were a CMO for an MSP in guiding the agency that you were working with, the way I look at it is when you understand who your target market is, what your message to that market is, that is information that you provide and review with that agency so that they clearly understand who you're going after. And that is the fuel that they need for the vehicles they're going to implement for you.

Laura Johns
That's one of the first things we do with our clients, actually. We like to do what we call not just... I love the book building a story brand. That's very foundational, the story brand exercise and figuring out your brand script. But that's very overarching and high level. I really love doing what I call a messaging library. We think about every scenario, every stakeholder, every core messaging pillar that we will want to communicate within the next 12 months. And then doing a whole library around it. So not just your marketing team, which, of course, is extremely valuable to us. But let's just say you've add somebody in the field or field team member. Let's just say your marketing team is posting to your social media twice a week, consistently. But you decide, Hey, I'm on the road this week. My field marketing guy's got a camera. Let's let him do a post or two. Well, actually had this happen last week. I had to confront a client about a post that was totally off-brand. And it was a new employee. He did not have the guy. He did not see the guy. He didn't know. And so he's posting something totally off-brand and not a character for the brand. And we policed it. But I think that you want to build an infrastructure because you may not always need a marketing agency partner. You might start out that way. And the hope is, and that's why I call us the business growers, is our hope is you grow out of us. We get you so much new revenue that you either don't need us fully or don't need us to the extent that you did, and you start to hire your team. That's the end goal, I would say. But you definitely want to have a foundation where everybody has access to to that messaging and the brand looking for.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I think I love it. So you call it a messaging library. We talk about it as a messaging playbook. I talk to potential clients about this all the time where it's like, and you touched on this, that playbook or that library isn't just for marketing. Marketing starts on the front end, but then it transitions to sales, and it transitions to customer service. That message It needs to be consistent throughout the entire customer experience or journey. And when you have a library or a playbook or whatever you want to call it, that's the tool that your entire team can use to be consistent with your message and on brand.

Laura Johns
Without it- Yeah, also great for new employees. I think share this with new... When you're onboarding a new employee, it's a great tool for them as well.

Should Outsource Your Marketing or Hire an  
In-house Team?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Exactly. It is a tool throughout the entire organization, not just a marketing tool. So let's shift gears and talk about outsourcing or in-house. What are your thoughts on that?

Laura Johns
Yeah. So going back a little bit to what I was saying is, our hope is that you grow out of us. But I think that if you are an MSP or IT company really dedicated to growth, there are a dozen or so things that you need to be thinking thinking about at all times. The likelihood of an owner, founder, CEO being able to execute on the most important marketing functions and tactics is zero. It is not realistic. It is an expectation. Even if he loves the thought of sales and marketing, or she loves the thought of sales and marketing, it's just not realistic. So I think for a period of time, if not always, it really just depends on how you want to structure your business. It's really been fun. I've been able to see some of my clients go from, Okay, we're the team. Then we leveled up a little bit, teared up a little bit. Then we teared up a little bit. Then I was able to share an advising a job description and helping him hire his marketing director. Now we have a marketing director that we work with. Honestly, it really didn't change our scope. He now is just directing versus the sales VP at the time who was directing a lot of our activity. He's now directing a lot of our activity. But the marketing director has a function internally that, like I said earlier, an agency can never really do. So I think that it's honestly, if you want to do those dozen or so things correctly, if you want to have a consistent brand message, if you want to have a consistent look and feel, if you want to even have an understand what SEO is and how it how it affects your business, if you want to have your Google business profile. There's just lots of moving parts, and all of together comprehensively contributes to new lead generation and new opportunities for business for you. So I think that it's impossible to assume that you can affordably hire all of these functions internally, especially at the beginning. So again, that client of mine, he's got over 30 employees now with the marketing director, and we're still the bulk of that marketing operations and lead generation engine for them. And then he's giving us some information that helps us make decisions about the direction we want them to go in. So I don't know how big you have to be to not outsource it to some extent. I don't have clients right now that big. But I do think that as you start to grow your internal team, having marketing coordinator, marketing director, someone internally, and then as you expand that team, that field marketing. I love the field marketing title. I think for local regional MSPs and IT companies, having a resource who is... Because your techs are not going to get the picture. They are not. You're installers, you're people who are out there. So having someone who is willing to go out to a customer site, take the photos, do the in-person quick interviews with the prospects or with the new clients, or as you onboard and install new clients, doing a lot of that. That marketing director, marketing coordinator could do that for a period of time. But as you expand, I think expanding into that field marketing, and then you might want to add somebody who has a graphic or web capability at some point. But I don't see any scenario, unless you're just huge, in which you wouldn't outsource to some degree.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I totally agree. Some of the biggest mistakes I see MSPs making with hiring is, and you touched on this a little bit earlier, hiring in-house and expecting that person to be a unicorn. They're not going to be great everything. It is impossible. Marketing is too broad. So they hire in-house with unrealistic expectations. Sometimes I'll see them hire full-time for a marketing leader when they really don't need a full-time leader.

Laura Johns
That person can't execute. They can't. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Exactly. Yeah. Because look, strategy, planning, and leadership is totally different from actual boots on the ground, creating emails, social posts, that thing. And oftentimes, why would you hire a high paid person and pay them to create social posts for you? That makes no sense. It's not a good use of resources. So that's another issue I see. Sometimes I'll also see them hire for a higher level person, but that higher level person is really only a higher a level higher in title. They don't have the experience. So I think you need to be realistic. And odds are long term, it's not just going to be one person that you're going to have. Look, even large companies don't handle everything in-house. Sometimes they have specific needs that their team does not have expertise in, and they go out to whoever, a freelancer or or an agency to hire for that specific task.

Laura Johns
Right. Absolutely. We have a client that has 120 employees, I think, that has a marketing team of four, and they still utilize us for a portion of their services. So, yeah, I think that there's always a place for it, for sure.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Always a place for it. And if you're not ready to hire a full-time marketing leader, you can hire people part-time. There are fractional marketing officers that you can hire to do that. So you don't have to bite the bullet and hire a full-time person.

Laura Johns
One thing we really love to do, and this is because I came from that CMO, having to figure out the agency play internally. We actually, in all of our monthly reporting, show our clients exactly how many hours we spent and on what. I feel like it's just a really good resource for them to figure out as they do grow, if they do want to hire. Historically, I can tell any client anytime, Hey, historically, over the last year, we've spent the majority of our time doing graphic design. That would be a great person for you to hire next. And then that part of us. I love being able to show our clients that. I think that gives them the insights they need to hire when it is time to hire. So that's a... If your agency... I would push... If your agency is not willing to do that, I would push them a little bit on it because it's always possible. I think that most agencies track time or at least track, for the most part, what they spend their time on.

How to Grow a Business Without a Full-time Marketing Team

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. Now, this last question I'm going to ask you, I think we've covered a little bit about this, but maybe we can expand upon it a little bit, which is How do I grow my business without a full-time marketing team? And what do I do if it's not working?

Laura Johns
I think there are what I like to call grassroots things that are still very... Let's not not the local sponsorships and the business networking events, all those things, because it really does take, again, I call it multichannel or omnipresent, or one of my favorite ways is trust building marketing, which is it all goes together. If you know, Hey, I don't have the budget for the next year, to hire anyone. Okay, well, what do you have the budget to do? Can I? Again, I'm not a big fan of. In my opinion, the beautiful thing about digital marketing is it tells you exactly what you got for your money. If I'm placing an ad, I know how many sets of eyes, how many people filled out the form, how many people clicked it, et cetera. With more grassroots or local marketing, you really don't have the same access to that type of data or analytics. But you can think before you sponsor something, because we know we all get stuck in the trap of the baseball team that needs to be sponsored or a friend of a friend who has somebody that's contributing in the dress for Success or whatever it is. Think to yourself, are 50% of the people in this room likely prospects or buyers for me? To me, if it's a baseball field and you are an MSP that serves attorneys, I'm thinking at a baseball game, you might have a handful of attorneys, probably not 50% of attorneys. Is it an after-hours Mississippi Bar Association networking event? That's where I'm going to go spend the $1,000 or whatever it is. I think that without a marketing agency, there are, first of all, always spend time with the freelancer or whoever to have a place to land. You don't want Facebook owning the only place there is for people to find out more information about you. You want your own website with a lead form at bare minimum. Get that done. But there are the sponsorships, the networking events. There are opportunities without a marketing team that you can. And like you said, you could get a freelancer to do things here and there, but you definitely can do things a little bit more grassroots, less on the digital marketing side if you don't have the skillset for that internally.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I would say if things aren't working, it typically is going to come back to there's an issue with target market. There's an issue with the messaging, or there's an issue with the vehicles that you're using. Are the vehicles getting you in front of the right people? It's usually one of those three things or a combination.

Laura Johns
I agree. I have, again, this webinar this afternoon that I'm doing. I'm going to talk about this. The very first thing I'm going to say is if you're looking for the one magic marketing pill, it does not exist. You really do have to hone in on your target customer and become present to them everywhere. And that's really when you start to truly see the needle moving. You sent them a resource by email. They clicked on the landing page. The landing page had a tracking pixel. They're on Facebook later this afternoon, and they see your ad. They were just got an email from you, and now they see your ad. Then they download that free download whenever they get the ad, and the free download goes to your salesperson. Your salesperson sees a ding, and he gives you a call the next day. Those are all things. I actually had a client. I saved the text message because I loved it. But he had been coaching travel baseball for decades. Someone who had a son on his son's team had known them for so long, never discussed work, never discussed what he did for a living. He basically says she saw an ad. She was targeted with an ad on Facebook, didn't know that we did that, went to look us up on the website. She saw all these testimonials on the website of people that she knew in the same line of business that she was in. She gave that person a call to get a referral to see how good of an IT company they were, got the referral. It took both the ad. They'd known each other for 10 years. They saw the ad. That triggered them to go to the website. The website had great testimonials on it. Then she circled back, and it was the biggest, I think it was 25,000 in monthly recurring revenue for them, just that one deal. It's not the one magic thing is my point in that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
There's no easy button.

Laura Johns
No, unfortunately not. If you want it done well, I hate to say it, and this is recorded, so I know that I will get quoted on this, but there's also no cheap button. You get what you pay for.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, you do.

Laura Johns
I understand different budgets, or you certainly have to work within a budget that makes sense for your business. But when you're really, really ready to grow and scale, you've got to be willing to make an investment.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, no doubt. This has been awesome, Laura. I could chat with you forever. So any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with today?

Laura Johns
I guess that would be just going back to what we're talking about. Just start somewhere. If you are overwhelmed by all of the marketing things, start with, is my target too broad? Am I trying to be everything to everyone? And maybe you do an exercise internally to really... If you can't afford to hire somebody, do an exercise internally to really try to hone in on who that is and let that set the tone for who you're targeting going forward instead of trying to do this and this and this and this and then scatter yourself and run yourself ragged. I also really, really highly recommend a book called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. It's a great read. Of course, I love the book Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. But They Ask, You Answer actually is a great practical tool. It gives you... It's a story. So you get to read this guy's story of how he survived, how his pool and spa business survived in the 2008 recession. But specifically, how your team can sit down and in one day think of all of the questions that your prospect and potential buyer might have about your business, or not just your business, your industry. What is a business owner? They just want stuff to work. Let's think about all the questions that we get, all the struggles they have. Let's write them all down, and then let's address them with content on our website and social media content. That's great because content gets overwhelming, too. I feel like that's a really good exercise. If you want to do something like a workshop or something practical, that's a great exercise.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. How can people connect with you?

Laura Johns
I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. You can look me up, Laura Pickard-Johns. My main name is still on there. Laura Johns and And also at thebusinessgrowers.com, you can learn more about the business and see my team at thebusinessgrowers.com.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. Laura, thank you so much.

Laura Johns
Thank you, Tim.

Tim Fitzpatrick
If you like what we talked about today, head over to thebusinessgrowers.com. We'll make sure that is in the show notes. So, Laura, thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you as well. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com or over at Revenue Roadblocks Scorecard. You can find out which of the nine Revenue Roadblocks are slowing down your growth. Takes us some five minutes, so take advantage of that. Thank you. And until next time, take care.