In this week’s episode
- It may not be a word you thought you’d ever associate with your business, but do you want to feel ‘SEXY’?! This week Paul talks to an MSP video specialist about how to upgrade your image and influence people on your website through the power of video
- Plus on the show Paul introduces you to the marketing super power of understanding how prospects think – essentially if you want to influence what they buy, you’ve got to look through their eyes
- Also this week, the most frictionless call to action on your website for booking more phone calls with prospects. Plus there’s a brilliant question from a listener on which stats to check out in Google Analytics
Show notes
- Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform
- Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert
- Find out how to get a book you can re-print as your own as part of the MSP Marketing Edge
- The tools Paul mentioned for self-service meeting scheduling were Calendly and Microsoft Bookings
- Paul’s special guest was Darren Wingham from MSPvideos.co.uk talking about how to make your MSP sexy with the power of video
- Many thanks to Simon Smyth from Ingenio for the question about the most important things to track in Google analytics (where Paul mentioned the website heat-map tracking tool HotJar)
- You can join Paul in the MSP Marketing group on Facebook
- Paul’s guest on June 30th will be Ben Niernberg from MNJ Technologies talking about how to manage client retention in these unusual times
- Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com
Episode transcription
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of the show. Here’s what’s coming up today.
Darren Wingham:
The real story is the fact that they can save you hundreds of thousands of pounds from leaving your bank account without your knowledge, and people will respond to that, funnily enough.
Paul Green:
We’ll also be looking at what you should be tracking within Google analytics and what should be the most frictionless call to action on your website.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.
Paul Green:
There’s a distress task that I’ve got to tackle over the next few months, and I’m starting to get my head into gear for it. I call it a distress task because I’ll be honest it’s something I don’t enjoy, I struggle with it, and yet it’s a very important thing to be done. It’s something that my business does, which is important. What it is, every year I write a book for my clients. So it’s a book that they can relabel for their end clients.
Paul Green:
I’ll give you an example. Last year, the book was called Email Hijack and it was 5,023 words, all about email security, but written in a way that people who don’t care and don’t really know about email security will understand it, and they must take action to protect themselves and their company. And the reason I wrote that book is because it is so powerful. I’ve built my last business and then this business based on writing books and giving away those books as an ethical bribe and using those books as business card and using those books as a positioning tool, and it’s such a powerful thing to do. I wanted my clients to do exactly the same thing. So I give that book away to the members of my MSP marketing edge, which is my content service, where I supply content to MSPs all around the world for them to use to get new clients.
Paul Green:
Now, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ll probably know that I’m not a tech. I don’t have a technical background. I do have an interest in technology. And obviously I love working with MSPs and IT support companies. I love discussing it, but I’m not a technical person at all. And that’s why this is distressing for me, because I have to take technical concepts and try and turn it into something that keeps technical people happy and also makes a lot of sense to non technical people, the end users.
Paul Green:
And the book I’ve got to write, which I need to deliver in the autumn, this is actually the fourth such book I’ve written. The first one was about GDPR, which is the European data protection laws. Then I did something last year about the 2020 problem, which was of course the end of life or Windows Seven. And then we’ve got Email Hijack, which is about this one and I’m not quite sure what the next one will be. Ask me in a couple of weeks and I’ll tell you what the next one will be because it’s sitting in my brain right now, stewing as to what it would be. I think it’s probably fairly obvious that it will have some kind of followup to the current situation. So the challenge that I’ve got writing this book and what makes it a distress task for me, and it’s exactly the same challenge that you’ve got in your business is that it’s two worlds colliding.
Paul Green:
Because you’ve got to try and explain critical concepts to ordinary people who don’t really care about this stuff anywhere near as much as you do. And the issue we’ve got is that when someone is baffled by something, their brain just dismisses, it. They’re less likely to take the time to try to understand it. They’re much more likely to just say, right, do you know what? Don’t get this, going to ignore it, going to move on because that’s easier for them. Because we live in a very busy world and these business owners and managers, these decision makers that you really, really want to reach and that you want to influence, they’re very busy and their brains are trying to make sense of the world. And they’re just not that much into technology. They’re interested in what technology can do for them, but they’re not that interested in technology itself.
Paul Green:
It’s a bit cool, but they won’t take the time to understand it. So if you baffle them with science and technology and acronyms and the word Cloud, which really doesn’t mean a great deal to ordinary people compared to us, what’s more likely than them struggling to try and understand it is that their brain will disengage and they’ll just carry on as they are. And you will see this with your clients every day. Unless they’ve got a specific problem that has to be fixed for any particular reason, sometimes they’ll put up with a fudge or they’ll put it with a make do or a workaround because they don’t understand what the problem is. And they don’t really care. Their brains simply aren’t interested. That’s why when I wrote last year’s book, I had to try and explain email security and blended layers of security and how hacks can happen and how something as simple as one hacker getting into one email account with one click can be disastrous with the company and to see them lose 12,000 pounds or dollars out of the bank accounts.
Paul Green:
And I had to do this in a way that nontechnical people will understand and fill 5,000 words with it. And I’ll be honest. I had to lock myself in a luxury hotel. It was a Sunday night to a Tuesday morning just to write that book. And yes, there was a lot of wine involved in that when I finished writing, and no I’m not going to be able to do that this year. I’ve got to find a different way of writing the book this year. So the challenge for you when you’re talking about any kind of technical concept is to break down what you do into the smallest possible, most easily understood chunks. So whenever you’re talking to prospects and especially when you’re talking to clients, you’ve got to make sure that you do that and make it simple for them because the second that they don’t get it, the second that it’s too difficult, they’ll just disengage.
Paul Green:
If you’re talking to prospects and you’re wowing them in any way with technology and with concepts and they don’t get it, they’re just going to disengage and you’re not going to get the sale. You cannot get the sale if they disengage from the selling process. And this isn’t about you talking down to them in any way. This is actually about you dropping down to their level. And you’ve got to look at things as they look at it. Now there’s a phrase that I’ve been using for a few years, which explains this concept so well. And I did read it in a book. I cannot remember which book I read it in, but let me give you the phrase. “To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes.” And this is exactly what we’re talking about here, because the challenge within your MSP is to be constantly interpreting the technical gobbledy goop that’s your world into normal, every day easily understood concepts for the prospects that you want to talk to, that you want to influence.
Paul Green:
The clearer and more precise your business is, the easier it is to understand what you and your colleagues are talking about, the greater the financial rewards will be. Because these ordinary decision makers, they’re not making decisions on suppliers and spend, they’re not using their brains, remember. These aren’t cognitive decisions. Their brains are just rubber stamping the decisions that their hearts are making. And this is why we have to create marketing that’s emotional and not logical. So it’s got to be your heart having a conversation with their heart with just a little bit of evidence to reassure their brain to rubber stamp the deal. To influence what John Smith buys, you must look through John Smith’s eyes and influence his heart.
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
What’s the purpose of your website? Ultimately it’s to generate leads. You know, that’s the whole point of the website is to grab the attention of prospects, get them engaged with you in some way, and then get them to talk to you. And that’s why one of the most critical, but often overlooked elements of any website is the CTA, the call to action. The thing that we want them to do next, and you look at most MSP websites. The call to action is simply here’s our phone number, give us a call. But you know, it’s 2020. People really don’t like picking up the phone these days. We prefer to do our research. We kind of prefer to lurk while we’re doing our research. We like to go and visit websites and Google stuff and check out Facebook pages and check out LinkedIn profiles and do all of that in the background and lurk.
Paul Green:
And even then when we want to talk to someone, picking up the phone, not for everyone, but for many people, it’s just time consuming and it’s difficult. And it’s just a lot easier, isn’t it, to send an email or fill in a form or something like that. But I believe you owe it to your prospects to have the correct call to action on your website. And the four call to actions that you’ve really got available to you, these are the four core ones anyway. The first one is for just people to phone. And obviously you should have your phone number on the website. It should be in the header so that people can see it on every page. On the desktop that should appear on the top right hand side of the website. And it should also be in the contact details as well, in the contact us page.
Paul Green:
But as I said, the phone number’s no good, especially at 10 o’clock at night. What if at 10 o’clock night they’ve been looking at your website. They’re just about to turn in and this is the point they decide, actually we quite like this. Well, no one’s going to answer the phone at 10 o’clock at night even if you’ve got some kind of emergency support line. Those are not the people that we talking to prospects at 10 o’clock at night. So then we’ve got an email and again most MSP websites have email as an option, a hello at, or a sales at, or an info at. Personally, I prefer the more friendliness of info at all, better still hello at. Certainly support at isn’t one that you should be using. But a generic email is good so long as someone gets it because what’s the risk and what’s the fear whenever we send an email to someone for the first time? Will it get there, will it land in spam? We don’t want our first contact with a prospect to be something where they’re worrying or concerned that it may not actually reach you.
Paul Green:
So yes, have the phone number and have the email, but I believe we can go even further. Now the third kind of call to action is to have a web form embedded into the page and web forms again have a certain fear that goes with them, particularly if it’s one of those web forms that just kind of reloads the page, or just comes up with a message saying, “Thanks, your message has been received,” because there’s also still a fear then in the background of has it? Will anyone actually get this? We know that most forms just turned into an email anyway, and there is a risk that that email is just going to sit in your inbox for three, four hours, or worse three, four days before someone does anything with it.
Paul Green:
So to summarise where we’re at right now. Phone number is a nice active call to action. It’s them picking up the phone, doing something active. And that’s great because we want them to take active action. However, they’re less likely to do it. But then email and forms are passive actions. It’s something that they can do to satiate that immediate urge to take action but that kind of stops there. They don’t really get to do something there. I believe the best call to action on any website, other than a buy now button, which you can’t do because no one is going to buy MSP services from you right now. So instead you should be embedding a live calendar into the website, and this can be done either through Microsoft Bookings, which you have as part of 365, or there is a separate service, which is calendly.com. And you’ll have heard me mention this on the podcast before. I use Calendly in my business and I think it’s just beautiful.
Paul Green:
Because it integrates with your calendar, whichever calendar you’re using, certainly whichever mainstream calendar you’re using. And it allows you to show your exact availability directly on the website for other people to book a 15 minute conversation with you. And that ticks so many boxes because it allows them to take active action. They can directly book an appointment with you at a time that suits you and them without having to check in with anyone. That’s brilliant. So they can do this at two o’clock in the morning if they want to. And I don’t mean book an appointment with you at two in the morning. I mean, they can take action at two in the morning. It’s a very low commitment thing for them to do. All they’ve got to do is book a 15 minute call or a 15 minute Zoom.
Paul Green:
No, I know I said earlier that people don’t like picking up the phone, but they don’t mind so much when they’ve got a pre-booked appointment. That’s one thing, isn’t it? To have 15 minutes in your calendar when it suits you. That’s great because you’re, to a certain extent, in control of that as a prospect. You know that’s going to be 15 minutes, whereas you pick up the phone now, there is that fear and that risk that you could be on the phone for the next 30, 40, 60 minutes or so. So this ticks every single box. It really does. And you should get this into your website quickly because you’re not going to get a huge number of people booking. You know, you’re only going to get one or two of these a month at that, depending on how much traffic you get to your website. But this is powerful stuff because those people who book appointments, well, you’ll get two types of people.
Paul Green:
You’ll get time-wasters and you’ll get very hot prospects. And some of the time wasters declare themselves in the way they communicate beforehand. In fact, it’s particularly frustrating when you get salespeople booking appointments with you and they deserve to have their heads ripped off. They really do because that’s just rude and it’s just them stealing your time. But when you get a really good prospect and they’ve actually gone to the effort of booking that appointment with you, and then they actually turn up for it, it’s a really, really good sign. That person is very advanced in the buying cycle. And they’re at a point where they’ve been influenced by you in some way, and they want to have that conversation. So go and get calendly.com or have a look at Microsoft Bookings. I have clients who’ve used both of those versions. Apparently Microsoft Bookings is just not as pretty in the website.
Paul Green:
It’s not quite as flexible. You can’t quite do as much with it because of course Calendly you’ve got a single team dedicated to one product and Microsoft Bookings, it’s a team, isn’t it. It’s one of probably hundreds, if not thousands of teams within Microsoft, but apparently it is good enough. So go and get that and just embed it in your website. And remember, you’re looking to make this as frictionless as possible. The more friction there is in booking an appointment with you, the fewer appointments will get booked. And by frictionless, we mean we just want it to be easy for people. Really, really easy. So with Calendly, you can display the calendar there on the webpage. If they have to click a button to see your calendar, that’s friction, isn’t it? You know what I mean by friction? It’s something else they’ve got to do.
Paul Green:
And the more friction there is, the less likely they are to take action to actually do it and see it through to day. So think about embedding the actual calendar there on the webpage. Imagine if there was a call to action on every single page, and you want to do this in an easy way, and that might be done if you use WordPress, you might do it through a widget for example. A widget, you can do something once and then you can display it on every single page. And you really do want the call to action on every single page so that no matter what page they’re looking at, they can take action if they are absolutely grabbed by the desire to do so.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
So I mentioned earlier that I’ve got to write another book and I’m going to be giving it to my clients. Well, these are the clients for my MSP market edge service, which you can see it mspmarketingedge.com. And there’s kind of two elements to it. In fact, we’re just relaunching our website to try and explain this better. The first element is we give you fresh marketing content every month, and every single month on the first of the month, you get a new guide. It’s like an educational guide to help you capture leads and talk to people about important issues. You get a new video you can put on your websites, you get social media content, you get a press release, you get a done-for-you advertising pack, you get emails that you can send out to prospects and clients. You get a sales letter, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. So that’s new and fresh every single month. And then the second aspect of the membership is a whole load of bonus stuff that we give you as well.
Paul Green:
So for example, there is the book. At the moment it’s called Email Hijack, and the idea is you can put your name on the front. You can make alterations inside, you can get it printed, and you can send that off and use that in your area. And there’s a new book that comes out every year. There’s a printed newsletter that you get every single quarter and it’s repurposing old content, but again, you can print it and you can send it out to your prospects. There’s a plugin for have I been poned, which you can put into your website and you can use this a type of data capture. There’s a campaign in a box. It’s a special marketing campaign, and it’s a 30 day integrated campaign that’s multiple touch points to try and influence prospects to get them to talk to you. There’s weekly tech tips, videos, which go into your website.
Paul Green:
And there’s all sorts of extra marketing materials. During the coronavirus, we’re adding new marketing materials pretty much every week. It’s a very powerful thing to do. And all of this we’ve deliberately made very, very cheap. Now it’s free to get going in the States. It literally doesn’t cost you a cent and the UK it just costs you a pound to get going. And that gives you a 30 day trial. So you can try this out for 30 days. And if you don’t like it, just cancel. In fact, it’s cancel anytime. We have no membership blocking whatsoever. Once you’ve done your trial in the States, it’s $129 a month. In the UK it’s $99 pounds plus VAT per month.
Paul Green:
Now the one thing with this is that we only sell this to one MSP per area because it would not work if you had competitors using this. So the first thing to do is to check out whether or not your area is still available. You go into mspmarketingedge.com, pick your country’s site. So either the US or the UK, and then in the US you just put it in your zip code and it tells you if it’s available and in the UK, you just put it in your postcode. Does exactly the same thing. Go on, go and have a look just to see if your area’s available. mspmarketingedge.com.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Darren Wingham:
Hello, I’m Darren Wingham from mspvideos.co.uk. And really the part of my job is to make MSPs look sexy. They’re heroes, they essentially save other companies from IT nightmares.
Paul Green:
Absolutely love that description make MSPs look sexy because of course, the reason that you and I started working on mspvideos.co.uk, which is a service for MSPs in the UK, is because it answers the question of how do MSPs differentiate themselves from their competitors, and how do they emotionally engage with prospects who are on their website. And often when you go out to film with MSPs, some of the content is a little bit too dry for the business owners and managers that they want to target. Isn’t it?
Darren Wingham:
A bit like everybody, really. No matter what job you’re doing, you’re always passionate about it. What I always find is that no matter who I talk to, that passion comes through and it’s just tapping into that passion and finding the story that comes from that. I haven’t failed yet in finding that from people because business owners are very motivated to do well. I find it fairly straightforward to find that passion. And then from that passion comes the story. And then from that story, you can then ask the various questions. And so build that passion and that story into the video, which is infectious to the client. So the clients get that passion and drive the business. And it’s kind of a win, win thing, really.
Paul Green:
So when you are putting together a video for an MSP, you’re trying to avoid all talk of technology, servers, services, all this kind of stuff, because we know that’s the stuff that people don’t emotionally engage with. How do you find those stories? Because you say you’re looking for the passion, but is it simply a case of figuring out in advance what it is that you’re going to show or do the stories sort of reveal themselves to you as you’re chatting to these MSPs clients?
Darren Wingham:
No, they don’t reveal themselves without talking to the MSP clients. I like to go with a really good, strong idea as to the narrative that I need to get. And what I tend to do is I tend to have a good 20 minute, half an hour conversation depending on how much time the MSP owner has just to kind of have a conversation with them and just ask them some key questions about their business and what drives them and why they get up in the mornings. And unbeknownst to them, which is kind of quite handy for me, they just go into passion mode and they forget about being interviewed most of the time. And will just tell you. An MSP owner knows their business really, really, really well. And the client will know the benefit of having an MSP really, really well.
Darren Wingham:
And you can only marry those two together. So from an MSP perspective, they will tell you their passion for service, et cetera. They will often tell you we had this client who was scammed and we managed to stop that scam happening now. And we can save people hundreds of thousands of pounds by not being scammed either. And just by that alone, whilst the technology behind it to the average person running their business who isn’t an IT enthusiast, the real story is the fact that they can save you hundreds of thousands of pounds from leaving your bank account without your knowledge and how easy that is to happen. And people respond to that funnily enough. Or even if it’s just someone’s in the middle of London and yet their internet service is really, really bad.
Darren Wingham:
And yet they’ve got to get these files out to somebody because it’s what makes them money having someone coming in to make that brilliant. It just works all of a sudden, and the magic happens. And I do think really from a client perspective having an MSP is having someone who does magic for you. And if you can put that into the narrative, I think that’s really, really strong. And I believe you can do that with anything as long as the people who you’re interviewing or talking to who are providing that service, are passionate about that, that just always will fall out when I chat to them.
Paul Green:
Completely agree with you. And in fact, we can see from the results, just from some of the videos that you’ve done so far that the MSPs have put on their websites and then they’ve won new clients. And it’s because of the social proof that these videos provide, because other people can see existing clients talking about how good their MSP is or their IT support company is, but also from just getting that passion across and it makes such a difference to a very dry website. So when you’re doing your filming, Darren, let’s look at the technicals of it at the moment. Now we’ve been friends for must be coming up for nearly 20 years. And I know you have a very big building full of technology and kit and camera lenses and toys and all that kind of stuff, but you don’t really need the very, very best camera equipment with this, do you? You just need to … what do you need, do you need to just a creative mind to looking at it and thinking, well, how is that going to look on screen?
Darren Wingham:
It’s like anything, really. Yes, you have the toys. And yes, the toys are lovely, but you don’t start with the toys. You start with the idea, you start with the story, and then you build out from there. You obviously buy the toys because we are all gadget fans. I suppose you can have all the gear and no idea. You always start with the idea first, and then you’ll build the gear around it, if you know what I mean. So we have very, very good quality cameras, but we don’t have 21,000 pound red cameras that you need to shoot a film on. That’s just not necessary, but I have cameras that can shoot incredibly well with lenses in very low light, for example. It means I can travel quite light. And that’s really, really important because when you’ve got somebody in an MSP environment or you’ve got a customer, what they don’t want or what can initially put people off being interviewed is that you’re sitting there and you’re surrounded by a massive camera crew.
Darren Wingham:
Well, I don’t work like that. Having spent many years than I care to admit in the media industry and understanding every aspect of it, I’m very much a one man band most of the time. And so it’s a backpack full of cameras and a bag full of tripods, and that’s kind of it so more often than not, what will happen is you often go from the story from the start and you travel light so that people aren’t intimidated by “a camera crew.” And so they’re more likely to relax. They’re more likely just to have a chat with you and more likely to forget there’s a camera a few meters away. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s just getting that story. It’s getting that narrative and they forget that that’s all there because at the end of the day, it isn’t about the gear.
Darren Wingham:
It’s really what it’s always been about before the gear was invented, which is one person having a conversation with another. And that’s what it’s always been. And that’s even with all this equipment we have then MSP will more often than not sign somebody up because they’ve talked to them, they’ve established a relationship with them, and they’ve got to know them. And that is still done in a one to one relationship. You know, one person knows another and all we’ve got really is the equipment kind of in the way, but the stories is still the same. And the relationship building is still the same. And that’s by getting to know the MSP owner and the quality of their service and the passion behind their service.
Paul Green:
Okay. So the final question, let’s just park the Hollywood style video that should go on your homepage and educate your prospects. And let’s just talk about the other kind of video that all MSPs should be generating. And that’s what I like to call disposable social media or blog videos. So it’s short bursts of passing on your knowledge, educating people about technology. It doesn’t take hours and hours of filming to produce 60 seconds of video. You can pretty much kind of bang out and knock off this kind of video. I know you’ve trained a number of MSPs to be better vloggers, video vloggers, you’ve trained people to be more confident when they’re talking to a camera. What are your top tips for just getting that disposable social media video content done?
Darren Wingham:
I suppose it’s know your audience, almost have a visual in your head before you even turn the camera on as to who you’re speaking to. And imagine you’re speaking to that person. They are just stood the other side of the camera, so you can engage their eyes, even though they’re not there, imagine you’re literally talking to them. And that makes a big difference. I think also having a very clear idea as to what you want to talk about. Now, that doesn’t mean you’ve got to write it word for word, unless you’re a trained professional who’s spoken to camera many times. What you want to do really is to have bullet points of what it is that you want to talk about.
Darren Wingham:
It’s the old fashioned start middle and end, really. Get yourself into the video very quickly. Talk about what it is that you want to talk about, and then give them a call to action or a very good way of rounding it off. I would always say call to action because that’s what we’re trying to get people to do is to get them to do something. And I would say keep it within a minute.
Paul Green:
Absolutely. And here’s your call to action. What’s the best way for us to learn more about you and what you can do?
Darren Wingham:
So what they can do is they can go to the website, mspvideos.co.uk, and you can see some of the videos that we’ve made for previous MSPs. And if you want to book a chat, then just click on the live calendar and we can chat for 10, 15 minutes.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast. Ask Paul anything.
Simon:
Hi, my name’s Simon from Ingenio. What are the most important things to track in Google analytics?
Paul Green:
That’s a great question, Simon. Thank you very much. And I’ve got to give a caveat with my answer to this one, which is at a technical level, I am not an expert in Google analytics at all. In fact, in preparation for the recording of this podcast, I logged back into my Google analytics. It seems to be easiest since I was last in. It must be two years since I looked at the Google analytics from my own website, but I then lost a good 40 50 minutes or so just looking at stats and figures and graphs. And it’s actually very, very cool. I personally prefer using hotjar.com, which has a free program. And that will give you heat maps of where people are clicking on your website and where they’re looking, and also gives you recordings of users, recordings of people using the website.
Paul Green:
Because I like sort of the overall gut feel that you get from Hotjar. I like that gut, where are people looking? What are they not looking at? Where can we move things so that they see it? But of course, Google analytics is raw data. And sometimes you do just need that raw data. So some of the things that I think you should look at, first of all, is source. So where is your traffic coming from? So to find this, you click on acquisition and then overview, and you can see which sources are giving you the most traffic. Now, again, a caveat, most MSPs have such tiny amounts of traffic that this is almost unlimited help to you. And you’ll see the organic search will probably be your top one or direct will be your top one. Direct is people going and typing your website’s address. Organic search is people Googling you and clicking on you, but it’s worth just having a look through. Look through the top five or top 10, just to have a look and see where your traffic is coming from.
Paul Green:
There may not be any urgent actions that you take away from this, but it’s always good to know something like that. You can then go and have a look at page views and page views are literally what pages are people looking at. You want to see what pages people are looking at. You want to see how many pages they look at per session. If you’ve got really, really good content on your website, then people will come back to your website. Most MSPs that doesn’t happen. Most MSPs people are visiting your website once, twice, maybe three times during the selling process. And then after that, they’re simply coming back to have a look at how to get in touch with you for support. Most people aren’t on your website at all. In fact, one of the highest sources of traffic to your website is most likely to be your own email newsletter. It certainly is on mine. I don’t get a lot of organic traffic at all or referral traffic.
Paul Green:
Most of the traffic that comes to my website is people that have been driven by my own list using my own email newsletter. But then when they’re on my website, they go and have a look at more than just one page. They’ll have a look at other pages as well. Another one to have a look at is the average time spent on a page. Now, you haven’t got a blog site, your content is there purely to get you traffic and to engage with people. But it’s worth just looking to see how long are people spending on pages. And if you are investing in original content, so you’re getting a writer on fiverr.com or people per hour to create content for you, is that leaving people on your website for more than 30, 40, 50 seconds a minute?
Paul Green:
There is no real target to aim for other than the longer they’re spending on a page, the more they’re engaging with your content. And of course the more they engage with your content, the more likely you are to influence them at an emotional level. And it’s all about influencing people. As we were saying earlier, when we were talking about looking through John Smith’s eyes, the more you can engage with your prospect, the more likely they are to interact with you and ultimately to become a client. Then you should be having a look at something called entrances. So this is where people are coming in to your website, because you might think that they’re all coming in through the homepage, but you might have a specific article on your website that for some reason has just ranked really well within Google and actually a fair proportion of your traffic is coming in through that page. Then we want to have a look at the bounce rate.
Paul Green:
Now the bounce rate is where someone comes into a specific page and doesn’t interact further, they just go back. They leave, they essentially hit the back button. And bounce rates can be useful just in terms of interpreting if someone types in a certain search term, lands on a certain page on your website and then bounces back, then clearly that isn’t what they were looking for. And that tells Google something about that page. But also that tells you something about that page as well. Two more that you should be tracking, I would have a look at exit percentage. So what’s the page that people leave in a given session? Again, this is probably of little use to an MSP unless that pays to they’re leaving on is some kind of appointment confirmation page. That’s what you want. You want someone to book an appointment with you through Calendly or bookings and then exit on the confirmation page. Reality is very, very small percentage of your traffic is going to be doing this.
Paul Green:
These kinds of things are more of use to e-commerce sellers. The likes of people who sell things directly online, there will be all over this kind of thing, because for them it’s a way of keeping people on the sites and ultimately getting them to buy more. And the final thing to look at is location. Where are your visitors coming from? Because you only really want them from, well certainly from, I don’t know, 50 miles around your radius, or maybe just the country that you’re in, because obviously we know you can serve anyone anywhere, but is it mostly local people who are looking at your website? So you can go into audience, click on geo and then have a look at location.
Paul Green:
So don’t think you should really be obsessing over Google analytics. It’s a useful tool and it’s something to look at now and again, but your traffic levels are so low, it’s debatable whether or not there’s actually actionable information in there. Go and have a look every now and again. See what’s there, see what’s interesting. See what’s an insight into your own websites, but I do believe you’ll get a lot more actionable information as to something like hotjar.com.
Voiceover:
How to contribute to the show.
Paul Green:
I’d really loved your question to go onto the podcast. Any question at all to do with marketing or growing your business. It could be how to increase monthly recurring revenue. It could be how to improve your net profits. What you’ve got to do is grab your mobile, get onto the voice recorder, record a quick question, just make sure you start with your name just like Simon did there, and then send it over to me. And my email address is hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Ben Niernberg:
You have to be the champion for how you go about questioning those customers. Otherwise you’ll slowly starts to see that business trickle away into those that are.
Paul Green:
That’s Ben Niernberg from MNJ Technologies. He’s going to be here next week talking about how to manage client retention in these unusual times. We’re also going to be talking about a slightly delicate subject. It’s the matter of your life expectancy and how many more good years you can expect on this planet. I’m talking about that in the context of making sure that your business is there to feed your life, and not the other way around, because if your life has been given up to feed the business, that’s not a great life at all. And we’ll also talk next week about the best book on negotiating I have ever, ever read. It saved me absolutely thousands and thousands of pounds. And it can do exactly the same for you. See you next week.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world. Paul Green’s MSP marketing podcast.