SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) - Do you have these fundamentals?

SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) – Do you have these fundamentals?

Paul Green

Podcast 2024
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) - Do you have these fundamentals?
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To mark our 350th episode I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. By the end of this you’ll know exactly where to focus your marketing efforts to create a stronger foundation.

Welcome to Episode 350 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

SPECIAL: MSP Marketing Audit (1 of 3) – Do you have these fundamentals?

It’s episode 350 and I can’t quite believe that we’ve actually made it here. We’ve been doing this every single Tuesday since the 5th of November 2019 and we’ve not missed a single week yet. So to mark this big anniversary, I’m going to do something a little bit different.

Not just today, but over the next three episodes, I’m giving you a complete audit of your MSP’s marketing. We’re not just talking about theory here. I’m actually going to go through a practical numbered checklist that you can work through right now, so that you can assess where you stand with your marketing.

Before we start, grab a pen and paper because you’re going to be scoring yourself as we go along. Actually, the score is simply yes or no. Yes, we’re doing this or no, we don’t. I’ve got 40 items to go through today and there’s going to be more next week and more the week after.

Marketing audit

So today we are going to look at the foundations of your marketing. We’re covering things like your ICP, I’ll explain what that is in a second, your USP, we’re going to look at your website and we’re going to look at your LinkedIn setup. And as I say, there are 40 questions in total across this episode. So count your yes answers as we go and I’ll tell you what your score means at the end. Let’s get started.

SECTION ONE: ICP – Your Ideal Client Profile

We’ve got six questions in this first section and your ideal client profile means that you have a very strong grip on exactly the kind of client that you would like to work with. So I often ask brand new members to our MSP marketing edge, tell me about your ideal client profile and they’re like, “yep, yep, we’ve got all of that sorted out, we know exactly what we want.” And actually their idea of an ideal client profile is, businesses round here that’ll spend at least $400 or $500 a month or whatever the case is.

Actually for a good ideal client profile, you need to go more into detail with that. The more you have a real grip on exactly who you want to do business with, the more relevant you can make your marketing. Because one of the biggest tricks and secrets to marketing is making it seem really relevant to the person that you most want to reach. So I’m going to go through six questions and as a reminder, you’re answering yes or no. So just write these down. You can just do like one, two, three, four, five. And at the end we’ll go through what it means depending on how many yeses and nos you’ve got.

Question 1: Have you actually written down a specific description of your ideal clients?

And if you have, have you included these kind of things? The size of your ideal clients, the kind of sector that they’re in. I mean, it could be that you’ll work with literally any business or you might just prefer professional services, for example you might like manufacturers. Have you written down the location of where the ideal client is? Now, you and I know that you can look after clients all around the world, but you may choose to have clients that you can physically visit at least once a year just so you can show your face because we all know there are benefits still of meeting people in real life. And do you know what the job title of the decision maker is? For example, if it’s smaller businesses, which is typically up to 50 staff, is it the operations manager, the CEO, something like that? So that’s the first question is have you written down, literally in writing stuck on the wall of your office or whatever is the case, do you have that written down? Really important.

Question 2: Does your marketing speak to one specific type of person rather than any business, of any size, anywhere?

So the whole point of having this ideal client profile is to narrow down your marketing. When we start marketing, it feels as though the more wide our marketing is, the more people we’re going to reach, but that is not the case at all. What actually happens, and it’s kind of weird but I promise you this is the case, the more narrow your marketing and the more you talk just to the ideal person that you’d like to work with, the more likely they are to be attracted to you. But also weirdly, the more attractive your overall marketing is.

We only work with MSPs. I mean, literally every single page of our website and everything I do on LinkedIn is MSP, MSP, MSP, marketing, marketing, marketing. There’s no end to it. And yet at least once a month, maybe a couple of times a month, I’ll get approached by someone outside. It could be a vendor within the channel or someone outside of MSPs saying, “Do you think you could help us?” And it’s almost like the more specific you are, the more attractive you become to everyone.

Question 3: Do your current best clients, so the ones who if you could you would clone, do they match this ICP?

Now there could be a mismatch if you’ve decided you want to go off in a different direction. So a lot of MSPs, they get five, sometimes 10 years in and they’ll just take almost any business that comes in. But at the point you’re getting intentional about growing your MSP, you have to ask yourself, “Hey, do we want more of just anything? Or do we want more manufacturers? Do we want more lawyers?” I mean, some people hate lawyers, some people love lawyers, but what do we want more of? So it’s okay if the current clients don’t quite match the ICP so long as you’re very clear that going forward, we only want lawyers, CPAs, accountants, financial people, people that sit within professional services, for example.

Question 4: If you work in a specific vertical or a niche, does all of your marketing make that specialism obvious?

So let’s take the lawyers example. If you would take any kind of business, but actually you’d like lawyers, you want to really drill down and just focus just on lawyers. If I looked at your marketing, your website, your homepage, your emails that you send out, does it within a couple of seconds say to me, “This is for me. I am the practice manager or whatever, the managing partner of a legal practice. Is this talking directly to me? ” And if the answer is no, then you are missing a trick on that one. In fact, you’ll know this if you’re an Instagram person or a Facebook person, which I do now and again, and you’ll see that the adverts these days, and there is a reason for this, it’s because the advertising system has changed, but the adverts these days say right upfront who the audience is for.

So I might be looking at an advert which says, “Hey, are you an MSP between two and 10 staff or between 200,000 and two million revenue?” And that instantly says right at the start of the advert who that’s for. And it’s exactly the same with you with your verticals. If you want to work with lawyers, you’ve got to say upfront, “Do you own or manage a legal practice with at least five staff or at least 10 staff?” There’s nothing wrong with saying really clear and very proactively in your marketing exactly who this is for.

Question 5: Could a stranger read your homepage and immediately know what kind of business you work with?

And actually there is a test for this. The test is you go networking, just go to any old networking meeting, go and find someone that you don’t know that you’ve never met before, do the whole shaky hands, what do you do? Etc. etc. And then when they say, “What do you do? ” You say, “Well, can I ask you a favour?” Grab your phone, pull up your website on your phone, give it to them and say, “You tell me what we do.”

And the power of this, and it’s kind of scary if you were to do something like this, but the power of this is that if they can’t tell you immediately from your own website what you do, then you’ve clearly got a problem. Even if they’re not in the audience, let’s say they’re an accountant and you are talking to lawyers, they should still be able to say, “Oh yeah, so you guys help lawyers grow their business using technology.” I mean, that’s exactly the kind of thing that you want to hear back.

Question 6: Have you ruled out the types of clients you don’t want so you’re not accidentally attracting the wrong people?

So for example, manufacturers are very yes or no, love or hate within the channel. So some MSPs love manufacturers because they love the complicated setups and the unusualness of it and the challenges. And other MSPs don’t want any of that. They want lawyers and CPAs and office workers where it’s the same system being rolled out again and again and again. Little bit more boring, but it’s a lot more consistent and it’s easier as you scale that up. So do you know and as part of your ICP who you don’t want to work with?

SECTION TWO: USP – Your Unique Selling Proposition.

So if your ideal client profile answers the question of who you want to work with, your unique selling proposition answers the question of why would they want to work with you? So this is very much looking at things from their point of view, which as I say, is a marketing superpower. So we’ve got seven questions here and the first is this.

Question 7: Can you finish this sentence right now without hesitating? We help <who> achieve <what> by <how we’re different>?

If you can’t answer that, then you don’t have a unique selling proposition. You may think you do, but the beauty of a USP is that you know exactly why your ideal client would buy from you. So if you can’t answer that, you’ve got some work to do on that.

Question 8: Does your USP avoid these words?

These are all bad words because they’re overused… proactive, responsive, trusted partner, great service and tailored solutions. I know those last two are two words. But if you’ve got any of those words in your USP, you need to strip those words out because they’re not differentiators. I promise you, as someone who has looked at more than a thousand MSP websites over 10 years, maybe even more than that, I promise you those are the words you see again and again and again. So they may feel to you like they’re the message that you want to get across, but from the prospect’s point of view, they see them all the time. If they see a word all the time, it cannot be a differentiator.

Question 9: If a prospect or when a prospect reads your USP, would they say off the back of that, “so what”?

If they would say “so what”, then you score a no on that question. The so what test is a great test you can apply to almost any kind of marketing. So for example, if you want to talk to lawyers and they’re lawyers with at least 10 or 20 staff, and if your USP doesn’t make them go, “Oh, this is for us” then it has failed the so what test. These days they don’t say so what, but they just kind of move on to the next thing.

This so what test is something that I learned in journalism college in 1992, 1993. It was one of the first lessons we learned was anything that goes into a newspaper or radio, as the training I was doing back then, has got to pass the so what test. Otherwise, it’s not of interest to the listeners and the readers. And actually you can apply that to all of your marketing as well. Your USP has got to pass the so what test.

Question 10: Could you complete this sentence? We are the only MSP in our area that…

What goes on the end? If you’ve got nothing on the end, then you’ve got no differentiator. We’re the only MSP in our area that helps big legal firms to grow faster with technology. Can you see how it doesn’t really matter what the words are, but if you don’t know instantly how to complete that sentence, you are missing something from your USP.

Question 11: Does your USP appear on the homepage of your website as a headline? On your LinkedIn as a headline? And do you have it memorised as your elevator pitch?

That’s three different places to use the same thing. And you use slightly different words, but your USP, once you’ve encapsulated it down to a sentence, something that you can say to someone else that they instantly understand what makes you different. You use it as the headline on your homepage, the headline on your LinkedIn, mostly the same just a few tweaks of the words, and you have it saved in your brain as an elevator pitch so if you ever meet someone and they’re potentially a good ICP, a good ideal client profile fit for you, then you know how to say to them why they would want to work with you.

Question 12: If you Googled three of your local competitors right now, would you sound genuinely different to all of them?

In fact, this is one of the tests of your USP. You go onto the web, you Google IT support in your vertical or your area, and you go and look at all of the websites of your competitors, or you get your AI friend to do it for you. But it’s kind of better for you as a human to do it. Maybe you and your AI friend doing it together and you’re asking yourself, our USP once it’s there in our marketing, does anyone else have that marketing? I guess it would make sense to do that in advance. The reality is 80% of websites in any market or MSP’s websites in any market are pretty much identical. So just in doing this exercise and making yourself stand out, that can make a real difference.

Question 13: Have you tested your USP on a real business owner, obviously outside of the channel and asked them if it means something to them?

So you remember earlier I was saying go networking and show your website to someone. The next time you meet a lawyer or whoever is your ideal client. Why not say to them, “Can I ask a big favour please? So we are always looking for clients like you and we’ve just changed all of our marketing. Can I show you something on my phone? Would you just tell me, and be brutally honest with me because this just helps me and I’ll obviously happily return the favour, does this talk to you? So you’ve described yourself as the perfect kind of client for us. I’d like to know if this is the right thing.” Does that make sense? I mean that’s a scary thing to do, but it’s a very smart thing to do.

SECTION THREE: Your website.

This of course is a big one because even in 2026, your website is the most important marketing asset that you have at your disposal. Every single person who is thinking of working with you at various stages will check you out on your website. They check your websites and they check your LinkedIn. We’ve got some stuff on that coming up. So we’ve got a lot of questions in this section. I’m going to speed them up a little bit because a lot of them are very simple questions. In total, we’ve got 18 questions here and you’re answering yes or no to each one. Now we’re going to start with the five questions that every single prospect asks themselves and you need to know whether or not your site answers them.

Question 14: The first thing people ask – Is this for a business like mine?

So this builds on the work that we’ve just done about the ideal client profile and your unique selling proposition. Does your homepage make it immediately obvious who you work with and what size of business you’re built for? It’s okay to say we work with larger businesses of 50 or more staff, or we are built for small businesses up to 20, 30 staff. And I know you’d always like more users, but sometimes an MSP that does really well with 20-30 users or staff just wouldn’t cope with 100, 200, 300. Not that they would come knocking, but people want to know that you and them are the right size for each other.

Question 15: The second thing that people ask – Do these people understand my world?

This is a big one. So you’ve got to ask yourself, does your website talk about the problems and frustrations that your clients and prospects have rather than technology and processes? No one really sets out to go and get another IT company to get another MSP. The reason they have an MSP is because they want the outcomes. They want the outcomes where they just want their technology to work. They want it to help them to grow their business, not hold their business back. They are fed up of their staff complaining and they’re fed up of it just being an unknown entity.

You can talk about those frustrations and those problems and how you take them away because you make sure that technology is there ready to help them grow, things don’t go wrong so often so their staff don’t complain so much. And you will help them budget their IT infrastructure as they grow, which you do with roadmapping and all that sort of stuff. So the more you talk about problems and frustrations and the less you talk about technology and processes, the easier it is for them to answer that question.

Question 16: The third thing that people ask – Can I trust them?

Can I trust you essentially? Does your website have specific social proof? Named people, photos, names, companies, maybe even job titles where they’re saying very specific things about you. If they’re saying, “Oh, great service, would recommend,” that’s not social proof. These days that kind of generic social proof doesn’t work. It has to be specific. Specificity sells. We need real stories from real named clients.

And I know that there’s always the worry of a security concern if you put the names of your clients and photos of them on the website. I understand that, but you can systemise around that. You can educate your clients about making sure that any call that they get that they verify, it is actually from you guys and not someone that’s trying some kind of security scam.

Question 17: The fourth thing that people ask – Roughly what’s it going to cost me?

Does your website address the pricing question in any way, even if it just explains what affects price rather than not saying anything about it? This is such a big thing. And last year I read this book. It’s called Endless Customers, written by Marcus Sheridan. It’s a reinvention of his previous book called They Ask You Answer. Highly recommend that you get it. We’ve actually partnered with Marcus Sheridan on a project called msppriceguide.com and it’s an interactive price calculator that’s powered by AI and you put it on your website and it completely answers this question.

It tells all of your prospects immediately roughly what it’s going to cost to work with you. And it is only roughly, you’re not held to it, it doesn’t have to be an exact price because that comes from the sales process, doesn’t it? Because if someone asks you how much is what you do, the answer is how long is a piece of string? So an interactive AI-powered pricing calculator helps you to answer that question early on. It just gives them comfort and security that it’s in the right ballpark.

If they’re thinking, I’m not going to spend more than $20 a month, and the price calculator says it’s $70, $80, $100 a month, then they know that you are not for them. I mean, let’s be honest, they’re going to struggle to get good IT support for $20 a month. But the point is if it’s roughly around what they expected it to be, they’re going to move on to the next step. This is so important. This is literally a lead killer, which is why I partnered with Marcus and his team. Please do go and have a look at that, msppriceguide.com.

Question 18: The fifth question that people ask – What do I do next?

Is there a very clear low risk call to action? I recommend, and this is best practice right now, a 15-minute discovery call, your live calendar embedded on every single page of your website. And you say to them, book a 15-minute call with us. 15 minutes on a Zoom or a Teams where they just talk to you as the technology advisor, not the salesperson, but the technology advisor. 15 minutes is nothing. Everyone will book a 15-minute call without really overthinking it. But the point is they’ll only book it if they’re nearly ready to take the next step.

So when you put your live calendar on there, and obviously people can still go to contact us and email you or fill in a form or phone you or write to you or whatever they do, send you a pigeon if they do that, but the point is when someone books in a 15-minute appointment it’s an indicator. It’s them putting their hand up and saying, “I am nearly ready to move forward. I just want to have a conversation.” It’s kind of like they’re checking you out and actually you are checking them out. It’s a good fit call. That’s what it really is. But we call it a discovery call. Your purpose on that 15-minute call is for you to push for a full sales appointment, which obviously happens offline.

So those are the first five questions that a prospect asks when they’re coming onto your website. We’re now going to whiz through a bunch of other questions about your website. And the first of those relates to your homepage.

Question 19: Does your homepage headline speak to the outcome that the prospect wants rather than just describing your service?

Like I was saying earlier, talk not about your technology, talk about outcomes. People don’t buy from features, they buy from benefits. So it’s not about the tech, it’s not about the services you manage. It’s about what they can do with it.

Question 20: Can a visitor tell within five seconds what you do and who you do it for without having to scroll down?

When someone first lands on your website, the thing that they see at the top, which obviously is a different amount of size depending on whether they’re on their phone or whether they’re on a laptop, we call this the hero section. It’s also known as the fold, this goes back to in the old days when you had newspapers, you remember the newsagent would fold the newspaper over and just put it on their counter. That’s where the concept of the fold comes. These days it’s more often called the hero section. Can I tell in your hero section what you do and who you do it for without having to scroll down? If I can’t, then you need to do some work on that hero section.

Question 21: Does your website have real photos of real people?

That’s you and your team and not stock images. It’s 2026, right? Stock images were bad in 2016. There’s no space for them anymore. There are plenty of photographers out there, good photographers who don’t charge a huge amount of money to come and shoot you and your team. So just get it done. If you are your team, just use yourself as the face of the business. I promise you, you will win more business by having real photos of you, maybe even you and your family, you and your team, you and your associates.

I promise you, you’ll win more business from that because humans buy from humans. The second they see stock images, no. AI images, they know they’re AI images, we’re still in the uncanny valley where we know it’s an AI image when we look at it or we’re not quite sure. I wouldn’t even use an AI image of you. Use real, real images that a photographer has taken, they’re not expensive, they’re not difficult to do, but if you have stock images or anything like that on your website, I promise you, you’re turning people off.

Question 22: Are all your accreditations, your certifications, your years in business clearly visible?

When we are talking to a prospect, we’re talking to their heart and their brain. Actually, we need to spend 80% of our time talking to their heart. They are making emotional decisions on whether to pick you or whether to pick someone else, but we do need to give the brain a bit of information as well. So we’re talking to the heart with all of this stuff we’re talking about with all the stuff I’ve mentioned so far, but the brain will want to look for a bit of evidence. Show me some accreditations, qualifications, memberships, how long have you been in business? All of that kind of stuff. It’s just ticking a box.

Question 23: Do you have at least one proper case study that’s a before and after story?

It’s really important. It’s a great form of social proof. A case study is where you’re taking someone on a journey. Now, the best kind of case study is where you video a client, you interview them. What was it like before they started working with you? What did you guys do to make it better and how has that made their lives and their business easier? That’s exactly the kind of stuff that works as a great case study. And the beauty of doing it on video is you can repurpose it. So you can edit that down into a short video for your websites, little clips of that to go onto social media, and you can turn it into a written case study that goes into a sales proposal. It can be used over and over again.

Question 24: Do you have at least one video testimonial on your website?

So a video testimonial is different to a case study. A case study is taking someone on a journey. You could have four or five minutes as a case study, whereas a testimonial is someone talking and saying literally like, “Oh, I’ve been working with your MSP for some time now and oh, what an experience. Whenever we have a problem, we just have to get in touch and they do X, Y, or Z.” Something like that is beautiful. So a video testimonial is very important.

Question 25: Do you also have written testimonials including the client’s name, job title, and company name?

So we need all of these things, right? All of these are called social proof. Social proof makes us feel that you’re safe. Social proof talks to the caveman inside us because back in the day, 10,000 years ago, if as a cave dweller we saw lots of people running, we just joined them. We didn’t sit and think about it and go, “We wonder why they are running.” We just ran with them because the chances were there was a dinosaur chasing them and it was hungry. I know that humans and dinosaurs never live together, but go with that. Saber-toothed tiger.

So social proof talks to us as a very base level. And when we see videos and we see written testimonials and we see clips of testimonials, it just sends a message to us saying, “These guys are safe. You can trust these guys. Other people like you trust these guys.”

Question 26: Is your Google review rating linked or shown anywhere on the site?

So it’s important to collect external reviews. Google is a great place to do it because actually by getting reviews on Google, you are helping to improve your Google juice. And yes, people are using AI to find an MSP, but they are still using Google. And as we know, Google is putting a whole series of changes in for the AI age. So having reviews in Google is great. Here’s a bit of a trick actually, solicit and collect reviews on Google to help your Google juice and get more Google testimonials. You can then take screenshots of those to feed them into your websites, or you can get a widget which sucks them into your website. That’s a very smart thing to do.

Question 27: We’re talking now about services pages – Are your services pages written from the client’s perspective?

So looking at their pain, their problems and their desired outcomes rather than a description of what you do technically. Now, services pages are not that important. People kind of just skip over them, but often they do that because they’re boring, because they’re far too technical and they talk about all the services. Remember, people don’t care about the services, they care about the benefits. In fact, there’s a great way of turning any feature into a benefit. If you list a feature and then you say the words “which means…” or “so that…”, and then you can list the benefit.

So for example, if you say, “We have 15 different scanning tools, which means you can just carry on with your work and if there’s a problem, we’ll detect it and fix it without it interrupting you.” Does that make sense? Yeah. So you have a feature “which means” or “so that”, and that goes into a benefit.

Now we’re going to ask some questions now just about the general website.

Question 28: Does your website work properly?

Is it fast? Does it look good on a mobile phone? Those things really do matter.

Question 29: Does it load quickly?

I mean like under three seconds. There are all sorts of speed tests you can do. Google has a speed test, that’s the one to do because what Google thinks about your speed does affect your ranking. It does affect how much organic traffic appears on your website.

Question 30: Does your location and your core service appear in your page titles and your headings?

So that Google and the AI tools know where you are and what it is that you do.

Question 31: Is there a call to action at the end of every single page, not just the homepage?

And that call to action, of course, being your live calendar.

SECTION FOUR: LinkedIn setup.

Right, we’re nearly there. We’re in section four, which is all about your LinkedIn. Remember we’re looking here at the foundations. So I’ve got the final nine questions all about LinkedIn. And they’re to do with your personal profile. When we talk about building up your LinkedIn, we’re always talking about your personal profile. So having a company page is important because they will go and check out the company page as part of their due diligence, just like they look at your website, they look at your company page. But in terms of building your connections and finding hot prospects on LinkedIn, it’s all about your personal profile.

Question 32: Is your profile photo professional, approachable, recent and on a plain background?

So not quite a passport photo, but does it look like you now and is it professional? Like I was saying earlier, photography is cheap, so when you get that photo shoot done of you and your team, you get lots of different shots of you, make sure you have a good professional photo of you on your LinkedIn. And as an aside, it should be the same photo of you on your LinkedIn, on your website and on your business card. Yes, you should put your photo on your business card.

I change my photo around about every two to three years, depending how fat I’m getting, how the old neck’s drooping and how the cheeks are getting a bit, whatever, and obviously the grey hair… well, it’s all gone grey now, so I don’t have to worry about that, it’s just I guess as the grey hair starts to drop out, I’ll need to update my photo. But when I do that, I change it on my LinkedIn, on my website, everywhere I have that photo. It’s really important you do that for consistency reasons.

If you are using a Photoshopped photo of you from 2007 and that’s on your LinkedIn and then someone turns up on a Teams call with you and you are like a 20 year on fatter, older version of yourself, I know that it’s funny, it’s a joke, but actually it’s not because it’s almost like you’ve pulled the wool over their eyes over something as simple as your appearance, which matters a lot less to them than it does to you. Consistency, people want consistency because it makes them feel secure. It’s all about how they feel here.

Question 33: Does your banner image communicate what you do and who you help rather than just showing your logo?

So of course your banner is that image at the top of your LinkedIn personal profile and it’s really important what you put in there. So in mine, for example, it says something like “Grow your business with the MSP Marketing Edge”, and it has a URL in there as well. They can’t click it because it’s the banner in LinkedIn, but it’s a really important way of getting that out there.

Question 34: Does your headline on LinkedIn describe the value you deliver to clients?

Not just saying what your job title is. So if it’s just “Founder so-and-so IT”, then you’ve lost out on that. Like we were saying earlier in one of the questions, you take the same headline on your website and you adapt it for your LinkedIn headline as well.

Question 35: Is your About section written in first person, focused on your ideal client’s problems and ending with a clear call to action?

That About section is really important. You write it as if you have written it to them. It’s you, one person, talking to them, one person. Really important. And it needs to basically take them on a small journey. So you talk about their problems, don’t talk about technology, but you talk about the outcomes that you deliver, and then there’s that clear call to action. Literally, you put the link to your live calendar or maybe like a link to your website with a live calendar page right there at the end of your About section.

Question 36: Does your featured section contain something that moves the prospect forward?

So for example, a link to your website or a useful resource like an IT services buyer’s guide, we give one of those to all of our MSP Marketing Edge members. Definitely a way for them to get in touch, that link to your live calendar.

Question 37: Does your profile read like a sales page for your MSP rather than a CV for a job application?

People sometimes get confused with LinkedIn, even people who run their own businesses and own their own businesses. LinkedIn is a job hunting platform for people who are employees and that’s a very important platform. I have lots of friends who are quite high up, some of them in quite impressive companies, and they’re always keeping their LinkedIn profile up to date because they never quite know when they’re going to have to use it for job hunting.

But for you as the business owner who wants to use it to attract prospects, you’ve got to remember that LinkedIn is a different platform for you. You use it in the same way, but it’s to talk to prospects, make them think, “Okay, I should talk to these people” and kind of tell them the outcomes, the reasons why you understand their problems and you can help solve those problems.

Question 38: This is moving away from your personal profile page – Does your company page have a professional logo, a banner image, correct contact details, and an About section written for prospects rather than about your history?

So again, this is about getting the basics right. Your personal profile is about you. People buy from people, so the two of you connect on there, but your company page is about the company and needs to have all the details about your business.

Question 39: Has your company page been updated in the last 30 days?

Every Thursday I go and add something to our MSP Marketing Edge company page and it’s normally just a bit of news, something new that we’ve done or some new feature that we’ve added, but obviously I write about it as a benefit, not just as the feature. And I just do that as part of my system. 50 weeks of the year, don’t do it at Christmas, 50 weeks of the year, there’s something new going on the company page. So when a potential member is doing their due diligence on us, they can see that we are active, we’re constantly adding something to our company page. I’m updating my personal profile every day with new content, but I’m doing the company page once a week. That is a great cadence.

Question 40: Do you have a process, even if it’s just a basic one, a system for adding new ideal prospect connections every single week or better still every single day?

So I just mentioned having a good cadence for content, adding content every day. I believe that you should be reaching out and adding new connections every day as well. LinkedIn has changed the rules for this over the years, it used to be that you could go and do this almost like as a once a week job, but now there’s all sorts of limitations. The more money you give them, the bigger you can do.

But I believe that connecting to ideal prospects is something that should be done every day. You as the owner or the driver of the business shouldn’t be doing this. It’s something that a VA or someone somewhere should be doing on your behalf. But imagine if every day you attempted to connect to 10 ideal clients, ideal prospects in your area, and let’s say just two or three of those accepted. That doesn’t sound a lot, but you’re attempting 50 connections a week. Someone will accept somewhere around about, let’s say eight to 10 a week and you are just slowly, consistently building up your LinkedIn connections over a number of years.

And that’s not rocket science, right? And that’s not going to get you into orbit quickly, but it’s slow and steady and it’s a system and someone else can do it on your behalf. And slow and steady always wins the race when it comes to marketing your MSP because it’s a marathon, right? There’s so much that you have to do. The trick is doing it all consistently and turning it into a system.

Let’s work out your score.

Awesome. We are so nearly done, it’s just the scoring to do and you need to add up all of your yes answers across all four sections. How many yeses have you got out of 40? If you answered all of those questions, either as yes or no, how many have you got?

If you’ve got 35 to 40 yeses, you have some of the strongest marketing foundations of any MSP anywhere in the world. Your marketing base is solid and you are ready to move straight onto next week’s episode, 351, where we’re going to start to build a lead generation engine on top of what you’ve already got there.

Now, if you have somewhere between 25 and 34 yeses, then that’s really good. That’s still like leading class. Most MSPs don’t have that many. So you’re very good in places. Obviously you’ve got some gaps to fix. You’ve clearly got the right instincts, but there are some specific areas to go and improve. So now you can go back through the questions where you had to write down no, and I’d just pick out sort of the top three to fix before you do anything else. And then of course you can come back for next week’s episode 351.

Now, if you scored somewhere between 15 and 24 yeses, this is good. You’ve got some of the foundations in place. You need to do a little bit more, because at the moment there’s a possibility your marketing might be working against you in some of those areas. So before you invest any more time or money in trying to generate leads, just go back and fix some of those foundations. Almost everything we’ve just been talking about there is kind of one-off items. So you want to make sure that you’ve got those basics in place first because if you go off on a big lead generation campaign and they come to your website and it’s broken or there’s a LinkedIn profile that’s seven years out of date, those are kind of wasted leads.

And then finally, if you score anywhere under 15, then don’t spend another penny on marketing until you’ve worked through this audit and fixed the gaps. You have to get the foundations right first. And you can do these at the same time as doing lead generation, but most of these fixes are really straightforward, they need your attention just once. You do them, you can use an AI tool to help you with them, you get them done, they’re in place and that’s it, you can then just move on. But even if you just spent a couple of weeks just every day just doing one of these items and making them better, in just the next couple of weeks, your marketing foundations are going to be so much stronger.

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