Episode 224: Can you grow your MSP with YouTube ads?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Fresh every Tuesday for msps around the world. Around the world, this Paul. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Paul. [00:00:06] Speaker A: Paul Greens, MSP Marketing podcast my friend. And welcome to another episode of the podcast. Here's what's coming up this week. [00:00:14] Speaker B: Hi, my name is Ben Jones, and I'm a YouTube ads expert that's created millions of dollars in sales across a wide range of industries. And I'm going to be showing you how you can grow and scale your MSP with YouTube ads. [00:00:24] Speaker A: And on top of fascinating interview with Ben later in the show, we'll also talk about why you mustn't become despondent when you ask someone to buy from you. And they say, Paul. Paul. Paul Greens, MSP Marketing podcast going to start this week by talking about something which affects a surprising number of MSP owners. And although there is a little bit of talk about it within the channel, it's not something that really is as high priority as it should be. And that is, of course, how we are doing. And I mean our mental health, I mean our physical health and just how we're doing as people. You think about it, the world that we're in, and I don't mean the big world, I mean the channel. It's a very male, heavy sector. There's lots and lots of men, and men are typically, not always, but often they're not very good talking about their feelings. They're not very good talking about when they're not doing so well or when they're exhausted or when they're tired. There's still a bit of a macho I can power through. There's blood coming out my ears, but I can power through. So there's that. And then there's just the very nature of tech, and tech itself is unbelievably busy. And there's so much change and there's just huge amounts of activity. And I know you as an MSP, you're used to huge amounts of information being dumped on you every single day, right? There's just so much coming in and so much that you have to do. And I think you get to kind of this time of the year where it's been a couple of months since Christmas. So you may have just thrown yourself into 2024, and you may not have realized that actually you probably need a break because it has been a couple of months and maybe you're starting to feel a little bit stressed. The problem is, the real issue is actually recognizing that stress in the first place. At what point do you realize that actually you're feeling anxious a lot of the time do you ever do this? Do you ever sort of stop or maybe lay in bed at night and just think about your mental state and lie there and analyze, how am I feeling? That sounds a bit hippie, but actually, the older I get, the more cool this stuff is to me. Do you ever lie there and think, how am I feeling? How was today? Was today a good day? Was it a bad day? Do I feel okay? Do I feel good? Do I feel anxious? How do I feel? And it's not just that kind of feeling. We can actually spot, if we're aware of it, we can spot symptoms of stress by the very behaviors that we are exhibiting. For example, I'll give you a common one for me, too much coffee. Now, I love my coffee. I have black Americanos. I love most coffees, apart from those really bitter little espressoes. And on a normal day, I'll have two or three coffees. And then in the afternoon, I'll move on to sort of herbal teas and hippie stuff like that. And I know I am a little more stressed than normal. If I find myself drinking coffee in the afternoon, guess what? When I'm drinking coffee in the afternoon, that then affects my sleep, and then that lack of sleep causes me to have more coffee the next day. So it's kind of an evil loop of feedback like that. And you have to be very careful of that. Another one. For me, as well as coffee, is alcohol. Now, I don't drink a huge amount of alcohol. I have, well, I was about to say a reasonable and normal amount of alcohol. What's normal? It's certainly not what you tell your doctor, is it? We all tell our doctor we drink a little bit less than we actually do. But again, if I'm a little bit stressed, if I'm more tired than usual, if my body or my mind are not quite as good as they could be, I will find myself drinking more alcohol. It's the same as the coffee. Well, I guess I'm trying to counteract the two maybe, and I will just find it's easier to have just another glass of wine. Or maybe I'll just have a beer on a Tuesday night. Well, that's not how it should be. Certainly that's not how I choose for it to be for me. So for me, it's a warning sign that I need a break, that I'm stressed, that I'm tired. And then you can kind of go into the more obvious symptoms, such as paranoia, just thinking bad things, catching yourself having bad thoughts, or your sleep being disrupted. In some way, and even getting up to go to the toilet two or three times in the night, unless that is normal for you. For me, that's not normal. I might get up once in the night some nights not quite of that age yet where I have to be up every night. But I know if I wake up two or three times or I can't go to sleep or I can't wake up in the morning, that kind of bad quality of sleep, or if I wake up tired, all of that, that bad quality of sleep is actually indicative of stuff that's happened during the day. And if that happens two or three nights in a row, I recognize that as a symptom, a symptom of stress. And I think you can throw another one in there, which is just poor judgment. If you find yourself either not able to make a decision or making decisions that you later reverse, or you're second guessing yourself or your team say to you, that's not quite, we don't think you've quite made the right call there, boss. All of these can be symptoms that you need a break, that you're stressed, that you're not looking after yourself. And this is a key thing that we've got to look after ourselves. We're not getting any younger, you and me. I hit 50 this year. In the summer, I'm going to be 50 now. That's terrifying, right? Because my 40s have gone just like that. And my 40s have been quite a challenging decade for a number of different reasons that I'll tell you about in the podcast at some point in the future when I'm ready to talk about some of the stuff, some of the cool things and not so cool things that have happened in my 40s. Maybe I'll have a 50th birthday special for that, maybe not, we'll see. But the point is, you have to look after yourself, because the older you get, yeah, sure, the wiser you get, the more experience you get, but the more tired you get. This gets fatigued, this being your brain, your body gets fatigued more. And you have to remember, core fundamental of being a business owner is that the business is there for you and not the other way around. Let me say that again, because that's kind of stupidly important. The business is there for you and not the other way around. And at the beginning, when we first become business owners, we forget this, don't we? Well, or we place it to one side, because actually the business needs everything we have to give ourselves to the business in order to make sure the business gets through those first difficult couple of years. And the problem is we get into a mindset and a way of working that is not healthy at all. And so month after month after month after month, we are there for the business rather than the business being there for us. Well, that's not a very sustainable situation. That's a situation that ends in a stroke or a heart attack. And I don't say that flippantly. That's a genuine threat to you as a business owner is to be found slumped over your desk one morning by your team. And you're not coming back from that if you get the idea. So we've got to look after ourselves. There's a number of things that we have to do. First of all, you have to watch out for those kind of symptoms. You need to be hyper aware of your own body and of your own mind. And you kind of already probably are aware when things aren't quite right. But the difference is, and maybe today is a line, and you can draw a line and do this differently after today, but the difference is you need to act on that. If you know your brain is tired or your body is tired or you find yourself procrastinating, that was another symptom. I meant to mention procrastination. For me, massive procrastination is a symptom of tiredness, that I need a break. So if you've got some symptoms and you know you're mentally or physically tired, take a break, right? I know you've got that migration and I know you've got those new users and you need to onboard that new client and you've got the new staff. But you know what? Take a break. Just take a few hours off, go for a walk, go to the cinema are, go and hang out with some friends, buy a dog, steal a dog, take your dog for a walk, go and hang out with the other half for a bit, play with your kids for a few hours. You can always do that job that things needs to be done tomorrow. It's very hard for us as business owners to be realistic about what we can do, but we've got to do that, especially as we get older and we get more tired. We've got to prioritize, we've got to be realistic. And the number one thing that you need to do is you need to look after yourself. This is not the job of your other half. This is not the job of your business partner. This is not the job of your staff or your kids. The number one job of you is to look after yourself. And you know what? Actually, your business will thrive better in the long term the more that you look after yourself. Because without you, how can the business rely on you? It can't. You've got to look after yourself before you look after the business. Here's this week's clever idea. Here's a little sales scenario that I bet you have been through, and I bet that you have experienced the exact emotions that I'm about to talk about. So you've got this lead, and this lead turns into a prospect. You start having a conversation with them. Every single question that you ask them, the answers are amazing. They've got the right number of users, they've got the right attitude to technology, they're the kind of business that you want to work with. You like your principal contact, you put together a proposal. The package seems right, the price seems right, everything seems right. You're going to do this. You and your new clients are going to get together and you're going to stay together for 20 years. And then they call you one day and they say, yeah, so we've decided to. And it's either stay with their incumbent or it's go with someone else. And you're genuinely gobsmacked. I mean, like, properly, utterly. What? How? You know, like when you met that girl or that boy, whichever it was back in the day, and you utterly fell in love and you were convinced that you guys were going to get married and then one day they ended it. And it's that similar kind of. It's like being punched in the face repeatedly by Rocky in the 1980s. And Rambo. Rocky and Rambo both having a go at you and you genuinely. You're shocked by it. It's a complete shock. It's that exact same thing. Have you experienced this? If you haven't experienced this yet, I promise you it will happen to you. Not necessarily in love, but definitely in business. Sometimes we meet people that seem to be the perfect match for us. They are the ones, the ones to come and join us, to be our new flagship clients. And for some reason they say no. Here's the thing. I want you to get it really clear in your head, well, partly in your head, but more in your heart, that just because someone says no today, they don't mean no forever. That this is not dating advice, but it is business sales advice. You see that super hot prospect that you've formed that great relationship with. You feel so close to them, it feels like it could happen. They say no to you today. The thing is, in a couple of years time, they could be back. Because what if they have stayed with their incumbent? People stay with their incumbent MSP through fear. They don't know what they don't know about technology and all of the world that we live in, the technology world we live in. So sometimes it feels safer for them to stay with their incumbent than to move over to someone new. They may dislike their incumbent and not be satisfied and have noticed the service levels have dropped and the prices have gone up and they're unhappy. But at least they know them. They know that the incumbent haven't and probably won't do damage to their business and to their technology. And they may like you better and the price may be right and the package may be right, but you're still a devil they don't know. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't, right? This is how people think. Or actually, it's more how they act. So they stay with their incumbent. They have massive trauma about it, but they stay with their incumbent. Now, you and I both know they are going to leave that incumbent at some point, right? So unless that incumbent completely changes their business and essentially rewinds that client, they are going to leave at the end of the next contract or the one after that. We'll come back onto how you can make sure you're there in a second. What about if someone says no and goes with one of your competitors? Maybe they've made the right choice. Maybe one of your competitors is a better fit. Maybe they've made the wrong choice. You're good at what you do, right? By the way, this is the point. You should be Hail marrying at the podcast. You should be like, hell yeah. We are brilliant at what we do. You're good at what you do, right? Yes. Then don't you owe it to the business owners of your town or your vertical or your niche? Don't you owe it to them to make sure they pick you and they don't make a mistake and they pick a competitor? Yes, you do. You owe it to them. You mustn't let them go off and make the wrong choice. But sometimes they will. So in each of these scenarios, and any other scenario where a really hot prospect that you thought was yours has gone off to somewhere else, you must never take no as no forever. It is simply no. Today we get a bit wounded, don't we? As business owners, we take it personally when someone doesn't pick our business or when someone leaves us, whether that's staff or whether that's clients. We do we see it as not just them doing business, we see it that they've rejected us. And particularly if you're male, the fragile male ego doesn't like that, doesn't like rejection, doesn't like the thought that someone might leave you. It's horrible when your staff do it, unless you want that staff member to leave. But it's kind of worse when a client does it because it's the ultimate rejection, especially if you've been doing what you think is a good job. And it's the same when a prospect says no. The inclination is to push them away and say, well, screw you then. If you don't want to work with us, we don't want to work with you. That's the wrong attitude. Here's what you want to do. You want to look at that person as someone who has made a terrible mistake. They have stayed with their incumbent, or they have moved to one of your competitors or whatever they have done. And now it is your job to rescue them from that bad mistake. And the way you rescue them is through the power of marketing. You keep following them up. You keep them on your email newsletter to you, stay in touch with them through LinkedIn. You drop them emails now and again. You might just pick up the phone now and again just to have a chat. You send them stuff in the post. It could be your printed newsletter, which is a really cool thing. Or you could just now and again find something that you think, oh, XYz prospect who nearly signed up with me would find that interesting. I'm going to print that off, write a little handwritten note on it and send it to them in the post. Because that, believe me, is going to stand out more than anything else. You find out when they are next going to be doing a review. And if you don't know, it's probably 1224 or 36 months after the last time you spoke to them or the last time they started that process. You stay in touch with them and you make sure that when that review comes up, you have such a good relationship. In fact, your relationship has got even stronger over the last couple of years. The relationship is so strong that you get yourself a place at the table again. Will you win that sale? Maybe. Maybe not. Will all of them come over to you? Of course they won't. You can't win all of the prospects over all of the time. But you know what? You will win more of them by being mature, having a mature relationship, and never, ever stopping with your follow up. Making sure you keep marketing to these people until they make the smart choice eventually to choose you. Paul's Paul's blatant plug latent plug. I'm just wondering, are you and I connected on LinkedIn? Because if we're not, let's connect. I'm connected to about 8000 msps right now. I've got just under 9000 that are following me and I put out all sorts of useful content on there. Stuff that enhances the podcast. Do a particularly good LinkedIn newsletter every single Thursday. If you want to connect, you can actually kind of google it. Just Google LinkedIn. Paul Green, MSP Marketing edge and it's me that comes up as the first result. Google LinkedIn. Paul Green, MSP Marketing Edge big interview. [00:16:04] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Ben Jones. I have msps grow and scale with YouTube ads. [00:16:08] Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Ben, because we all know that YouTube is massive and it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger every year. We all spend more and more of our time on it, consuming great content. And then we see the adverts come up and the adverts have been popping up again and again and again in the videos, and sometimes you skip over them and sometimes you don't. But I'm sure every MSP, it has occurred to them at some point of I wonder if I could use YouTube to get business for my business. And that's something we're going to explore in this interview. Let's do a quick credibility check, first of all. So what do you do with businesses to help them with YouTube? And how did you get to this position? [00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah, cool. Look, I've been in marketing for well over seven or eight years now. We've helped lots of businesses grow and scale to over seven figures with YouTube advertising. We personally spent over a million dollars on YouTube ads in the last year with a lot of our clients actually are doing over 100k in their first hundred days, just starting with YouTube advertising. So I guess if I was to sum it up in a sentence, we've helped businesses in a wide variety of niches grow and scale using YouTube advertising. [00:17:07] Speaker A: Fantastic. Now, as I say, YouTube is massive. And I find myself watching YouTube every day. Obviously, I do searches for how do you do something? Or I'm looking for information on something, and then in the evening I'll watch one thing on Netflix or Disney or something and then just flick over to YouTube for ten minutes, which we all know becomes 40 minutes as you go down the YouTube rabbit hole. YouTube has just been a phenomenal growth story. It's only been around was it 19 years this year. So how have you seen in the years you've been working on YouTube, how have you seen it grow and change and adapt? [00:17:40] Speaker B: Yeah, look, I think YouTube is massive, and at the moment, we've all heard about the war for attention, and YouTube basically has taken over pretty much everyone's devices. The big one that's taking out is cable companies like Netflix and Hulu and all of those. And I think as far as attention goes, YouTube is really good at getting attention because YouTube's on tvs and it's just absolutely everywhere. What's really exciting, though, is only about less than 10% of business owners actually advertising on YouTube at the moment. So it's kind of, at the moment, really positioned as an opportunity of a lifetime. I mean, if you go back a decade, Facebook was the thing. Right now, it's oversaturated. You go back two decades, it was Google Search, and that was amazing. But then it got really expensive, and all these platforms go through what I call an adoption curve. And YouTube at the moment is pretty much positioned to say where Facebook was a decade ago. Search was probably two decades ago. Email was in the 90s. So it's a really awesome opportunity to get in and be rewarded as an early adopter. [00:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is kind of strange for us, talking about something, being an early adopter of something when the service has been around since 2005. That was when YouTube has started. Of course, YouTube was independently owned for, what was it, a year before Google bought it. And someone at Google has either had an incredible vision or they've just been very patient, plowing money and resources and creating the world's biggest, by far biggest video site. My gut feel on why YouTube is so big is because you get kind of like you do with most social networks. You get a very personalized feed for you. But the YouTube algorithm and the YouTube feed seems especially personalized to you. And I say this because in my house, there's just me and there's my 13 year old daughter, and we're both logged into YouTube on the tv. And when I go into my. Well, when I go into her YouTube, I see musical theater stuff, I see TikTok stuff, which, weirdly, is on YouTube, and it's kind of like 13 year old stuff. And then I go into my feed and it's astonishingly different. It's Star Trek. Last night, I watched a guy who's digging a tunnel under his house in the UK to create, like, a bat cave, which doesn't seem legal, but it was a fascinating 20 minutes video and it's all the kind of stuff that I'm interested in. And this is the clever trick that YouTube has pulled off, isn't it? This is what makes it seem relevant to every single person. [00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. And the cool thing with Google, particularly, that owns YouTube, which is a good side issue, is it has all your history of not only what you're watching on YouTube, but what you're browsing online, what websites are visiting. It knows what your interests are, kind of before you even go there. It's got your browser history, it knows what apps are on your phone, it knows exactly what searches you're putting into Google. So for it to be able to give you relevant content and also what you can use in the ad targeting is really, really cool. And I think that's how they pull it off. And I mean, YouTube is literally very similar size to Facebook in terms of daily users. In Covid, it was actually more. And the fun thing is it's the second largest search engine behind Google. So if you got yahoo, bing, IOL, asta, vista and combined all those together, YouTube is still bigger than all of them. Right? So it's just a massive platform, anything from search to content in terms of the user experience. [00:20:43] Speaker A: Yeah. No, that's really interesting. The idea that Google is using your other search history to affect what you see on YouTube and the adverts you see on YouTube, that's particularly of interest. Let's part that because we'll come back to that in a second. Let's first of all talk about adverts. So obviously, the average MSP, they're looking for more b to b clients. They're not interested in residential, they're not interested in consumers with cracked iPad screens. They want 10, 20, 30 user businesses who are looking for a strategist, a technology strategist. They're looking for someone to proactively maintain their technology. And of course, cybersecurity is bigger than ever these days. Can we reach those decision makers on, you know, traditionally, as we said, it's cat videos, it's people tunneling under houses and doing stuff like that. Why is it so easy for us still to reach those decision makers? [00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think particularly with YouTube, the targeting on YouTube that you can do is unparalleled to pretty much anything else out there. For example, we call it like a credit card out targeting approach. So the first thing that you want to do is target people who are genuinely interested. In this case, it's going to be like business owners who basically need tech support and help, right? And then our next layer would be like, can they afford our services? And this is revolutionary. So the cool thing you can do on YouTube here is you can actually target people who are based in income level. So you might pick a certain suburb zip code postcode, and you can basically say, look, I want the top 30% of business owners in this area. So that way you're only talking to people who actually can afford your products or services, which is a big deal, right? And then from there, we want to really like, are these people looking to buy right now? And what you can do with YouTube, which you just can't do anywhere else, is a couple of really cool things. One is you can actually just target people who are searching for, hey, I need cybersecurity help, or I need this tech help in my business. Right? Like whatever it is your specialty that you might do within your business, you can search people looking for that or provider for this thing in your local area, and then when they go to YouTube, you can show them ads. So, I mean, that's basically as good as intent as you're going to find anywhere. The other really cool thing that you can do is actually target your competitors'websites, which is really fun. So go find all your bigger competitors and stuff like that. And you can literally target people who are visiting websites like that or looking at services that you provide and then show them your ad. So if you combine them together, like, hey, look, this is a business owner who's interested in having tech services or cybersecurity supplied for me. And then from there it's like, yes, they can afford my product. So we want to only target people with a certain income bracket. And then from there it's like, of all of those, I want to only target people who are literally searching for my product or service, then show me an ad. And that's why the leads on YouTube are pretty much unparalleled to anywhere else in terms of being able to target that exact business owner, if that makes sense. [00:23:27] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. Now, one of the issues that msps have with Google Ads is that they're very, very expensive. There might be, let's say, 50 msps in a small city trying to attract the same kind of business. There's plenty of business for everyone. But in terms of Google searches, obviously there's only two or three ads that appear. The cost per click is huge, and you have to deal with a lot of noise. A lot of people with cracked iPad screens who just aren't reading the advert, but they're clicking on the link costing you 20 $30 US dollars and then sort of inquiring to you and wasting your time. So with YouTube, is that a similar position that you're going to be paying a very high price per click or do the targeting tools make it actually easier to avoid the wastage? [00:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll compare apples to apples. So basically, if we want to target someone who's searching for best MSP in my area, for example, versus best service provider or whatever it might be on Google Search now, if we go to Google search, you're going to get like 15 to 30 characters, you're going to pop up the top, you're going to compete with everyone. That's horrible, right? It's the most expensive click that you're going to pay on the Internet. Compare that with YouTube, you can target that same person because Google owns YouTube. So target that same person searching, but you can show them a YouTube ad. Now, the way YouTube ads are charged are different, they're usually free. So the YouTube ads I'm talking about here, there's lots of different types, are what's called a pre roll ad. So you know when you're watching your content, you're like 5 seconds to skip and you're waiting to skip. They're the ads I'm talking about. Right. So we want those ads and you're actually not charged for the first 30 seconds. The first 30 seconds of that ad is free. If they watch more than that, you get charged or if they skip your ad, that's free too, right? So basically instead of 30 characters or 15 to 30 characters, you get in a search ad, you now get 30 seconds of video. Now you can say a lot in 30 seconds of video, right? So in terms of how much it costs on average, depending, because we work with a lot of companies who are doing, particularly software companies as well, that are doing cost per click, sorry, Google CPC search keywords, which is really expensive. Usually if you compare like what's that's costing on YouTube for exactly the same click, they're usually about half to a third of the price. So you get to get in front of the same person for a half to a third of the price than say, everyone who's doing search ads. And you've been able to have a video on the front end which is free for the first 30 seconds. So the feed you get from that is obviously way better than search anyway because you've been able to usually help someone in your ad. If you've got a value based ad, which I'd recommend. So I guess that's the big difference. To answer your question, how do you overcome everyone who's in search? Well, by using YouTube, because around 10% of people who are doing cost per click advertising are on YouTube ads, and they're half to a third of the price cheaper than what you're going to spend in search. [00:26:13] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So let's talk about the actual ad itself. And you just mentioned something called a value based ad. Can you explain what that is and what kind of ads work best in your experience on YouTube? [00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah. So look, the ad needs to be broken down into four parts. This is what we find works really well. So before we get into the four parts, you want to have an ad that entertains or educates people in some way, basically give people value, help them in some way. So, for example, you might say, hey, look, have you got a cybersecurity issue? Here's two or three things that you could probably do that would help. And if you'd like to know more, click here. That might be the overall or here's three cybersecurity risks you didn't know that you had. You could probably do that one a bit better, or whatever the thing is that people need help with. So once you found out, what's your ad going to be about, the first thing that you want to do is the hook. So that's the first part of your ad. Now that covers the first 5 seconds. So if I'm watching YouTube and I've got 5 seconds to skip, that's exactly where your hook wants to go. So best type of hook that we found is a rhetorical question where people say, yes. Okay, so, for example, are you sick of burning money on Facebook ads? [00:27:17] Speaker A: Yes. [00:27:18] Speaker B: That would be a good hook, right? That's one we use now. The other one would be, the next bit is your elevator pitch. So in here, before the 30 seconds you want to pitch, tell people what's in the video and how you're going to help them. So usually I would say something like, hey, my name is Ben Jones. I've helped multiple business owners generate millions of dollars online with YouTube ads. If you hang around this video, I'll show you the three things you do know about YouTube ads that can help you grow and scale your business. Something like that. Right? And then you do the story. Now, the story part is the third part of your four parts. And in here, you're going to actually tell them, well, what are the three secrets? What are the three hacks? Or what are the three things I need to avoid know it doesn't have to. Here's a case study of someone else I've helped or whatever it might be, but of tell them or teach them or help them in some way. If you can be funny, then that's great too. Be funny. A lot of business owners we meet are usually better at helping people than be funny. But hey, it's up to you. And then at the end, that's your close. Okay, that's part four. So in part four, we want to have probably about a 15 second close. It'll go something like, hey, if you're interested in getting x solution, all you need to do is click on the link and we look forward to seeing you on the other side. And then at the end, you want to have a little end screen with arrows to click. Right. So that's pretty much how you would do a really good ad. And you probably want two types. You probably want the next person that gets how long. So probably about two and a half minutes is a good place to start testing. Once you've got your messaging and an ad that works, you can probably shoot like a vertical ad and do like an under a minute ad in YouTube shorts and stuff. But I would just start with a horizontal ad, about two and a half minutes in that format and you'll be good to go. [00:28:49] Speaker A: Easy. You make it sound so easy. I guess. Is this where you find a lot of business owners get stuck? Is actually creating that ad? So coming up with the idea, you say two and a half minutes, that's hours. That's hours and hours and hours of work. Because you can do two and a half crap minutes on a phone, or you can put a lot of effort into it. And you don't often see a lot of crap adverts on YouTube. [00:29:10] Speaker B: No. And this is where YouTube ads are different to Facebook ads. Okay? What you can't do is go get some salesy ad from Facebook that's like a minute long or something crazy, and it's like, hey, rugs a million discount, bargain, 50% off. All that doesn't work on YouTube, right? Because people go to YouTube for a different reason than Facebook. People go to YouTube for entertainment. They want to be entertained or educated in some way. And it's not congruent. If you're scrolling through, looking at what people had for breakfast and cats and stuff, then that's why that other type of ad format works, right? So what you want to do here is when you're shooting your ad, just keep it really simple and try and be as authentic and genuine as possible. Because here's the thing. Don't create studio based ads. Just create something really simple. Like 90% of our clients literally shoot their ads off their phone and like a gimbal or something like that. Because the content on YouTube, for example, is exactly like this. It's a guy sitting at his desk with his podcast mask, right? So you don't need to have big, expensive ads. Just have something that actually helps people and be genuine about it in terms of writing the script. Look, we do have some script templates that I'm happy to give anyone who's listening to this that you can use with AI and Chat GPT and that sort of thing. But even without those, just get started with that four framework. Like if you went to Chat GPT and you're like, hey, look, this is the four part framework that I want to use with my script. You could probably get a whole script knocked out in ten minutes, right? So don't make it harder than it has to be. Just get the script, get it shot, and get it done. [00:30:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. I think getting the ads right is very hard. And I say this as someone I try not to get involved with adverts. My approach is more a direct marketing approach, which is about building audiences and proactively building a relationship with them and then phoning people and direct mailing them. I look at ads, and often I'll be like, I'm not quite sure what I would do there, but like every other human on the planet, I know a bad advert when I see it. The pre roll for me on YouTube at the moment are two sets of adverts. And we're recording this interview in November last year just to set some context, because I'm sure it had been replaced by now. But I keep seeing one for a Pixel phone on Google, like the new Pixel eight or something, and it's got like a face replace where if you take a photo of someone and they're looking like that, it actually takes several photos and you can replace their face. And that's okay. Except I see all the time, it seems to come up before every single video. And I know that Google's essentially getting free advertising because it's advertising its own phone on its own platform. But that just annoys me because I'd like to see different versions of that advert. I'm seeing the same advert every single night. But the other one that really annoys me is an advert for a company called Gong. And I know that Gong is like Monday. So it's like a project management collaboration type software. The only reason I know this is because I had to google it to see what they do because the advert is a bunch of people's backs hitting gongs. That's it. And it's like a four or five second pre roll advert and it's like Gong, gong, gong Gong Gong IO or Gong.com or whatever it is. And I must have watched the advert four or five times before thinking, what the hell is this? What is this service? What am I watching? Versus. I remember the adverts I used to see for Monday probably about a year ago, which as I say, is a competitor, very well funded VC backed competitor. And they went jump straight into if work is complicated, we make it simple, or whatever their value message was. And the two approaches couldn't be completely different. I understand how business owners, or how even advertising agencies get lost in that because they get so caught up in all the things we're trying to say and standing out and doing something amazing visually. Do you find that business owners find it very hard to create adverts for their own business because they're too close to it? Or actually, is that just a bad example? That happened to be on my YouTube, yeah. [00:33:07] Speaker B: So there's two things there. One is the type of ad that's being run. So a lot of big corporates and vcs funded people will actually do non skippable ads and they'll go for like 15 seconds or something and they'll be really annoying. And they're basically for brand awareness. Right? So they're not for direct marketing. Like, hey, we want to lead and we want to call them up. We want to make sales. Right? So those type of ads are no good here. The ad that we're looking for here is a skippable ad. So if you don't like it, you can skip it in 5 seconds. So that's an important difference. And I think the problem that a lot of big corporates have is they try and treat YouTube like tv and it's not, and they haven't figured that out. Um, anyway, so that's one, the other thing would be in terms of the messaging, I think Monday you can go have a look at some of those ads. That's a really great example. They have some really cool ads. They are a bit more studio like, top end, but the messaging and the way they do their scripting is quite clever. Right. And you'll find if you sort of dissect their ads a little, they'll have a similar format, they'll have a hook, like you said at the beginning, and then they'll go into a value proposition of how they can help them, what their software does. And if you're interested, click here to find out more. Right. So it's the same deal, like have an ad that actually helps people who are experiencing a problem and deliver them value in the ad. And your ad, they're going to convert way better than some guy just hitting a gong all day long. Right? And that just comes back to having that four parts that I spoke about earlier. So if you can nail that, like have a value based ad, you're going to do way better than someone who just has some ridiculous, stupid corporate ad. [00:34:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. No, you're absolutely right. That's great guidance. And of course, you don't need to go and look up Monday. Com's adverts on YouTube. You can just visit Monday in your browser where you're logged into Google. And inevitably that Monday advert is going to appear on your YouTube in a couple of days'time if they've got an advertising campaign running at the moment. Ben, thank you so much for sharing with us your insights into YouTube advertising. So tell us what you do for msps. How can we get your help and what's the best way to get in touch with you? [00:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah, look, we offer a bunch of free training. We want to help as many people as we can get started with YouTube and we have some free training, a whole bunch of stuff like that, just to get people set up and get going. And I guess that's really the big part. Just go out there and start to take some action. Like at the moment, YouTube ads are really primed for probably the best opportunity of paid ads out there at moment. So just get out there and get started. Look, if you get started with $100 a day, or even if it's like $30 or $10 a day, that's way better than just not doing anything right. So get out there, get amongst it. Like I said, if you're interested in some free training and stuff, you can check us [email protected]. So that's tidemarketer with an ER.com. If you're interested in connecting with me, just Ben or Benjamin Jones on LinkedIn and type in YouTube, I'll pop up. Other than that, guys, hopefully I've been able to help you guys in some way. Thank you so much, Paul, for having me. Best of luck to all the msps out there. Hopefully you guys can grow and scale your business with YouTube ads, and I've helped you along the journey to do that. [00:35:59] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast this week's. [00:36:04] Speaker B: Recommended book hi, I'm Michelle from I'm your Pa, and the book that I recommend is Susan Jeffers. Feel the fear and do it anyway. And the reason I recommend that is sometimes we doubt ourselves completely, but you should just get on and do it. Feel the fear and do it anyway. [00:36:26] Speaker A: Coming up next week. Hi there, it's David Duffett, and if you want to get more deals over. [00:36:32] Speaker B: The line or you simply want your communications to land even better, especially with non technical people, then join me on Paul's podcast. [00:36:41] Speaker A: On top of that interview with David next week, I have the most insane idea for you. Even though next week it's only going to be March, I'm going to suggest that you send some Christmas cards and Christmas presents to your prospects. I'll explain why next week. Join me next Tuesday and have a very profitable week in your MSP for msps around the world. Paul Green's MS MS MSP Marketing podcast.