How to create the perfect MSP about us page

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to be the best MSP you can be. I know a guy who can help with that. [00:00:11] Speaker B: When you're ready to grow your msp, this is the show to binge. And here's what we got coming up for you today. How to create the perfect About Us page. It takes 50 plus touch points to get a new client for your MSP. And is it really viable for MSPs to use Google Ads for lead generation? [00:00:30] Speaker A: Welcome to episode 2263 powered by mspmarketingedge.com Paul Greens and MSP Marketing podcast the. [00:00:39] Speaker B: Two most important pages on your website are the homepage and the About Us page. And why? Because those are the pages that most people are going to look at, the ones they're most going to be influenced by, because they're most likely to land on your website on the homepage. And then of course, they want to know what you're about, they want to know who the people are behind the business. So they'll head over to the About Us page. Let's have a look, look at some of the elements that you should have in your MSPs about us page to make sure it delivers the most value to your business. Now, where a homepage is almost like a summary of the whole business, the About Us page is about the people and the core values of the business. So of course you still have an attention grabbing headline, although a different one to the one that you have on the homepage. And of course you still have your social proof, data capture maybe, and certainly a call to action. Plus of course videos and photographs of real people. It's just that you present those in different ways than you would do on your homepage. The most important thing on your About Us page is your story. But it needs to be presented in a way that's relevant to the reader. And actually it's not really about you. You can talk a little bit about you and how you're really into tech as a child and you're obsessed with computers as a teenager and you've been doing it now for 800 years. And then 20 years ago you had an entrepreneurial seizure and you decided you gotta do your own things, your own way, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, all that is good. In fact, actually you can take that backstory, you can embellish it, you can enhance it, but you have to tell it in a way that makes it interesting to the reader. Because you being obsessed with computers, that's not really of interest to them until they realize or you tell them that that means that you're across every technology detail in your business and you only hire people who are incredibly attention focused, very good technology people. And they're very good at following systems and documenting success and all of that kind of thing. So you your story and you keep flipping it round and looking at it from a different angle so that actually your story is about the reader. Even an About Us page is not really an About Us page. It's about the prospect. It's a selling page. That's what it really is. So of course something else you do on there is you'd put some case studies on there. Now if you've got case studies on your homepage, you can repeat those. And video case studies are absolutely fine. You can repeat those across the site. You can also repeat just sort of normal printed case studies or PDF case studies that they could download or even just web page case studies as well. You don't have to have those completely separate between the homepage and the About Us page. But you do need to make sure you have some kind of case studies on your About Us page. And people go to an About Us page because they want to know about the people. They want to know who it is they might end up buying from. But also, of course, with the case studies, they want to see who else you are working with. And case studies are typically more influential because it's a form of social proof. It makes you appear safe to people who are thinking of buying from you. When they can see that other people like them have trusted you and continue to trust you. That makes you a very safe pair of hands to them. And that's what we're trying to get them to feel. Then the next thing you need is something about what drives you and your team. So how do you all jump out of bed every morning? You know, do you all run into the office? You can't wait to get your hands on a keyboard and do all those proactive checks to stop things going wrong. And how you actually feel honored to protect people. You feel honored and proud to think that a thousand people in your local area trust you every day to keep them working. They trust you and your team. And that's the kind of intent and the kind of language that we want to see on your About Us page. We want drive, we want passion. We want to see and feel and smell that passion. Because passion sells. And the more passion you can put actually into your overall website, but especially your About Us page, the more you're going to connect with people, the more you're going to engage with them. And then I suggest you put on some stuff about your family, if you can. If it's acceptable to you to do this, put on a photo of you, your other half, maybe even your kids. I've seen quite a few MSPs do that. And it's great because it makes you real. It makes you not just an IT person and the owner of the business. It makes you a wife or a husband or a mom or a dad. And this is really, really important, you know, because it makes you human. You will find a photo of me and my child on my MSP Marketing Edge website. And again, that helps us to connect because it shows you that I'm a real person. People do business with people, they don't do business with businesses. People buy from people. This is really important to understand. So let's show them the people. You almost want to reflect anything which makes you connectable. So let's say, for example, you're really into, I don't know, a local sport, let's say football. And you might have a piece on your About Us page about how much you're into football, perhaps even with a photo of you in your local team kit or, you know, photograph with some of the players or something. If you're really into, let's say, playing golf, right, you have a photo of you with your golf sticks. I don't do golf. Obviously you can tell by that, but if you do, again, you know, that makes you relatable to anyone that does golf. If you adore, when you live, absolutely adore it, then have a photo of you next to one of the big landmarks in your town or something like that. The kind of landmark that everyone would recognize. It's all about connections. If people buy from people, you've got to show them the real you. And I'll tell you what else you can use is a bit of business. Nostalgia. Nostalgia's great. So if you got a photo of you in your first van, or some kind of photo of you at your first desk back in the day, or with an old computer, there is that famous photo floating out there of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, sat at his first desk in his garage in Seattle in 1995. And the desk was made of an old door, and that's still a thing that they do now at Amazon, they use desks made out of doors because it's all part of their heritage, it's all part of their nostalgia, which is great. Not that Amazon needs an About Us page. But you get the idea. Now you can do exactly the same thing. Show us something from the past. If you've got maybe, I don't know, it could be a photo of you as a child sat with a really vintage computer, or just you without the gray hair, something like that. It would be an absolute great piece of business nostalgia. And people really do love this and they connect to it. Now, of course, it's not just about you, the owner, the leader. On the About Us page, you should have some profiles and pictures of your team. They only need to be like 25, 30 word profiles. They don't need to be huge. Perhaps just about what they do in their spare time or something quirky. You could even do like a mini interview with them. What's their favorite food, what's their favorite place to visit, what's their favorite sport, which is the best Star wars movie, that kind of thing. And you can just do little profiles of the team, that kind of thing. Again, works really well with a photo of them on your About Us page. And then one final thing to go on this page and you're not going to be surprised by this. It is of course a call to action because we need to have that. Every single page of your website needs a call to action. And the very best one right now, it still is your live calendar so people can book in a 15 minute discovery call with you. That's really important because that About Us page is a core sales page. [00:08:06] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to come. [00:08:10] Speaker B: If you have far too much money and you need somewhere to burn it, Google Ads can be a great place. Lots of MSPs have spent a couple of thousand on Google Ads and seen very little returns. And yet there's also a small number of MSPs who use Google Ads very well as a lead generation tool. My special guest this week is going to tell you about a great Google Ads strategy that you can adapt within your business. And he'll be here in the next five minutes. It always makes me a little bit sad when I hear an MSP owner is pinning all of their growth hopes on a new marketing campaign. Because campaigns are typically one offs a burst of intense activity followed by a return to the default of of intending to do marketing but not getting around to it. And I know that marketing campaigns are really popular. Lots of vendors give them away free as a value add. I can see how as an MSP your brain will fill up with all this delicious dopamine when you see a campaign and you feel excited by the possibilities. But here's the fundamental problem that you're fighting. Managed services is one of the most unusual sales on the planet. And people only buy when they are ready to buy. There's almost nothing you can do to speed this up. The big problem with running a campaign is that that it's a one off burst of activity. So you do some marketing on a Monday, but they're not ready to buy yet. So you do some more marketing on a Wednesday, but they're not ready to buy yet on Friday you need a rest so you don't bother with marketing. And yet that's the day that they wake up ready to buy, but you're not there in front of them. And don't believe that they will remember you or your MSP's name and brand. They really won't unless you have a marketing message in front of them at the exact moment that their brain is ready to see it. And trust me, a proportion of your clients don't know what your MSP is called. So you haven't got a hope in hell of your prospects knowing what the name of your business is. This is why my three step marketing system is the most powerful idea in MSP marketing. It's easy to understand, but also solid and powerful. Build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. And the idea is to build a relationship with someone months and years before they're ready to leave their current MSP. This is where the idea of 50 plus touch points comes from. If you Google it, it'll say that you need seven or eight touch points with a prospect. Well, not for what you sell. You need an ongoing never ending stream of touch points so that the morning they wake up and they're ready to talk, boom. You are there in front of them. Whether that's tomorrow, whether that's May next year, whether it's someday in 20. And your touchpoints might include daily LinkedIn posts that they see now and again. A weekly email that they open just once a month because they don't open that many emails. A monthly printed newsletter that sits on their desk waiting to be read or gets passed on to a colleague or something like that. A regular blog and video on your website that they sometimes read. A weekly LinkedIn newsletter they see in their feed or they open in their email. Occasionally a short conversation about their business that they had with your colleague on the phone. A buyer's guide that they've flicked through which tells them how to pick an MSP. A LinkedIn message from you that they acknowledge but they don't really remember. All of these are touch points and they can all be swept up into a marketing system with tasks you do daily, tasks you do weekly, and tasks you do monthly. And best of all, you personally don't need to do these tasks. Much of the work that I've just talked about there can be delegated or outsourced to someone else. [00:11:47] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast Still to. [00:11:50] Speaker B: Come, if there's one secret weapon you could add into your MSP's marketing, it would be someone doing outbound phone calls for you. And not an agency and certainly not a telemarketing company. Someone working for you just two to three hours a day, two to three days a week, calling your leads and your prospects on your behalf. And let me tell you why this is so important in the next few minutes. Most MSPs have considered doing Google Ads at some point. It kind of makes sense because the very nature of Google Ads is it puts you in front of a lead at the exact moment that they're looking for someone like you. The problem is Google Ads are very expensive and they do generate a lot of noise. My guest today has a very good take on the right kind of strategy for Google Ads and some suggestions how you can use it as a channel for lead generation into your msp. [00:12:40] Speaker C: Hey, this is John Horn and I am the CEO of A Stub Group, a digital advertising agency. [00:12:45] Speaker B: And we're especially going to be talking about Google Pay per Click PPC today because it's one of those things that you look at it 20 years ago and everyone seemed to be doing Google Pay per click and paying pence just pennies for their adverts. Whereas these days you can be paying 10, $20 or more. And lots of MSPs have tried it, lots of MSPs have spent a ton of cash and then burnt out within a week. And John, I'm hoping, because I know you work with a lot of MSPs doing their pay, and I'm hoping you can give us some insights today on how to use pay per click to generate leads for an msp. So let's first of all look at you and your career. So what's your background and how did you get into this wonderful and very technical world of pay per click? [00:13:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I've been doing this world of pay per click for over a decade at this point. Prior to that was in just kind of various marketing roles and then morphed into Stub Group where I'm at now. And so I've been able to track that journey, like you said, of going from very inexpensive traffic to where we are today. [00:13:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's crazy. My best friend, actually he built a business up, we're talking 2002, 2003 and he was spending the equivalent of US$120,000 a week on adverts, which is insane back then. I mean that would be insane today, but that was doubly insane. But what he discovered, because he was getting, he did tell me the figures a couple of years ago. He was spending like let's say 3 pence or 4 pence because he was based in the UK. So that's let's say 10 cents for a click. And he was making a dollar in re you for every 10 cents. And when you broke it down to you spend 10 cents and then three, four weeks later, someone's go through your sales process and you make a dollar. Who wouldn't do that? [00:14:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:24] Speaker B: Who wouldn't work up to $120,000? It was a training business that he built that up on that same model wouldn't work today because today of course that same advert isn't costing 10 cents, it's costing 10, 20, 30, $40, but may still only bring in that $10. Is that what you see as one of the primary challenges to doing pay, understanding the economics of it? [00:14:47] Speaker C: I would say it's one of the primary challenges, yeah. Like you said, it's become very competitive. So cost per clicks are quite high. So it becomes crucial to figure out okay with how high the cost per clicks are. We have to be laser targeted with what searches we're going after, what keywords we do or one target because it's really easy to, like you mentioned, waste money and get those economics out of scale. [00:15:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Although of course for an msp, if they win a new client today, and let's say that's $1,000 a month monthly recurring revenue, they will keep that client for five, seven, ten years. So that $1,000 a month becomes $120,000 of what we call lifetime value. So I guess if I was to ask any MSP, would you spend 1,000 bucks today to win £120,000 worth of revenue, albeit you've got to stick around for 10 years to do the work. You'd think many MSPs would say yes to that. So is that the kind of thinking that you bring to pay per click campaigns or do you have a different way of looking at date? [00:15:43] Speaker C: Yeah, lifetime value is super important. So it's coming to it and saying, okay, obviously there is going to be, you know, a timeframe. It's going to take a while often to close leads, but then hopefully they're going to stick around for a long time. And so what is the average lifetime value of your clients? What are the different kind of buckets? And then we got to factor that into, okay, what is a realistic profitable amount that we can spend or that we can put into test budgets to see if we can get the right quality of leads. On the Google Ads side of things, if you're like, hey, you know, I can only afford to spend, you know, you know, $100 for a new client, like, well, Google Ads is not going to be the right place for it. You got to go somewhere else. [00:16:20] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So Google Ads is definitely something you don't do if you haven't got cash available, I guess. Is that something in your experience that makes it something just bigger? MSPs do so when they've got to the point where they're experimenting with different marketing channels and they add pay per click on. [00:16:34] Speaker C: I've definitely seen it be a strategy for smaller ones as well. Good example. We just recently onboarded a relatively small local MSP who's looking to Google Ads as a way to generate more business. And one of the key strategy things that we're working on with them and with some of the other MSPs we've worked with as well, is don't try to be all things to all people. They have a lot of services that they can offer. But if we try to advertise every service or even advertise kind of at the high level of hey, msp, you know, just general stuff, you know, IT support near me, stuff like that, it's never going to work because they don't have enough budget to test and iterate for all those different services. So we're saying, saying, let's niche down. What are the things that are really working well for you right now? What's setting you apart? What are the questions you're solving when people come to you? And let's hyper specifically target those things and create landing pages around that and so forth so that you can stand out from the very competitive market that they're in. [00:17:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And essentially what you're saying is because cheap traffic has been gone for 15 years, you can't muck about with pay per click. You've got to have a strategy for it. So let's take, let me give you a scenario. Let's take an MSP, let's say they've got somewhere between five, seven technicians. So you've got the owner, you've got five to seven technicians. They want 20 seat clients. So companies that have got 20 users or more or 20 devices, and they're looking for those companies that have got an urgent need because they know that when someone comes in and actually the server's been playing it for a couple of days, or have we had some kind of cybersecurity incident or there's malware or something, it creates a level of urgency and that urgency is obviously very good for revenue today and converting them onto being a proper managed services client. So in that instance, and let's assume they're in a normal average sized town, so they're not in like LA or New York City or some crazy, crazy place like that where there's a thousand MSPS per street. Right? It's nothing like that. It's just a normal town. There's perhaps 10, 20 MSPs in that town. What would you recommend as a general strategy for pay per click in a scenario like. [00:18:39] Speaker C: Yeah, so first of all, like you said, identifying those urgencies, figuring out what are the top things that are making clients right now from the other traffic sources that they're using convert be willing to make that move over. Is it like you said, is it cybersecurity issues, is it, our server is down, whatever. And then let's identify those things and target those things very specifically. So if I'm having server issues, my server is down, I need to switch to another msp. What am I searching on Google that indicates I have that problem and I'm looking for a solution. And then we're going to target that very specifically, those keywords. We're going to have ads that are very, very specifically targeted towards that and kind of capturing the urgency factor and then super important as well. The landing pages we send people to, they have to build upon that as well. I don't want to just send them to my homepage that says, here's all the things we do. I want to send them to a page that says, you have this need, we're going to fix it today. Call us right now. We make this change. Here's what we do, here's why you trust us, et cetera, and then go off to the races and test and see, all right, Is there enough traffic for these different areas that we're actually getting leads from it? Or if not, maybe we need to pivot and try, you know, a different service or a different need and kind of work our way through to find the ones that are working and sticking. [00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that sounds like a sensible strategy. I know nothing at a technical level about pay per click, but I do read sort of of broad principles and I remember reading a long time ago that if your pay per click advert, as you say, says as part of the headline, we can fix your server today. I mean, no one would promise that. But you know, if that was the headline, then you're absolutely right. The landing page needs to repeat the same message. You're wasting your money if it just goes through to the homepage. And actually if the pay per click I see msps doing, many of them make immediately make that exact mistake that they'll send this expensive paid traffic that's just cost them $20 for a click and they send them to their general homepage. Whereas, you know, why has someone clicked this message? Because that's the problem they've got. So let's address that problem, let's get them on the phone or whatever is the case. That's really interesting. And you mentioned about levels of traffic. I mean if we take that normal town with 20 MSPs that we were talking about, there's not gonna be hundreds of people typing in every day, server crashed or, you know, or red screened or something like that. So do you have a gut feel for what's a good level of traffic for a keyword or sort of a key term? Or do you go more on what the data tells you? [00:21:04] Speaker C: Yeah, so we definitely always look at the data and we've got tools that we can do to kind of forecast and say, okay, does it look like there's enough traffic to justify going after this keyword? If there is a keyword where there's so little traffic per month that Google kind of doesn't think it's worth serving ads on, they'll actually give it a label, we'll call it low search volume. And you won't even if somebody randomly does search that, you might not even actually show an ad because Google's like there's just not enough search volume. So you gotta figure out kind of that sweet spot between keywords that are still very laser focused but that are not low search volume. And it takes some time and some work. Usually it's a combination of using tools like Google's keyword planner and other things to estimate traffic and then literally just running the campaigns and seeing. And that's the beautiful thing with pay per click is it's pay per click. So if no one's searching for something, it's not costing you money to go after it because no one's clicking. So you can for free test and find out whether or not there is traffic for particular phrases or searches. [00:22:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Or it's not paper click, it's paper clip. As my daughter, when she was about 7 and she heard me talking about pay per click and she said, oh daddy, do you want pay per clips? You don't have to pay for those. That was so sweet. Kids are like that, aren't they? Now, let's talk about remarketing. In that kind of strategy that we just talked about there, would you use remarketing or retargeting? And John, could you actually start by just telling us what exactly remarketing is? [00:22:25] Speaker C: Absolutely. So remarketing is basically the annoying ads that follow you around after you go look at a pair of shoes and then you see those shoes everywhere else online. But at a bigger picture level, it's very important and very impactful. Where, hey, if I go to a website, especially if I'm researching msp, there's a very good chance I'm not going to reach out right away. I need to maybe talk to somebody else. I'm looking at different options, I'm thinking through things, et cetera. And so with remarketing, you're able to serve ads through Google's display network. You can do it through Facebook and other places as well. Basically follow the people who've been to your website around the web and just remind them of, hey, we're here, here's why you should choose us. You can even get strategic and offer, you know, special incentives of hey, you know, get a free demo or get something for free if you reach out today or whatever the case may be. But you can do things to try and create urgency and bring people back who otherwise might forget about you or get distracted or go with a competitor. [00:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:20] Speaker B: And do you recommend remarketing for people who are doing pay per click or is it very much on a case by case basis? [00:23:26] Speaker C: 95% of the time you should do remarketing. It's very cost effective because you're targeting a very small group of people, just people who've been to your website. So it's not expensive at all to serve those ads and it's a very, very warm audience. So remarketing usually has the highest ROI return on investment of any marketing type. And of course, you've already spent money get to people to your website to begin with. So you can't just say remarketing is bringing new traffic to me. But yeah, for most businesses, I would strongly. For most MSPs, I strongly recommend using remarketing. [00:23:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. I love it. John, let's wrap up with one final question I'm going to ask you. What's the. Let's assume now you're talking to MSPs who are doing their own DIY PPC. So their own. They're doing it themselves, which obviously, you know, lots of people put themselves through courses and on Udemy and places like that and try it out, what's the one thing they absolutely should do? And then tell me, conversely, what's the one thing they absolutely shouldn't do? [00:24:20] Speaker C: The one thing they should do is run search campaign. There's a bunch of different campaign types you can run with Google, like Google Display and different things, but search would be my number one recommendation for MSPs starting out. And then I would say in most cases, the thing not to do is don't use what they call broad match keywords. Right. When you start out, that gives Google a ton of flexibility to match different types of searches to the keyword you think you're targeting. And because of how expensive clicks are in the MSP space, like we talked about, it's really easy to waste money. So I start with very targeted, probably what they call exact match keywords, and then work your way up from there strategically over time. [00:24:58] Speaker B: Amazing. I love it. I love when we take a strategic view to anything like this because it takes a tool which many people will try it, spend 1,000 bucks and say, this doesn't work for me. But I think you're right, going in with a strategic view is a much better way of doing it. John, tell us what exactly you do to help MSPs and how can we get in touch with you? [00:25:15] Speaker C: Yeah, so we do all the advertising work for you, so we create, manage the ads, reporting, work with you on your goals, all that good stuff. We'd love to speak with any MSPs who are listening to this. You can reach out through our website, stud group.com for a free consultation where we can see if we're the right fit for you. [00:25:30] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing podcast. Paul's personal peer group. [00:25:35] Speaker B: Right, we've just got time to answer one of your questions. Producer James, what have we got? [00:25:40] Speaker D: Thanks, Paul. This week we've got a question from Christine. The MSP that she works for in Portland is basically her and her husband's msp. She does all the admin, he does all the selling and the technical work. They've both been listening to the podcast for around six months and she thinks she's noticed a bit of a recurring theme in some of the content. Her question is, why are you so insistent I hire a phone person? [00:26:06] Speaker B: Well, yes, I am insistent because I believe that a really good phone person can be a secret weapon for every msp. Like we were talking about earlier, the long term marketing strategy for all MSPs should be to build audiences and then grow a relationship with those audiences. And this gives you a huge pool of potential future clients. You just have to remember again, like I was saying earlier, people only buy when they're ready to buy. But if you wait for them to tell you that they're ready, you'll be sitting next to a very quiet phone for a very long time. And that's why I believe that every MSP needs to get a phone person to call these audiences all the time. And this is not cold calling, this is not telesales, this is warm calling. This is telephone intervention. If you like, your telephone person is calling them to move the relationship forward on your behalf. So go and find yourself a back to work mom who can work two to three hours a day, two to three days a week making outbound calls on your behalf. And remember, she's not doing any selling. She doesn't need to know much about technology or your business. She just needs to be interested in talking to people and listening to their answers. If she asks the right open questions, she'll find people who are fed up with their incumbent MSP and then she can put them in for a 15 minute discovery call with you, which is just beauty. To submit your own question, go to mspmarketingedge.com and go over to Contact Us. [00:27:32] Speaker A: Coming up, coming up next week. [00:27:33] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening this week. Next week. Are you guilty of procrastination because you've confused busyness with business for MSPs around. [00:27:43] Speaker A: The world Round the World the MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.