ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?

Episode 298 July 28, 2025 00:28:03
ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?
Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast
ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?

Jul 28 2025 | 00:28:03

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Hosted By

Paul Green

Show Notes

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 298 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?

Just like in the tech world, marketing is full of confusing sounding acronyms. There’s your LTV, your CTR and your PPC, but while you can safely ignore those, there’s one that you must not ignore. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already. When you get this acronym right, it influences all of your MSP’s marketing and you get better results. Let’s talk about this acronym that you must be aware of and how implementing it in your MSP will help you win brand new clients.

So we’re going to talk about something called an ICP, which stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some kind of big scary marketing concept. It’s actually really simple and it can make a massive difference to how effective your MSP’s marketing is. So what’s an ICP? Think of it like this.

If you could clone your best customer – the one who always pays on time, never complains, values what you do, and is a dream to work with – who would that be?

That’s what sits at the heart of your ideal customer profile. It’s a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. And I’m not just talking about the vague stuff like saying small businesses or anybody with computers and a wallet. I mean details like what industry they’re in, how many staff they have, where they’re based, what kind of technology they use, who makes the buying decisions, and even what headaches are they dealing with right now that you can solve?

Why do you bother with all of this? Because when you are clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier. Your marketing becomes sharper, your messaging really hits home. You stop wasting your time chasing leads that when never a good fit in the first place because you understand exactly who you want to work with. It’s like fishing with a rod rather than chucking a net into the sea and hoping to get a very specific kind of fish.

So how do you build your ICP? Well, I suggest that you start with your current clients. Have a good look at them, analyse them. It could just be while you take the dog for a walk, you don’t need to sit down and stare at a screen for another six hours, but just think it through. Who are your best clients? Who are the ones that you wish you had 10 more of? Write down what it is that makes them great. Look for the patterns. Is it that they’re all in professional services? Do they all have a round about 15, 20 staff? Do they all hate dealing with IT and they just want someone to handle it all for them and they’re willing to pay for that person? What are the things they have in common? Your best clients. And then turn that into a profile. And you might find yourself saying something like, We help 10 to 50 person accountancy firms in the southeast who are growing fast and who need reliable IT support, but they really don’t want to do it in-house.

That in itself could be your ICP, just that statement. It doesn’t have to be a massive document that you’re never going to look at ever again. And once you’ve got something as simple as that statement, then everything you do in your marketing points you towards attracting more of that kind of business. On your websites, your LinkedIn posts, your emails, they all need to speak directly to the people that you actually want as clients.

Let me give you a specific example of an MSP with a really clear ICP. So they work with dental practices, specifically private practices with between five and 20 staff that are based in their specific geographical area plus 50 miles. Their ideal client isn’t just any dentist, it’s a dentist that uses digital X-ray systems, has a receptionist who struggles with slow computers, and the owner hates IT and hates dealing with it. So that MSP positions themselves as the go-to IT provider for dental practices in that region. And their website talks about IT that keeps your practice running smoothly, even when the x-ray software doesn’t. Because that directly talks to people who are using digital x-rays. They go to dental conferences, they’ve even written a guide called the IT survival kit for busy dentists, and they’re not trying to be everything to everyone. In fact, they’re not even trying to be everything to every dentist. Because of that, they attract exactly the kind of clients that they want. Clients that are profitable, they’re easy to support and they stay for years. That’s the power of a really good ICP.

So quick recap for you, ICP means ideal customer profile and it helps you to focus on the right kind of clients. Start by cloning your best current clients and then use that insight to sharpen up all of your marketing. Very simple, very powerful. It’s going to save you a ton of time and move you a lot closer to winning new clients.

MSPs: How to never drop a ball (no matter how busy you are)

Does this happen to you during the day? You’re just trying to run the best MSP you can and of course, hopefully find some new clients, but come the evening, you’re trying to chill out and then all of a sudden your brain goes into overdrive. Did I send that proposal? Did I do that thing that I promised a client or did I forget it? If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life.

Sometimes the hallmark of a business owner is that we pride ourselves on our busyness as much as on our business. Most of the MSP owners that I’ve met are very high performing individuals and I think this is why we get frustrated with our staff and other mere mortals who can’t do what we do at the pace that we do it. But even you and I have our limits and I know that I’m approaching mine right now. I’ve got several projects which all seem to be concluding at the same time. Home life’s getting really busier. My child is doing loads of stuff that needs transport and organising and thinking, and I am about to take an impending vacation, a short break, which is kind of clashing with a project deadline. And it’s all adding pressure. Yes, this recording is my way of getting counseling, thanks very much for being there for me. But actually no matter how busy I get, I rarely drop a ball, which is a very dangerous thing to claim in public, and I certainly don’t get everything done when I say I will. But I am able to make conscious decisions about what needs to be done now and what can be safely postponed.

I’ve used a simple but powerful productivity system for years and it helps me to prioritise what’s most important… what’s going to get me closer to my life goals.

I’ve distilled it down to six key things:

The first is to set very clear goals and review them every single day. Literally, one of the first things I do every day is to read my goals book, even at the weekend I do this. And if you don’t have written goals which are constantly top of your mind, you kind of can’t be more productive because true productivity is about doing less, not more, which means prioritising more. You’ve got to know what you’ve got to do to get you to the place you want to go. So my goals book contains my vision board. It’s a series of pictures representing the things that I want in my life in the near future. So there’s a picture of the house that I’m going to own next, a picture of the car that’ll sit on the gravel driveway of the house. There’s a picture of the villa somewhere hot, probably Portugal where I’ll be enjoying 10 weeks of the school holidays. All of that kind of stuff is on there. And then on the next page of the book is a summary of my key goals for the year. Each containing three bullet points on my strategy to achieve those goals. And I tweak these as we go throughout the year, but achieving each of these business goals gets me so much closer to my life goals. So for example, to have that villa in Portugal, I’m going to need both cash and time. I need cash to pay for it and I need time to enjoy it. So I have to make sure with my business goals and my business strategy, I’m not too tied up. It generates plenty of cash for me, but also frees me up to enjoy that time in Portugal. Does that make sense? And then the final page is a tracker for my daily KPIs, my key performance indicators, things like sleep and exercise, stuff like that.

Number two, use software. Personally, I’m an enormous fan of something called Todoist. I love the way that it drags and drops. I love the way that it syncs instantly between your phone and your laptop. And I like the way it works exactly the same way across every single device. In fact, I used Todoist more than almost any other software. Apparently over the years, I just checked, I’ve already completed more than 71,000 tasks in Todoist. Woo. But it doesn’t really matter what software you use so long as you rely upon it heavily. Great software makes it a thousand times easier to be more productive while doing less.

Number three, get everything out of your head. The most critical part of my productivity system is to leave nothing in your head ever. A task or idea that exists only in your head is too easily lost or worse. It takes up so much thinking space that it stops you from moving on to the next idea. Todoist has an inbox that I can add tasks to and I can even email them in using email or if I’m driving or something I can use, well, I try to use Siri, but we all know how hard that is, so I use an app called Brain Toss. And at night I have a pad next to my bed to write down ideas without having to wake myself up getting the blue screen of using my phone.

Number four, keep projects and tasks separate. Within your productivity software you need two separate sets of to-do lists. The first are projects and these are the big things that move your business forward. Each project has its own list of tasks all broken down into the smallest possible chunks. So by doing this, it allows me to sit and focus on a project for a few hours before moving on to the next project. The other to-do list I’ve got is just everyday tasks. These are things that need to be done, but they don’t necessarily help me achieve anything. So I do schedule tasks for specific days of the week and then I swap them around when they don’t get done. So for example, Tuesday is always the day that I’ll record my podcast and YouTube videos and that’s there in my productivity system every week, protected time. Whereas there are other things today, like I do a weekly update to my team of how well we’ve done in the last week, what our performance is. Sometimes that gets bumped off Mondays or Tuesdays and I end up doing it on Wednesdays. Doesn’t matter, but it never falls out of the productivity system until it’s done.

Number five, rank and dump. Not all tasks are equal, so you need to find a system of ranking them that works best for you. I’ve tried traffic light rankings before. I’ve tried the A, B, C thing, but now I just keep it really simple. I label tasks that get me closer to my goals and I put them at the top of the list. And critically, I also identify tasks every day that are so unimportant that it doesn’t really matter whether or not I ever do them. These are tasks that actually if I think about it, I was never going to do them anyway, but because they came out of my head, and remember I said earlier you have to write them down, if it doesn’t feel right to delete them because you had that thought, I just kind of file them away somewhere safe. I actually call this place the black hole.Now I can’t see the tasks in there and it doesn’t really matter because I was never going to do them anyway, but I don’t feel stressed by the fact that I’ve moved the task somewhere rather than deleted it. I’ve got it out to my head. I’ve decided didn’t want to do it, and I’ve put it in a folder somewhere where I’ll never look at it, but it’s there if I wanted to. My brain likes that.

Then finally number six, plan tomorrow at the end of each day. And this is the final work job of each day for me. I move any project items or tasks that are left over from today, I read tomorrow’s project and task list, and I rearrange items to reflect the ever-changing priorities. We all should do this every single day. You have to look at your calendar to estimate how much time you’ve got tomorrow for GTD, which is getting things done, and if you need to move some tasks to a different day so that your list tomorrow is grounded in reality, then do that. Once you’ve done that, you can shout hooray, and go and watch the latest episode of Daredevil or whatever you are watching right now on Netflix or Disney Plus. Tell me how good is your system for productivity in your MSP.

AI is changing EVERYTHING with your MSP’s website

Featured guest: Matt Dorman is the co-founder of Ndevr, a technology services agency specialising in high-scale digital platforms. With over 20 years of experience, he has built and optimised websites for major brands like Time Inc., Johnson & Johnson, and Fox News, bridging the gap between technical execution and business strategy.

A lifelong digital innovator, Matt started coding the moment he got an internet connection in 1995—and hasn’t stopped since. Now based in Colorado, he enjoys camping and tackling the ever-evolving challenges of digital media.

We all know that generative AI is changing everything at a rapid pace, but have you ever stopped to think through the implications of that? Take your website for example, what was a perfectly good site optimised for Google just a few years back is now not good enough for the age of AI. My special guest today is on the frontline helping MSPs with their sites. We’re going to talk about the new paradigm for websites and look at how it’s affecting you right now.

I’m Matt Dorman. I’m one of two owners of Ndevr. We’re a technical services agency out of the US.

And thank you so much for joining me on the podcast Matt, because I want to talk about websites. It seems to me like marketing is changing and evolving at the most rapid pace ever, and it’d be interesting to see if you have the same experience because obviously we both spend all of our working lives helping people with their marketing and getting better results when their marketing. But with AI and technical things that are happening and just consumer and B2B demands, marketing seems to be changing at a really rapid pace right now. So that’s what I want to delve into today. But particularly based around MSP’s websites, I still believe that your website is your number one marketing weapon even with all of these other weapons that you’ve got. Ultimately, everybody looks at your website and makes an emotional decision whether or not you are worth speaking to based on the contents of your website. So that’s something I’d like to look at today. Listen, first of all just delve into you and your background. So what got you into this business in the first place?

Yeah, the actual business, it was a little while ago, but the technical side of building out websites like you said, I mean that’s one way of putting what we do, we build digital infrastructure for any kind of site. We’re actually coming close to the 10 year anniversary of our company. My partner and I, we actually worked at a firm before this together. She and I were kind of done with what we thought we were going to do. We were going to do some independent work on our own and one thing led to another and we started doing some projects together right away and we decided we wanted to form a company together. We’ve been working in the digital media space prior to that. I’ve been doing it almost 30 years now, so quite a while. It’s hard to say when it became like, oh, we’re going to do that as a company versus we were just going to do some independent freelance stuff.

That’s really cool. Well, you’ve clearly seen even just over 10 years, you’ve clearly seen a massive amount of change. And I remember in the year 2000, or maybe even 1999, we used to have here in the UK, we used to have these things called night schools, which as it sounds was like a college you could go to in the evening and it was all subsidised by the government until they shut it all down a few years later. But I remember going to night school for Microsoft FrontPage and it was the first time I’d ever been able to actually do HTML and build a website. And I remember I was just blown away by the opportunity that was facing me, and I kind of wish I could go back 25 years and speak to 25-year-old Paul and say, go build websites, go help people figure out online marketing years before it becomes really, really important. But even in the last 10, 15 years or so that you’ve been working with the internet and with websites, what are the big shifts that you’ve seen that are really starting to hurt people with their marketing today?

I think the elephant in the room is AI, the last nine months to a year have been a complete shift in how to build websites, and why to build websites. What’s your actual audience? I think it is not completely changed because we still have Google, we still have people going to Google and looking up search results, but that’s now drastically changing where you’re now having to really entice their AI or whatever AI a person’s using to interact with finding people, finding things, you’re now able to get into those results. And I was reading some articles today specifically around digital media publishers, so people that write articles, news articles and things like that… and

For years it’s been about page views and getting people to click through to websites. That’s turned on its head because now brand recognition is happening inside of a chatbot and people are getting their content there.

I wish I had the answer. I think there’s some ways of getting into there, but I don’t know yet because it’s constantly changing. We’re constantly changing how we’re using them also.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even you and I are doing this interview at the beginning of June, 2025. It’s not broadcast for a few months, but even in those couple of months before it’s broadcast ChatGPT could release another iteration, there could be another amazing AI tool. Every day there’s hundreds of new tools being released and I think the generative AI revolution that we are seeing around us is certainly changing things. I have friends in their forties, their thirties and forties who say they use ChatGPT more than Google these days because it’ll do the research, it’ll do the recommendations, and they’re happy with the hallucinations. They can cope with it getting it wrong sometimes, which is kind of terrifying. So from a marketing agency’s point of view and looking at this of how MSPs can improve their websites, we know that most MSPs don’t do a great deal of work on their websites. So you are saying the work they should be doing should be based more around building up that brand equity now?

We were building out blog posts all about SEO, right? Keywords and injecting as much content as possible around your audience. What we’re finding now is around kind of the question and answer, having the content actually focused around answering questions versus having a lot of content now. That’s a different way of writing and a different way of creating the content on the website and structuring it also in a way that actually can be pulled in. Because people, like you said, people are asking questions to the ChatGPTs and others and then getting its research, and it’s telling them based on looking at websites, it’s still a crawler, what they’re telling it to tell the people. So if you can get your answers inside of your content, it’ll eventually show up to them. I think the hard thing is then measuring the initial KPI, because you don’t have a page view anymore. Right away you have an answer and they might have brand recognition about you, but you have no indication that it was actually coming there unless they click through or go to your phone call or go to your site to submit a contact.

Yeah, exactly. Just recently I read Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan, which I’m sure you’ve come across or maybe his previous book They Ask You Answer, and Endless Customers absolutely nails that. You give the answers and you put them on your website and you make it easy for the AI to find them for exactly that reason. And I think that’s an instant and easy quick win for any MSP to do. Obviously, you and I have no idea where this is going to go, but we can see a shift, a shift in human behaviours. It’s just occurred to me, it’s almost like Google has forced us over the last 25 years to search in a specific way in that we’ve always had the questions, we’ve always had the question of which MSP should I hire, but we knew that the search engine wouldn’t answer that for us. So instead we just search for IT support near me or IT support city or something like that. Do you think, and again, just asking your crystal ball, make it up kind of answer, do you think in the next 25 years we are going to go much more down the route of going back to natural behaviours of just saying to maybe to an agentic AI that will go and actually do searching for us or go research a contract and have conversations with salespeople and do all of that for us, which is not unfeasible over the next 25 years. Do you think that’s the direction we’re going to go, or do you think it’s going to be something a bit different?

I think a year ago I would’ve said, yeah sure 10, 15 years from now. But I don’t know, I mean it feels like it’s months away now. I’ve gone in the past few weeks to looking at how we use them as tools and we’re typing things in. Now I’ve pulled in, I think it’s called whisper flow, and I press a key and then I just talk. And I’m now having to have a conversation with a screen essentially, but now it’s getting me to rethink because when I type, I feel like I type in a way that you’re talking to Google. I need this answer, this is how I’m supposed to type it, but when I’m talking I’m having a conversation all of a sudden. I’m 47 years old, I’m not adopting as quick as my sons and things like that, but I feel like now I’m having to because it’s so much easier for some reason, and that’s just been weeks or months.

I’m 50 so I’m feeling your pain. My 14-year-old recently did some revision for her exams by taking photos of the textbooks, putting them into ChatGPT and asking it to do the revision summary, which is so smart, right? It’s not lazy, that’s actually a smart thing to do. And if she’s doing that at 14, what’s she going to be doing at our kind of age? I’m actually quite excited by this. It is a lot of change. It is happening really quickly, but the reason I’m excited is because it creates opportunities where anything changes really rapidly. I believe that creates huge opportunities. And my final question for you, Matt, is what kind of opportunities do you see for MSPs to keep up with these changes in marketing and to actually iterate their own marketing to take advantage of it?

Yeah, I think one opportunity is if you get the audience to come to your website, having more integration. Even as simple as what used to be a chat bot is now a fully integrated bot onto your site, and it’ll actually give them those same answers that you were trying to ingest into it because they don’t want to click through or people are less likely to want to click around. Like where the search box was and some people, advanced users would use it to find articles or find content on your site. It never really worked well. So if you can implement a good bot that’s actually pulling your content in and actually keeping them engaged in your answers, that’s definitely one way. I think limiting that time period to getting to a person depending on the type of site you are, is still important. So if it can come up with that goal, that would be the biggest thing. I’m big on having just the actual information that the user wants and not a bunch of fluff, but I feel like some of that fluff is still needed for the new bots to crawl through.

I’m sure it will come out in the wash over the next two, three years, and just as back in the day as SEO was changing year by year, month by month, and people ended up going off in a certain direction, I’m sure it’ll be exactly the same with generative AI or it will all change so quickly that we are all constantly playing catch up. I suspect that may be a part of it as well. So thank you so much for your time. Matt, tell us a little bit more about your business and what you do to help MSPs with their websites.

So we handle all the technical implementations whether it’s third party applications like your CRM, your Salesforce or things like that. We do build websites, it’s becoming a smaller portion of what we do anymore because it’s so automated, essentially. We can help with SEO or AI engine optimisation. We do have tools for that, obviously other people have tools, but really integrating those tools into your processes. So whether it’s building out systems that have integration with your content management system or just giving you overall what’s going on. We’re based out of the US but we do work globally. So again, I’m with Ndevr and you can find me at Matt Dorman on LinkedIn. Reach out if you have questions. Happy to make connection, I don’t block my connections for sure.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

MSP owner Gideon in Wisconsin has a question about promotional emails. His question is: Should I send promotional emails as plain text or use HTML templates?

I’ve got a very clear answer to this. You should use plain text or HTML that makes your email look like plain text, but never a pretty well-designed template.

Why? Because you’re not running an e-commerce business selling “things” and also you’re not selling to consumers. The second someone sees a very pretty email template, they know it’s a sales email, which is fine if they’re interested in the thing that that business is selling. But you are not selling in your emails… you’re educating, you’re entertaining. So you want your emails to look like they’ve been sent from one person to one other person. You can only do that with emails that look like plain text.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Nervous about promoting your msp? You're not alone. This show gives you the mindset, message and marketing to do it all with confidence. Ah, you're here. Great. That means that we can start the show. Here's what's coming up today. Have you heard of an icp? Is it jargon or a powerful marketing tool? How to never drop a ball no matter how busy you are. And my special guest today talks about how AI is changing everything to do with your website. Welcome to episode 298 powered by MSP marketingedge.com Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast. Just like in the tech world, marketing is full of confusing sounding acronyms. There's your ltv, your CTR and your ppc. But while you can safely ignore those, there's one that you must not ignore. Perhaps you've heard of it already. When you get this acronym right, it influences all of your MSPs marketing and you get better results. Let's talk about this acronym that you must be aware of and how implementing it in your MSP will help you win brand new clients. So we're going to talk about something called an icp, which stands for ideal customer profile. And don't worry, this isn't going to be some kind of big scary marketing concept. It's actually really simple and it can make a massive difference to how effective your MSP's marketing is. So what's an ICP? Think of it like this. If you could clone your best customer, the one who always pays on time, never complains, values what you do, and is a dream to work with, who would that be? That's what sits at the heart of your ideal customer profile. It's a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. And I'm not just talking about the vague stuff like saying small businesses or anybody with computers and a wallet. I mean details like what industry they're in, how many staff they have, where they're based, what kind of technology they use, who makes the buying decisions, and even what headaches are they dealing with right now that you can solve. Why do you bother with all of this? Because when you're clear on who you're targeting, everything else becomes easier. Your marketing becomes sharper, Your messaging really hits home. You stop wasting your time chasing leads that were never a good fit in the first place because you understand exactly who you want to work with. It's like fishing with a rod rather than chucking a net into the sea and hoping to get a very specific kind of fish. So how do you build your icp? Well, I suggest that you start with your current clients. Have a good look at them, analyze them. It could just be while you take the dog for a walk. You don't need to sit down and stare at a screen for another six hours. But just think it through. Who are your best clients? Who are the ones that you Wish you had 10 more of? Write down what it is that makes them great. Look for the patterns. Is it that they're all in professional services? Do they all have around about 15, 20 staff? Do they all hate dealing with it and they just want someone to handle it all for them and they're willing to pay for that person? What are the things they have in common? Your best clients. And then turn that into a profile and you might find yourself saying something like, we help 10 to 50 person accountancy firms in the southeast who are growing fast and who need reliable IT support, but they really don't want to do it in house. That in itself could be your icp, just that statement. It doesn't have to be a massive document that you're never going to look at ever again. And once you've got something as simple as that statement, then everything you do in your marketing points you towards attracting more of that kind of business on your website. Your LinkedIn posts, your emails, they all need to speak directly to the people that you actually want as clients. Let me give you a specific example of an MSP with a really clear icp. So they work with dental practices, specifically private practices with between 5 and 20 staff that are based in their specific geographical area plus 50 miles. Their ideal client isn't just any dentist. It's a dentist that uses digital X ray systems, has a receptionist who struggles with slow computers and the owner hates it and hates dealing with it. So that MSP positions themselves as the go to IT provider for dental practices in in that region. And their website talks about it. That keeps your practice running smoothly even when the X ray software doesn't, because that directly talks to people who are using digital X rays, right? They go to dental conferences. They've even written a guide called the IT Survival Kit for busy dentists. And they're not trying to be everything to everyone. In fact, they're not even trying to be everything to every dentist. Because of that, they attract exactly the kind of clients that they want. Clients that are profitable, they're easy to support and they stay for years. That's the power of a really good icp. So, quick recap for you. ICP means ideal customer profile and it helps you to focus on the right kind of clients. Start by cloning your best current clients and then use that insight to sharpen up all of your marketing. Very simple, very powerful. It's going to save you a ton of time and move you a lot closer to winning new clients. Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to come, you and I know that AI is changing everything fast, and that's happening in marketing as much as it's happening in the tech world. Have you ever considered the changes that you might need to make to your website because of AI? My special guest today has spent a great deal of time looking at this and we're going to be talking about the improvements you need to make later on in the show. Does this happen to you? During the day? You're just trying to run the best MSP you can and of course hopefully find some new clients, but come the evening you're trying to chill out and then all of a sudden your brain goes into overdrive. Did I send that proposal? Did I do that thing that I promised a client? Or did I forget it? If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life. Sometimes the hallmark of a business owner is that we pride ourselves on our busyness as much as on our business. Most of the MSP owners that I've met are very high performing individuals and I think this is why we get frustrated with our staff and other mere mortals who can't do what we do at the pace that we do it. But even you and I have our limits and I know that I'm approaching mine right now. I've got several projects which all seem to be concluding at the same time. Home life's getting really busier. My child is doing loads of stuff that needs transport and organizing and thinking, and I am about to take an impending vacation, a short break, which is kind of clashing with the project deadline and it's all adding pressure. Yes, this recording is my way of getting counseling. Thanks very much for being there for me. But actually, no matter how busy I get, I rarely drop a ball, which is a very dangerous thing to claim in public. And I certainly don't get everything done when I say I will. But I am able to make conscious decisions about what needs to be done now and what can be safely postponed because I've used a simple but powerful productivity system for years and years and years and it helps me to Prioritize what's most important, which means what's going to get me closer to my life goals. I've distilled it down to six key things, and the first is to set very clear goals and review them every single day. Literally, one of the first things I do every day is to read my goals book. Even at the weekend, I do this. And if you don't have written goals which are constantly top of your mind, you kind of can't be more productive because true productivity is about doing less, not more, which means prioritizing more. You've got to know what you've got to do to get you to the place you want to go. So my goals book contains my vision board. It's a series of pictures representing the things that I want in my life in the near future. So there's a picture of the house that I'm going to own next, a picture of the car that'll sit on the gravel driveway of the house. There's a picture of the villa somewhere hot, probably Portugal, where I'll be enjoying 10 weeks of the school holidays. All of that kind of stuff is on there. And then on the next page of the book is a summary of my key goals for the year, each containing three bullet points on my strategy to achieve those goals. Tweak these as we go throughout the year. But achieving each of these business goals gets me so much closer to my life goals. So, for example, to have that villa in Portugal, I'm going to need both cash and time. I need cash to pay for it and I need time to enjoy it. So I have to make sure with my business goals, my business strategy, I'm not too tied up. It generates plenty of cash for me, but also frees me up to enjoy that time in Portugal. Does that make sense? And then the final page is a tracker for my daily KPIs, my key performance indic, like sleep and exercise, stuff like that. Number two, use software. Personally, I'm an enormous fan of something called Todoist. I love the way that it drags and drops. I love the way that it syncs instantly with between, you know, your phone and your laptop. And I like the way it works exactly the same way across every single device. In fact, I use Todoist more than almost any other software. In fact, apparently over the years, I just checked, I've already completed more than 71,000 tasks in Todoist. Woo. But it doesn't really matter what software you use so long as you rely upon it heavily. Great software makes it A thousand times easier to be more productive while doing less. Number three get everything out of your head. The most critical part of my productivity system is to leave nothing in your head ever. A task or idea that exists only in your head is too easily lost or worse. It takes up so much thinking space that it stops you from moving on to the next idea. Todoist has an inbox that I can add tasks to and I can even email them in using email or if I'm driving or something I can use. Well, I try to use Siri, but we all know how hard that is. So I use an app called Brain Toss and at night I have a pad next to my bed to write down ideas without having to wake myself up getting the blue screen of using my phone number 4. Keep projects and tasks separate within your productivity software you need two separate sets of to do lists. The first are projects and these are the big things that move your business forward. Each project has its own list of tasks, all broken down into the smallest possible chunks. So by doing this it allows me to sit and focus on a project for a few hours before moving on to the next project. The other to do list I've got is just everyday tasks. These are things that need to be done, but they don't necessarily help me achieve anything. So I do schedule tasks for specific days of the week and then I swap them around when they don't get done. So for example, Tuesdays is always the days that I record my podcast and YouTube videos and that's there in my productivity system system every week. Protected time. Whereas there are other things today. Like I do a weekly update to my team of how well we've done in the last week, what our performances. Sometimes that gets bumped off Mondays or Tuesdays and I end up doing it on Wednesdays. Doesn't matter. But it never falls out of the productivity system until it's done. Number five Rank and dump not all tasks are equal, so you need to find a system of ranking them that works best for you. I've tried traffic light rankings before. I've tried the A, B, C thing, but now I just keep it really simple. I I label tasks that get me closer to my goals and I put them at the top of the list. And critically, I also identify tasks every day that are so unimportant that it doesn't really matter whether or not I ever do them. These are tasks that actually, if I think about it, I was never gonna do them anyway. But because they came out of my head and remember I said earlier. You have to write them down. If it doesn't feel right to delete them because you had that thought, I just kind of file them away somewhere safe. I actually call this place the Black Hole. Now I can't see the tasks in there and it doesn't really because I was never going to do them anyway. But I don't feel stressed by the fact that I've moved the task somewhere rather than deleted it. I've got it out of my head. I've decided didn't want to do it and I've put it in a folder somewhere where I'll never look at it. But it's there if I wanted to. My brain likes that. Then finally, number six Plan Tomorrow at the end of each day and this is the final work job of each day for me. I move any project items or tasks that are left over from today. I read tomorrow's project and task list and I rearrange items to reflect the the ever changing priorities. We all should do this every single day. You have to look at your calendar to estimate how much time you've got tomorrow for gtd, which is getting things done. And if you need to move some tasks to a different day so that your list tomorrow is grounded in reality, then do that. Once you've done that, you can shout Hooray. And go and watch the latest episode of Daredevil or whatever you're watching right now on Netflix or Disney plus. Tell me, how good is your system for productivity in your msp? Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast still to Come so do you get promotional emails from other people which land in your inbox and you look at them and you think, oh, these are really pretty. These got lovely designed email templates. And maybe that gets you wondering, what should you do with your own promotional emails that you send out? Should you use a pretty attractive template, perhaps with your branding on it? Or should you use something that looks like plain text? I've got a very definitive answer to this, and I'll tell you what it is in the next few minutes. We all know that generative AI is changing everything at a rapid pace, but have you ever stopped to think through the implications of that? Take your website for example. What was a perfectly good site optimized for Google just a few years back is now not good enough for the age of AI. My special guest today is on the front line helping MSPs with their sites. We're going to talk about the new paradigm for websites and look at how it's affecting you Right now, Matt. [00:14:12] Speaker B: I'm Matt Dorman. I'm one of two owners of Endeavor. We're a technical services agency out of. [00:14:18] Speaker A: The US and thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Matt, because I want to talk about websites. It seems to me like marketing is changing and evolving at the most rapid pace ever. And it'd be interesting to see if you have the same experience because obviously we both spend all of our working lives helping people with their marketing and getting better results from their marketing. But with AI and technical things that are happening and, and B2B demands, marketing seems to be going at a changing at a really rapid pace right now. So that's what I want to delve into today, but particularly based around MSPs websites because I still believe that your website is your number one marketing weapon even with all of these other weapons that you've got. Ultimately everybody looks at your website and makes an emotional decision whether or not you're worth speaking to based on the content to your website. So that's something I'd like to look at today. Let's first of all just delve into you and your background. So what got you into, into this business in the first place? [00:15:17] Speaker B: Yeah, the actual business, it was a little while ago, but the technical side of building out websites like you said, I mean that's one way of putting what we do build digital infrastructure for any kind of site. About 10 years ago, we're actually coming close to next week or week after we come up with our 10 year anniversary of our company. My partner and I, we actually worked at a firm before this together. She and I kind of were kind of done with what we thought we were going to do. We were going to do some independent work on our own and one thing led to another and we started doing some projects together right away and we decided we wanted to form a company together. We've been working again in the digital media space prior to that. I've been doing it almost 30 years now, so quite a while. It's hard to say when it became like, oh, we're going to do that as a company versus we were just going to do some independent freelance stuff. [00:16:13] Speaker A: No, that's cool. That's really cool. You've clearly seen Even just over 10 years, you've clearly seen a massive amount of change. And I remember in the year 2000 or maybe even 1999, learning at, we used to have it here in the uk we used to have these things called night schools, which was as it sounds, it was like a College you could go to in the evening and it was all subsidized by the government till they, they shut it all down a few years later. But I remember going to night school for Microsoft front page and it was the first time I'd ever been able to actually like do HTML and build a. And I remember I was just blown away by the, the opportunity that was facing me. And I kind of wish I could go back 25 years and speak to 25 year old Paul and say go build websites, you know, go help people figure out online marketing years before it becomes really, really important. But even in the last 10, 10, 15 years or so that you've been working in with the Internet and with websites, what are the kind of the big shifts that you've seen that are really starting to hurt people with their marketing today? [00:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, well, I mean the elephant in the room or whatever AI, right? Like the last nine months to a year have been a complete shift in how to build websites. How, how and why to build the websites. How you're like, what's your actual audience? I think that's it. It's not completely changed because we have, still have Google, we still have people going to Google and looking up search results. But in the next, within days to months that's now drastically changing where you're now having to really entice their AI or whatever AI a person's using to interact with finding people finding things. You're now able to get into those results. And I was reading some articles actually today around, around, specifically around digital media publishers, so people that write articles, news articles and things like that. Like for years it was all about page views, all about that like getting people to click through the site that's now turned on its head because you're now brand recognition inside of a, a chatbot essentially of some kind and getting their, people are getting their content there. I wish I had the answer. I think there's some ways of getting into there, but I don't yet like, because it's, it's constantly changing. We're constantly changing how we're using them also. [00:18:26] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean even, even, you know, you and I are into doing this interview at the beginning of June 2025. It's not broadcast for a few months, but even in those couple of months before it's broadcast that the, you know, chat GPT could release another iteration. There could be another amazing AI tool tool. Every day there's hundreds of new tools being released. And I think, you know, the, the AI generative AI revolution that we're seeing around us is certainly changing things. I have friends in their 40s, their 30s and 40s who say they use ChatGPT more than Google these days because it'll do the research, it'll do the recommendations, and they're happy with the hallucinations. You know, they can, they can cope with it getting it wrong sometimes, which is kind of terrifying. So from a, from a marketing agency's point of view and looking at this, of how MSPs can improve their websites, we know that most MSPs don't do a great deal of work on their website. So you're saying they, the work they should be doing is, should be based more around building up that brand equity now. [00:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah, but, but also like, so we were doing, building out blogs, blog posts for all about SEO, right? SEO, like keywords and injecting as much content as possible around your, around your audience. What we're finding now is around kind of the, the question and answer, like having the content actually focused around answering questions versus having a lot of content. Now that's a different way of writing and a different way of like creating the content on the website and structuring it also in a way that actually can be pulled in because people, like you said, people are asking questions to the, to the ChatGPTs and others and then getting its research and it's telling them, you know, based on looking at websites, still, still a crawler, what they're telling it to tell the people. So if you can get your answers inside of your content, it'll eventually show up to them. I think the hard thing is then measuring the initial KPI of like, because you don't have a page view anymore. Right away you have an answer and they might have brand recognition about you, but you have no indication that it was actually coming there yet. Unless they click through or go to your. Go to your phone call or go to your site to submit a. The content. [00:20:35] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Just recently I read Endless Customers by Marcus Sheridan, which I'm sure you've come across, or maybe his previous book, they ask, you answer. And Endless Customers absolutely nails that. You give the answers and you put them on your website and you make it easy for the AI to find them for exactly that reason. And I think that's an instant and easy quick win for any MSP to do. So obviously you and I have no idea where this is going to go, but we can see a shift, a shift in human behaviors. It's just occurred to me, it's almost like Google has forced us over the last 25 years to search in a specific way. In that we've always had the questions, haven't we? We've always had the question of which MSP should I hire, but we knew that the search engine wouldn't answer that for us. So we instead we just search for IT Support near me or IT Support City or something like that. Do you, do you think, and again just asking you crystal ball, make it up, you know, make it up kind of answer. Do you think in the next 25 years we're going to, to go much more down the route of going back to natural behaviors, of just saying, you know, to, to maybe to an agentic AI that will go and actually do searching for us or go and research a contract and have conversations with salespeople and do all of that for us, which is not unfeasible over the next 25 years. Do you think that's the direction we're going to go or do you think it's going to be something a bit different? [00:21:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I think a year ago I would have said yeah, sure, 10, 15 years from now, I don't know, I mean, I feel like it's months away now. I mean I've, I've gone in the past few weeks to look, looking at like we use them as tools and we're typing things in and now I pulled in, I think it's called whisper flow and I type a key, I press a key and I just talk. And I'm now having to have a conversation with a screen essentially. But it's now it's getting me to rethink because when I type I feel like I typed in a way that you're talking about like typing to Google. I need this answer, this is how I'm supposed to type it. But when I'm talking, I'm having a conversation all of a sudden already. And I'm, I mean I'm not, I'm, I'm 47 years old. I'm not like adopting quickly as quick as my sons and things like that, but I feel like now I'm having to because it's so much easier for some reason and that's just been weeks or months. [00:22:45] Speaker A: Yeah, but as much as this pace, I'm 50, so I'm feeling your pain. And my 14 year old recently did some revision for her exams by taking photos of the textbooks, put them into ChatGPT and asking it to do the revision summary. Which is so smart. Right. It's not lazy. That's actually a Smart thing to do. And if she's doing that at 14, what's she going to be doing at our kind of age? I'm actually quite excited by this. It is a lot of change. It is happening really quickly. But the reason I'm excited is because it creates opportunities where anything changes really rapidly. I believe that creates huge opportunities. And my final question for you Matt, is what kind of, what kind of opportunities do you see for MSPs to keep up with these changes in marketing and to actually iterate their own marketing to take advantage of it? [00:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I think one opportunity is like if you get, if you get the audience to come to your website having more integration with, I mean even as simple as now, what used to be a chatbot is now a fully integrated bot onto your site and it'll actually give them those same answers that you were kind of trying to ingest into it. It because they don't want to click through or people, people are less likely to want to click around just like where the search box was kind of there. And some, some people, advanced users would use it to find articles or find content on your site. It never really worked well. So if you can implement a good bot that's actually pulling your content in and actually keeping them engaged in your answers, that's definitely one way I think think, you know, limiting that time period to getting to a person if depending on the type of site you are is still important. So if you can get come up with that goal, that would be the biggest thing. You know, I'm big on like having just the actual information that the user wants and not a bunch of fluff. But I feel like some of that fluff is still needed for, for the new bots to, to crawl through. [00:24:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'm sure it will come out in the wash over the next two, three years. And you know, just, just as back in the day as SEO was, was changing year by year, month by month and people ended up going off in a certain direction, I'm sure it will be exactly the same with generative AI or it will all change so quickly that we're all constantly playing catch up. I suspect that that may be a part of it as well. So thank you so much for your time. Matt, tell us a little bit more about your business and what you DO to help MSPs with their website. [00:25:09] Speaker B: Yeah, so we, we handle all the technical implementations for whether it's third party applications like your, your CRM, your Salesforce or things like that. We do build websites. It's becoming a smaller portion of what we do anymore because it's so automated. Essentially we can help with SEO or AI engine optimization. We do have tools for that. We have obviously people, other people have tools, but really integrating those tools into your processes. So whether it's building out systems that have integrating with management system or just giving you kind of overall what's going on, we're based out of the US but we do work globally. So again, I'm with Endeavor. If you look it's up on the web, it's spelled a little bit differently, especially if you're UK or us. The, the Endeavor word we spell really short. So N D E V R IO is the way you find us. And Matt Dorman on LinkedIn. Reach out if you have questions. Happy to make a connection. I don't, I don't block my connections for sure. [00:26:11] Speaker A: Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast Paul's Personal Peer Group all right then, roll your sleeves up. It's time to get to work. Producer James what's our question today? Well, this week it could be quite a tough question to do with email. So let's see. [00:26:27] Speaker B: Paul, if you have your work cut. [00:26:28] Speaker A: Out with this one from MSP owner Gideon in Wisconsin. His question is should I send promotional emails as plain text or use HTML templates? I've got a very clear answer to this. You should use plain text or HTML that makes your email look like plain text, but never a pretty well designed template. Why? Because you're not running an E commerce business selling things. And also you're not selling to consumers. The second someone sees a very pretty email template, they know it's a sales email, which is fine if they're interested in the thing that that business is selling. But you're not selling in your emails. You're educating, you're entertaining. So you want your emails to look like they've been sent from one person to one other person. You can only do that with emails that look like plain text. I'd love to get your question on this part of the show. To submit it, you can email me, go to mspmarketingedge.com and head to the Contact Us page. Coming up, coming up next week. Thanks for listening. This week. Next week I've got an analogy for you. Something to help you understand why marketing your MSP takes so long. In fact, it's an analogy you can use while you're making a cup of coffee. Grab a kettle and join me next week when I'll explain everything for MSPs around the world. Around the world. The MSP Marketing Podcast with Paul Green.

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