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msp marketing pillar msp pillar series Sep 14, 2022

Today I’m going to share why you might consider click-baiting your audience, just like I did with this post, or perhaps explain why it would be a stupid thing to do.

The third part of our MSP Mach Plan from today’s sponsor, Marketopia, is to do Social Media Marketing.

There are many facets to doing strong social media marketing, so in today’s post, I’m going to break down exactly what good Social Media Marketing looks like, and provide a few hacks to save you time doing this yourself.

 

💍 Re-engagement 

Many of us have the same problem, we’re busy running the business so we don’t have any time to do marketing.

If anything, I think Social Media Marketing is probably one of the only ones that people do find time to do because if you are like most people, you probably spend at least a part of your day scrolling through LinkedIn and possibly other services like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

 

👷🏼‍♂️ Setup (address how XYZ is going to fix your problems)

So what does Good Social Media Marketing look like, to me? I’m going to break this down into a few segments. Connections, Engagement, and Content.

 

CONNECTIONS

For Connections - every day, just spend 5 minutes on LinkedIn, looking for people to connect with who fall into your ideal customer avatar. Those could be business owners from your local area, senior positions in your dream list clients, or perhaps those who work in your chosen vertical.

Spending 5 minutes each day, you could connect with anywhere from 1 to 5 people every single working day of the week, which gives you the opportunity to make introductions and start conversations with people who you otherwise wouldn’t have. This opens up future opportunities to work with those people.

Once you’ve connected with them, we move on to the Engagement piece.

 

ENGAGEMENT

 

Engagement is just what it says on the tin. Engage with those ideal customer avatars.

Technically it doesn’t matter what platform they’re on, but more often than not this will again be on LinkedIn.

I’m not talking about spamming each of those people with HEY JOHN, HERE’S MY LATEST NEWSLETTER THAT I REALLY THINK YOU SHOULD READ.

Or, Please sign up for my webinar. Or, hey, your IT guy is awful, use us instead.

Instead, try this as an example. Say they post a photo of themselves on a boat with their family. Awesome!

Now you can ask meaningful questions: Where were you sailing to? How are you kids with the bumpy waves? I was out there on the water too this weekend and we did XYZ with our kids and they loved it. Do you have any suggestions on where we could take our kids?

Now you know they are married, and have kids, like boats, and maybe even own a boat. Pure gold to add to your marketing efforts in the future.

The point I’m making here is that you want to engage with their content, and dare I say it, treat it more like Facebook.

Use LinkedIn to build up personal relationships with people that you don’t know. Here is your opportunity to basically start hanging out with who you want to hang out with.

Once they know you, once they like you, once they trust you, then you will find it much easier to engage with them and help them and their business when the time comes.

For this, I’d recommend doing it when you can, a few minutes whilst waiting for a meeting, waiting to pick your kids up from school, whatever spare time you can find.

The next thing is something that can require a little more planning, and that is, content.

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CONTENT

Content is pretty much the only way to quickly grow a following on any social platform. It works on LinkedIn, YouTube, and even TikTok.

Post content that your audience wants to consume, and that they engage with. I’d like to summarise this content as ‘PVA’. Personal, Video-able, and Actionable.

Your content should be personal. Call on personal situations and things that have happened to you, or things that have affected you or your business. Share what you have learned and why others should learn from what you have learned.

Now there is one hack beyond this that works SUPER quickly for growth, and that is to post more conflicting content.

A simple example of this is when you discover someone has done something wrong, and they are blatantly ignoring or not correcting that mistake, then call them out on social media. LinkedIn is the B2B version of Twitter for this.

I know so many situations where someone has been wronged, then they write a post about someone who hasn’t paid them, who then gets paid immediately, AND clocks up a huge number of views, comments, and connections because of their post.

This, overly dramatic posting does work very well, but you need to be very careful to not blow this out of proportion.

I know some people who post content just for the sake of posting content to ruffle feathers, just to get engagement on their posts, because they know it will get the views and perform well, and ultimately that sells more of their services.

It’s not a great strategy for most, you need a very thick skin, but it’s one that I’ve seen work for a number of people now.

I also think that content should be Video-able, for a portion of the content that you’re putting out, why not pick up your phone and record yourself saying that content out loud, instead of just typing it out?

Video content gets better engagement and allows the watcher to quickly build a rapport with you, which helps establish the Know, Like and Trust factor faster than when posting just text content.

I made a whole post around my passion for using video marketing in your MSP which you can see here, but for now, all I will say is that you should include video posts in your social messages.

Lastly, you should include some actionable content in your posts.

These are clear calls to action and can work as direct lead generation for the right audience. As someone who works with MSPs, I could have taken the recent news of an MSP being breached to create a checklist to help other MSPs check that they have the right protection in place. Post that on LinkedIn, talk about the challenges MSPs face, and give a clear CTA at the end to download the checklist. Perfect for building your mailing list!

As a bit of a bonus tip around social media content, I also would highly recommend coming up with a few buckets. A bucket is a category of content.

You might have:

  • Current News
  • Cyber Security
  • Personal Updates
  • Problems, and Solutions.

There are 4 buckets. Now you can make a post from one of those buckets each week.

Or perhaps on Monday, you share a News Article, Tuesday talk about Cyber Security, Wednesday it’s a personal update, and Thursday it’s a Solution to a Problem.

If all else fails, you can always fall back on the ‘Feedback Friday or ‘Throwback Thursday’ posts to share things your customers are saying about you or something from your company's history.

If all of this sounds like it’s too much work, or too complicated for you to do with the limited time and budget that you have, then I’d recommend having a chat with today’s sponsor - Marketopia.

Thanks for reading, I hope it's been helpful, see you in the next one!

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