Here are six psychological weapons of influence that you can apply to your MSP’s marketing to win more clients. Also this week, three hot marketing ideas around Copilot, and the surprising secret for talking to clients about cyber security.

Welcome to Episode 348 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

A deep dive into the psychology that drives prospects

One of my all-time favourite books is called Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini. And today I want to walk you through his six psychological weapons of persuasion and show you exactly how they apply to winning clients for your MSP.

Now, this book which I’ve owned for about 20 years, in fact, if you’re watching on YouTube, the copy I’ve literally got in my hands now, I’ve had for a round of 20 years or so, it was actually first published in 1984. Of course, it’s been updated since, but it is still, in my opinion, the definitive work on why people say yes.

Dr. Robert Cialdini is a psychology professor, but he specialises in marketing. He’s still active now, I don’t know if he teaches still, I think he’s in his 70s, but he’s in New York, I believe.

He’s identified six psychological weapons of influence, and we can apply every single one of them to your MSP.

So let me take you through them and give you an example of how each one can help make your marketing so much easier and more effective.

The first is something called reciprocity. People feel compelled to give something back when they’ve received something completely free or something of high value at very, very low cost. So for example, I give away a free MSP marketing wall planner, and I do that partly because I want to educate thousands of MSPs around the world how to have better marketing. But also I know that in giving someone a physical free wall planner that I’ve had printed at my cost, that I’ve mailed out to them at my cost, there’s a certain level of reciprocity in that. And many, not all, but many of the people who get one of those wall planners will come back and buy something from me at some point in the future.

And by the way, if you don’t have one of those wall planners yet, I’ll tell you in just a few minutes how you can get one completely free. And there is no obligation to buy anything if there’s a psychological obligation that’s set up in your brain and that’s just good marketing from Dr. Robert Cialdini. But you can do this as well so you can give away free guides, you can give away other kind of lead magnets, scorecards are working really well right now as a lead magnet, and there’s still some reciprocity from that. You could do a really in-depth LinkedIn post, you could do a major in-depth guide on cyber security or something else on your websites. All of this is reciprocity in action.

What you’ve just got to remember is that when you give genuine value first, then the prospects feel a pull towards you before you’ve ever asked them for anything, ever asked them to buy anything from you. So practical question on this, what are you giving away that’s actually useful? So things like a buyer’s guide or a sales brochure, those kind of things are okay, but the more value you can give in your freebie, in the things you give away, the better.

And just a reminder, by the way, if you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we have a book called Email Hijack. That’s available to our B2B members. You can get it in the portal right now. It’s in the tool section and it’s kind of like a book, a fictional book about an email compromise attack. So you can very quickly update that with all of your details, put that on your website for free. People just enter their email address and you email them or physically post them, mail them, ship them a copy of email hijack. But th...

Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them. Also this week, get up at 5am every weekday to grow your MSP, and before you do any marketing or sales, you MUST get these foundations right.

Welcome to Episode 347 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

How to use webinars to identify the hottest prospects

So have you ever thought of doing webinars to promote your MSP and if you have, what stopped you from actually going ahead with it? Were you worried that perhaps no one would turn up or worse than no one… one person would turn up? Or maybe you were worried about your own performance. Let’s look at why webinars are an amazing way for MSPs to grow their business primarily because most MSPs aren’t doing them.

And let’s just address this right from the start. Yes, there is room in the world for more webinars. You might think there are too many webinars already, but that’s just because you’re inside the channel. Outside the channel, they are getting lots of webinars about the law or carpentry or manufacturing or whatever line of work your prospects are in, but they’re not hearing a lot from MSPs that are pushing technology and talking about the importance of cyber security.

There’s plenty of business out there to be won through webinars, but you’ve just got to approach it the right way.

Most MSPs think the goal of a webinar is all about getting the attendance numbers in. Get 50 people on a webinar, get big conversion rates. That’s not what it’s about at all. The real goal of a webinar is intelligence. It’s telling you something about the leads and the prospects that you’re talking to right now, the people who are in your CRM or who are connected to you on LinkedIn. I mean, even if you just look at who has done something, so who registered for a webinar in the first place?

Actually, you could take that back a step and say, who clicked the email link to have a look at the webinar that I’m promoting? Who then registered for that webinar? Who then showed up for that webinar? Who stayed for the majority of it? Who asked questions? Who booked a meeting or did something afterwards to say thank you? All of this tells you really interesting things about the leads and prospects that you are talking to. And it helps you to kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff. It helps you to show who are the hottest prospects right now and where should you be focusing all of your attention. I mean, the very fact that someone would attend your webinar or even register for your webinar that says something to you.

Now, you might know that with my members, I work either helping them to win B2B business, which is what most MSPs want, more business owners, or I help them to grow their co-managed business, so helping them to reach IT directors. And in both these instances, webinars can be a really, really powerful tool. It can help you to see who through their behaviour alone is worth me talking to. Who’s worth me following up, ringing them, sending more emails to them, sending stuff to them in the post in the mail.

Someone registering for a webinar and turning up for a webinar and being engaged with a webinar, it’s like their hand going up. These are buying signals that people are inadvertently sending to you and it’s great for you because you then know exactly who you should be following up and exactly who you should be talking to over the next couple of weeks. Now there are three, if you like, kind of three tiers of heat after a webinar. By heat, I mean, how hot is a prospect.

So the first tier is where someone has attended and they’ve asked a question or they’ve stayed to the end. So they’ve turned up, they’ve stayed engaged. In fact, if they’ve asked a ques...

Facebook has a new ad system that could be a game changer for MSPs. Also this week, where should you put your LinkedIn energy… personal profile or company page?, and meet the guy who built an MSP from zero to $20 million in six years.

Welcome to Episode 346 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Are Facebook ads suddenly hot again for MSPs?

I want to start with something that I think is genuinely underused by MSPs and that’s Facebook advertising. Now, just to give some context to this, Facebook advertising was really hot for MSPs like years and years ago and then suddenly it wasn’t. It stopped being an effective way to reach people, but actually I think it’s back. Let me bring you up to speed.

Now I know what you might be thinking. Facebook, Paul, really? Isn’t that where your mum posts pictures of her garden and people just argue about politics and yes, it is that. But it’s also something else.

Facebook is the most universally used social platform on the planet. 3.5billion people use Meta’s platforms every single day. And that includes the business owners and managers that you want to reach.

Of course they’re on LinkedIn and that is still the primary social platform because they use that for work. But what if we could reach them during their downtime? They’re almost certainly on Facebook or using other Meta products and that makes it a very interesting place to advertise. As I said, for the last few years, I’ve been pretty lukewarm about recommending Facebook ads to MSPs. The targeting was getting harder after the iOS privacy changes of a few years ago and the costs were creeping up and the results were kind of inconsistent.

And most MSPs just don’t have the budget or the time or the patience to run the kind of long test cycles that Facebook advertising used to need from you. But something changed at the very end of 2024 and it matters enough that I think it’s now worth revisiting this whole question. So Meta introduced a completely new advertising engine. It’s got a great name, it’s called Andromeda. And if you haven’t heard of Andromeda, then you’re not alone because it obviously wasn’t front page news. But in the world of digital advertising, it’s actually a pretty big deal. Here’s what Andromeda is and why it matters.

Previously, Facebook’s ad system worked by letting advertisers define their audience very precisely. So you’d pick interests, age ranges, job titles, locations, obviously, behaviours if you could, and then the system would try to match your ads to the people that you described. And that sounds sensible, but the problem was the algorithm was really blunt. It would find one ad in your campaign that seemed to be working and dump all of the budget into that ad, kind of ignoring everything else. So it was very rigid and actually got less effective over time, especially as privacy changes made the audience data less reliable.

Andromeda replaces all of that with a completely different approach. Instead of you telling Facebook who should see your ad, the AI figures out who should see the ad by itself based on your creative, based on the actual advert that you’ve created. So your ad becomes the targeting signal. The system watches how people respond to it. It looks for patterns, it detects who engages and who converts. And then it goes off and finds more people like them across the platform. So there’s no interest targeting required and no demographic filtering required. You just go broad and the AI does the matching for you. And this is really exciting.

Because it’s been running for over a year already, the results from advertisers who’ve adapted to this properly have been really impressive. In fact, Meta’s own data shows a 22% increase in something called return on ad spend, ROAS. It’s a way...