628 Marketing Trends for MSPs (Insights from Matt Rodela)

[Speaker 2]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, powered by NetAlly. This is your show. If you are a managed service provider, IT solution provider, computer repair shop, solo tech, whatever.

If you are supporting businesses, this is the show for you, where we try to help you do your job better, smarter, and faster. Today's episode is another in our series where we're going to be talking about marketing, branding, and all those things to help you get more business. Today's show is presented by SuperOps, the AI-powered PSA RMM platform that streamlines your IT management.

SuperOps helps you work smarter, not harder. Experience the future of IT operations today. All right, my guest, some of you will remember him from years past.

He was a staple at our UnConvention and tech cons. He is very big when it comes to helping techs with their websites. Matt Rodela is in the house.

Matt, how are you? Hey, I'm doing excellent.

[Speaker 1]
How have you been?

[Speaker 2]
I'm doing well. I should have waited for your question before I started answering. It has been some time, but I wanted to reach out to you.

I know that the first order of business I should let everybody know is that rumor has it that you will be at TechCon later this year. Did we hear that correctly?

[Speaker 1]
The rumor is true. TechCon this year is actually going to be right in my backyard here in the Baltimore, Washington corridor. I have no excuse not to come.

Plus, I just wanted to come. I'm looking forward to coming. Last year was one of the first years that I had to miss because of scheduling and other conflicts.

I'm super excited to be back to TechCon this year as a sponsor. I think I'll be running a workshop and, of course, an enthusiastic attendee as well.

[Speaker 2]
All right. Sounds great. We will see you there.

Let's go ahead and get started. I know that I typically try to start these off with a question that I think is relevant and pertinent and that you can answer, but probably the way to start is how I approached the series this year where I wanted to find all of the movers and shakers out there into helping us understand what some of the common mistakes and pitfalls are that MSPs are making with their marketing and what can we do to fix those.

Let's start there.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. Yeah. With Tech Marketing Engine, we've had an opportunity to work with hundreds now of IT businesses and MSPs.

Of course, I ran my own IT consulting business for a few years before I ventured into the website and marketing space. Definitely have seen my share of mistakes. I've made my share of mistakes.

I think if I look through all the past work that we've done and customers that come to us that need help, the biggest mistake we see is just lack of some kind of coherent plan of a marketing plan because it's easy to see shiny objects. It's easy to hear the latest buzzwords and say, I need to do that. I need SEO.

I need social media. I need blogs. I need all this stuff.

Then just do it, create it, and then leave it there and hope and pray that it brings in customers or does what it's supposed to do and rarely does it. Setting it and forgetting it isn't usually the answer. The biggest mistake I see is trying all of these things without thinking to yourself, why am I doing this?

How does it fit into the broader picture of my business and the type of customers I need? Then fitting it into the puzzle piece of a bigger marketing picture.

[Speaker 2]
Let me refresh some of the listeners' minds. Most of us know you as when you left your IT consulting and you were doing tech site building. It was kind of a one-stop shop for putting together an easy website.

You added on the blogging and some automated stuff. The difference today is that everybody wants to kind of set themselves apart and differentiate. How is it that we're able to differentiate when we're kind of all still doing the same thing?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, that's a good point because you'll go out and maybe look at your competitors and see that they're doing all the same stuff that you are trying to do or that you think you should be doing or that you are doing. They have a website. They're on all the social media.

They're writing blog posts and all that stuff. But what I would recommend is really look at what your competitors are not doing. Usually, there's something that the majority of them are not doing.

Do they not have a local presence? If that's something you're looking at, are they not showing up on Google Maps? Are they not going to local networking events?

If not, then that's a perfect opportunity for you to focus on that and make sure that you can dominate that aspect of marketing. Or maybe they have a website, but it's not very good, or it doesn't look good on a mobile device, or it doesn't answer questions that people might have when they visit an IT website. Go ahead and make sure yours does that, and then does that plus some.

So I really think the best way to differentiate is just look at your competitors and then just do different things a little bit better than they are. You don't have to do everything that they're doing, but find where they have some of the gaps, and then really hard charge into that particular aspect of marketing, where you can then be the best thing at that. And then once that's done, then you can move on to the next thing.

So whether it's websites, whether it's social media, whether it's SEO or any of the other things that you can focus on, just pick one thing, focus on being better than all of your competitors at it, and then switch and focus on the next thing. And pretty soon, after a while, you'll be better at them than everything.

[Speaker 2]
Right. So now your company, Tech Marketing Engine, is much more than what you started out as with the websites. So before we go too much further, why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

Because it's not just web development. I understand you're doing WordPress consulting, SEO services. What are all the things that you're doing?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's been a really organic kind of growth of a company, right? We started out just seeing, and I'm taking my own advice, right? I'm looking at the gaps that are out there.

So we were looking at a gap originally where techs had, specifically like break-fix techs and IT mom-and-shop type businesses, were struggling having a web presence. And they would either try to throw up a website really quickly on their own, and it wouldn't look good, or it wouldn't really function very well, or they didn't have one at all. So we actually bought Tech Site Builder as a WordPress theme from Steve Cherubino way back in the day, and then recreated it into a Squarespace-style platform where you can go on, load up your own site, and then start building it out from there.

And then as I was running that for a while, I would just hear from people who were using it other things that they wanted and other things that they needed, and also just hearing the latest trends and what was working for IT businesses. And so the next thing we added on was blog posts, right? That was a big thing that techs wanted to be able to do.

They just didn't have the time to do it. And blog posts are great because it helps with SEO. It helps with having content to send in newsletters and to post on social media and all the other stuff.

So it's kind of the website is the home base, and then the blog posts are like the news story that gets syndicated everywhere. So we went into blog post writing. And then, of course, you mentioned WordPress.

WordPress is what most websites are built on, and that's where I cut my teeth with website development. So we started offering just if they had a website outside of Tech Site Builder, we offered to be able to maintain and update that, and then do that for their clients who needed that service as well. So branched out to that.

And then, of course, on top of that, you need SEO to help the website get noticed. You need social media posting and stuff like that to help augment your content. Newsletters, we've added a fully managed newsletter service.

And then we've just started to dip our toe into like Facebook ads and Google ads and the PPC side of things. So we're hoping to eventually get to the point where we're kind of your one-stop shop for all the marketing needs, whether it's just getting a website going, kind of the basic stuff, or kind of the next levels that you'll need to up your game from there.

[Speaker 2]
All right. I should probably at least mention the fact that most people, like I said, knew you from Tech Site Builder. That is staying from what I understand, but everything else that you're doing is kind of rolling into this tech marketing engine, right?

So your other consulting business is kind of rolling into that. The tech reputation stuff is kind of all rolling into that. So it sounds like you are becoming that one-stop shop.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. And all of these different kind of brands and businesses that I kind of started up or brought in at certain points, I'm trying to get them all kind of consolidated under the tech marketing engine brand. So Tech Site Builder will be there, but it will be a website builder under tech marketing engine.

So it'll all be under that one umbrella and there'll just be different services and different types of things you can do in that one-stop shop.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. All right. Let me take a little sidestep here.

You weren't ready for this, but let me just ask, from the days of being your friendly neighborhood computer guy to now, how's that rollercoaster ride been for you?

[Speaker 1]
Rollercoaster is definitely a good word to describe it. It's one of those things that was never really planned. I was always just kind of following opportunities that came and seeing what I liked and seeing what I didn't like.

And I kind of just follow what I feel I'm best at and what I feel like I'm helping people the most with. And that changes from time to time. But I think the kernel that's stayed through all of that is, I love IT business owners.

I love the world of IT and I always want to stay in that world. And then just figuring out, I love marketing and I love kind of figuring out how the puzzle to solve of how to get customers and how to find customers and that kind of thing. So fusing those two things together is kind of the core thing.

And then just finding my way around what different services could help with that, what I like to do. And then just learning on my own all these new things. I could only learn so much at a time.

So I started out learning websites and then learned content marketing and then snowballing from there. So it's a lot of fun. I love learning and then I love sharing what I learn with other people.

So this business gives me a chance to do all of that.

[Speaker 2]
All right. So as I look from the outside into your success, I'm going to kind of parallel some things. So you talked about what MSPs could be doing and tech professionals can be doing for their business.

So you were able to find your niche and focus on that one thing that was kind of missing in the market. You created automated revenue streams with creating this easy to manage website template for everybody. You did stay open and flexible and kind of found other things to bring into the portfolio that was needed.

I assume you're doing outsourcing and delegation. You're not doing this all on your own, right? Right.

[Speaker 1]
A big part of the services that I provide in the business is learning how to do it myself first and then understanding how it fits into helping IT businesses. So that's kind of the second step. And then the third step is to then put a process around it and automate it as much as possible and then outsource it and then just kind of stay over to supervise things to make sure it's going well.

But yeah, that's kind of the thing I fell into starting with Tech Site Builder is learning a technology or a marketing service, figuring out how it can help IT businesses and then rolling it into the company and outsourcing it. So then I can kind of move on to the next thing.

[Speaker 2]
Right. So now let me ask this question. I mean, you've kind of laid out a bunch of stuff, but I wanted to ask it in a way that gives you the opportunity to frame it better.

What is it that kind of makes tech marketing engine kind of standout compared to everybody else that's out there? Because I mean, I'm only interviewing a small fraction of marketing companies out there. So what makes you stand out?

[Speaker 1]
I think probably two things. And again, this changes all the time. And you're probably better off asking my customers what they think makes us different.

But what I think makes us different is, number one, all of our services are personalized, whether it's Tech Site Builder, where you personalize it yourself, you go in there and create the website you want. Or most of our other services where we work with you, our blogging service, every month we send you an email and ask you, what topics do your customers care about? What do you want us to talk about?

And then you let us know whether it's very detailed or just a simple, we want to talk cybersecurity, whatever. And then we'll take that. We'll look at how your business is presented.

Are you a professional? Are you kind of laid back and personable? And we'll take that tone and then embed it into your blog posts.

Whereas a lot of other marketing services out there will do something called syndicated content, where they'll write one blog post and then syndicate it out to all of their customers so that they're getting content. Sure, they're getting blog posts on their websites, but it's the same blog post for everybody. So that's a big thing is we try to personalize everything for our customers.

And the second big differentiator, I think, is the fact that we want to offer any help at any level. So whether you're just getting started or whether you've been in business for a while, whether you have a super small budget of only $20 a month, all the way up to thousands of dollars a month, we want to be able to have a service that is right for you. So that's why we have some of these more automated things like Tech Site Builder and Tech Reputation, where you just sign up for it, it gets set up, and then it kind of runs on autopilot after that.

And then you're able to go in and make your own changes if you want to, up to more bespoke services where we'll do everything for you and we'll run everything for you. So we want to have those two sides of the coin so that no matter what level you're at, you can get started and then you can grow with us. And that's what we look for.

Whereas some of our competitors might want you to start with them at thousands of dollars a month to kind of buy into their whole thing. And that's cool. They give you like this whole package and suite of marketing, but that's not right for everybody at every time.

So we want to give you exactly what you need at exactly the right time and then grow from there.

[Speaker 2]
All right. I need to drill down on one of your points. I'm going to put my no marketing Marv hat on and ask you about this content blog newsletter stuff because, first of all, I don't do it.

I'm going to tell you what I think it is, but I thought it was kind of what you said where one blog or one newsletter is written, sent out as either a template or some other form or fashion. And if you wanted to personalize it, you could just insert name here, either at the end, contact for more information or anything like that. Your service, you're actually sending emails out asking what topics and what style.

Now, I'm assuming that there's got to be some sort of selection process to go to a template or something. But how much customization are you actually offering in that?

[Speaker 1]
It's customized to the point where we write it from scratch every time. So we have three writers on our team that will write full blog posts, full newsletters for our customers every month. So it is fully written from scratch.

And so that allows us to take a look at the business, see what they're doing, see what customers they're focusing on. And, for example, we can write a blog post for you about cybersecurity issues that only lawyers face with maybe a specific software that lawyers use that you support for your clients. So we'll dig in deep to very specific topics that relate to only your customers.

And then we also throw in things about your local area, if you want, where you're based out of. And, of course, like I said, the tone. So different businesses strike different tones.

Some businesses like to be very casual and personable and not use a lot of big words or big jargon. But we do have customers who really want to look professional and talk the lingo of high level consultants and that kind of thing. So we really businessify all of our posts for them and talk business speak in it.

And that's really what we try to do with the personalization is really kind of write everything from scratch as if it were being written by the business owner that we're working for.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. So I now have two roads we can travel as follow up to that. One road is I've got to imagine at some point that that's going to be overwhelming and you're just going to have to keep adding writers and writers.

So let me ask the question that has the subject of the year, AI. How much AI are you guys using to help you do this?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it's tempting, right? As a content creation service, it's very tempting to see this this generative AI trend and see all the great, you know, you can ask chat GPT or BARD or whatever they're called now and get them to write a full article. They're writing books, you know, they're writing all this great stuff.

And it's tempting to do that. So the way we use AI is we use it as a planning tool, as an outlining tool sometimes. I actually don't even tell my writers to use it.

They might use it to help generate some parts of their content. But part of it is the reason why we don't use it to create our content is there's an it's the technology is changing so much like now search engines are adding things to their algorithm to be able to parse the AI written content and to be able to flag it or to be able to lower it in their search results. And so, you know, that kind of stuff, there are tools that can look at something that's written and tell if it's written by AI or not.

And so we want to make sure that none of our content is caught in that type of thing. For better or worse. So we encourage our clients to use it as a tool to help them speed up the process of creating content.

But for us, I think because we want our content to be SEO friendly, and we want it to appear as though and it is being written by humans, that we are not using it to generate content for our clients. But we do use it, like I said, as tools to help run other parts of the business to answer questions to, to create outlines to, you know, I'll ask it, you know, what, for an example, like, you know, what are what would be the main points of a blog post written to help IT businesses, you know, figure out the best social media platform to use, and it'll give me a few bullet points. And I'll be like, okay, that's a good bullet point.

That's a good one. I didn't even think about that one. So it's kind of like a brainstorming tool is what I use it as now.

But it is something, you know, to keep an eye on for sure. It's something that I encourage everyone to use to save time. But just keep in mind that as it evolves, all the things around it will evolve.

And especially things like search engines that really want to show the best valued content. First and foremost, you just want to make sure that you're still staying in the good graces of the search engine.

[Speaker 2]
Now, the other path is kind of something you just alluded to. You mentioned, you know, encouraging people to use AI for their own selves. But what about the people that are thinking, you know what, I don't need marketing help.

I'll just go to AI and I'll draft my newsletter. I'll draft my social media content. Is there any danger or benefit, I guess, to somebody trying to do it themselves using AI?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I mean, I can tell you the benefit is to save time, right? And you can let it churn it out for you. I think the danger is that, you know, AI is still not very reliable as far as like the facts, you know, like actual facts of things that you want to present.

And so especially if you're like creating a newsletter that's supposed to educate your customers, you just want to make sure if you do have AI content that you're going through it and, you know, vetting it and making sure that the things that saying are actually true, especially when it comes to like current events and the way, you know, like the latest trends and those kind of things, it often gets those facts wrong or, you know, messes with them and stuff like that.

So just if you are generating AI content for your marketing, just make sure that you're still spending the time to go through it. And then, of course, there are other things like formatting, finding and adding photos, adding links back to helpful content or back to your website, all of those things you still kind of need to do manually. So there's still some work involved, but it can definitely save time as far as just getting the bulk of the content generated for you, especially for things like newsletters where SEO isn't even a factor, right?

Search engines don't look at your newsletter. So that's a way to get a kind of a quick and dirty newsletter out there. Now, kind of where we try to differentiate ourselves or where we try to add the value on top of that is all of the other pieces around that.

So that's why we offer a fully managed newsletter, because we saw that just writing newsletters for folks wasn't super valuable, because, again, that's something you can do yourself. That's something you can get AI to do. But setting up the email marketing service, getting leads into there and segmenting them based on what type of customer or what type of lead they are, and then being able to send different newsletters to different types of customers and scheduling it out and all of that stuff, creating the images and customizing all of that, I think, is where we add our value and what we do as part of our service.

[Speaker 2]
All right. So let's now shift to social media marketing, because I'm hearing that people are claiming that social media marketing is dead. Facebook has changed all their algorithms and LinkedIn, with all of its noise about wanting to create these thought leaders and stuff, that it's becoming this AI cesspool of everybody doing stuff.

Yeah. I guess the first question is, I have to believe that it's still relevant to some degree, right?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. I think a lot of times when people say something is dead, they just mean it's not the new hotness anymore. It's not the leading edge of whatever marketing or getting the word out.

And that's probably true. But I think it's still a tool to have in your arsenal, just like people declared websites were dead 10 years ago because of social media. But people still go to websites.

People still use the web to get information. Social media didn't take that over. So I think social media is just kind of becoming another place where people might go or might not.

Certain platforms, people get tired of or get jaded on. But then there are other people who are either growing up and getting tired of TikTok, and they want to see what Facebook all is about because that's what their parents used. And now they're starting to get a little more serious and they start using it.

So I think there's still opportunities in those platforms, especially, again, if you try to dominate one, like if you focus on one platform, whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or even Instagram or TikTok, those types of things. If you just focus on that and try to be the best at that and find the customers that are looking for your services on that platform, that's usually the best approach versus trying to do them all. And I think that's where people kind of fall short as they try to be on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all that stuff.

And then they'll send out the same post and just blast it across all of the channels and then not engage with people, not answer questions, not do any of that. So it's still relevant. It's just not the new hotness.

And maybe it's fallen a little bit out of favor, but I think it's still a place you need to be with your businesses, even if it's just on one or two of them.

[Speaker 2]
Did any of them get broken because of the hashtag or keyword loading to make them get to the point where people are saying, well, you don't need to put hashtags in because they don't look at hashtags anymore? Is that true?

[Speaker 1]
I think not necessarily. I think it depends on the platform. So X now and yeah, I know the URL is still twitter.com.

So I don't know what I use. So that or Instagram still use hashtags as a way to sort information. So if you're looking for posts on a specific topic and usually who does this is journalists or thought leaders who are trying to find topics or people who are authorities on certain pieces of information.

And so if you hashtag your posts with some of those trending hashtags or hashtags that people might be looking up, then you can get on the radar of journalists or kind of one trend that I see emerging is kind of like many influencers or many thought leaders, people in a super, super narrow niche or people in a super local area geographically will kind of rise in the social media sphere as someone that people listen to and that they follow.

And so if you can get on the radar of someone that's relevant to you, whether it's someone who's hyperlocal to the area where you do service or someone who's in a super specific niche like lawyers or whatever type of industry that you're in. And if you can get on that person's radar, that can really help boost your signal and open you up to a bunch of new customers. And hashtags can help you with that for sure.

[Speaker 2]
All right. Thought you were very gingerly trying to avoid calling me a mini influencer. Definitely are.

[Speaker 1]
You're absolutely an example of a mini influencer. Yes.

[Speaker 2]
All right. So in this marketing craze that we're in, I guess the next question is, you know, what can companies do, whether they're, you know, solo, tax, MSPs, million dollar mansion companies or whatever? What are kind of the trends right now for people to get themselves recognized, stand out?

Is there anything coming down the road that you see we need to start to look at?

[Speaker 1]
Well, I mean, I'll go back to AI, right? I think AI is a big talking point right now. And I think people, the average person is still very confused about what it means and is scared of what it does or excited about what it does.

And I think if you as an IT service provider can frame that in, you know, how you can help your customers, help them implement AI in their business, help them find ways to improve productivity using AI tools that are out there, that can go a long way in, you know, riding the trend. Because not only does that force you as the service provider to learn these tools and understand them for your own business, but then it helps you be able to help your customers, especially business customers who are wondering how they can leverage AI to help their business. And you can be the person who kind of leads the charge and says, oh, hey, you know, you can use AI to automate your chat window on your website to, you know, answer quick questions for your customers and build it into your workflow and help it, you know, make your team more productive and also help, you know, make sure that your team is not slacking off and that they're not just spending five minutes to get an AI prompt that then does all the work for them. So all of that stuff you can provide as a service to your customers because it is part of technology, right?

And it is something that lots of people are talking about and wondering about. So I think as far as services you offer and the way you market your services, including AI in there, definitely can't hurt because it's something that everyone's interested in right now.

[Speaker 2]
All right. And if you had to give somebody like me, somebody who's just starting out in the world of marketing, getting ready to do their first deal, what's probably a good first step we should take?

[Speaker 1]
So just getting started with marketing, I think it goes back to that first question you asked me where what's the biggest problem that or the biggest mistake I see people have, and that's not having a plan. So I think it all starts with just going old school and writing down on a piece of paper or on a Word doc or whatever, create a marketing plan. And usually a marketing plan I like to think of in terms of a marketing funnel that we kind of know about where you have all these people that might know about your business.

How are you going to get their attention? Who do you want to get the attention of? What type of customer do you want?

And then once you understand what type of customer you want, how do you get their attention? What do they care about? What kind of problems are they having?

And then how can you solve those problems? And that's what you put on your website. That's what you start putting in social media and stuff like that.

So identify your target customer. What is their problem? How can you solve it?

And then picking one thing to focus on. So whether it's your website, you say, oh, my website's crap. I haven't looked at it in a while.

Let me focus in on that. And then take what you did through that exercise of your target customer and what they want and make sure your website speaks to that. We service lawyers in Florida and your biggest pain point is, I don't know, regulatory issues.

And here's how we can help with regulatory issues and making sure your data is protected and all of that stuff. Put that on your website. Once that looks good and once that's set, then venture out into LinkedIn and start talking about those problems in LinkedIn and engaging with lawyers in your area.

That's another big thing that I meant to mention in the differentiate category is engaging with other people on social media. So it's one thing to just post a bunch of stuff yourself and say, hey, we're the best IT shop in town. Come work with us.

And it's another thing to see other people in your local area posting about, I passed the bar exam or we added a new attorney as a partner. And then you can say, congratulations. Just jump in there and say, congratulations or that's great.

And then just start from there and then start engaging more. And then maybe you'll see them ask a question or share frustration about technology or something like that. And that's where you can kind of swoop in and start talking about your services.

So that was a long explanation. But who's your target customer? What are their problems?

How you can help them start sprinkling that into your marketing and focus in one area, start engaging with your target customers in that area. And that's what I've seen be the most successful for MSPs as far as getting started in marketing.

[Speaker 2]
All right. So there you have it, folks. So whether you're getting started or whether you've been doing marketing and you are not happy with your results, Matt Rodela is somebody that you can turn to, to see if he can help you out.

And if you are in the DC area at the end of September, or you are looking for a conference to go to, head over to techconunplugged.com and sign up there and you get to see Matt. And he'll go into a lot more detail and explain it in all its richness for you while they're in DC. So Matt, thank you for hanging out.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure, man.

[Speaker 2]
I was sitting here thinking, you know, we've watched you grow from the friendly little neighborhood computer guy to this tech marketing engine juggernaut.

[Speaker 1]
Juggernaut. I like that. I'll have to add that to my marketing.

[Speaker 2]
See, I can help. I can help.

[Speaker 1]
Marketing, juggernaut, learn B. I love it.

[Speaker 2]
All right, folks, there you have it. Matt Rodela, tech marketing engine. Matt, thank you.

That's going to do it, folks, for this quick audio episode. I ask that you tune in to other episodes. If you just happen to come across this because somebody shared the link with you, head over to itbusinesspodcast.com, click one of the pod catchers and get notified whenever we have an episode go live. Or you can head over to any of our social medias and watch us on the Wednesday live show on LinkedIn, YouTube, and the Facebook. I'm still using the social media. So if we are going to do it, folks, Matt, thanks a lot.

And we'll see everybody next time. And until then, Holla!