Writing The ONE Piece Of Content That Generates MSP Leads

Case studies are the single most powerful piece of marketing in an MSP’s toolbelt, here’s how to get started. Also this week, is it ever a good idea to rebrand your MSP? And, you can’t grow your MSP until you’ve got solid leadership (even if it’s just you and a tech). Welcome to Episode 357 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge. How to write a case study that makes prospects salivate If a prospect said to you right now, “Go on, send me a case study about your MSP,” what would you send them? Do you have just a simple paragraph on your website that’s actually a testimonial wrapped up as a case study that’s just a client logo and a quote saying, “Great service would recommend?” That’s not a case study. A case study is a proper story that takes a prospect on a journey. When they’re reading it or watching it they’re feeling and thinking, “That’s exactly my situation. This is the IT support company that I should be talking to and hiring.” Well, today I want to show you how to write that second kind, because done properly, a case study is one of the most powerful sales tools your MSP will ever have. Let’s start by looking at why most MSP case studies are useless. And most MSPs either don’t have case studies at all, or if they do have something it’s so vague and generic it could have been written by anyone about anyone. If yours looks something like this, “We helped a local business to improve their IT infrastructure and reduce downtime”, well, that tells the prospect nothing at all. And the problem you’ve got there is you’ve written that case study from your own perspective. It’s about what you did technically rather than looking at everything from the client’s perspective. And the client cares about the problem they had, how it felt when the solution came in, and what changed, what got better, what the results were. A case study is not a description of services, and it’s not a boast of how clever you are technically. A good case study tells a story. Stories only work when they make the person who’s reading it, or watching it if it’s a video, it only works if it makes them feel something. You think about every book that you’ve ever loved, every movie that you left the cinema thinking, “Oh, that was just amazing.” None of those started with a list of features of things they were going to do in the film. They started with a character that you could relate to, and that character was in a situation that you recognised and they’ve got a problem that made you feel something. The best stories move us emotionally. And do you know what? Case studies work exactly the same way, which is kind of weird when you think about it because it’s only marketing. But when you’re talking to ordinary business owners and managers, even when you’re talking to IT directors for co-managed IT, you’re looking to move them emotionally. The MSP who can emotionally move the prospect is dramatically more likely to win that prospect. Let’s first of all address a big problem that a lot of MSPs throw up to me, and that is the issue of confidentiality. “But Paul, what if I lay out all of the details about my client and bad actors out there can use those details to attack our client, to pretend to be us?” I get this, I understand it, and I think this is a unique thing within managed services within the channel. It is a real fear, but it is your fear and not your client’s fear. The most common reason that MSPs don’t have proper case studies is that they’re too worried about naming clients publicly and giving details that will be out there. The reality is that that worry almost always belongs to you and not the client. And most happy clients are not just doing case studies with you, they are doing them with lots of other suppliers as well. Most clients are g...