Was your marketing as bad as mine was in 2005?

Back in 2005, I started my first business. I was still working full-time running a radio station. So was ducking out to make furtive sales calls during the day, then doing most of the work from my spare bedroom in the evenings.

Ahhh... how much spare time you have before children come along...

The business I started was a PR agency, public relations. It morphed over several years into a general marketing agency, and really took off when I focused on three specific healthcare sectors.

I have an old external hard drive packed with marketing from back in the day.

Man, my marketing was weak back then.

I'm serious. I look back now at what I did in the first few years, and realise there was very little strategy behind it. I was doing the kind of marketing lots of business owners do... a random bit here, a random bit there, see what works.

Driven by the need for cash, rather than implementing a strategy.

Here's an example. I sent out thousands of these flyers to local businesses...

That was an expensive and pointless exercise. From memory it didn't even pay for itself.

Everything changed in about 2010. I realised that I was putting in a lot of marketing effort for very little return.

But I was meeting people who were very successful, because they were great at marketing.

What made them different? I wanted to find out. So started going to marketing seminars. Dedicated my evenings to learning. Analysed marketing that I knew was working.

And soon realised what my fatal mistake had been - I was doing one step marketing.

What's that? It's where you have just one step in the marketing process.

Get someone's attention -> ask them to buy something

I realised that the more robust strategy was to have two step marketing.

Get someone's attention -> build a relationship with them -> ask them to buy something

The beauty of two step marketing is that you have multiple bites at the apple. You can start talking to someone today, but they might not be ready to buy today.

With one step marketing the conversation is over.

With two step marketing you can continue the conversation for years... until the exact day they are ready to buy.

And that's when the relationship building really pays off, as you have first place at the table.

That was a real epiphany for me. I wrote my first book, and started to build a database of prospects (so I could build a relationship with them).

This is the cover of that first book...

I went on to build a database of 12,000 prospects, which allowed to me massively grow, then ultimately sell the business in 2016.

Over the last two decades I've learned an enormous amount about marketing, by getting my hands dirty and doing it. Obviously I still make mistakes and have misfires (I think you learn more from those, than from your successes).

But at the heart of any marketing I do today, sits that same marketing strategy. Over the years I've simplified it and refined into my easy 3 step lead generation system.

I use it for my own marketing. I advise MSPs to use it as their marketing strategy. And I've built the MSP Marketing Edge around helping MSPs to implement it...

• Build audiences
• Grow relationships
• Convert relationships

Is your MSP's marketing driven by a powerful strategy like this? Or are you still doing the "random bit here, a random bit there" kind of marketing?