Thank you to YouTube Ads specialist Ben Jones, for joining me to talk about how MSPs can use YouTube ads to grow their businesses.

Benjamin is a serial entrepreneur and international keynote speaker. He’s the co-founder of Titan Marketer, which has helped a wide range of businesses generate millions of dollars in sales with YouTube Advertising. He also founded Youth In Business, which helps kids start and scale businesses that make sales in less than a week. Benjamin’s passion is enhancing youth entrepreneurship and helping businesses scale with YouTube Ads.

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben09/

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

Paul. Paul Greens, MSP Marketing podcast going to start this week by talking about something which affects a surprising number of MSP owners. And although there is a little bit of talk about it within the channel, it’s not something that really is as high priority as it should be. And that is, of course, how we are doing. And I mean our mental health, I mean our physical health and just how we’re doing as people. You think about it, the world that we’re in, and I don’t mean the big world, I mean the channel. It’s a very male, heavy sector. There’s lots and lots of men, and men are typically, not always, but often they’re not very good talking about their feelings. They’re not very good talking about when they’re not doing so well or when they’re exhausted or when they’re tired. There’s still a bit of a macho I can power through. There’s blood coming out my ears, but I can power through. So there’s that. And then there’s just the very nature of tech, and tech itself is unbelievably busy. And there’s so much change and there’s just huge amounts of activity. And I know you as an MSP, you’re used to huge amounts of information being dumped on you every single day, right? There’s just so much coming in and so much that you have to do. And I think you get to kind of this time of the year where it’s been a couple of months since Christmas. So you may have just thrown yourself into 2024, and you may not have realized that actually you probably need a break because it has been a couple of months and maybe you’re starting to feel a little bit stressed. The problem is, the real issue is actually recognizing that stress in the first place. At what point do you realize that actually you’re feeling anxious a lot of the time do you ever do this? Do you ever sort of stop or maybe lay in bed at night and just think about your mental state and lie there and analyze, how am I feeling? That sounds a bit hippie, but actually, the older I get, the more cool this stuff is to me. Do you ever lie there and think, how am I feeling? How was today? Was today a good day? Was it a bad day? Do I feel okay? Do I feel good? Do I feel anxious? How do I feel? And it’s not just that kind of feeling. We can actually spot, if we’re aware of it, we can spot symptoms of stress by the very behaviors that we are exhibiting. For example, I’ll give you a common one for me, too much coffee. Now, I love my coffee. I have black Americanos. I love most coffees, apart from those really bitter little espressoes. And on a normal day, I’ll have two or three coffees. And then in the afternoon, I’ll move on to sort of herbal teas and hippie stuff like that. And I know I am a little more stressed than normal. If I find myself drinking coffee in the afternoon, guess what? When I’m drinking coffee in the afternoon, that then affects my sleep, and then that lack of sleep causes me to have more coffee the next day. So it’s kind of an evil loop of feedback like that. And you have to be very careful of that. Another one. For me, as well as coffee, is alcohol. Now, I don’t drink a huge amount of alcohol. I have, well, I was about to say a reasonable and normal amount of alcohol. What’s normal? It’s certainly not what you tell your doctor, is it? We all tell our doctor we drink a little bit less than we actually do. But again, if I’m a little bit stressed, if I’m more tired than usual, if my body or my mind are not quite as good as they could be, I will find myself drinking more alcohol. It’s the same as the coffee. Well, I guess I’m trying to counteract the two maybe, and I will just find it’s easier to have just another glass of wine. Or maybe I’ll just have a beer on a Tuesday night. Well, that’s not how it should be. Certainly that’s not how I choose for it to be for me. So for me, it’s a warning sign that I need a break, that I’m stressed, that I’m tired. And then you can kind of go into the more obvious symptoms, such as paranoia, just thinking bad things, catching yourself having bad thoughts, or your sleep being disrupted. In some way, and even getting up to go to the toilet two or three times in the night, unless that is normal for you. For me, that’s not normal. I might get up once in the night some nights not quite of that age yet where I have to be up every night. But I know if I wake up two or three times or I can’t go to sleep or I can’t wake up in the morning, that kind of bad quality of sleep, or if I wake up tired, all of that, that bad quality of sleep is actually indicative of stuff that’s happened during the day. And if that happens two or three nights in a row, I recognize that as a symptom, a symptom of stress. And I think you can throw another one in there, which is just poor judgment. If you find yourself either not able to make a decision or making decisions that you later reverse, or you’re second guessing yourself or your team say to you, that’s not quite, we don’t think you’ve quite made the right call there, boss. All of these can be symptoms that you need a break, that you’re stressed, that you’re not looking after yourself. And this is a key thing that we’ve got to look after ourselves. We’re not getting any younger, you and me. I hit 50 this year. In the summer, I’m going to be 50 now. That’s terrifying, right? Because my 40s have gone just like that. And my 40s have been quite a challenging decade for a number of different reasons that I’ll tell you about in the podcast at some point in the future when I’m ready to talk about some of the stuff, some of the cool things and not so cool things that have happened in my 40s. Maybe I’ll have a 50th birthday special for that, maybe not, we’ll see. But the point is, you have to look after yourself, because the older you get, yeah, sure, the wiser you get, the more experience you get, but the more tired you get. This gets fatigued, this being your brain, your body gets fatigued more. And you have to remember, core fundamental of being a business owner is that the business is there for you and not the other way around. Let me say that again, because that’s kind of stupidly important. The business is there for you and not the other way around. And at the beginning, when we first become business owners, we forget this, don’t we? Well, or we place it to one side, because actually the business needs everything we have to give ourselves to the business in order to make sure the business gets through those first difficult couple of years. And the problem is we get into a mindset and a way of working that is not healthy at all. And so month after month after month after month, we are there for the business rather than the business being there for us. Well, that’s not a very sustainable situation. That’s a situation that ends in a stroke or a heart attack. And I don’t say that flippantly. That’s a genuine threat to you as a business owner is to be found slumped over your desk one morning by your team. And you’re not coming back from that if you get the idea. So we’ve got to look after ourselves. There’s a number of things that we have to do. First of all, you have to watch out for those kind of symptoms. You need to be hyper aware of your own body and of your own mind. And you kind of already probably are aware when things aren’t quite right. But the difference is, and maybe today is a line, and you can draw a line and do this differently after today, but the difference is you need to act on that. If you know your brain is tired or your body is tired or you find yourself procrastinating, that was another symptom. I meant to mention procrastination. For me, massive procrastination is a symptom of tiredness, that I need a break. So if you’ve got some symptoms and you know you’re mentally or physically tired, take a break, right? I know you’ve got that migration and I know you’ve got those new users and you need to onboard that new client and you’ve got the new staff. But you know what? Take a break. Just take a few hours off, go for a walk, go to the cinema are, go and hang out with some friends, buy a dog, steal a dog, take your dog for a walk, go and hang out with the other half for a bit, play with your kids for a few hours. You can always do that job that things needs to be done tomorrow. It’s very hard for us as business owners to be realistic about what we can do, but we’ve got to do that, especially as we get older and we get more tired. We’ve got to prioritize, we’ve got to be realistic. And the number one thing that you need to do is you need to look after yourself. This is not the job of your other half. This is not the job of your business partner. This is not the job of your staff or your kids. The number one job of you is to look after yourself. And you know what? Actually, your business will thrive better in the long term the more that you look after yourself. Because without you, how can the business rely on you? It can’t. You’ve got to look after yourself before you look after the business.

Here’s this week’s clever idea.

Here’s a little sales scenario that I bet you have been through, and I bet that you have experienced the exact emotions that I’m about to talk about. So you’ve got this lead, and this lead turns into a prospect. You start having a conversation with them. Every single question that you ask them, the answers are amazing. They’ve got the right number of users, they’ve got the right attitude to technology, they’re the kind of business that you want to work with. You like your principal contact, you put together a proposal. The package seems right, the price seems right, everything seems right. You’re going to do this. You and your new clients are going to get together and you’re going to stay together for 20 years.

And then they call you one day and they say, yeah, so we’ve decided to. And it’s either stay with their incumbent or it’s go with someone else. And you’re genuinely gobsmacked. I mean, like, properly, utterly. What? How? You know, like when you met that girl or that boy, whichever it was back in the day, and you utterly fell in love and you were convinced that you guys were going to get married and then one day they ended it. And it’s that similar kind of. It’s like being punched in the face repeatedly by Rocky in the 1980s. And Rambo. Rocky and Rambo both having a go at you and you genuinely. You’re shocked by it. It’s a complete shock. It’s that exact same thing.

Have you experienced this? If you haven’t experienced this yet, I promise you it will happen to you. Not necessarily in love, but definitely in business. Sometimes we meet people that seem to be the perfect match for us. They are the ones, the ones to come and join us, to be our new flagship clients. And for some reason they say no. Here’s the thing. I want you to get it really clear in your head, well, partly in your head, but more in your heart, that just because someone says no today, they don’t mean no forever. That this is not dating advice, but it is business sales advice. You see that super hot prospect that you’ve formed that great relationship with. You feel so close to them, it feels like it could happen. They say no to you today. The thing is, in a couple of years time, they could be back. Because what if they have stayed with their incumbent? People stay with their incumbent MSP through fear. They don’t know what they don’t know about technology and all of the world that we live in, the technology world we live in. So sometimes it feels safer for them to stay with their incumbent than to move over to someone new. They may dislike their incumbent and not be satisfied and have noticed the service levels have dropped and the prices have gone up and they’re unhappy. But at least they know them. They know that the incumbent haven’t and probably won’t do damage to their business and to their technology. And they may like you better and the price may be right and the package may be right, but you’re still a devil they don’t know. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, right? This is how people think. Or actually, it’s more how they act. So they stay with their incumbent. They have massive trauma about it, but they stay with their incumbent. Now, you and I both know they are going to leave that incumbent at some point, right? So unless that incumbent completely changes their business and essentially rewinds that client, they are going to leave at the end of the next contract or the one after that. We’ll come back onto how you can make sure you’re there in a second. What about if someone says no and goes with one of your competitors? Maybe they’ve made the right choice. Maybe one of your competitors is a better fit. Maybe they’ve made the wrong choice. You’re good at what you do, right? By the way, this is the point. You should be Hail marrying at the podcast. You should be like, hell yeah. We are brilliant at what we do. You’re good at what you do, right? Yes. Then don’t you owe it to the business owners of your town or your vertical or your niche? Don’t you owe it to them to make sure they pick you and they don’t make a mistake and they pick a competitor? Yes, you do. You owe it to them. You mustn’t let them go off and make the wrong choice. But sometimes they will. So in each of these scenarios, and any other scenario where a really hot prospect that you thought was yours has gone off to somewhere else, you must never take no as no forever. It is simply no. Today we get a bit wounded, don’t we? As business owners, we take it personally when someone doesn’t pick our business or when someone leaves us, whether that’s staff or whether that’s clients.

We do we see it as not just them doing business, we see it that they’ve rejected us. And particularly if you’re male, the fragile male ego doesn’t like that, doesn’t like rejection, doesn’t like the thought that someone might leave you. It’s horrible when your staff do it, unless you want that staff member to leave. But it’s kind of worse when a client does it because it’s the ultimate rejection, especially if you’ve been doing what you think is a good job. And it’s the same when a prospect says no. The inclination is to push them away and say, well, screw you then. If you don’t want to work with us, we don’t want to work with you. That’s the wrong attitude. Here’s what you want to do. You want to look at that person as someone who has made a terrible mistake. They have stayed with their incumbent, or they have moved to one of your competitors or whatever they have done. And now it is your job to rescue them from that bad mistake. And the way you rescue them is through the power of marketing. You keep following them up. You keep them on your email newsletter to you, stay in touch with them through LinkedIn. You drop them emails now and again. You might just pick up the phone now and again just to have a chat. You send them stuff in the post. It could be your printed newsletter, which is a really cool thing. Or you could just now and again find something that you think, oh, XYz prospect who nearly signed up with me would find that interesting. I’m going to print that off, write a little handwritten note on it and send it to them in the post. Because that, believe me, is going to stand out more than anything else. You find out when they are next going to be doing a review. And if you don’t know, it’s probably 1224 or 36 months after the last time you spoke to them or the last time they started that process. You stay in touch with them and you make sure that when that review comes up, you have such a good relationship. In fact, your relationship has got even stronger over the last couple of years. The relationship is so strong that you get yourself a place at the table again. Will you win that sale? Maybe. Maybe not. Will all of them come over to you? Of course they won’t. You can’t win all of the prospects over all of the time. But you know what? You will win more of them by being mature, having a mature relationship, and never, ever stopping with your follow up. Making sure you keep marketing to these people until they make the smart choice eventually to choose you. Paul’s Paul’s blatant plug latent plug. I’m just wondering, are you and I connected on LinkedIn? Because if we’re not, let’s connect. I’m connected to about 8000 MSPs right now. I’ve got just under 9000 that are following me and I put out all sorts of useful content on there. Stuff that enhances the podcast. Do a particularly good LinkedIn newsletter every single Thursday. If you want to connect, you can actually kind of google it. Just Google LinkedIn. Paul Green, MSP Marketing edge and it’s me that comes up as the first result. Google LinkedIn. Paul Green, MSP Marketing Edge big interview.

YouTube has just been a phenomenal growth story. It’s only been around was it 19 years this year. So how have you seen in the years you’ve been working on YouTube, how have you seen it grow and change and adapt?

There might be, let’s say, 50 MSPs in a small city trying to attract the same kind of business. There’s plenty of business for everyone. But in terms of Google searches, obviously there’s only two or three ads that appear. The cost per click is huge, and you have to deal with a lot of noise. A lot of people with cracked iPad screens who just aren’t reading the advert, but they’re clicking on the link costing you 20 $30 US dollars and then sort of inquiring to you and wasting your time. So with YouTube, is that a similar position that you’re going to be paying a very high price per click or do the targeting tools make it actually easier to avoid the wastage?

So, for example, you might say, hey, look, have you got a cybersecurity issue? Here’s two or three things that you could probably do that would help. And if you’d like to know more, click here. That might be the overall or here’s three cybersecurity risks you didn’t know that you had. You could probably do that one a bit better, or whatever the thing is that people need help with. So once you found out, what’s your ad going to be about, the first thing that you want to do is the hook. So that’s the first part of your ad. Now that covers the first 5 seconds. So if I’m watching YouTube and I’ve got 5 seconds to skip, that’s exactly where your hook wants to go. So best type of hook that we found is a rhetorical question where people say, yes. Okay, so, for example, are you sick of burning money on Facebook ads?

And you probably want two types. You probably want the next person that gets how long. So probably about two and a half minutes is a good place to start testing. Once you’ve got your messaging and an ad that works, you can probably shoot like a vertical ad and do like an under a minute ad in YouTube shorts and stuff. But I would just start with a horizontal ad, about two and a half minutes in that format and you’ll be good to go.

And we’re recording this interview in November last year just to set some context, because I’m sure it had been replaced by now. But I keep seeing one for a Pixel phone on Google, like the new Pixel eight or something, and it’s got like a face replace where if you take a photo of someone and they’re looking like that, it actually takes several photos and you can replace their face. And that’s okay. Except I see all the time, it seems to come up before every single video. And I know that Google’s essentially getting free advertising because it’s advertising its own phone on its own platform. But that just annoys me because I’d like to see different versions of that advert. I’m seeing the same advert every single night. But the other one that really annoys me is an advert for a company called Gong. And I know that Gong is like Monday. So it’s like a project management collaboration type software. The only reason I know this is because I had to google it to see what they do because the advert is a bunch of people’s backs hitting gongs. That’s it. And it’s like a four or five second pre roll advert and it’s like Gong, gong, gong Gong Gong IO or Gong.com or whatever it is. And I must have watched the advert four or five times before thinking, what the hell is this?

What is this service? What am I watching? Versus. I remember the adverts I used to see for Monday probably about a year ago, which as I say, is a competitor, very well funded VC backed competitor. And they went jump straight into if work is complicated, we make it simple, or whatever their value message was. And the two approaches couldn’t be completely different.

I understand how business owners, or how even advertising agencies get lost in that because they get so caught up in all the things we’re trying to say and standing out and doing something amazing visually. Do you find that business owners find it very hard to create adverts for their own business because they’re too close to it? Or actually, is that just a bad example? That happened to be on my YouTube, yeah.

The ad that we’re looking for here is a skippable ad. So if you don’t like it, you can skip it in 5 seconds. So that’s an important difference.

And I think the problem that a lot of big corporates have is they try and treat YouTube like tv and it’s not, and they haven’t figured that out. Um, anyway, so that’s one, the other thing would be in terms of the messaging, I think Monday you can go have a look at some of those ads. That’s a really great example. They have some really cool ads. They are a bit more studio like, top end, but the messaging and the way they do their scripting is quite clever. Right. And you’ll find if you sort of dissect their ads a little, they’ll have a similar format, they’ll have a hook, like you said at the beginning, and then they’ll go into a value proposition of how they can help them, what their software does. And if you’re interested, click here to find out more. Right. So it’s the same deal, like have an ad that actually helps people who are experiencing a problem and deliver them value in the ad. And your ad, they’re going to convert way better than some guy just hitting a gong all day long. Right?

And that just comes back to having that four parts that I spoke about earlier. So if you can nail that, like have a value based ad, you’re going to do way better than someone who just has some ridiculous, stupid corporate ad.