If you’re like most MSP owners, you didn’t start your business because you love marketing.
You started because you’re good at the tech. You like fixing things. There’s a quiet satisfaction when a difficult ticket is finally closed and the client says, “Brilliant, that’s sorted.”
Then, a few years in, the referrals slow down. The easy wins fade. You realise that if you want to keep growing, you can’t just sit there hoping the next client will magically appear.
So, you start trying a bit of everything. You tweak the website. You set up some Google Ads. You post on LinkedIn when you remember. You might even hire an agency. But nothing feels consistent. Nothing feels like a simple system. Most of the time, it feels like guesswork.
On our scaleUP episode, Paul Green from MSP Marketing Edge summed it up:
- “MSPs are very good technicians … but one of their weakest things is marketing.”
This blog is here to help with that.
Not by turning you into a full‑time marketer. Not by throwing new tactics at you. But by giving you a straightforward way to think about marketing as a system you can actually run, alongside running your MSP.
Imagine we’re sat down with a brew, talking through:
- Why getting new MSP clients naturally takes time
- Why most MSP marketing sounds like it was written for other techs
- How to decide who you really want as a client (and attract more of them)
- How to use AI without ending up with cold, robotic content
- And how to build a small, steady marketing engine that quietly brings you the right conversations over time
Contents:
FREE Download: MSP Marketing That Delivers
Winning new clients takes longer than you think
Let’s start with the hard bit: getting new clients is slow.
You’re not selling a chair or a mouse. You’re asking someone to trust you with all of their computers, files and systems. If that goes wrong, their whole business hurts. So they are careful. Very careful.
Most business owners don’t see what you see. They don’t think about tools, platforms and settings. They think about simple things: “Can we work today?” “Is email up?” “Are the team able to do their jobs?”
When they look at you and their current IT company, they can’t really compare the technical detail. So they go on feeling instead: “Do I feel safer with these people than I do now?” That feeling is what slows everything down.
Paul explained it using his accountant:
- “I’ve been with my accountant for 15 years and I’ve thought of leaving him every year. But it feels difficult to move … It’s the same with MSPs.”
Most of the clients you want already have an IT company. It might be slow and annoying, but at least it’s familiar. Changing feels scary. It feels like more work. And if it goes wrong, they worry they’ll be blamed.
So even when they’re unhappy, many stay where they are for a long time.
You can’t make that fear disappear, but what you can do is make sure that when they finally want to make the change, your name is the one they already know and feel comfortable with.
That’s why short, three-month bursts of marketing usually feel disappointing. Selling IT support is slow by nature. Your marketing must work with that reality, not against it.
See your marketing through the buyer’s eyes
Once you accept that winning new IT support clients is slow, the next step is to look at your marketing the way your buyer does.
Most MSPs don’t do this. They think like technicians choosing another technical supplier. In their head, they’re asking things like, “Which vendors do they use?” and “What tools have they invested in?”.
So that’s what ends up all over the website.
Logos. Badges. Acronyms. Product names.
Inside our world, those things matter. Outside it, most people simply don’t know what they mean.
The person who decides to switch IT provider is usually a managing director, finance director or operations manager. Their day doesn’t start with “How’s our RMM doing?”. It starts with their staff moaning that something isn’t working, a diary full of meetings, and a vague feeling that technology either helps them move forward … or keeps tripping them up.
Paul summed it up perfectly:
- “They just want technology to help, not hold them back.”
Think about a time you changed solicitor, accountant or insurance broker.
They probably threw a lot of technical language at you. You nodded, but you didn’t follow every detail. In the end, you chose based on who felt calm, clear and on your side. Maybe you also looked at price, but feeling safe came first.
Your ideal clients choose an IT support company in exactly the same way.
This is why so much MSP marketing falls flat. It’s written to impress other IT people, not to reassure the non‑technical buyer who is actually making the decision.
A simple test is to stand in their shoes: look at your own website or LinkedIn profile.
Read the first screen as if you’d never heard of managed services in your life.
Does it talk about problems they recognise, like slow systems, worried staff and fear of data loss? Or does it jump straight into your stack, your certifications and how proactive you are?
If you showed your homepage to a sensible friend who doesn’t work in IT, would they understand it? Would they be able to tell you, in plain words, who you help and what changes for those people? Or would they say, “It sounds impressive, but I’m not really sure what you actually do”?
When you start re‑writing with the buyer’s eyes in mind, the tone changes on its own.
You move from being a “Leading IT provider offering managed services and cyber solutions” to “We help businesses in [your area] stop worrying about IT, by keeping things running quietly in the background and stepping in fast when something goes wrong.”
Same work. Same tools. Same team.
But from the outside, it finally sounds like the help they’ve been looking for, not another confusing IT company talking to itself.
Get specific about who you actually want
There’s another big reason MSP marketing feels messy: you’re trying to talk to everyone at once.
One day you’re thinking about manufacturers. The next day it’s charities. Then you’re thinking about co‑managed IT for internal IT teams. By the end of the week, your message has changed three times and nothing really sticks.
From the outside, it just sounds like noise.
The quickest way to calm this down is to decide, in plain words, who you really want as a client. Not a long report. Just one clear sentence.
For example:
“We look after 20–75 person professional services firms in the North West who want IT to ‘just work’ without drama or surprises.”
That kind of sentence becomes your filter.
It helps you choose who to add on LinkedIn. It guides who you talk to at events. It shapes what you write about on your blog. It even nudges how you build your service packages.
Paul’s view on this is very simple:
- “An ideal client profile isn’t a big document that sits on your laptop. It’s a clear sentence you can say in one or two lines.”
Once you’ve written that sentence, think of one or two real clients who fit it and who you actually enjoy working with. Picture them on a normal bad IT day.
Maybe staff can’t log in. Shared folders are a mess. A key system runs slowly right when they need it most. People start saving things on their desktop or personal devices just to get around the problems. Everyone feels stressed and a bit fed up.
Those little details are important. They are what make your marketing feel real.
When you write with those people in mind, your content starts to sound like this:
“I know what it’s like when your team keep getting locked out of systems and end up saving things everywhere just to get through the day. Here’s how we fix that for firms like yours in the North West.”
When you start talking to your audience like this, you’re no longer just an IT company shouting into the void.
You sound like a specialist who understands their world and has seen their exact problems before. That’s when people start to think you’re the right IT company for them, instead of being just another generic provider.
Using AI as a helper, not your marketer
AI is everywhere in the MSP world at the moment. It’s powerful, and in some areas, it will reshape how services are delivered.
But in marketing, it can easily make things worse if you let it lead.
If you ask ChatGPT to write a detailed blog about backups using lots of technical words, it will do it very well.
But it will be so full of computer talk” that only another IT person would want to read it – most normal business owners would get bored and stop.
That’s not a win.
Paul sees this all the time:
- “If you have a technical conversation with AI about backups, it will pump out a 500‑word blog on the technicalities of backups. No normal person on the planet will read that.”
The issue isn’t the tool. It’s the way it’s being used.
Your customers don’t stay up at night thinking about fancy tech words.
They worry about simple things: “What if something breaks and we lose our files?” , “Can we get everything back quickly?” , “What if someone on the team clicks on the wrong thing and we get hacked?”
So AI needs to take its direction from your understanding of those worries, not from technical jargon.
In practice, that means:
- You decide the topic, based on real client pains.
- You decide the angle: a story you saw this week, a mistake you fixed, a pattern you keep seeing.
- You give AI a rough draft, bullet points or a transcript of you talking.
- You tell it who the reader is, in plain terms: “busy MD of a 40‑person firm, not technical, hates jargon.”
Then you let it help you:
- shorten
- simplify
- remove internal language
- turn one idea into a blog, a LinkedIn post and an email
One simple way to use this is to take a single, real pain point and turn it into several small pieces of content.
For example, imagine this happens a lot with your clients:
“Staff keep getting locked out of systems and end up saving files everywhere just to get work done.”
From that one problem, you could create:
- a LinkedIn post that paints the picture and ends with “If this sounds familiar, message me ‘ACCESS’ and I’ll send you the simple fix we use with clients”
- an email with a subject like ‘When staff can’t log in, this is what really happens’, telling the story in a bit more detail and inviting them to reply for your 3‑step checklist
- a short video where you talk for 60–90 seconds about the mess this causes and one or two simple ways you fix it
You bring the real problem and the rough story. AI then helps you tidy the words, keep it plain English, and reshape the same idea into a post, an email and a video script.
Used like this, AI becomes a time saver, not a voice replacement. It helps you say what you already know, more clearly, without turning your marketing into the sort of grey, empty content that all sounds the same.
The simple 3-step plan you can actually stick to
So far, we’ve looked at how your buyers think, who you really want as clients, and how AI can help. Now we need to turn that into something you can do every week without it taking over your life.
You just need a small plan that keeps you in front of the right people, over and over again.
Paul breaks it into three simple jobs:
- “You build audiences, you grow relationships, and then you convert those relationships.”
If you treat your marketing like those three ongoing jobs, instead of one‑off pushes, it gets much easier to manage.
Step 1: Help more of the right people find you
First, you need more of the right people to know you exist. For most MSPs, that’s things like:
- Connecting with the right owners and managers on LinkedIn
- Collecting email addresses from people who have a good reason to hear from you
This doesn’t have to be big or scary.
You could have someone in your team spend ten minutes each day on LinkedIn, finding and connecting with people who look like your ideal clients in your area. No sales pitch. Just a friendly connection.
An easy way to make this happen is to turn these actions into a Coffee Cup Routine. While you (or a team member) drink your first brew of the day, send those 10–20 connection requests, respond to comments and move on. This is something that has been tried and tested by our own Scalable team. Take our word for it, this works.
Over a year, that tiny daily habit quietly builds up a large group of people who have at least seen your name and face before. Some of them will also join your email list when they download something useful from you or ask a question.
That’s “building your audience” in real life.
Step 2: Stay in touch in a calm, helpful way
Once people are in your world, your job changes. You’re not trying to “hunt” them. You’re just staying close enough that they don’t forget you.
That can be as simple as:
- Sending a short email every few weeks with one clear tip or story from your week
- Posting on LinkedIn a couple of times a week about real problems you’re fixing for clients
Different B2B studies show it often takes at least 8–10 digital touch points before someone is ready to reply or book a call. That might sound like a lot, but it adds up quickly when you’re sending simple, regular emails and posts.
Think about the things you see all the time: slow systems, password chaos, people nearly losing data, staff getting stressed because of clunky tech. Each one of those is a story you can share in plain English: Here’s what went wrong. Here’s what we did. Here’s how you can avoid the same thing.
If you keep this going, some people will start to look out for your name. They’ll share the odd thing with a colleague. They’ll feel like they know you a bit, even if you’ve never spoken.
That’s what growing relationships really means. Nothing clever. Just steady, honest contact.
Step 3: Start real chats with the ones who are ready
The last step is turning all that quiet contact into actual conversations.
This is the bit many MSPs skip. They build a following. They send the odd email. But they rarely pick up the phone and talk to anyone until a lead falls in their lap.
Paul suggests something much softer than cold calling: gentle check‑ins.
You don’t have to do these calls yourself. In fact, it often works better if a friendly team member does them. Their job is simply to ring a few people each week who fit your ideal client, have been on your list for a while and have opened or clicked on a few things.
The call can be as simple as:
“We’ve been connected on LinkedIn for a while and you get the odd email from us. I just wanted to say hello, see how things are going, and learn a bit more about your set‑up.”
After they’ve listened for a few minutes, you can gently ask:
“Do you have an IT company you work with at the moment?” and “If you had to rate how happy you are with them out of 10, what number would you pick?”
If someone says nine or ten, they’re happy. You leave it there and keep them on your list.
If they say five, six or seven, they’re telling you there’s a problem. Your team member can listen, take notes, and if it feels right, offer a short call with you to see if you can help.
By the time you sit down with that person, you already know who they are, roughly how big they are, and what’s annoying them about their current provider. It doesn’t feel like a cold sales call. It feels like a grown‑up chat about whether you’re a better fit.
And that’s the whole plan:
- Help more of the right people find you
- Keep in touch in a simple, human way
- Gently talk to the ones who put their hand up, even a little bit
Small steps, done every week, beat big bursts that you drop after a month.
Showing people the real you
Once you’ve got a simple plan for finding people, staying in touch, and starting conversations, it’s very easy to get pulled back into thinking about tools again.
Which CRM should we use? Which email system is best? Which video platform? Which scheduler?
These things matter, but they’re not why a business owner signs your IT support contract instead of the one from the MSP down the road.
When buyers can’t really tell the technical difference, the real tie‑breaker is much simpler: it’s you.
It’s how you talk. It’s what you care about. It’s how your team sounds on the phone when someone rings in a panic. It’s whether you seem calm, straight talking and on their side.
- “The one thing they can’t copy is you.”
Other MSPs can copy your list of services. They can copy your prices. They can even copy bits of your website layout if they want to cut corners.
What they can’t copy is the feeling someone gets after they’ve seen a couple of short videos where you explain tricky topics in plain English. Or the feeling a manager gets when they meet you and think, “This person would really look after us.”
That’s why we encourage MSPs to let more of their real selves show in their marketing.
Use real photos of your team, not stock pictures. Talk about real situations you’ve handled. Record simple, honest videos on your phone where you explain one small problem and how you fix it. You don’t need a studio. You just need to sound like you.
You don’t have to share your whole life. You don’t have to turn into a personal brand. But if everything you put out could have been written or filmed by any other IT company, it’s hard for a buyer to feel any connection to you.
When your simple system and your real personality work together, it becomes much easier for the right prospects to think, “These are our kind of people.”
Protecting the moments that really matter
There’s one last part of MSP marketing that often gets forgotten. It has nothing to do with blogs, videos or AI.
It’s what happens at the exact moment all of that work finally does its job, and someone decides to get in touch.
A new enquiry lands in your inbox. Someone fills in your contact form. The phone rings and it’s not an existing client – it’s a prospect.
In that moment, they’ve moved from “we should do something about IT one day” to “we’re actually going to speak to someone now”.
What happens next tells them a lot about your business.
Do they get through to someone who sounds surprised and a bit unsure what to do? Do they leave a message and wait a couple of days for a call back? Do they get told, “Someone will get back to you,” with no real idea when?
Or do they speak to a calm, friendly person who knows this is important, takes a few details, and books a proper time in your diary so they feel looked after straight away?
Paul shared a simple story that makes the point. His EV charger started tripping his house, so he emailed three electricians. One rang him back within a couple of minutes and booked the job. The other two didn’t reply for nearly a day.
Of course, the fast one got the work.
You’ve probably seen the same in your own life. When you’re ready to sort something out: a car problem, a broken boiler, a house issue – you don’t wait around for the slowest company to respond. You go with the one who seems awake and on it.
Your IT support prospects are no different.
You can spend months building your audience and sharing helpful content. But if you’re slow, messy or confusing when someone finally reaches out, it does more damage than if they’d never heard of you at all. It breaks the feeling of safety you’ve been building.
The good news is, this is one of the easiest things to fix.
Decide who looks after new business calls and emails. Give it to a named person. Make it clear that, within reason, those moments are allowed to interrupt other work, because they are rare and important. Make sure that person can see your diary and book a proper slot with you while they’re still on the phone or waiting on email.
Treat that first contact like a P1 ticket for revenue.
Because in many ways, that’s exactly what it is.
What this looks like in a 10–20 person MSP
Let’s tie this all back to reality.
If you’re running an MSP with around 12 people, you’ve got a decent client base. Most of them came from word of mouth. But over the last year or two, that’s started to slow down. You feel the pressure of wages, tools, rent and your own household bills.
You don’t have a full‑time marketing person. You probably can’t justify one yet. But you know that doing nothing isn’t an option.
Here’s how the ideas in this blog might look if you put them into practice over the next 12–24 months.
You start by writing that one sentence description of your ideal client. It feels almost too simple, but it gives you something concrete to aim at.
You then look at your website and LinkedIn profile with fresh eyes. You strip out some of the jargon. You make sure the opening lines talk about the sorts of days your ideal client is having, not the tools you’re proud of.
Next, you set up a light rhythm:
- Every weekday, someone on your team spends ten minutes connecting with the right kinds of people on LinkedIn.
- Every fortnight, you jot down a short story from your week and you let AI help you turn it into a blog or email in plain English.
- Once a week, a team member calls a handful of people from your audience list, just to say hello and quietly gauge how happy they are with their current IT support.
You don’t try to do everything at once. You don’t spin up six channels and then collapse. You pick a steady pace you can actually maintain.
The first few months may feel underwhelming. You won’t suddenly have ten new deals on the table. But, slowly, something starts to shift:
- More of the right people start replying to your emails.
- Conversations on LinkedIn feel warmer.
- Your team member begins to hear more sixes and sevens when they ask that 1–10 question.
By the time you’re a year or so in, you notice that first call where someone says, “We’ve been getting your stuff for a while, and it feels like you understand the issues we’ve got. Can we talk?”
That’s not a lucky one‑off. That’s exactly what this approach is designed to create.
And as long as you keep the rhythm going, building your audience, staying visible, and protecting those key moments when people do reach out, that trickle can turn into a reliable flow.
FREE Download: MSP Marketing That Delivers
-
Turn Random Marketing Into a Simple Weekly Rhythm
Swap one‑off bursts for a calm, three‑step system of building your audience, staying in touch and gently starting real conversations with the right firms. -
Talk to Buyers, Not Other Techs
Learn how to strip out jargon, focus on the bad IT days your MDs and FDs actually feel, and make your website, LinkedIn and emails sound clear, human and reassuring. -
Use AI to Save Time, Not Kill Your Voice
See how to feed AI real client stories and worries so it tidies and repurposes your words, instead of churning out cold, technical content no business owner will ever read.
scaleUP Podcast: Listen to the Full Episode
If this blog landed with you, it’s worth hearing the full scaleUP conversation with Paul Green.
In the episode, Paul and Darren go deeper into:
- Why MSP sales are naturally slow (and what to do about it)
- How to see your marketing through the buyer’s eyes
- Simple ways to define your ideal client and talk directly to them
- How Paul uses AI to tidy and simplify content
If you’re serious about getting more of the right clients without random, stop‑start marketing, it’s a very practical watch.
