Most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re just burning through their time. Let’s discuss how to change that. Also this week, many MSPs use AI badly for marketing, and it costs MSPs 5 figures to win a new client.

Welcome to Episode 329 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Marketing tasks MSP owners should NEVER touch

You’d be mad to do all of your MSPs marketing yourself, and if that sentence annoys you a little, there’s a good chance that you are exactly the person who needs to hear it. Because most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re burning the one resource they can never replace… their time. Right now, I want to talk about which marketing jobs you absolutely should outsource, which ones you must keep ownership of, and how to focus your limited time on the activities that deliver the biggest return.

So let’s talk about time, because for MSP owners and managers, time is the real bottleneck. You don’t have a lack of ideas, you don’t have a lack of tools, you don’t even have a lack of willingness. What you have is too many things competing for your attention. And marketing is often the thing that’s squeezed into the cracks between the tickets, the meetings, and the client fires.

The goal of marketing isn’t for you to do more, it’s for you to do less of the wrong things and more of the right things.

And here’s the core principle that I want you to adopt. You should outsource anything that someone else could be trained to do well, and you should keep ownership of anything that requires judgement, direction and deep understanding of your business. Most MSPs get this completely backwards. They clinging very tightly to low value tasks and then outsource high level thinking, which is absolute madness, right?

Let’s start with what you should almost always outsource. Anything repetitive. Anything admin heavy. Anything that’s process driven, things like loading social media posts, scheduling blogs, uploading videos, formatting newsletters, whether that’s email or print making, LinkedIn connection requests, cleaning lists, basic CRM updates, repurposing content, chasing webinar registrations, creating transcripts and pulling simple reports. None of those tasks that I was just mentioning require you. They just require instructions. They require an SOP. If someone can be trained to do it once, they can be trained to do it again and again and again.

And every hour you spend doing those things is an hour you are not spending on strategy, leadership, relationships or growth. Now let’s talk about what you absolutely should not outsource. You should never outsource ownership of your marketing direction. You should never outsource deciding who you are targeting, what you stand for, what message you want to be known for or what success looks like. You shouldn’t outsource thinking, you shouldn’t outsource high level decision making, and you definitely should not outsource responsibility. Strategy for your marketing lives with you, direction lives with you, and accountability lives with you. Even if you have a marketing agency, a virtual assistant, a marketing assistant, or even if you have a content team, they should be executing your thinking and not replacing it. Because trust me on this, no one else in the entire world understands your MSP, your clients, your ambition, your risk tolerance, the way that you do.

Many MSPs say, Oh, I haven’t got time for marketing, and what they really mean is, I don’t have time to do admin marketing tasks. But the high ROI marketing doesn’t look like admin, it looks like deciding where you want to focus. I...

People do not buy features, they buy benefits… many MSP’s know this but very few actually live it in their marketing, here’s how to change that. Also this week, is your MSP’s expertise hiding in plain sight? And how much is your MSP really worth?

Welcome to Episode 328 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The most common MSP marketing mistake

There’s a basic marketing mistake that the vast majority of MSPs make. In fact, once you know what it is, you’re going to see it everywhere. It’s going to drive you crazy, you’ll see it on your website, on your LinkedIn, on your other marketing channels. But the good news is I can help you to spot it and fix it in the next five minutes.

We are diving into one of the most fundamental principles in all of marketing. People do not buy features, they buy benefits. Now, every MSP has heard this, but very few actually live it in their marketing. And the reason this matters so much is because features and benefits land completely differently in our brains.

A feature is normally processed logically, it engages the analytical part of the mind that loves detail but really doesn’t like to make decisions. Whereas a benefit is processed emotionally and hits the part of our heart and also the brain that drives action, that imagines outcomes, that feels relief, confidence and safety. And here’s the uncomfortable truth…

All buying decisions made by ordinary business owners and managers start emotionally. People only use logic afterwards to justify what they already wanted.

So features live in the logical world. Benefits live in the emotional world. When you talk about features, you are speaking to the wrong part of the brain… you’re speaking to the part of the brain that doesn’t buy. But when you talk about benefits, you’re speaking directly to the part of the brain that says yes. And this is why when MSPs proudly list their features – 24/7 monitoring, remote support, patching, ticket automation, all of that stuff – prospects kind of nod politely, but they’re kind of glazing over and they feel nothing. It’s like listing ingredients instead of actually showing the finished meal, it’s like describing the different parts of the engine rather than describing the feeling of driving the car.

So benefits create pictures in people’s minds and they let the prospect imagine what life will be like when they’re working with you. And you do know that imagination is one of the strongest decision-making tools that humans possess, right? Let’s make this real. When you say “24/7 monitoring”, that’s just a mechanism, it doesn’t actually mean anything to a normal business owner. But if you say to them, Hey, we spot problems early which means fewer business disruptions, then suddenly that becomes something tangible that they can feel.

They can imagine a calmer working day, systems just running and fewer surprises, and that is a benefit. When you say “remote support”, again, that’s just a mechanism. But if you say, Hey, we can fix issues really quickly without downtime and you don’t even need to wait for us to arrive, that becomes a benefit because that sends a message of speed and convenience and continuity. When you say “regular patching and updates”, they’re yawning because you’re naming a process. But if you say, Hey, look, so your security stays strong with zero effort from your team, you guys don’t have to do anything, that’s a benefit and it speaks of safety and ease and peace of mind.

So features describe what something is, whereas benefits describe what something does. That’s the big difference between the two. Features force the prospect to translate what you’ve said in their brain into some kind of emotional meaning, whereas benefits you’ve alre...

Breaking into a new vertical is one of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, here’s how to get started. Also this week, why MSPs are terrified of guarantees, and the huge AI revenue opportunity for MSPs.

Welcome to Episode 327 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

No vertical for your MSP? That’s a mistake

One of the smartest marketing decisions you can make for your MSP, is choosing to break into a new vertical. Because marketing to a vertical is easier, more effective, and ultimately more profitable. A lot more profitable. And a lot of MSPs want this, but they don’t know where to get started. So let’s talk right now about how to enter any vertical you like and get traction quickly and easily.

Choosing to work in a vertical is like switching from a megaphone over to a sniper rifle. Most MSPs marketing sends a pretty generic message, something like, We help businesses of all sizes, any kind of business, with their IT, which is very lovely and friendly but also utterly forgettable. Vertical focus marketing says, We help dental practices eliminate downtime, secure patient records, and keep imaging systems running smoothly, and suddenly with a message like that you are relevant, you are specific, and you sound like someone who understands that exact person that you are talking to. The thing is that humans, we respond to familiarity. Prospects respond to relevance. Marketing responds to focus.

When you pick a vertical, your story becomes sharper, your audience becomes easier to find, your content becomes dramatically better, your conversion rates jump, and you instantly differentiate from every generalist MSP around you.

This is especially true in professions like accountants, lawyers, dentists (like I was just saying), medical clinics and manufacturers. These groups all share similar software compliance concerns, workflows, frustrations, and even buying psychology. This is marketing heaven, but how do you actually break into one? Let’s get into the practical stuff. There are three phases to entering a vertical. First, understand the vertical. Next, build the assets and the messaging. And then thirdly, build the audience.

So let’s do phase one, understanding the vertical. This is kind of like the homework phase and it’s also where most MSPs skip straight ahead to the marketing and you kind of miss out on all the prep work. So please do do this bit. To break into a new vertical, you must first understand the software that they use, the regulations that they’re bound by and maybe even that they fear, and the workflows that frustrate them. You’ve got to understand the downtime disasters that could ruin their day, the KPIs that they care about, the conferences they attend, the associations that they belong to, the influencers they listen to and the language they use. If you talk their language, even just 70% of it, you instantly feel to them like your one of them. And no, you don’t need decades of experience in their vertical. You just need curiosity, a bit of research, a handful of conversations, and the ability to turn what you’ve learned, your insight, into content for them and to adapt your conversations to take all of it into account.

Once you understand their world, you are ready for phase two, which is building up your assets and your messaging. And the question I always get from MSPs on this is, Paul, should I have a page on my website or should I have a whole separate website? Well, my recommendation for this is to start simple. So yes, you begin with a single vertical specific page on your main website. Don’t go building 17 new websites before you even know whether or not the vertical is going to respond to you. So your vertical page on your existing site should inc...