Short Summary: MSP marketing often fails for seven core reasons: trying to appeal to everyone instead of someone, zero differentiation from every competitor, inconsistent execution, valuing only “buy now” buyers, broken sales follow-up, ignoring the math and starting with the media before you have the market and message dialed in. Fix these seven things in your MSP and you’ll turn your marketing failures into a system that consistently produces profitable new managed services clients.
Most MSP marketing fails, producing zero leads, zero opportunities, zero new clients and/or grossly insufficient ROI – yet it’s not for the reasons most MSP owners think.
It mostly fails because the majority of MSP owners have zero direct sales and marketing experience and therefore grossly underestimate the difficulty of the task of attracting new managed clients. This causes them to fall waaaaay short of doing the necessary preparation, planning, groundwork, research and investment required to get a productive client attraction plan in place.
Here’s what actually goes wrong more often than not.
It tries to appeal to everyone (which means it appeals to no one).
IT services aren’t like a bathrobe – one size does NOT fit all. When an MSP advertises, “We’re the BEST at IT support,” they fail to understand that there is no “best” that covers all situations and clients.
To succeed in marketing, you have to decide, in advance, who you specifically want as a customer so that you can target your message, offer and media strategy to talk directly to that customer. Not “small businesses.” Not “companies with 10 to 100 employees within a 30-mile radius of our office.”
Are you the best at IT support for someone on a tight budget? With compliance needs? With remote offices and employees? With a big staff? Small staff? You can’t be the “best” for everyone – so make sure your MSP marketing efforts and communications are designed for a specific type of client and then make that abundantly clear in ALL marketing communications so that your ideal client immediately connects with you.
It falls into the “me too” marketing trap.
Here’s a question I want you to answer honestly: If I removed the logo from your website and replaced it with your competitor’s, would anyone be able to tell the difference?
For 95% of the MSPs I’ve worked with over the past 20-plus years, the answer is no.
If your marketing makes you look, sound and seem like every other MSP out there, the marketplace – your target customers – won’t take time out of their day to listen to what you have to say. They won’t leave their current MSP for someone “potentially better.”
It’s horribly inconsistent.
One clever campaign won’t save you. Marketing is an ongoing practice within your business made up of multiple, synergistic systems that repeat — not a stunt you pull off every once in a while when you’re desperate for cash or need more clients.
If you want to succeed at marketing, stop quitting. Don’t allow yourself to get busy and give up. Stop changing your strategy like you change your underwear, constantly heading off in a “different direction” every time a marketing campaign fails to produce, or every time the next new “guru” promising easy money shows up.
It requires a prospect to be ready to buy RIGHT NOW.
Here’s a reality check for you: The vast majority of prospects are NOT ready to buy today – and if you design all your marketing for THAT person, you’ll never get the ROI you need. All of your best prospects are already working with another MSP or IT person and are neck deep in urgent, time-sensitive problems.
If your advertising and marketing is ONLY designed for the “buy now” buyer, you’re going to miss out on a wide range of prospects who, with the right offer or message, would be curious enough to engage with you, giving you permission to build trust and earn the right to sell at some point when they are looking for a new MSP.
This is why I recommend E.D.R. marketing, or “educational direct response” — a strategy that offers valuable educational content to attract prospects, convert them into a lead AND position you as a trusted advisor. This enables you to build and nurture a list of “getting ready to buy” prospects, staying in front of them with consistent drip marketing communications until the time is right for them to buy.
Inbound leads and opportunities are grossly mishandled.
Most MSPs don’t have just a marketing problem – they have a broken, dysfunctional SALES problem but blame marketing for the leads being “weak.”
I call these “broken bridges” — and they are invisible killers of your client acquisition strategy. Your prospect doesn’t call to tell you your website is broken. If they request information and you take days — or weeks — to follow up, they won’t remind you. When they call and get voicemail, they hang up and call your competition. And you sit there wondering why your marketing isn’t working.
Here’s your broken bridge checklist:
- Your phone number works and is answered by a trained, supervised human being during business hours. Not all businesses need this, but it’s critical to an MSP because lack of response is the #1 reason why someone leaves their current MSP and looks for someone else.
- Your web forms need to work. That means they don’t throw errors when someone submits one, they deliver the right information on the confirmation page, and they flow into your CRM so someone can follow up immediately.
- Inbound leads are responded to within minutes, not hours or days. In the digital world, your prospect is one click away from your competitor at all times.
- Your first-time appointment process is documented, trained and followed — not improvised. Your prospect won’t tell you they were put off by your sloppy, unprofessional or haphazard sales process that broke trust. They just ignore you.
Marketing is a chain. Every link has to hold. You can have an incredible lead generation campaign that is utterly destroyed by the person answering your phone with the energy of someone who just found out they have to work on a holiday. Fix the broken bridges before you spend another dollar on lead generation.
The “Math” doesn’t work.
Imagine you’re on a plane and the Captain comes on the intercom and says, “Good morning, folks. This is your Captain speaking. We’re off the ground and in the air flying in the general direction of North. At least I think that’s where we’re going. Unfortunately, none of my gauges are working, so I’m not sure what airspeed we’re flying at, what our altitude is, how much gas we have or the heading indication, but we’re flying! So sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.”
Obviously this would not be acceptable to you as a passenger due to the danger it would put you in. The same goes for your sales and marketing process. You need to know your funnel metrics, CAC (customer acquisition costs), allowable cost per lead, average sale and acceptable funnel averages by media to make good decisions.
I call this “backwards math.” Backwards math starts with how many customers — or how much MRR or revenue — you need to hit your goal, then works backwards to the specific activities and funnel goals you need to assure that you “land” the number of clients, MRR and growth you want.
Here’s the bare minimum you need to know:
- Goal: How many new managed services clients do you want to add this year?
- Average contract value: What’s the average managed contract you close in MRR? What is the average total contract worth?
- Close rate: What percentage of first-time appointments (SQLs) result in a signed contract?
- Lead-to-appointment rate: What percentage of your qualified leads (MQLs) schedule and sit for an appointment?
- Cost per lead: What are you spending to generate each qualified lead across all channels?
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): What does it cost you, all in, to land one new client?
Once you have these numbers, you can work backwards from your goal to build a real plan. If you need 12 new clients a year and your close rate is 33%, you need 36 first-time appointments. If 65% of your qualified leads schedule an appointment, you need 55 qualified leads. If your campaigns are producing a 2% response rate, you need to be in front of at least 2,750 targeted prospects per year to hit your goal — consistently.
MSP marketing failures are often math failures where the owner has an unrealistic expectation of the leads, appointments and clients they will get, underestimating the investment and effort required for success.
If you need to get more than a 1% response rate to cold prospecting in order for your “marketing math” to work, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. If you need your website or landing page to convert 30% or more of the cold traffic hitting it, or your e-mail to get an 80% open rate, or your webinar or seminar attendance to be 90%, you’re “math” is based on hope (or ignorance) not realistic numbers.
It chases attention instead of earning trust.
Clicks, visitors, likes and raw leads are actually easy to get. Trust is hard-earned. But trust is what builds a business and melts fee resistance. Most campaigns optimize for the short-term spike, not the long-term relationship.
Yes, you need clicks and likes and page visits – but you also need to make sure the content you publish, the story you tell about your business and the process a prospect goes through when engaging in the sales process is all strategically designed to BUILD TRUST, not destroy it.
We’re in a trust recession and AI is making it worse. Buyers are now drowning in AI-generated content that looks authoritative and says nothing. Every inbox is full of it. Every search result is polluted with it. The MSPs who win over the next five years won’t be the ones generating the most impressions — they’ll be the ones building real relationships through consistent, specific, problem-focused communication that proves, month after month, that they actually know what they’re talking about and genuinely give a damn about the businesses they serve. That’s a high bar. It’s also a massive competitive advantage, because most of your competition is too busy chasing shortcuts to clear it.
You start with the MEDIA instead of starting with the MARKET and MESSAGE.
Every marketing campaign must get 4 things right in order to work. I call it the Four M’s of marketing success: Market, Message, Media and Math. Most MSPs get all four of these wrong — and they almost always get them in the wrong order.
Here’s how the average MSP owner approaches marketing: They start by thinking of the MEDIA first. Should I do PPC? SEO? Should I hire an SDR to make calls? Maybe radio ads? In other words, they go right to the MEDIA or message delivery system before they know who they are targeting and what they are going to say in the e-mail, website, ad or promotion.
Here’s how you’re supposed to do it:
Market first. See my first item on this list of why MSP marketing doesn’t work. You have to know WHO you are targeting and what they will be interested so that you can create the message…
Message second. The message is your offer, your headline, your big idea — it’s the reason a prospect stops scrolling, opts in, returns the call or responds to the e-mail. Most MSP messages are catastrophically boring. “Reliable IT support for your business.” That’s not a message. That’s a yawn wrapped in a brochure. Your message needs to speak directly to what your target market fears, wants, is angry about or desperately needs. It needs a specific offer — something they can respond to — not just a general invitation to “contact us today.”
Media third. Only after you know WHO you’re talking to and WHAT you’re going to say do you decide HOW you’re going to reach them. Direct mail, email, LinkedIn, cold calling, networking events, paid search — all of these can work. All of them can also waste your money completely. The media choice should follow logically from the market and message, not the other way around.
Math fourth — but don’t skip it. This is the one most people hate, but it’s also the one that separates the MSPs who scale from the ones who stay stuck. See my section above on this.
Skip any one of these M’s and your results will be inconsistent at best, nonexistent at worst.
Why is it SO difficult for MSPs to get marketing to work?
Bottom line, most MSP owners fail at marketing for the same reason most people fail at dieting. They want the result without the process. They want a “one thing” they can do — one postcard, one SEO campaign, one social media post — that will fill their pipeline with perfect-fit clients who pay on time, buy anything you recommend and refer their friends.
That “one thing” does not exist. It has never existed. And the vendors and agencies promising you that it does are counting on you being too lazy to dig deeper and too hopeful to ask for proof.
What does exist is a repeatable, measurable, multi-channel marketing system built on direct response principles, a clear target market, a compelling message with a real offer, and the discipline to work the math and follow up relentlessly. That system exists. I’ve seen it built and run successfully by thousands of MSPs across North America.
The MSPs who grow — I mean really grow, not just survive — are not doing anything magical. They are doing the fundamentals, consistently, better than their competition.
They know their numbers. They maintain a responsive, qualified list. Their phones get answered. Their leads get followed up fast and professionally. Their message speaks to real fears and real problems. And they show up, month after month, in their market, until their name becomes synonymous with IT and they are the only logical choice.
That CAN be you. But NOT by accident.
Frequently Asked Questions About MSP Marketing
What is the most common reason MSP marketing fails?
The most common reason MSP marketing fails is a lack of proper execution. Websites, social media marketing, trade shows, prospecting campaigns with an SDR (sales development rep) cold calling, canvassing, SEO and every other type of marketing works – but ONLY if you implement it correctly and have proper expectations on what is and isn’t possible. Most MSPs do not execute well and underfund their marketing and sales efforts, which ends up wasting the time time and money they do invest.
What is EDR marketing for MSPs?
EDR marketing — Educational Direct Response — is a strategy that attracts prospects by offering genuinely useful educational content (a report, a checklist, a webinar, eBook, book, etc.) to generate a lead instead of directly promoting your services (managed IT, co-managed IT, cybersecurity, backup, etc.). It converts curious visitors into leads, positions the MSP as a trusted advisor and builds a nurture list of “getting-ready-to-buy” prospects the MSP can convert into clients when they are ready to make the move to another IT firm.
How do I calculate my MSP customer acquisition cost?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is your total marketing and sales spend divided by the number of new clients acquired in that same period. If you spent $24,000 on marketing and sales last year and landed 12 new managed services clients, your CAC is $2,000. Knowing your CAC lets you evaluate which campaigns are profitable and how much you can afford to invest to win each new client.
How much should an MSP spend on marketing?
A commonly cited benchmark for best-in-class MSPs is 10–11% of topline revenue reinvested into marketing and sales combined. This includes the salaries of your sales and marketing staff, as well as all media and agency fees. The right number, however, is determined by your backwards math: how many new clients you need, your current close rate and lead-to-appointment rate, and your allowable cost per client, or what you are able and willing to spend to get a client, then work backwards to sales and marketing funnel metrics. Build the math first — then set the budget.
