Why Do Most MSPs Struggle With Marketing?

Quick answer

Most MSPs struggle with marketing for three primary reasons: First, they don’t think of themselves as “marketers” or “salespeople,” nor do they put any serious effort into learning and developing those skills. They are Gerber’s iconic “technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.” Second, they treat marketing like a “to do” list of tactics (SEO, email blasts, websites, trade shows, etc.) instead of seeing marketing as a critical and strategic part of their MSP’s plan to acquire customers and grow. Third, they grossly underestimate the difficulty of winning new clients, thereby underfunding and understaffing the effort, hoping that “doing a great job” will be sufficient to win people over. The problem is almost never a lack of budget, the competition or a lack of opportunity. It’s the lack of clear positioning, a consistent system, and someone experienced enough to drive the results they want.

I’ve spent more than 25 years working with thousands of MSP business owners on marketing and new client acquisition. In that time I’ve watched the same smart, hard-working owners pour money into websites, ads, content, and agencies and still end up frustrated with the results.

So when someone asks me why MSP marketing is so hard, my answer surprises them. It’s not that the market is saturated and the “big guys” are getting all the clients (or the cheap guys, or the established MSPs, etc.). It’s not that you don’t have the budget or ability. It’s that almost everything you’ve been told about sales and marketing – or that you think you know about it – is grossly incomplete, too generic or completely wrong.

Here’s what’s really going on.

You sound exactly like every other MSP

Go read the homepage of ten MSPs in your city. They all say the same thing. Proactive IT support. Cybersecurity you can trust. We act like your in-house IT department. Worry-free technology so you can focus on your business.

If your prospect can swap your logo for a competitor’s and the message still fits, you don’t have a position or differential value. You have a logo, not a brand. Buyers can’t choose you when you look identical to everyone else, so they default to the only thing left to compare: price.

Strong positioning is what makes marketing work, and it’s the piece most MSPs skip entirely. Until you can say who you’re for, what you do differently, and why that matters to the buyer, every dollar you spend after that works harder than it should have to.

Further, to have a strong position, you need to be crystal clear on who your ICP, or “ideal client profile” is. If you want to be the “best,” you have to decide for who? The “best” MSP for a large medical facility with 5 locations is entirely different than the “best” MSP for a small 5-person non-profit. Pick your audience first, then DESIGN your value proposition, service offering and of course, marketing message, so that you become of the obvious choice, regardless of price.

You’re referral and word of mouth strategy sucks

Referrals are absolutely the best lead source you can get. They trust you already, are less sensitive to price, close faster and easier and cost next to nothing.

The mistake MSPs make with referral marketing is two-fold. First, you don’t do anything to FUEL them. You act like a vulture on a perch waiting for one to lay down in front of you. If you want more referrals, put referral marketing SYSTEMS in place that encourage, reward and facilitate good clients giving them to you. 

One MSP I just worked with was able to generate 18 solid referrals in under a week using a simple e-mail campaign I designed. Those were all opportunities that would not have happened if we just waited for them to show up. 

The second mistake MSPs make is not supplementing referrals with other marketing. They can train you to get lazy. The argument I hear is, “Why bother building a marketing plan when the phone rings on its own?” That’s fine until a big client leaves, or two referrals dry up in the same quarter, and suddenly you have no pipeline and no way to create one. You were never actually in control of your growth. You were just lucky for a while.

Your marketing starts and stops

This is the pattern of failure I see repeatedly with MSPs who are actually trying to get marketing in place. Business gets slow, so they panic and throw money at marketing. A few weeks later, after you onboard a client or two, you get busy delivering the work and STOP all the marketing. Then the work slows down, you churn a big client and get desperate for MRR again – and you start the marketing and selling over from zero.

Marketing compounds when it’s consistent and collapses when it isn’t. The owners who win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who know marketing is a LONG GAME won by showing up with a consistent message, to the same audience, year over year. 

You’re chasing tactics, not running a strategy

Last year it was SEO. Then someone told you to hire that outsourced SDR from the Philippines. Then you rebuilt the website. Then you tried a cold email tool. Then you spent some money on a trade show. Each one felt like the answer for a few weeks, then fizzled.

None of those tactics are wrong. But a tactic without a strategy is just activity, not strategy. New client acquisition requires 4 things to be exactly right:

• Market (the list, audience or prospect you’re targeting)
• Message (what are you going to say when you show up)
• Media (the way you are going to convey your message to the market)
• Math (backwards funnel math from your goal to the audience)

This is the difference between activity and progress. Most struggling MSPs have plenty of activity (media). What they’re missing are the other 3 legs of the table (market, message and math) that make the effort work. 

Your marketing and sales aren’t unified

Marketing generates a lead, and then what? For a lot of MSPs, the honest answer is nothing. No follow-up system. No nurture. No clear handoff. Leads that took real money to generate go cold because there’s no process waiting to catch them.

When marketing and sales aren’t aligned, you blame the marketing. It “didn’t work.” Usually the marketing worked fine. The problem was everything that happened after the lead came in fell apart.

You don’t know your numbers

Ask a struggling MSP what it costs them to acquire a client, or what a client is worth over the life of the relationship, and most can’t tell you. If you don’t know your numbers, you can’t tell what’s working, so you make decisions on gut feel and whoever shouted the loudest at the last conference.

Marketing math isn’t glamorous, but it’s how you turn marketing from a gamble into an investment.

The real problem underneath all of it

Notice that none of these are tactical problems. They’re strategic ones. Positioning, consistency, alignment, and clarity. That’s why buying another tool or hiring another agency to run another campaign rarely fixes anything. You’re adding execution on top of a broken strategy, and execution can’t fix strategy.

This is exactly the work I do one-on-one with MSP owners. Not running your campaigns, not selling you tools, but helping you get the strategy right so the money you spend after that actually produces clients. I’ve seen what holds MSPs back often enough that I can usually spot it fast, and help you fix it in the right order.

If you’re tired of guessing, that’s what an MSP marketing consultant is for.

Schedule a consultation at https://www.robinrobins.com/msp-marketing-services 

FAQ

Is MSP marketing really different from other marketing? Yes. IT services get bought on trust, over long sales cycles, by technical and financial decision-makers who fear making the wrong choice. That changes everything about how you position, message, and follow up. Generic marketing advice built for e-commerce or consumer brands falls apart against those realities, which is why so many MSPs fail when applying it to marketing managed services.

Can’t I just hire an agency to fix my marketing? An agency executes on the tactical part of getting ads out and websites done. It rarely fixes strategy. If your positioning is weak and your sales process is broken, an agency will happily run campaigns into that broken system and charge you for it. Get the strategy right first, then bring in execution. That order matters more than almost anything else.

How long does it take to see results from MSP marketing? Real, compounding results usually take six to twelve months, because trust and visibility build over time. Anyone promising overnight results is selling you a spike, not a system. The good news is that consistency is rare in this industry, so an MSP that commits to a clear strategy can pull ahead of competitors surprisingly fast.