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Welcome to Episode 266 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• 3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025: The silver bullet to getting new clients and growing your MSP lies in consistent and persistent marketing. Make it easy by prioritising these three things.


• And 3 big questions to ask yourself: Before the new year begins, take some time to answer these questions and focus yourself on your future goals, in life and in business.


• This MSP is using a clever backdoor marketing tactic: My guest this week tells us what his special marketing tactic is, how it makes finding clients easier, and how you can do a version of this in your MSP.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Graham, an MSP owner in Omaha, reflects on how little he feels his MSP has achieved in terms of lead generation this year. He wants to know why his marking projects take so long to implement.

3 big MSP marketing priorities for 2025

Did your MSP sales engine feel broken in 2024? Well, here’s the fix. The best new revenue comes from lead gen that’s driven by a marketing machine, but don’t be scared. It’s dead easy and it’s built with just a few simple parts and it’s going to make 2025 your best year yet.

Right now let’s go through why your current marketing isn’t working, how to find more people to speak to and how to make all your marketing easier. I do love this time of year because everyone has a collective pause and after you’ve had a few days off to enjoy some time with your family, you move on to time to just kind of take stock of what’s happened in the last 12 months. And you figure out what it is that you want to improve next year.

Most of the MSPs that I’ve spoken to this year just want to win more new clients, and keep their existing ones and make sure those clients are happy.

And of course, make sure their staff are happy and service quality is important too. These are all important things to MSPs, but ultimately, if you nail it down to what’s the one thing that you would do to improve your business, if you could wave a magic wand, for most MSPs it would be to win new clients.

So let me suggest to you three marketing priorities to focus your business on next year. These are not difficult concepts to understand. In fact, I’ve deliberately made this as easy as I can, as I try to do with all the marketing that we talk about in our podcast and on the YouTube videos.

My first recommendation is to create a marketing system rather than a series of one-off activities. Now, the reason I suggest this is because the whole channel seems to be geared around helping you to do one-off activities. You get big vendors giving you marketing campaigns or social media that you can just roll out in one go. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think doing a one-off campaign or being all over social media for a couple of months is better than no marketing at all. But the very best kind of marketing is consistent and persistent, and that comes from having a marketing system.

A system means you have a series of tasks that are happening on a regular basis. Ideally, you personally as the owner of the MSP, is not doing them. You have someone doing them on your behalf, whether that’s someone who works for you or a trusted outsource person. If you’ve been listening to my podcast or watching my videos for a while, you’ll know the marketing system that I recommend. I suggest you build audiences of people to listen to you, starting with your LinkedIn and your email list. And then grow relationships with those people using educational and entertaining content posted on LinkedIn and email to them. And then you convert relationships using marketing campaigns and calling people on the phone.

My entire MSP Marketing Edge service is based around this 3 step system, and the beauty of it is that you are doing marketing 365 days a year. Even when you’re taking some time off, like in the weeks ahead, your marketing still happens every single day. And that’s necessary because people only buy when they are ready to buy, and you don’t know when that is. It’s only by doing marketing every day that you can get in front of them at exactly the right moment.

My next recommendation is to build up the numbers of people that you’re talking to. Now, you may have heard people say that marketing is a numbers game, and yeah, that’s kind of true in that the more people you market to, the more likely you are to find someone who’s nearly ready, willing, and able to speak to you about switching to your MSP.

It takes the same amount of time and costs the same amount of money to market to a hundred people on LinkedIn as it does a thousand people, or even 10,000 people. The more people you market to, the more successful your marketing will be and ultimately the more new clients you will win.

And then my final recommendation is to do a little bit every day. And this seems to be the one that MSP owners find the hardest, and yet it’s one of the most critical things in marketing. This is the most important part of growing a business. You’ve probably already got too many things to do and not enough personal time, right? And yet, I highly recommend that you find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on your business rather than in it.

This is what I’ve been doing for years and it’s what’s helped me to build up my last business, the one I sold in 2016. It’s what’s helped me to grow my current business, the MSP Marketing Edge. Every single weekday, I try to find a minimum of 60 to 90 minutes to get things done. And when I’m in that 60 to 90 minute window, I’m not doing email or Facebook or anything that robs my time. I’m just working on the business.

You might find this easy to do at seven in the morning every day before your staff arrive at the office or maybe seven at night when they’ve left. Or you find an hour during lunch to lock your office door and put a sign on the door that says, do not enter unless the building is on fire. And I suggest that you do this at the same time every day. Don’t think that you can compile it into one day a week such as all of Friday, as a) you won’t get as much done in a day compared to five 90 minute sessions, I promise you that. And b) there’ll always be some crisis that steals your time from that day. There is a direct link between your ability to find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work on the business and you getting closer to the future that you really want.

Literally everything I’ve achieved in the last 19, 20 years has come in 60 to 90 minute chunks. And it’s been a real compound effect of lots and lots of small things adding up over thousands of thousands of days. It’s the only silver bullet to grow your business, spending that time every single day, making sure that you are implementing the right strategies and the right tactics.

And 3 big questions to ask yourself

When you are an MSP owner wanting to grow the business, vacations might as well be cancelled.

There’s just no such thing as time off, but not in the way that you might think. No, this is nothing to do with being too busy with client issues to have time off.

What I mean is when you do take time off, you just can’t help it, this always happens… you find yourself thinking about the business, right?

So over the Christmas break, after you get your child’s new drone stuck in a tree and make them cry…

Here are three big questions to ask yourself for when you inevitably start mulling over how to grow your MSP business even further in 2025.

Let’s start with big question number one: What’s your personal vision for the future? This is not a question about the business. This is about real life, family and stuff that matters a hell of a lot more than the business frankly. Close your eyes right now, unless you are driving, and dream about how you’d like your life to be in the next two to three years. What kind of house would you like to own? What kind of car would you like to drive? What kind of vacations, holidays would you like to take? And where would you like to take those vacations? Who would you like to take those vacations with? How much time would you have to yourself every single week to do the things that you truly love doing?

I know that you love working in your business, but I also know that you probably wish you could do more golf or hang gliding or spend more time with your kids or knitting, whatever it is that you like doing. Our brains are incredibly powerful computers and the more that we can sit and dream about the future and picture where we want to be, the more likely it is that our brains will act on that and move us in that direction.

Okay, big question number two: What are the smart goals for the business? Smart, of course, is an acronym. You’ve heard this before and it stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And a bad goal for your business is I just want to grow revenue because you never quite know when you’ve actually got there. You never know really what you are working towards. But a great and smart goal would be, I want to grow my net profit from 200,000 to 400,000 by the 31st of December, 2025, because that’s a very specific and measurable goal. And of course you’ll know exactly when you’ve achieved that. It is definitely achievable by th