Let’s explore whether giving away something for free is a good marketing tactic for your MSP. Also this week, why you must put your personality in your MSP’s marketing, and the MSP that grew from $0 to $36m in 12 years.

Welcome to Episode 322 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Is FREE a good marketing tactic for MSPs?

Free. It’s a big, shiny word that always draws the attention of MSPs. No matter how much cash you’ve got, free is always an appealing proposition because if something’s free, there’s zero risk, right? So here’s a question, can you use giving away something free as a marketing tactic for your MSP? And more to the point, if you can, should you? Or does it risk devaluing what you do for people?

Giving away something for free is one of the oldest playbooks in marketing. I mean, right back in the 19th century, Coca Cola was giving away free samples to promote itself. In fact, that was one of the ways that that brand became so dominant across the US. Free has always been a magic word, hasn’t it? It grabs attention, it lowers barriers, and it makes people feel like they’re getting something for nothing.

In the world of B2B, and especially for MSPs, is free still a smart tactic? Or does it actually make people value you less?

Before we decide, let’s be clear on something. Free doesn’t automatically mean bad. There are good kinds of free, and there are bad kinds as well. So let’s start with the good ones. When you offer free value, say a helpful guide, a webinar, a checklist, or even a 15 minute consultation, that’s a smart kind of free. It gives potential clients a taste of what you’re like to work with. They see your expertise, your communication style, and the way that you think, and that builds trust. People buy from people they trust, and small, risk-free experiences like that are a great way to earn it.

But then there’s the other kind of free, the kind that feels desperate, like giving away months of support, doing unpaid audits, or fixing little things just to prove yourself. And that’s where free starts to devalue what you do. Because if you make it seem like your time, your skill, and your expertise aren’t worth paying for, why would anyone believe that they are? And here’s the tough truth. Once someone sees you as the free guy, it’s very hard to change that perception later. You’ve anchored your value at zero.

So how do you walk that line? How do you use free strategically without shooting yourself in the foot? Here’s the test that I like to use. If it gives value but doesn’t cost you much time or money, then it’s “good free”. But if it costs you significant effort or replaces something you should be charging for, it’s “bad free”. So a downloadable guide that explains how to protect a business from phishing attacks, great free. But a two-hour deep dive audit of someone’s network, that’s not free, that’s a service. No pay, no play.

Here’s one more thing to keep in mind. In 2026, attention is the new currency. So giving something away for free can be a brilliant marketing exchange as long as it earns you attention or trust. Thank you very much for those. But if it earns you nothing but extra work and frustration, it’s not marketing, it’s martyrdom. So is free still a good marketing tactic for an MSP? Yes, it is, but only when it’s intentional, limited, and built to lead somewhere valuable.

Don’t give your time away, give away your thinking. That’s what positions you as the local IT expert and gets local business owners saying, wow, if this is what this person gives away for free, imagine what I get if I paid for it.

Why you must put your personality in your MSP’s marketing

Have you ever wondered what it’s like being an ordinary business owner or manager searching for a new MSP? The channel has made it much harder than it needs to be for them to research the available providers and pick the right IT support business for them. And that’s because of a massive error that many MSPs are making with their marketing. Let’s explore what that error is, whether or not you’re making it and how you can fix it to give yourself an unfair advantage.

So just for a few moments, put yourself inside the brain of an ordinary business owner or manager in your town. Let’s say you’ve had this MSP that’s looked after you for a number of years, but just lately you’ve kind of had this feeling deep inside that things just aren’t as good as they used to be. The service levels seem to have gone down. Things just seem to take longer to get fixed and the prices have kind of crept up at the same time. And you’re not desperately unhappy, but you do feel as though maybe you’ve outgrown your IT support company or maybe even they’ve outgrown you. And so perhaps it’s time for change at the end of your current contract.

This by the way, is how real business owners and managers feel. It’s not like they wake up one morning and they suddenly decide, right, I’m going to switch over from A MSP to B MSP. It’s kind of a gradual feeling that comes in and often it’s their perception. It can’t always be based on reality or isn’t always based on reality. It is sometimes just a perception and a feeling. You lose the client slowly over a number of years without you realising it. That’s why you have to have regular meetings with your clients.

Anyway, that was a side note. Let’s go back to you being that ordinary business owner or manager. You’ve decided it’s time for a change, and so you enter the research phase and you start to look at who else could help you. Now let’s assume you’re doing this the old fashioned way. So you’re not asking AI to do the research for you, but instead you start by Googling, IT support in your town, and people still do this. Just because you and I are using AI to do the research, a majority of people today are actually still just Googling it. I do think that’s going to shift over time, but let’s just go with this.

So they Google it and the results just bring up, of course, website after website, after website of the same. And as an ordinary business owner or manager, your heart sinks because you don’t know a great deal about IT support. you know roughly what IT support is, roughly what these MSPs do, and you have a vague idea of how they do it, but you don’t really care about the ins and outs of technical stuff.

Your clients just want someone they feel they can trust who’s going to look after their staff, watch their back, and just help their business to grow.

And when you’re looking at all of these websites and they all have very similar images and the words are all very much the same and the branding is all very much the same, it feels really difficult to pick out someone from lots and lots of the same. And then you stumble across a website that’s really different from all the rest. So this MSP doesn’t have those same tired stock images. It doesn’t have the same impersonal text. Its website is packed with personality and specifically it’s the personality of the owner. And as you look through the pages of this MSP’s website, you see photos, you see videos, you see stories about this person, their staff, their family, their clients, and their life. And in fact, what you don’t see is a lot of talk about technology, but you do see their live calendar and you book yourself in a 15 minute video call with that person, with the owner of the business who you’ve just been reading about and watching videos about. And this seems like a really smart move.

Okay, story over… right now as an MSP, as we stand here in early 2026, you have a massive opportunity. Because I see very, very few MSPs put their authentic personality into their marketing. Instead, most just look at what other MSPs are doing. They look at what their competitors are doing and for their own website, they do a version of their competitor’s website. Sometimes it’s not even a conscious choice to do that. You do that because it feels safe. If everyone’s doing this, then you should do this. And that kind of behaviour is built into us. It’s what drives social proof like reviews and testimonials, but it doesn’t work in marketing.

In marketing, you have to do something different to what everyone else is doing. And maybe in the years ahead, that kind of mentality of just copy your competitors will change. But as things stand today, you have a unique opportunity to stand out in your marketplace by being different. And the easiest way to be different is to base your marketing around you. Now, this is what I’ve done with the MSP Marketing Edge, and it’s working very well for me. I’m not a narcissist. I’m not an attention seeker. I’m actually an extroverted introvert. I much prefer being on my own, working on my own, sitting in a quiet room. I don’t get energy from big crowds of people. Big crowds of people suck energy out of me. That’s why I know that I’m an extroverted introvert.

But I understand the power of using your authentic personality as a differentiation tool, because of course the MSP Marketing Edge has competitors, but no one has me. No one else can be me or compete with me. That’s why I’m the face of the business and everything about my business has me at every single touchpoint because no one else can ever touch that. Could you do this? Should you do this? Absolutely you should.

What’s the very first thing for you to do? It’s to look at your website and say, how can I put me into that website? In fact, go and have a look at my site, mspmarketingedge.com. You’ll see photos, you’ll see videos. You go on the About Us page, you’ll see my story. There’s a picture of my