We are kicking off a three part series based on the MSP Marketing Edge 3 step system, and in this special episode we focus on the first step: Build audiences.

Welcome to Episode 319 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Build audiences

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the podcast. We are kicking off a three part series this week. Earlier this year, I released my latest book, it’s called MSP marketing: Start Here, and it’s all about a 3 step lead generation system trusted by hundreds and hundreds of MSPs around the world. It’s super simple and yet incredibly powerful, and that’s by design. So starting this week, we’re doing a deep dive into it. Let me tell you what the 3 step system is, and then this week we’re going to look at the first step.

I see my job as making marketing super simple for you, which is why I’ve pulled together an entire marketing strategy, a whole 3 step system into just six words. Let me tell you what they are – Build audiences. Grow relationships. Convert relationships. Super simple. But as you’re about to hear today and over the next couple of weeks, there’s a lot of detail within these three steps.

This week’s special, we’re just going to focus on how you can build audiences. So let me start with the question. If I asked you right now to name 10 local business owners who would love to hear from you about their IT, could you do that? Most MSPs can’t, and that’s not a criticism, it’s just the reality of how most MSPs build their businesses. They focus on doing great work for the clients they’ve already got, which is great. They rely on word of mouth, referrals, and maybe the occasional inbound lead.

Here’s the truth, if you don’t have an audience to market to, then you don’t really have a marketing engine. You’ve got luck but you haven’t got control.

Building audiences is the foundation of everything else you’ll do in marketing your MSP. And yet, it’s the bit that most MSPs skip because it feels slow, it’s not sexy. You can’t post a selfie about it on LinkedIn and get a dopamine rush of likes. But when you’ve got an audience, a real audience of people who are listening to you, trust me, everything changes. Let me tell you where this hit me the hardest.

Back in my first business, a marketing agency that I built up between 2005 and then sold in 2016. Back in the early days, I was desperate for predictable leads and I tried everything… one-off campaigns, buying data lists, I was spending too much on ads and some things worked a little bit, but most of these things didn’t work. And then one day I realised something painfully simple. I didn’t have an audience. I had a client base, and I had some people on my email list, but I didn’t have a community of people who wanted to hear from me.

And that’s when I stopped chasing leads and started building lists. Lists of people who liked what I had to say. People who might not buy today, but who might remember me when they were ready to buy. And that’s when things really started to change in that previous business. So what does building audiences look like for you as an MSP? It’s not complicated. It’s small, deliberate habits that compound.

You start by finding the right people on LinkedIn. What if you were to attempt 10 new connections every weekday? And here’s the thing, it’s not about the numbers that you build up. It’s about doing this intentionally, because you’re not connecting to just everyone, you’re connecting to the right kind of people, the people you’d like to do business with – the decision makers, the people who run businesses that match your ideal client profile. Because when your connections are right, your content really starts to land in front of the right people. And then you engage with them, you comment thoughtfully on their posts, not just nice post or, yeah I totally agree, but something real, something that adds value to their posts.

So essentially you’re human. You show a bit of your personality, and gradually the algorithm does something magical. It starts to show you in their feeds. In fact, what’s happening here is a bit of a mix of outbound and inbound marketing. By making connection requests to people, which is outbound, and then by commenting on other people’s posts, which is inbound, some of those people will connection request you. And this is really good for telling LinkedIn that you are a popular and in demand person. Outbound, inbound, that’s the start of awareness on LinkedIn.

Now, here’s the clever bit, because you take that LinkedIn list, which is just one audience, and you use it to start building your own email database. Because one of the downsides of LinkedIn is that it’s a borrowed audience. At any point, the algorithm could change or you could even be banned from LinkedIn and lose that audience altogether. So to balance that out, you also build alongside it something called an owned audience. And this is where the data is yours. And the ideal owned audience for an MSP is your email list. You add the connections that you’re making on LinkedIn to your CRM. You find their email address, maybe even their business address so that you can reach them outside social media.

And of course, you can spend money on this and do it quickly by using plugins such as Lusher, Apollo or Hunter.io. And these are plugins which sit in your Chrome and will show people’s email addresses. Or you can just Google, you essentially do a brute force search. You Google to find their email address. Whichever way you use, now you’ve got multiple touchpoints. You have the ability to reach people via the borrowed audience of LinkedIn, which is where they are, and also via your own audience of emailing them. And this is how marketing becomes a system, instead of an event. Every day you add a few names to the pot. Every week, you’ve then got a few more people who know who you are. And every month that pot compounds.

Before you know it, you’ve got hundreds, maybe eventually thousands of people who know your name, they see your face now and again. And some of them will start to think of you as the local IT expert. So you’re not chasing them anymore, you are present in their world within LinkedIn and on their email. And that is the power of building audiences. You are not begging for attention. You are quietly, patiently earning it. Because every future sale starts here, with someone who’s aware you exist and who’s been quietly learning to trust you long before they need you. So when their current MSP messes up, when they wake up one morning thinking, do you know what, we need someone new, you are already in their mind. And that’s how you win before the selling even starts.

So if you do one thing differently in 2026, build audiences. 10 new LinkedIn connections a day, a couple of minutes commenting every day. Make it a habit, not a project. Because your audience is your future pipeline, and the MSP who builds one now will own their market in a few years time. If you want to go into a bit more detail on this, it’s all laid out in my book, MSP marketing: Start Here. You can get it on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle, and it’s also on Audible.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.


• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.


• Connect with me on LinkedIn.


• Recommended book: MSP marketing: Start Here by Paul Green.


• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Let me know.