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Welcome to Episode 307 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic: Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago. Let’s find out which tactics are working for building your email list and lead gen right now.


• Why ignoring Copilot damages MSPs’ retention: Whether you love it or hate it, AI tools are here to stay and we know that Microsoft is highly committed to baking Copilot into everything. Let me tell you why.


• Can MSPs win clients without embracing video?: The video revolution is happening, and it’s the MSPs who are embracing it who are winning new clients faster. My special guest reveals ways for you to use video easily and also something that he’s calling, the new social SEO.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: As an MSP owner, do you struggle to let go and delegate tasks to staff or outsource. Let me tell you why it’s such an important step to growing your business.

MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic

You’re not doing MySpace marketing, are you? Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago. Building an email list is still one of the most effective things you can do, but are you asking for email addresses in the most modern way? Let’s find out which tactics are working for building your email list and lead gen right now, and which should have died out alongside MySpace.

What I’m talking about here is lead magnets. Have you heard of those? Let’s discuss what they are, why you should care, and why your approach to them might be stuck in the past. First things first, what is a lead magnet? It’s something valuable that you give away for free in exchange for someone’s contact details. And usually that’s their email address, but sometimes it’s also their phone number or other information.

The whole idea is to attract the right prospects and start a relationship with them before you try and sell them anything.

Now, if you think about it, no one wakes up in the morning thinking, oh, I can’t wait to fill in another contact form today. You have to give people a reason to do it, and the lead magnet is that reason. So how would you use one in your MSP? It’s simple. You put it everywhere that you prospects might come across you. So on your website, your LinkedIn, both your profile and your posts, your email signature, anywhere really, and you promote it almost like it’s a service that you offer. In fact, the more valuable it feels, the more people will download or sign up for it. And then you can follow up with useful emails that guide them towards becoming a client, whoop.

Now here’s the thing. For years the go-to lead magnet has been a PDF download, something like top 10 tips for cyber security or a small Business IT checklist. And don’t get me wrong, these can still work, but let’s be honest, PDFs are a bit old hat now, right? People are drowning in files they never open, and the guide that you put hours into creating is probably sitting in someone’s downloads folder and they’ve never opened it. So what’s better these days?

Well, I believe these days, interactive content wins. And one of the best examples is an engagement quiz. The kind of thing that you can build with a platform like ScoreApp. If you’ve never heard of that, go and Google it, it’s a great app. And here’s why quizzes work so well.

• They’re quick – your prospect can answer a few easy questions in minutes.


• They’re personalised – the results are tailored to them, which makes it more relevant and engaging.


• They create curiosity – people want to know their score. It’s human nature.


• And they lead naturally into some kind of sales conversation.

If the quiz shows gaps in their IT set-up, guess who’s perfectly placed to help fix them? You are. So for example, you could create a How secure is your business’s IT? quiz. And the prospect answers seven questions about backups, password updates, that kind of stuff, and at the end they get a score with some tailored recommendations. And if their score isn’t great, well that’s a perfect opening for you to reach out and talk to them about solutions.

So here’s your action step for this week. If your current lead magnet is a dusty PDF that hasn’t had many downloads lately, think about replacing or at least supplementing it with something interactive. Quizzes aren’t just fun for your audience, they give you better leads because the person who completes them is already engaged.

Why ignoring Copilot damages MSPs’ retention

How much does your MSP talk to its clients about Copilot? Is it something you embrace or just something you kind of sidestep? Whether you love it or hate it, AI tools are here to stay and we know that Microsoft is highly committed to baking Copilot into everything. So let me tell you why.

I believe you must tell your clients how to get the most out of Copilot or risk them listening to another MSP.

I’m a sole parent to 15-year-old Sam, and that means the usual quiet of my home office is broken now and then by the three main demands of any teenager – food, internet, transport. Actually, joking aside, Sam has really thrown herself lately into revising for her big scary exams, even though she’s not doing them until spring next year. I think this is a really good thing, right? And what’s cool is watching how she’s leveraging AI tools. Because you and I remember a time before ChatGPT and Copilot and all of the others, but for her AI tools have always been there.

Now here’s what she was doing recently. She was taking photos of her textbook pages, these are the books that we buy with all the information in the stuff she’s got to learn that’s on the syllabus. She’s copying the photos that she’s taken of the text pages into ChatGPT, and then she’s asking it to read them and summarise the content into a revision guide. Then this is the cool bit, she’s copying the revision guide out by hand because she has learned somewhere, and she’s right, that writing helps the brain to retain information better than just reading it. But essentially the AI tool is speeding up the revision for her. And yes, she’s checking that the AI that ChatGPT isn’t hallucinating.

Now, I don’t know if this is what the teachers are showing them what to do or if the kids have just cooked this up by themselves, but it got me thinking about Copilot and your clients. And I know lots of MSPs have really embraced AI tools, but I also know there are others who don’t really like Copilot and they try not to mention it to their clients. But we do see AI everywhere now, don’t we? Especially Copilot if you’re in the Microsoft ecosystem. And we can see that Microsoft is very, very committed to making it an embedded part of Windows and 365 going forward.

So here’s a question for you. Are you proactively telling your existing clients about ways they can use Copilot or other AI tools to make their lives easier? And I don’t mean in big flashy ways. I mean with small smart productivity hacks, like using it to summarise a meeting or turn a Word document into PowerPoint slides. I think there’s a terrible perception of generative AI out there from ordinary people who heard about ChatGPT, they tried it once and then they abandoned it. But they don’t realise how fast the tools are developing and how people are using them to save time and get things done of course. Do you know, I’d love to know some of the ways that you are recommending your clients use Copilot.

Can MSPs win clients without embracing video?

Featured guest: Jake Tlapek, the Wizard of Marketing, helps businesses stop guessing and start growing. With over a decade in digital marketing, SEO, and brand strategy, Jake scaled companies from side hustle to seven figures using clear messaging, clean web builds, and systems that actually convert.

Whether it’s building high-performance websites in a week, uncovering the truth behind SEO, or teaching marketing live on TikTok, Jake blends practical advice with real results. If you’re tired of fluff and ready to get serious about growth—he’s your guy.

The video revolution is happening all around us and it’s the MSPs who are embracing it, who are winning new clients faster. And that makes perfect sense because video allows you to connect with and engage with prospects like never before. My special guest reveals ways for you to embrace video easily and also something that he’s calling, the new social SEO.

Hey, I am Jake Tlapek and I am the Wizard of Marketing. I help businesses with very actionable marketing advice, socially and through my agency.

And waving a magic wand to get the wizard here on the podcast today, you are a very welcome, Jake. And we’ve just been chatting for like five minutes before we did the interview and the weirdest thing has happened, which is we discovered that you used to live in the village in the UK where I grew up as a child. So albeit 15 years after I left home. I grew up in a village called Bloxham, which is near the town of Banbury. Lots of people have heard of Banbury, in fact in the UK, everyone knows Banbury, Banbury Cross, I used to work at the newsagents just off the Banbury Cross, but I grew up in a