Most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re just burning through their time. Let’s discuss how to change that. Also this week, many MSPs use AI badly for marketing, and it costs MSPs 5 figures to win a new client.

Welcome to Episode 329 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Marketing tasks MSP owners should NEVER touch

You’d be mad to do all of your MSPs marketing yourself, and if that sentence annoys you a little, there’s a good chance that you are exactly the person who needs to hear it. Because most MSP owners are drowning in marketing tasks, telling themselves they’re saving money or keeping control, when in reality they’re burning the one resource they can never replace… their time. Right now, I want to talk about which marketing jobs you absolutely should outsource, which ones you must keep ownership of, and how to focus your limited time on the activities that deliver the biggest return.

So let’s talk about time, because for MSP owners and managers, time is the real bottleneck. You don’t have a lack of ideas, you don’t have a lack of tools, you don’t even have a lack of willingness. What you have is too many things competing for your attention. And marketing is often the thing that’s squeezed into the cracks between the tickets, the meetings, and the client fires.

The goal of marketing isn’t for you to do more, it’s for you to do less of the wrong things and more of the right things.

And here’s the core principle that I want you to adopt. You should outsource anything that someone else could be trained to do well, and you should keep ownership of anything that requires judgement, direction and deep understanding of your business. Most MSPs get this completely backwards. They clinging very tightly to low value tasks and then outsource high level thinking, which is absolute madness, right?

Let’s start with what you should almost always outsource. Anything repetitive. Anything admin heavy. Anything that’s process driven, things like loading social media posts, scheduling blogs, uploading videos, formatting newsletters, whether that’s email or print making, LinkedIn connection requests, cleaning lists, basic CRM updates, repurposing content, chasing webinar registrations, creating transcripts and pulling simple reports. None of those tasks that I was just mentioning require you. They just require instructions. They require an SOP. If someone can be trained to do it once, they can be trained to do it again and again and again.

And every hour you spend doing those things is an hour you are not spending on strategy, leadership, relationships or growth. Now let’s talk about what you absolutely should not outsource. You should never outsource ownership of your marketing direction. You should never outsource deciding who you are targeting, what you stand for, what message you want to be known for or what success looks like. You shouldn’t outsource thinking, you shouldn’t outsource high level decision making, and you definitely should not outsource responsibility. Strategy for your marketing lives with you, direction lives with you, and accountability lives with you. Even if you have a marketing agency, a virtual assistant, a marketing assistant, or even if you have a content team, they should be executing your thinking and not replacing it. Because trust me on this, no one else in the entire world understands your MSP, your clients, your ambition, your risk tolerance, the way that you do.

Many MSPs say, Oh, I haven’t got time for marketing, and what they really mean is, I don’t have time to do admin marketing tasks. But the high ROI marketing doesn’t look like admin, it looks like deciding where you want to focus. It means deciding and choosing the story you want to tell. Reviewing performance and adjusting direction. It means recording short videos, writing rough outlines, approving content, shaping campaigns, all of that stuff is founder level work. I’m a founder. I’m not doing the marketing tasks of editing my podcast or my YouTube videos or putting my blogs onto the website or LinkedIn newsletters. I shape all of that content and I do actually still write it myself because I’m a writer at heart, but I don’t do the little tasks of actually loading it. I have a much better member of my team who does that for me so I don’t have to do it. She does a much better job than I would do as well. And all of this doesn’t take hours a day, you just need a little bit of focus to decide what you’re doing and what you are not doing, and then train other people to do the rest of it for you.

Understand this, the smartest MSP owners design their marketing so that they personally spend the smallest amount of time possible on the activities that create the biggest impact. They think, decide, approve and guide and other people build, load, schedule and repeat. If you try to do everything yourself, marketing becomes a burden. If you outsource everything, marketing loses its soul. So the sweet spot is owning the brain and delegating the hands. I like that phrase.

The MSPs who grow consistently aren’t the ones that are trying to do every marketing task themselves. The ones that grow the fastest of the ones who protect their time, take ownership of the thinking, the direction of the decisions, and they let other people handle the mechanics. And that is not laziness and it’s not losing control. That… is leadership.

Many MSPs use AI badly for marketing

AI is changing the way that MSPs do their marketing forever, but not in the way most people think. This isn’t a story about tools, prompts, or automations, it’s about why the rise of AI might actually make being more human your biggest competitive advantage.

Cast your mind back for a moment to the year 2008. That was the year the first Iron Man film came out, which still feels impossible to me, to put that in context, someone who was born that year is now 17 or 18, which is nuts, right? Anyway, imagine if back then I’d said to you, Hey, in the near future there’s going to be some technology that can write your marketing for you. It can generate images, analyse your marketplace, plan campaigns, basically do almost anything you can think of and it’ll cost you about $20 a month. So you’d have thought I was mad or you’d have been bouncing off the walls with excitement, probably both. And of course, that future is now.

There’s an AI tool for almost anything, isn’t there? Writing, images, research, analysis, videos, strategy, ideas… and yes, of course it’s changed the game, but not in the way that most MSPs think it has. Because here’s what I really believe, the start of the AI revolution is also the start of a new content marketing revolution. For years, content marketing was dominated by the people who could produce the most content the old fashioned way, using humans. You either wrote it yourself or you paid someone else to do it. Output was the advantage. But now anyone, regardless of writing ability, can churn out hundreds of blog posts, emails and social posts today at the push of a button. There was already too much content online back then, and now there’s 10 times more, maybe a hundred times more, maybe a thousand times more. And we are barely at day one of our journey with AI.

So does that mean that content marketing is dead? Oh, no. No way at all. Not even close. But I do think there’s a big shift happening because when information becomes infinite, it stops being valuable. When people are overwhelmed with answers, the brain gives up trying to analyse them all and just hands the decision over to the heart. And the heart doesn’t look for more information, it looks for someone it trusts, someone it likes, someone it believes understands them. In other words, as information becomes commoditised, personality becomes the differentiator.

I think people are going to stop seeking information from content and start seeking wisdom from people.

And that’s the real marketing opportunity for you and your MSP, to put your authentic personality at the centre of everything you do. To be more human at exactly the same time that your competitors are flooding the internet with AI generated slop. Because as long as humans are making buying decisions – and in managed services that is going to be for a long time yet – trust, familiarity and personality will matter more than ever.

And this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use AI, I think quite the opposite. AI is an incredible amplifier, it’s a great assistant if you use it in the right way. You can train a GPT on you, your knowledge, your experience, your opinions, your tone, your sense of humour. You can ask AI to repurpose your content in your voice as long as you prompt it, well review it properly and correct it. You can ask AI to interview you in depth to pull ideas and insights out of your head. You can even use AI to generate images and visuals that feature you in different situations.

I like to think of this as the Iron Man approach to marketing. If you imagine Iron Man versus the Terminator, the Terminator is an agent, it has a mission and it executes that mission with no further input. It’s efficient, but soulless. Whereas Iron Man on the other hand, is Tony Stark, a very human personality surrounded by AI tools like Jarvis and Friday that enhance him, support him, and make him more effective without replacing who he actually is. Two very different approaches using AI. And I know exactly which one I would back. It’s the Tony Stark one, the Iron Man one.

The MSPs who win over the next few yea