The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 298 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?: Your MSP’s Ideal Customer Profile is a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. When you’re clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier.
• MSPs: How to never drop a ball (no matter how busy you are): If you want to run the best MSP you can and find new clients at the same time without the fear of ever dropping the ball, you need to get this system into your life.
• AI is changing EVERYTHING with your MSP’s website: Websites that were perfectly optimised for Google just a few years back are now not good enough for the age of AI. My guest explains what MSP’s should be considering now and in the future.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Ever wonder whether you should be sending promotional emails as plain text or HTML? I have a very clear answer to this…

ICP: Jargon or a powerful MSP marketing tool?

Just like in the tech world, marketing is full of confusing sounding acronyms. There’s your LTV, your CTR and your PPC, but while you can safely ignore those, there’s one that you must not ignore. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already. When you get this acronym right, it influences all of your MSP’s marketing and you get better results. Let’s talk about this acronym that you must be aware of and how implementing it in your MSP will help you win brand new clients.

So we’re going to talk about something called an ICP, which stands for Ideal Customer Profile. And don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some kind of big scary marketing concept. It’s actually really simple and it can make a massive difference to how effective your MSP’s marketing is. So what’s an ICP? Think of it like this.

If you could clone your best customer – the one who always pays on time, never complains, values what you do, and is a dream to work with – who would that be?

That’s what sits at the heart of your ideal customer profile. It’s a clear picture of the type of business that you want more of. And I’m not just talking about the vague stuff like saying small businesses or anybody with computers and a wallet. I mean details like what industry they’re in, how many staff they have, where they’re based, what kind of technology they use, who makes the buying decisions, and even what headaches are they dealing with right now that you can solve?

Why do you bother with all of this? Because when you are clear on who you are targeting, everything else becomes easier. Your marketing becomes sharper, your messaging really hits home. You stop wasting your time chasing leads that when never a good fit in the first place because you understand exactly who you want to work with. It’s like fishing with a rod rather than chucking a net into the sea and hoping to get a very specific kind of fish.

So how do you build your ICP? Well, I suggest that you start with your current clients. Have a good look at them, analyse them. It could just be while you take the dog for a walk, you don’t need to sit down and stare at a screen for another six hours, but just think it through. Who are your best clients? Who are the ones that you wish you had 10 more of? Write down what it is that makes them great. Look for the patterns. Is it that they’re all in professional services? Do they all have a round about 15, 20 staff? Do they all hate dealing with IT and they just want someone to handle it all for them and they’re willing to pay for th...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 297 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Every MSP should listen to this book: If you implement the simple ideas inside this book, it will dramatically improve your marketing – you’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.
• Would your MSP tackle a one off project to unlock MRR?: There is a way to warm up reluctant prospects and build a solid relationship with them, before asking them to sign a monthly recurring revenue contract with your MSP. Here’s how.
• This MSP looks back on his biggest marketing mistakes: If you could go back to when you started your MSP, what advice would you give yourself to avoid your biggest marketing mistakes? This is the question I asked my guest, see how his answer compares to yours.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Are Google’s Core Web Vitals still a thing in 2025? Find out how this affects your MSP and what you should be doing about it.

Every MSP should listen to this book

I know I know, you want to grow your MSP, but actually you barely have enough time to stay on top of the big shows on Netflix, let alone learn how to improve your MSP’s marketing. But could you make the time if all you had to do was read or listen to just one single book?

Let’s dig into a new book that if you implement the simple ideas inside, it will dramatically improve your marketing. You’ll get more attention and ultimately a lot more business for your MSP.

What was your lockdown experience like? Well, some people had a terrible experience, of course, but others discovered new things about themselves. So for example, I discovered a bit of a renewed love of running which led me to doing a couple of half marathons over the years after. And actually I lost about two stone in weight, which sadly has come back now and doesn’t seem to want to go again. But also back then I fell in love with reading one more time and I got through tons of books that summer.

And one book that I read for the first time ever, which I had been meaning to read for years, was a book called They Ask You Answer, written by a guy called Marcus Sheridan. And this was instantly an insane book for me and it resonated with me in every possible way. So I went away and I implemented as much of it as I could in my own business, and I kept telling the MSPs that I was working with that they should do exactly the same. And actually, I decided I had to get Marcus onto my podcast, which finally happened in January 2023. If you want to listen to that episode, Google MSP Marketing Edge and Marcus Sheridan, and you’ll find the podcast episode. It’s episode 164. Marcus was very generous with that interview and it helped to position, They Ask You Answer in ways that made it super relevant to MSPs.

I tell you all of this as background as it helps to explain why I got so excited earlier this year when I heard that Marcus was releasing a new book. It’s been billed as They Ask You Answer 3.0. Version two was a bit of a refresher to the original book which came out in about 2019, whereas this new book is more than just an update, this is a reinvention for the modern age. You see, They Ask You Answer first came out in 2016, that was nine years ago, and the world has changed dramatically since then, hasn’t it? No more so than with the AI tools that we have today. And so They Ask You Answer has changed into something new called, Endless Customers. That’s the name of the new book and it’s available currently as a hardback, but it is also on Audible as well. And you can acc...

The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 296 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• These emails help prospects love MSPs: It’s critical to have a series of good emails to send to prospects who are looking at your MSP for the first time. Early engagement is key for email deliverability and not being labelled as unsolicited spam.
• A simple way to reach senior decision makers on LinkedIn: Here’s a tried and tested LinkedIn hack to connect with the right people on LinkedIn. Remember, both decision makers and influencers are important contacts.
• Smart ideas to sell more to your MSP’s existing clients: Selling more to existing clients is the big opportunity and my guest tells you how to do it and how it can generate more delicious profit for your MSP.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you upload PDFs to your LinkedIn personal profile? You should, the algorithm loves it. Here’s how…

These emails help prospects love MSPs

It’s a huge struggle. A lot of MSPs looking to grow, struggle to do effective data capture from their website, and this is an important way to build up your database of prospects. But it’s not just about getting them to fill in the form in the first place, that’s just the start of the process, the real question to ask yourself is: What do I then send them?

Let me tell you some of the perfect emails to send to new prospects looking at your MSP for the first time.

So tell me, do you have some form of data capture on your website? You really should. The most basic data capture is asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, which actually very few people will. A better form is to offer them something known as a lead magnet, also known as an ethical bribe, which is where you give them something in return for their email address. And this might be a guide, like a cyber security guide. Although the 2025 version of data capture that’s working really well right now is to do an interactive quiz and you allow them to build a scorecard for something. Again, something like their cyber security score would be a great way of doing that. But the data capture itself is only the start of the process.

What’s critical is to have a series of good emails to send new prospects, because you can make an assumption that they may be looking for a new MSP in the future.

And you need to send them content that’s going to influence them to pick you and not another MSP. So let me give you some examples, starting with the very first email you send to them. And the goal with this first email is to get them engaged with your content and either get them to click something on the email or hit reply. Why? For email deliverability. Because that sends a very clear message to their email agent that they are interested in your content and they don’t just see you as unsolicited spam.

I do this with the first email in my sequence. I introduced myself and then I ask the MSP who’s reading that email to hit reply and tell me which marketing problem they’re suffering with right now. And we do get a pretty good reply rate to that. Of course, I make sure I answer every single person who replies. I do that personally, which in itself is good for engagement. It’s good for showing there’s a real human at the other end who’s listening. And of course it’s good for email deliverability. So I would definitely do that with your first email.

Here’s what you could do in some of the other emails that you send out to people wh...