MSPs must build audiences and relationships before selling IT support, which is why marketing is so important. Also this week, why technically superior MSPs lose deals to “average” competitors, and how MSPs can build resilience every day.

Welcome to Episode 344 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Every MSP is now a media & marketing company

I want to start today with something that landed in my email inbox a few weeks back from a guy called Tom Orbach. Now, he writes a newsletter called Tom’s Marketing Ideas. I’ve been a paying subscriber for a while. He’s sharp, he’s very original and when he says something, I really do pay attention.

Now, the subject line of his email was this… Every company is now a media company. And after I read the newsletter, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it because I believe he’s absolutely right and I believe it matters enormously for your MSP. Let me explain what he wrote about and then I’m going to add my own layer on top of that.

So Tom’s argument started with a data point. It was about OpenAI and how they’d recently spent over $100 million to acquire a podcast, which is kind of weird if you think about it because they didn’t acquire another technology company or any kind of software platform, they spent all that money on a podcast. In fact, it was two guys who’d been doing a live tech show for just 17 months. And then the week before that, a fintech company called Plaid, which by the way is worth $8 billion, they bought a newsletter with 200,000 subscribers and actually Tom listed company after company after company that have done the same thing.

HubSpot bought a newsletter with 2.5 million subscribers. Stripe bought a founder community. Semrush, which is an SEO tool, they bought several SEO publications. And these are not media companies, these are software and technology businesses, but they’ve all been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to own audiences. So before we explore why, let me first of all just put something out there to the universe. If there’s any business that wants to come and buy this podcast for let’s say $100 million, then please email me. Obviously I’m joking. (I’m not joking. Email me.)

Anyway, let’s look at why all of these big businesses are doing this and why even though these are big businesses buying podcasts and newsletters and stuff like that, it’s still relevant to you as an MSP. They’re doing it because they figured out something that most businesses are still catching up to. In a world where AI can produce infinite content at practically zero cost, the one thing that can’t be replicated is a trusted human voice with a loyal audience. Attention is the scarcest resource in business right now and the companies that own attention don’t need to chase customers anymore. The customers come to them. Tom Orbach in his newsletter puts this brilliantly. He says,

“The company that teaches about the industry earns the right to sell the tool.”

And that sentence is basically the entire philosophy behind what I do with this podcast, with my LinkedIn newsletter, with my weekly emails, with all of my content. I’m not really selling my MSP Marketing Edge membership. I’m building audiences of MSPs who trust me. And when they’re ready to take their marketing seriously, I’m the person they’re going to think of.

Now, here’s where this is applicable for you because the good news is you don’t need to spend $100 million on a podcast network, but you do need to think of your MSP as a media company. And what does that mean in practice? It means you should be publishing content consistently. Something that educates the business owners and managers that you want to work with. At the very least, a weekly email, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter, a sh...

MSPs love healthcare practices for many reasons, so here’s how to reach them and win them as clients. Also this week, the 5 questions your MSP website’s MUST answer (or prospects go elsewhere), and the scary implications for MSPs when your clients buy cyber liability Insurance.

Welcome to Episode 343 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

Deep dive: How MSPs win healthcare clients

Let’s talk about one of the most attractive client verticals that any MSP can go after. Healthcare practices. And when I say healthcare, I mean private practices specifically. So doctors, dentists, dental surgeons, optometrists, or opticians as they’re known here in the UK, veterinarians, we call them vets here in the UK, physiotherapists, cosmetic clinics, all of that kind of stuff. The kind of practice that’s owner operated or partnership run.

I mean somewhere that’s got a reception desk, clinical staff, and a growing pile of technology holding the whole thing together. This is not about hospitals or large health networks. This is about those small to medium-sized healthcare practices that need IT support and they’re probably getting it from someone who maybe doesn’t really understand their world, and that is your opportunity.

A heads up that this podcast is consumed all around the world and obviously there are lots of different healthcare systems out there. So for example, here in the UK, most doctors and what we call general practitioners, GPs, they work within the National Health Service, which is run by the government. So this means I’m not going to dive into specific details or specific laws for any particular country. Instead, I’m going to talk generally about how you can reach all of these kind of clients, whichever country you’re in. Because even though there are different laws and different systems around the world, these healthcare professionals all think and feel and act pretty much along the same lines.

So why do MSPs love healthcare practices so much? Well, let me count the reasons…

First of all, they’re almost entirely recession proof. People don’t stop going to the dentist when the economy wobbles. They don’t stop taking their dog to the vet. I mean, they might cut back on the extra spend such as having all their teeth replaced with those weird looking teeth that Hollywood people have, but they still maintain the basic essentials. So these businesses have a good solid base of revenue still coming in no matter what’s happening to the economy. In fact, these are businesses typically built on recurring appointments, loyal patients and services that can’t be postponed indefinitely.

Second, they are deeply dependent on technology. The appointment system, the patient records, the digital imaging, the billing software, the online prescribing, the payment processing. It’s all technology, right? And all of it needs to work all day, every single day, because when it doesn’t work, the consequences are immediate and painful. A dental practice that can’t access its patient management system on a Monday morning isn’t just frustrating. It’s losing appointments and revenue and it’s letting its patients down. And that’s the kind of downtime that gets you fired as their IT provider and the kind of risk that makes them incredibly motivated to find someone they can genuinely trust.

A side note, I worked with dentists in a previous business, one that I sold 10 years ago, and here in the UK, they call helping the patient’s “chair time”. That’s all the dentist wants, they want chair time. They want the patient in the chair, they want their fingers and metal things in the patient’s mouth, that makes them happy because they’re earning money, and anything other than chair time is losing them money. So it’s really good for you to get into the mindset of what is most import...

Most MSPs are just copying other MSPs’ marketing and this is a massive problem. Here’s what to do instead. Also this week, LinkedIn’s big algorithm change is SEXY for MSPs, and don’t bother starting marketing until you’ve got these fundamentals in place.

Welcome to Episode 342 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.

The trap of copying other MSPs’ marketing (and how to escape it)

Let me describe a scene to you. You sit down one afternoon because you’ve decided that you’re finally going to sort out your marketing and you think, “I’m just going to do a bit of research. I’m going to see what other MSPs elsewhere are doing.” And that sounds like a sensible place to start, right? So you Google IT support not just in your town, because you want to look out there and see what other people are doing, so you go and look for IT support in a few different towns. And you pull up 10 MSP websites and then you start looking at them and reading them and just getting a feel for them.

After about 20 minutes or so, you close your laptop and you realise that they all say kind of the same thing. They all say things like proactive IT support or your trusted technology partner or we keep your business running, something like that. Tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes, cyber security you can rely on… all of these kind of things. They’re all versions of the same thing. Here’s the problem, because you looked at all of those websites and thought, that’s what all MSPs say so I suppose that’s what I should say too. And because of that, you then go away and write your own version of exactly the same thing. And now your website sounds exactly the same as the other websites that you already looked at. Does this make sense?

I see this pattern constantly and I do completely understand why it happens. When you don’t know where to start with your marketing, looking at what other MSPs are doing feels logical because you think maybe they’ve already figured something out. Why do I need to reinvent the wheel? I’ll just do a version of what they’ve done. The problem with that is that in the MSP world, almost nobody actually has it figured out. Most MSPs are just copying other MSPs, who themselves copied other MSPs, who copied someone who copied the first MSP website that ever got built around about 1873. That was a bit of a confusing sentence, but you get the idea. It’s like an echo chamber of sameness that’s been bouncing the same tired phrases around the whole of the channel for 20 years or so.

When everything looks and feels the same, ordinary business owner prospects cannot tell MSPs apart.

This is a massive, massive problem across the whole channel. So the business owner prospect defaults to comparing you and all of the other MSPs on the only thing that they can compare you on, which is price. And that’s exactly the outcome that you don’t want. Now here’s the really interesting bit. The reason that MSP marketing is so samey isn’t that the businesses themselves are samey. It’s just that as I was saying, when MSPs write their marketing, they think about what they do rather than what their clients feel. So they describe their service from the inside looking out and the result is technically accurate but forgettable. It’s completely interchangeable with everyone else.

So how do you escape this trap of sameness? I believe the answer is to stop looking sideways at your competitors and start looking outwards at your clients. Specifically three things:

First of all, look at who you actually are not what you do. So your personality, your story, your opinions, the way you run your business. These are all the things that make you slightly different, slightly unconventional. Th...