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.

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. They’re very specific to you and that stuff is yours alone. No one else can copy it because it’s you, right? And we’ve talked about this in the podcast a few times over the years, about putting your authentic personality right at the centre of your marketing. And this is exactly why you do that. It’s the one thing that automatically separates you from the herd. So that’s the first thing.

Second, listen to how your best clients talk about you. So not the technical stuff, but listen to the emotional stuff. When a happy client describes what it’s like to work with you, they don’t say things like, “Oh yes, they provide proactive monitoring and their patch management skills are second to none.” They don’t say things like that. They say things like, “Honestly, since we moved to them, I sleep so much better at night.” Or they say things like, “Oh, my staff used to complain about IT all the time and now they just never mention it. ” Or they say something like, “Yeah, do you know what? The IT people just get on with it. I never have to think about my technology anymore.”

Those kind of phrases are marketing gold. They’re chef’s kiss because they’re honest, they’re specific and they’re so different from anything else that you’ll find on your competitor’s websites. So go and talk to your clients and find those phrases. Ask your happiest clients, on video, to describe what life has been like since they started working with you and then use their words and not your words. Because their words are going to be more real and they’re going to be different. That’s what you want. So those are the first two things.

Then third, go and look at what other industries are doing, but not other MSPs. So if you want fresh ideas, the last place you’re going to find them is staring at your competition or even looking at other MSPs in other towns. You’ve got to cast your net a bit wider than that. So what do the best financial advisors lead with on their websites? What does a great management consultant’s LinkedIn page look like? What makes a really compelling plumber’s van or builder’s van? What makes it stand out when you drive past it? New fresh marketing ideas are everywhere outside the channel and almost nowhere inside the channel. And I’m not meaning that to be critical or offensive in any way. It’s just that everyone or almost everyone inside the channel is copying each other.

There is one more thing that’s worth saying here. I do understand the anxiety behind the copycat habit, because when you look at what everyone else is doing and you think about doing something completely different, that feels risky. What if people don’t get it? What if it puts off prospects? What if you look weird? Well, here’s my answer to that. Looking weird is infinitely better than looking identical. An MSP that stands out for the wrong reasons will at least be remembered. Whereas an MSP that looks like every other MSP will just be forgotten in seconds.

And remembered even for being slightly different is always a better commercial position than being invisible. So the next time you feel the urge to look at another MSP’s website for inspiration, close that tab. Go and talk to your best client instead and ask them what they say to a friend who is looking for IT support. Listen really carefully write it down and then build your marketing around that because that right there is the most distinctive and powerful marketing material you’ll ever have. And when you throw some of your own unique personality in as well, it’s going to be completely unique to you.

Let’s now talk about something that’s changed very quietly on LinkedIn but really matters a lot for MSPs. It’s a big algorithm change called 360 Brew and I know that sounds like something you’d order at a trendy coffee shop or maybe an overpriced craft beer, but hear me out because this isn’t a small tweak or a minor nudge. LinkedIn has fundamentally changed how it judges your content and who gets to see that content. And the good news is, if you understand this properly, it works very much in your favour.

Let me explain. Until this change, LinkedIn judged each of your posts in isolation. So each post lived or died on its own merits. Did it get engagement quickly? Did people react or comment or share? And if they did, then it got some traction. If not, it just kind of quietly disappeared. So essentially it was a post by post lottery model. Sometimes you won, sometimes you didn’t, and you really had no idea why. And it’s also what led to people chasing engagement tricks, where people are begging for comments, they’ve got those kind of weird polls/surveys that go up, or a carousel that ends with a cliffhanger. And I’m not judging because I’ve done some of these things myself. But that whole model is now dead.

With this new 360 Brew, LinkedIn no longer looks at individual posts in isolation. Instead, it looks at everything about you. It looks at your posting history, how consistently you show up, what topics you talk about, who engages with you over time, whether people stop scrolling when your name appears, all of that kind of stuff. So in other words,

LinkedIn is now building a reputation profile for every person who publishes content.

And this bit is important, so I’ll say it again… every post you publish is now judged in the context of everything else you do, not on its own. And if you’re consistent, especially if you talk about the same core problems for the same audience, this is fantastic news, because random posting on LinkedIn is now officially dead.

What LinkedIn is trying to do is understand who you are, what you’re about, and whether the audience you’re speaking to actually cares. If it can’t work that out, it’s going to play safe and show your content to fewer people. And that’s why posting every couple of weeks about random things, in random formats just doesn’t work anymore, because when you do that LinkedIn can’t form a clear picture of you so it doesn’t know who to show your content to. But if you show up regularly, talking about the same themes like using technology to solve problems and grow your business, for the same audience of business owners and managers, then something interesting starts to happen.

LinkedIn starts to trust you. It learns that you talk about this stuff and it sees that the same kind of people engage with you over time. It understands who finds your content relevant and then it starts showing more of your content to more of the right people, and that’s the flywheel. And this is exactly why consistent focused content is so much more powerful than viral chasing one-off stuff. You don’t need viral posts now. You don’t need tricks. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. What you need is predictable, consistent content, covering the same few topics from different angles.

There’s one more change worth highlighting here and it’s a big one. Engagement now compounds over time. When the same people regularly like or comment on your posts, then LinkedIn sees a relationship forming and that strengthens future reach, which means that replying to people’s comments is no longer optional. If someone takes the time to engage with your post and actually leave a comment, you must reply. That two-way interaction matters now enormously. In fact, the algorithm specifically looks for what researchers are calling “lexical diversity” in comments, which means that it can tell the difference between a genuine back and forth conversation and a comment section full of “great post” and it treats those as very, very low value noise.

Oh, and there’s one more thing that 360 Brew does that’s worth knowing about, especially if you’ve been using AI tools to write your LinkedIn posts. The algorithm can now detect AI generated content. And it does not reward AI generated content. The reason for this is fairly straightforward. AI generated posts tend to follow very predictable templates, they’ve got that kind of certain polish to them, haven’t they, a certain structure and lack of personality that 360 Brew has been specifically trained to recognise. So when it detects that AI pattern, it deprioritises the content. So AI content is not banned from LinkedIn, it isn’t at all, but because 360 Brew is designed to reward authenticity and personal perspective and genuine human voice, the things that AI output lacks, then it’s going to ignore the AI output.

There’s also an engagement signal problem here, AI written posts tend to generate very surface level reaction to almost get like the AI bots responding to something that’s been written by an AI bot, quick likes, generic one word comments, great posts like we were just talking about. 360 Brew is looking for the opposite. It’s looking for humans talking to humans. So things like dwell time, like I said earlier, real back and forth conversation, that’s what the algorithm is looking for. So the practical implication is this. By all means, use AI to help you think or to structure an idea or draft a rough outline, but please, please always rewrite it in your own voice. Add a personal story or a specific observation from your own experience, or add an opinion because the version of you that actually shows up in the words is the version that 360 Brew rewards. And it’s also not coincidentally the version that your prospects actually connect with.

Let me summarise the practical takeaways from this. First, post consistently, I’d recommend one piece of content every 24 hours because consistency matters more than ever now. Second, stick to the same audience, business owners and managers. Or for example, if you were targeting IT directors for co-managed IT, you’d have a separate LinkedIn for that so you’re very consistent on one LinkedIn to business owners and then on a second LinkedIn to IT directors. In fact, that was something we were talking about a few weeks ago in our co-managed IT deep dive. Know your ideal client profile and speak to that person every single time. Third, stick to the same themes. So in B2B, it would be technology, security, productivity, growth, and running a better business. Co-managed IT would be about the strain on internal IT teams and how reinforcement can help. Pick your lanes and stay in them. Don’t suddenly post about your weekend run and wonder why your reach has dropped. And then fourth, reply to every comment. If someone engages with you, treat that interaction like gold dust because under this new algorithm, it really is.

If you’re a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, make sure you access my new high performing website framework. I put this together over a number of months based on the best MSP websites that I’ve seen. And I know that earlier I was talking about how a lot of websites are the same. Well, over the last number of years, I must have looked at well over a thousand websites and most of them are pretty bad and samey, but some of them are very, very good. And it’s been a delight to spot the things that work well on each of them and then compile that into a framework just for our members.

So you can access this right now, it’s in the portal, just go into the training section. There’s also some training on it there as well, plus a document you can download with a framework. And of course, you can also put your website into the monthly website review. Now, if you’re not yet a member of the MSP Marketing Edge, we do only work with one MSP per area. You can check to see if your area is free. It’s very simple, you don’t even have to enter your email address. Just go to mspmarketingedge.com/membership and then put in your postcode or your zip code.

Featured guest: Mark Gordon is the founder of Integrated Go-To-Market Solutions, a US-based consultancy that helps startups and mid-market companies turn scattered sales and marketing efforts into one aligned, revenue-generating machine.

He’s built and sold an eight-figure mortgage company, architected a platform that generated over a billion dollars per year in funded volume, and taken companies from $1 million to $30 million in annual revenue as head of sales.

Known for his direct style and Challenger approach, Mark specialises in clarifying what problem a company truly solves, building a scalable demand engine, and installing the systems that turn potential into predictable growth. He works with founders who are tired of guessing and ready to build a revenue machine that actually performs.

I know that to you, marketing must sometimes seem like a dark art, especially when you compare it to the technical work which perhaps you enjoy a little bit more. Marketing can seem a bit woo, can’t it? And actually I’ve dedicated my career to proving that it’s the opposite, that you can break marketing down into a series of small tasks, repeatable tasks, which you can then get other people to implement for you. My guest today takes this a step further by bringing that approach to your fundamentals. In fact, he believes that you have to get these fundamentals right before you start doing any marketing for your MSP.

Hi, my name is Mark Gordon. I’m the founder of Integrated Go-To-Market Solutions. Thank you so much for having me.

And thank you so much for being here because we’re going to talk about the four core ingredients that every MSP needs if they’re going to build a proper, what you call Mark, go-to-market sales engine for their business. And you and I both work with lots of MSPs and we know that the vast majority don’t get this in place. So this is the fundamental building block that we’re going to be talking about today. But let’s first of all talk about you. You have had one heck of a career, you’ve got a very impressive CV. Now we haven’t got the airtime, we haven’t got the 30 minutes for you to talk about everything that you’ve achieved in your life. So give us the highlights. What have you been doing over the last couple of decades with your life?

Yeah, so I got started as a salesperson in the mortgage industry and then I spent about 20 years in mortgage and real estate as a founder, CEO, chief revenue officer, helped a number of companies scale. And then Covid was amazing for the mortgage industry, people made life changing money and then rates went up and I just started in my 40s and I said, “Hey, do I want to wait for rates to come back down or do I want to go build?” And I’m a builder. So I took some time off and thought about what I wanted to build. And while I was thinking about that, I started helping my friends and family grow their businesses and I found it just incredibly rewarding.

And what I realised was that, at least in the United States, in the mortgage industry, there are 2,000 companies and everyone is selling the exact same product at the exact same rate. And that’s a sales and marketing knife fight then that really prepared me to launch the business that we’re in right now. I didn’t even think about it when I was in it, but when you have no product differentiation, you better have amazing marketing and sales. And so that translated to helping my friends and family grow their businesses. And we officially launched Integrated in June and we’ve brought on a bunch of really amazing clients, many in the MSP space and I’m here to talk about what’s been working so well for them.

That’s amazing. And something you just said there, which was, I’m going to paraphrase, when what you sell is the same as all of your competitors, you’ve got to have amazing marketing and sales. And you and I know from the work we’re doing with MSPs that most MSPs don’t have amazing marketing and sales. They’re very, very, very good at the tech work and protecting their clients and delivering, but actually their marketing and sales is often, they all look exactly the same to the average business owner and manager. So I know that there are four fundamental building blocks that you help MSPs to build that you recommend. Do you want to just sort of take us through those and we can dive into some detail in them?

Yeah, 100%. I’m really going to focus on the first three for today because I think for some of the smaller MSPs that are out there, the revenue technology part of this is never in the way and these guys are probably pretty good at putting together a CRM if they need to. And so I’ll leave that part of it out and usually that gets more complicated as MSPs grow. But the first three are what we’re going to affectionately call “messaging”, which really comes down to being really good at saying what you do and who you do it for, and really what result they can expect from working with you. I find that the majority of MSPs have no idea how to handle that.

If I ask somebody in an MSP, whether it’s somebody on the engineering team or the CEO, “Tell me what you do”, I often get very different answers that ramble on for two minutes and it’s a little bit incoherent and certainly it’s not about solving a specific problem most of the time. And then we have lead generation, which is how do you deliver that very concise messaging that we’re going to work on to the right audience at the right time, whether that’s through cold outreach or warm outreach and we’ll kind of figure out how we position those things as we go. And then the last piece of it is sales execution, which means that once you’ve gotten the right person to raise their hand and they say they’re interested, how do you convert that person from interested to paying client? And so those are kind of the first three of that core four, that last one being the revenue technology part.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And in your experience with MSPs, have they kind of dabbled in some of these and they’ve done a little bit and not done all of it? Or is it a case that they’ve either done none of that or all of that?

Well, I find very few. When I find someone who’s done all of those things, you’re usually talking about a company doing $30, $50, $70 million a year in recurring revenue and it happens for those companies, it sort of seems automatic. For whatever reason, there’s usually a founder or a CEO that has a background that’s not just in tech. They’ve built other companies before or they had a background in sales to start with and they start kind of seeing some of those things and they realise the importance of what it takes to get to scale in those ways.

For the most part, I find that the average MSP grows through a couple of key relationships and then relying on the fact they do a really good job and then getting referrals. And maybe they join a networking group or they have like their own little niche marketing locally, whatever else it is, but they’re really relying on kind of just doing a good job and that compounding over time and that leads to very slow growth if growth at all.

What we find in all industries, and MSPs are really even at the what I would say more competitive end of things, is that if you want to truly scale it requires an aligned plan of those core four and having those things work together. And so to answer your question, I’d say…

The vast majority of MSPs think they know what marketing and sales are, but actually have done none of these 3 things even a little bit right.

Yeah, no, I would agree with you on that. But obviously that creates an opportunity, doesn’t it? So where all MSPs appear the same in a marketplace to the uneducated buyer, which is the business owner or the business manager, that’s a massive opportunity for one MSP to just be a little bit better in sales and marketing terms and then you kind of stand out. So where would you start? What’s the first steps that you would take?

So I think one of the things I see MSPs having a really hard time with is what I’m just going to affectionately call niching down. But really if you’re for everybody, you’re for nobody. And if I come to your website and I can’t tell exactly what you do and who you do it for and really what problem you solve, you’re going to lose my attention in the first three seconds. You are now selling oranges in a farmer’s market where everybody’s selling oranges and there’s no way anybody’s going to come to the conclusion that they should use your orange unless you have some sort of personal relationship with them. Or they’ve had the experience, someone referred them to you. So you’re relying on just the luck of the draw or somebody really deciding they want an orange while they walk by your orange stand.

And so to me it really starts with, how do we make ourselves not look like oranges? How do we position what we do very specifically as a superior orange? And so that’s something that what we do first when we meet with companies is we interview their internal team, their clients and maybe some local competitors and we say, “What is the actual differentiation for this group of people? ” And there always is something, right? Whether it’s a couple of key clients are already in an industry or there’s some specific expertise on the team or it’s a vibe or a culture on the team, it’s very easy for us once we’re in there to see, okay, you guys are different because of X. And then be able to articulate X in a way that allows them to focus on a much more narrow niche of customers and be able to communicate specifically to that niche what makes them special.

So if our MSP has three accounting clients who are super happy, then the answer is, and by the way, people are very afraid of this, they go, “Well, what if I run into someone who’s not an accountant and they need my stuff?” It’s like if it’s a referral, they’ll still figure it out. But when we want to convert strangers into clients, when they come to a landing page, it needs to say, “Number one MSP in Dallas for accounting firms like yours.” So that person comes there, they know you specialise in them, now they feel warm and fuzzy inside and they go, “Hey, I want to talk to those guys.” And so once you’ve found a niche and you’re willing to commit to it, it doesn’t mean you have to stop doing everything else necessarily, but in terms of your outbound marketing or your focus in terms of where you want to grow, you should have a focus. And what that will actually allow you to do is continue to develop your internal expertise in helping accounting firms and suddenly now you’ll become the obvious choice for all accounting firms.

And once you’ve gotten that lockdown, then maybe you add another thing and another thing to your niche. But 99% of MSPs, and I’m not using that number lightly, would benefit both strategically and from an opportunity perspective, if they narrowed their focus and became really good at serving one type of customer and then expanded from there, when you try to be everything to everybody, you end up really being nobody to everybody.

I completely agree with you. I mean, fundamentally in everything you’ve said there, I completely agree. I know sometimes in podcasts, it’s terrible when the guests and the hosts just agree on everything, but you’re absolutely right. If you have a vertical or a niche and you have a foot in that door and you enjoy working with those clients, why wouldn’t you go and get more of those clients? Because the more of them you get, the more of an expert you appear to them, the higher you price you can pay and also the less work you have to do.

There’s only a finite number of accountancy software packages that you have to learn or legal packages or manufacturing software or whatever is the case. So what is it you think, because even though that’s so obvious to you and that’s so obvious to me, you and I are still going to go and talk to 50 MSPs tomorrow who won’t do that, even though they’ve already got the foot in the door. So why? Is it fear? Is that it? Simple as that?

It is literally as simple as that. It is fear that when you are hunting for growth, when you’re struggling as a business owner to pay the bills or to hire the talent or to scale, turning down any opportunity feels fatal. And by the way, this is at our core, a survival instinct. It’s almost like you’re saying if you’re starving, it’s like, “Well, I’m only going to eat this.” And so at our core, we’re not actually wired that way as animals. If we see an opportunity, we can’t let this one pass up, but by chasing every opportunity, it kills us.

And so it’s really a faith process that every founder has to go through, which is, “Hey, do you want to be the best at what you do?” “Yes, I want to be the best at what I do.” “Cool, that means really focusing on being the best at this.” If you’re going to be the best athlete, you’re never going to make professional in any one sport because you’re going to be constantly trying to figure out, “I got to get in a kayak and I got to get this… I want to be skier, I want to be a snowboarder. I want to be a gymnast.” You can’t be the best at all of them. You can be an amazing athlete and become the best gymnast in the world, but that requires six hours a day practicing gymnastics.

And it’s the same thing when you’re running your business. It’s that if you want to grow and scale and be great at something, you have to really narrow your focus and pick what that’s going to be. And while it is very scary, I promise you, if you commit and you do it through our four-pronged approach, you are three or four months away from having more sales opportunities than you could ever need, but you have to take that first step.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. I’m sure you’re very familiar with Alex Hormozi, who obviously has written some amazing books, the hundred million dollar series and he sent out an email a couple of months ago and the subject line was, “Good idea, not now.” And that wasn’t specifically about sales, that was about opportunities and new things. And he said that actually, you win a lot more by saying, “That’s a good idea, but it’s not for now”, than you do by chasing this opportunity and going off in that direction. And I completely agree, no one ever won an Olympic gold by doing five different sports at the same time. They won it by doing one sport and getting really good at that sport over a decade or something like that.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for the insight that you’ve just given us there. So just briefly tell us a little bit more about what you do for MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Best way to get in touch with me is it’s Mark D. Gordon on LinkedIn or our website is igtms.com. Integrated Go-To-Market Solutions. You can reach out to us there. What we do is we build predictable revenue machines for B2B companies and particularly high ticket B2B companies like MSPs. And so we’ve worked in SaaS and FinTech at some other places as well, but I would say actually we’ve worked with more MSPs than anything else because it’s so hard to differentiate as an MSP and that’s really where our value comes in.

And so if you’re feeling lost about any of this as a founder, it’s not you. You’re in a commodity business and the things that we’re talking about are very hard. And even with me, I spend a month with your team figuring out what makes you special before we even get to the lead generation and the sales process part of this, which is what should you be niching down into? What makes sense and how do we position you in your marketplace so you become the obvious choice for the right kinds of customers that are going to lead to the biggest jumps in your overall profit and revenue.

And so we map that out, we put you through that process. And so if you need help There’s no shame in reaching out. I would say one of my biggest mistakes in my career I made was in my first several businesses feeling like we were unique snowflakes and no one could help us. I now realise after I’ve read all the books that all business problems are the same and you need experts who are really great at solving specific problems. This is the problem that we solve. And so if you’re having trouble figuring out what you do and who you do it for and narrowing that down to two easy sentences even your mom would understand, that’s why you bring us in.