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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• MSPs: Stop using this 2008 marketing tactic: Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago.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 Some MSPs are trying to find new clients using outdated tactics from over 20 years ago.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 village a few miles away called Bloxham, no one’s ever heard of it, and here’s a guy in Phoenix, Arizona who has heard of it. So it’s the strangest, strangest thing.

Welcome on the podcast. You’re not here to talk about North Oxfordshire, you’re here to talk about marketing. So you used to work in an MSP doing marketing and you’ve since gone on and developed a much bigger footprint within marketing overall. And I know you’ve got so many things to talk about which are going to help MSPs with their marketing. So let’s delve a bit back into your history. I mean, tell us what were you doing in the UK and how did you go from being in the UK doing the work you were doing to actually working for an MSP?

Yeah, so I was actually in the US Air Force and I worked at a base in the UK that was a linking communications base between Washington DC and the Middle East. And so I did IT, MSP work. That’s what I did every single day, logging into routers, switches. So that was my life for a long time. I got out after a couple years and accidentally got into marketing kind of as a project manager, realised I loved it, started learning it. And then when I left that job, I got a job as a marketing director at an MSP. I was bringing back both my new skillset and my old skillset together and it was a lot of fun.

I bet. How long has it been since you’ve worked within an MSP?

I worked for that MSP about 10 years ago now, but I have worked on and off with MSPs over the years through my agency. In fact, the MSP I worked for, I left and they became my very first customer at my agency.

I love it when that happens. There’s some kind of real serendipity with something like that, isn’t it? Well, of course the MSP world has changed probably three times in that 10 years. And when I started in the channel in 2016, someone said to me the whole managed services, or I think we were just even saying IT back then, the whole IT world, the whole channel changes every seven years. And I would argue it changes every three to four years now. The pace of change has speeded up, and I’m sure that you’ve seen that with the MSPs that you’re working with.

Certainly in marketing, everything has changed. It’s only been a couple of years since ChatGPT went mainstream. AI has completely changed the marketing game, it didn’t at first, but you’d be pretty dumb not to look at it in this stage of 2025 and not say it’s changing, actively changing how we do marketing and even the way we use socials and everything is just huge change. It’s almost like we’ve picked two worlds that are in complete change. We should all be dentists. I’m sure very little changes in dentistry other than the drills get faster and the treatments get more expensive. So what are you doing right now with MSPs that let’s say, cutting edge? And I’m always slightly scared of cutting edge because actually for the average MSP, they don’t want cutting edge. They just want what is working right now, but what are you doing right now that’s new, that’s exciting, and that’s working right now with MSPs?

So what I think is really cool is that the cutting edge things we have right now are not necessarily new techniques or strategies. They’re just being deployed in new and more interesting ways that are being effective. SEO has changed dramatically, and SEO has been an absolute pillar cornerstone of MSP strategy for two decades, but SEO itself has changed underneath MSPs and there’s now an opening, a gap that not many people in that space are filling, and that is social, SEO. And so it’s this idea that we make websites, we make pages about this router, that switching mechanism, this raid setup, whatever it might be, to try and collect people from the internet that are searching for these things, businesses that need disaster recovery and whatnot.

But now we have a lot more capability to access video. And video is just much more consumable than text content. And these platforms that are doing video, social video are transcribing thanks to AI, every video and utiliSing that transcription in a search element within their platforms. And these searches get thousands and thousands of hits, and nobody’s really focusing on what doing SEO for that type of engagement – so it’s an open field.

Yeah, that sounds fascinating. So let’s put this into practical terms. So when you are talking about social platforms and doing videos and optimising the videos so that the transcripts show up, are we talking about doing stuff on LinkedIn? Are we talking about stuff on meta platforms? Or are we talking about optimising those posts so they show up in Google searches? Is that what you mean?

All of that. But let’s break it down to a very simple example, in Google, the third result on every page now is a chain of anywhere from two to four videos. That means that if you’re in a very crowded space, a very crowded keyword search, and you’re struggling to get your ranking up on that, not that many people are making videos about that topic. So if you go and make a YouTube video, that would just be your page content that you would normally try and rank for. Now you’re competing against a much smaller pool for the third slot on a Google search. That’s fantastic. And I can tell you people want to watch a video over read an article today. So there’s a secondary advantage to that too. That’s just, it’s the medium people want to consume. So reevaluating your SEO strategy to include that video component is great.

I love that. And you’re absolutely right, people do want to watch videos these days. It’s what we are all doing. The amount of YouTube consumption is going up, immeasurably the amount of traffic on the internet that video takes up. And I don’t have the stats, but it’s massive, isn’t it? It’s absolutely a huge proportion. And I think even people who traditionally don’t do YouTube are finding themselves watching shorts. They might be doing it on TikTok or they might be doing it on Threads, but they’re probably even doing it on LinkedIn. There’s so many ways to watch shorts. I find it myself, I’ve gone from reading articles to watching shorts. I’ve got Netflix, Prime and all of the other, Disney, everything. And what I’ll do is I’ll watch one proper TV show, and then I’ll spend 40 minutes on YouTube on my TV. And I don’t even pay YouTube, and I just get annoyed with the adverts, I should probably upgrade to YouTube premium or something.

But in my head, that’s not a channel I watch regularly. And yet I know I spend more time on YouTube than I do on all of those other subscriptions put together because it’s quick, it’s fast, and it’s exactly what I’m interested in. And that I think is the secret of videos and where maybe the secret for this lies. And let’s talk about how MSPs could make this relevant, I’m into Dr. Who, a British sci-fi show currently struggling, Disney ended the deal that put a load of money into it, it didn’t work, and it’s a 60 something year old TV show, but I could talk Dr. Who for hours, I should start a Dr Who podcast, but there’s plenty of them already. So I’ll end up watching very specific YouTube videos about that very specific subject and very, very insular, that would be of no interest to normal humans like you, Jake, right? But to me, that’d be of interest. And the point being,

But then there’ll be something, we don’t need to go into what your thing is, but you’ll have an equally tiny, little thing that is of so interest to you. It could be cars, it could be bikes, it could be boats, whatever. And you are like, oh, I want to look at the fins and the fin design of a boat, whatever, whatever. We all have these little things, and YouTube has allowed us to go down the rabbit hole of those. Bringing that back to MSPs, you know MSPs, you’ve worked in an MSP, you know that if you’re an MSP in Phoenix, Arizona, you’re just trying to serve that local market, you’re just trying to perform well in SEO. How does that actually work for a local MSP? Does it mean you’ve got to sit and say, right, what are people looking for? How do I do videos for that? How do I jump onto that platform? How does that actual work in a practical level?

Absolutely. So the way that I would approach that from an execution making a workflow and SOP for this, is I would approach your sales team, your account managers, whoever’s having conversations with your clients or potential clients and say, What types of questions are you getting asked early in the cycle? What are the most common things that people want to know the answer to? Then I’m going to take that, honestly go to ChatGPT, say, write me a 90 second to three minute script for how to… and it’s going to produce something that’s pretty good to be honest. Shoot that up. We don’t have to have complicated setups. The more organic, the more trustworthy a video is. So have a good audio. Good audio is the secret to good video, so have good audio, but shoot the video, get it up there, let it get transcribed, let it get processed by the system.

And that’s going to serve just like a blog article that you would write on your website. And it’s going to rank both in Google if you’re doing on YouTube, it’s going to be on YouTube itself. It’s going to be very discoverable, very shareable as well. And just to kind of put some practical numbers around this, if you do decide to do it on a social platform like Instagram or TikTok, there is a feature on those platforms where you can localise the video, where you can select the location of the video. And if you do that, it’s going to push it primarily to people near that location. I did this with my channel when I first started it on TikTok, I had to stop because I had people stopping me at the grocery store to say, Hey, you’re that Wizard guy from TikTok, and they would try to talk to me, and my wife’s like, I just need to get some bread and get out of here.

I love that. So essentially you made yourself slightly infamous in your local market, and actually I think that’s what MSP owners should be doing. It’s exactly that, because apart from the stalkers that were chasing you to your car, which I’m sure there were a few of those Jake, you want to be infamous in your market, you know want people to come up and look at you incredulously and go, I know you are the guy, I was watching your videos last week. Because when someone’s thinking of hiring an MSP, who are they more likely to hire? The person they’ve never heard of who has no video content versus the person that seems to have exactly the same business? They can’t tell the difference between one MSP and another, do they want the guy with no video or the guy that actually, they’ve watched some of their videos, they’ve seen him in the store, they’ve seen him at the ball game, and he is an authority. He is a known personality. What do you think would stop an MSP from doing this? Is it the fear of the videos? Is it the fear of getting it right, getting it wrong? Is it the time that it takes?

I got this from another creator on TikTok, and I think that this sentence holds very, very true. The cost of fame is cringe. It’s going to feel cringey, awkward, forced when you’re doing it. It’s like this doesn’t feel right. But the reality is, that that’s going to keep everyone else from doing it. And it’s not cringey, it’s helpful, it’s inspiring, it’s getting people to where they need to be.

With video, you need to push through that cringe curtain and just get it done. I think that’s the biggest thing, just starting to produce it.

Yeah, I love that. That’s my quote to the podcast, by the way, is to push through the cringe curtain. I absolutely love that. Laura on my team listens and watches all these episodes and she pulls out the quotes for the page. We have a podcast summary page on our website, and I very much hope that that’s the quote that she pulls out.

Final question for you, Jake, obviously we talk about AI and we know that it’s not just about SEO these days, it’s about GEO (generative engine optimisation). And right now, I read a stat a few weeks ago that said that right now ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc, they’re making recommendations for businesses based on people’s research. And right now it’s like 1-2%. So one 2% of your traffic or your new leads are coming from these AI engines. But we’re on day like one, we’re on minute one of hour one of day one, and I saw a great tweet, I don’t go on Twitter, but I saw a tweet which had been turned into some of the social posts somewhere from someone saying, our kids in 30 years will not believe that the way we got answers to things was to type something into Google, read a page of blue links, click on five of those links, and then figure it out for ourselves.

When actually for them, they just say to the AI, What should I do about this? And the AI works is all out. And when you see a sentence like that, it’s like, oh yeah, that makes complete sense. We’re cavemen, we are digital cavemen right now. So let’s assume that the GEO, generative engine optimisation, feeding the AI engines what they need in order to recommend you to people searching for the answer to the problem they’ve got, they’re not going to go searching for an MSP, but they’re going to go searching for the answers to a problem. Do you see, and I appreciate, I’m asking you here to look in a crystal ball because no one knows until it happens, but do you see video content continuing to be really important to the AI engines?

I don’t think it’s going to be important to the AI engines as much as it’s going to be to the consumer. And the reason for that is because at the end of the day, business to business, that model doesn’t exist. Everything is people to people. Maybe we’ll get to the point where AI is talking to AI and buys from AI and it does it on my behalf. Great. We’ll do some of that. But at the end of the day, when you are making those giant business decisions of which MSP you’re going to commit to for the next two, three years, that’s going to help you grow through infrastructure, you’re going to want to interact with a person. And a person is going to make that decision based off of another person talking to them. And so video is going to start to build that relationship better than any AI, better than any blog post that you can ever create. And so I think that the value of video, ultimately, SEO aside, GEO aside, is timeless when it comes to business.

Yeah, I agree with you. In fact, I can see something in the near future, let’s hope it’s not too far away, where we’ve got agents in our phones and we can be sitting watching a video and someone will say something and you just say to your phone, Oh, I want that. Can you just do that for me? And it’ll just go off and find a local buyer and buy it, and it’s got your credit card and it knows your limits and what you’re comfortable with or not. Or you’re watching a video and you say, I’d love to eat food like that, and it’ll find the local restaurant that you’re watching a video in Japan of a restaurant in Japan that’s making a kind of food, and it’ll find the nearest restaurant to you, realise you are free on Thursday night, you normally go out on Thursday night with your wife or whatever, and it just does all that for you. And that’s a whole different step up. And yeah, I completely agree with you there.

To me, that’s exciting, right? Because you can game that and by gaming it, I mean, you can feed that. You can realise that that’s what’s going to happen, and because we’re on minute one of hour one of day one, this is a great time to be talking about this stuff. There we go. Jake, we could talk for hours, hours about this, but we’re not going to, we’re going to stop here. Me because I want to go and look up childhood memories of Bloxham. But you because you have podcasts to record because you have an entire network of podcasts. So tell us about your podcast network, which I know they’re going to be fascinating to MSPs. Tell us about about your podcast network and also do tell us what you do to help MSPs in your agency as well.

Absolutely. So our podcast network is called Vox & Coin. We currently have three shows on the network – Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. They’re all very different. We have our kind of standard two hosts talk about the marketplace show, very thought leadership, very fun, very relaxed. We also have our interview show unicorn campaigns where we interview people who’ve run extremely successful marketing campaigns and break that down. And then my personal favourite is the last drop where myself and Dave, my co-host, we sit down and we invent a business from initial concept to rollout in about 45 minutes, and we always pick some very wild ideas, so they’re great shows to watch. If you’re just looking for some nuggets about business development, entrepreneurship, sales and marketing, I definitely recommend checking it out.

And that’s all supported by Finch, which is our agency. We do paid advertising management as well as SEO, that’s kind of our bread and butter. So discovery, lead gen, we’re going to get you found. We have one of the highest average ROAS that I’ve seen in an industry. Our team is incredible, and we are global. We always have a team member awake somewhere on this planet of ours. So we’re always working for our clients, making sure that everything’s optimised and always producing. So if you want to check out the podcast, look up Vox & Coin on your favourite podcast platform or YouTube, and you can visit our agency at finch.com.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Steven, from an MSP in Kansas, is trying to wrestle time back from working in the business to work on the business. His question is: Why am I struggling to let go of doing things myself or outsourcing stuff?

It’s because you are a control freak, but don’t worry. So am I, and so is everyone else listening to this podcast. All business owners are control freaks. Why do we start the business in the first place? Yeah, partly it’s for money, partly it’s flexibility, but for most it’s about control. Control over what you do, how you do it, and when and where you do it. And what makes the control freakery even worse is when you discover in the early days that no one can do stuff in the business as well as you can. So you use your business owning superpowers to hang onto as many jobs as you can, even if you don’t realise you’re doing this, you are.

The ability to exert this level of control is what stops far too many MSP owners becoming proper business owners. They spend their entire careers as owner operators, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But after 10 to 15 years of it, you really need to grow, let go and transition into being just the owner, where the business is being run for you by people, other people who together can actually do a better job than you could on your own. And yes, this is painful and it can lead to an identity crisis, but the reward is you get paid very well to go and do lots of other things that you really like doing. Like volunteering or walking the dog, anything like that. But at the same time, you retain full ownership of the business.

To get anywhere near this goal, there does come a point where you have to truly start to let go and accept that once you start involving other people, sometimes they will only ever do something 80% as well as you could do it, but that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay, as it means in the short term, you can focus your valuable time and energy on things that make a bigger impact on you, your family, your staff, and your clients. And in the long term, you can create a business that thrives without you personally needing to be there.

Imagine you had this phone call tomorrow. Someone says, Hey, it’s your biggest client here. I’m really annoyed that you can’t restore that file I lost because our backup stopped eight days ago and you didn’t fix it. And you have to say, I’m really sorry about that. I was so busy answering the phone and so busy changing passwords and scheduling social media and logging tickets and editing our newsletter, and also had to clean the kitchen and check the invoices and fix the automation links and tweak the PSA and set up new users. I’m so busy doing all of that. I just didn’t get round to checking that your backup was working.

Obviously, your most important client is going to be pretty mad at that. All business owners go through something like this. Letting go is a rite of passage. You do it slowly over a number of years until one day you just don’t go to work for a few weeks and the business does better without you. Here’s something to get you started. Read a book. It’s called the E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It’s also available on Audible if you don’t want the paper copy, but it is a great book to help you understand how you are feeling about this and what you can do to get started on that journey.

Mentioned links

• This podcast is in conjunction with the MSP Marketing Edge, the world’s leading white label content marketing and growth training subscription.
• Join me in MSP Marketing Facebook group.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn.
• Connect with my guest, Jacob Tlapek, on LinkedIn, and visit the Finch website.
• Recommended book: E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.