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Welcome to Episode 306 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools: If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, there are AI tools you’ll definitely want to avoid. Instead, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now.
• Why your MSP doesn’t stand out (and how to fix that): There are thousands of MSPs to choose from, so why would people choose you? Let me share a couple of good ideas with you and see if I can give you some inspiration.
• All successful MSPs have this in common: The easiest way to grow your MSP is to ask someone who’s already done it. My special guest has been growing MSPs for 20 years and has some ideas waiting for you to use.
• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Find out what “relevance increases results” actually means and how can it help with your MSP’s marketing.

Your MSP should AVOID these AI tools

It’s one thing being overwhelmed by your business and not having enough time to find new clients for your MSP, but it’s another thing being overwhelmed with the choices of AI tools that are supposed to save you time and reduce overwhelm in the first place. Have you found the options and variations of AI tools so completely bamboozling? Well, if so, you’re not on your own.

If you want to be more productive, do better marketing and ultimately grow your MSP, here are five AI tools that you should be using right now. And let’s be honest, there is a lot of noise about AI and a lot of it is hype. I follow a lot of AI newsletters very carefully to keep up to date with what’s happening, which of course is a never ending and somewhat overwhelming task in itself. Now while there is a lot of talk of people trying to do amazing things, often when you dive into the amazing things that all of these new tools should be able to do, they just don’t work that way. Well, they kind of work that way, but they’re never really good enough for you to rely on them. But saying that…

There are some very real and very useful tools that MSPs are already using to save time, create better marketing, and just get more done.

So let me give you a shortlist of what I think are the best AI tools you should know about right now:

Let’s start with the most obvious one, ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity or whatever your preferred tool is. And yeah, I know it’s obvious but hear me out because the trick with getting the best output from your general AI tool is giving it good input. So let’s look at content creation for example. The worst thing you could do is just say, Hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog post about backups because it’s just going to generate boring AI slop that isn’t going to bring any benefit to your MSP. So a better way to use it is to shape content that you’re already getting from trusted content providers and get the AI tool to customise it to your specific audience.

Let me give you an example. We create tons of content for our MSP Marketing Edge members and increasingly a number of them are using AI tools to tailor that content to their specific audience. So for example, some have created custom GPTs, which are then trained on their ICP, sorry to use two acronyms in a row there, but as you might already know, an ICP is an ideal client profile. So they’ve essentially taught the AI exactly what their ideal client looks like and then they put our content into that custom GPT and the AI tweaks and adjusts the content so it’s completely relevant to the ideal client. And you do this because relevance increases results. Can you see the power of doing that? You’re taking very well-written content that’s been put together by humans and then you are optimising it for the very specific audience that you want to reach.

The other big thing that I found recently with ChatGPT especially is that just giving it a prompt and expecting it to do a great job is rarely the answer. Instead, you’ve kind of got to challenge it to do something, give it a mission, perhaps get it to interview you, make it a two-way street. If you use ChatGPT like an assistant that you’re having a discussion with rather than a contractor you’re just giving a very short brief to and expecting it to get on, that’s where you get the best results – two way conversations.

My suggestion number two is OpusClip. If you’re making any video content, even just filming yourself giving tech tips, then this tool is magic. You upload one long video and OpusClip automatically chops it into short clips with captions, jump cuts and highlights. It’s perfect for LinkedIn or YouTube shorts and I’ve seen a few MSPs use this to turn a 5 – 10 minute video into a whole month of content.

Suggestion number three is Descript. And this is a game changer for editing audio and video because instead of fiddling around with timelines, you edit the transcript like a Word document and then Descript cuts the video to match. And you can remove filler words automatically. It even has a voice cloning feature, so if you say something wrong and you want to fix it without re-recording, it just kind of makes up your voice for you. Very clever.

Number four, Firefly.ai or Fathom or one of the other AI meeting assistants. And as you probably know, they jump on your Zoom or Teams calls, they take notes and then they summarise the key action points. And MSPs are using them for client meetings, initial discovery calls, and even internal strategy sessions because you get searchable transcripts. So if someone says, Can we talk about cyber insurance again next quarter? it’s right there and some of them will pull out those action points as well.

What’s funny these days is when you join a Zoom or Teams call with lots of people, you get almost as many note takers as you do actual humans joining the call. But like I was saying earlier about ChatGPT, just using something to automatically record and transcribe and summarise every meeting, there’s little real value to you because when do you ever read back those summaries? You don’t because you were in the meeting. But they can be great if you take those summaries and you use them as an aide memoir in the future. Anything that stops you having to go back and ask someone, What was it we were talking about? just saves everyone time, which is great.

I find it quite useful to take summaries and put them into another AI like ChatGPT and ask it to pull out the actions that you should have been doing or to summarise something that you might’ve missed. I know it’s kind of weird to use two AIs together, but sometimes one AI will spot something the other AI hasn’t.

And then suggestion number five, let me tell you about a productivity tool I’ve been using that has completely changed the way I work. It’s called Wispr Flow. Now this is a dictation tool, but you use the same tool across all of your devices and it learns about you and how you talk and what you like and what your preferences are over time. Now, I was kind of dubious when I started their free two week trial. I use dictation on my Mac and on my iPhone all the time, and that’s been a big part of how I work for a couple of years. So why did I need another dictation tool? But actually Wispr Flow is very smart.

It adapts to the platform that it’s being used in. So for example, it’ll be a lot less formal in a WhatsApp or an SMS conversation than it would in an email or if you’re writing a LinkedIn post. It also handles all of the formatting and the presentation of the content for you. The real power of Wispr flow is you just talk to it naturally rather than the stilted conversation that you have with normal dictation tools. So when I’m just dictating something on my iPhone, I’m saying something like, And I will get back to you open bracket when I can close bracket full stop smiley emoji. And it’s not a natural flow.

When I’m using Wispr Flow, I can just say, So I’ll get back to you when I’m ready and if there’s anything else that I can help with, will you just let me know? Thanks Paul. And it automatically arranges it into sentences and leaves gaps and puts emojis in and all of that kind of stuff because it’s learned I like emojis in my texts. I mean even just something like leaving a pause as I’m thinking about something, it acknowledges that that’s the end of a paragraph and it starts a new paragraph. Or it can sometimes go back if I change my mind about something. So if I say, Can you get back to me about the cheese? Oh sorry, the cheese and the beef and the ham. Then all I see in the text is Can you get back to me about the cheese and the beef and the ham? Whereas most other tools that you use like this, you end up seeing cheese, cheese, beef, and ham. Does that make sense?

It will also pick up the way that you spell certain words and you can program certain things in. So if I go in and edit some texts that it’s just dictated for me, which is transcribed for me, then if I’ve changed the spelling, it will automatically add that to the dictionary and use that spelling again in the future. And I can tell it things right from the get go. For example, I have a colleague called Ami, but she spells it with an I on the end, not a Y on the end. And I say the word Ami quite a lot as I’m dictating messages to her. So I only had to tell it once that it’s Ami with an I and now it gets it right every single time on all of my devices. That’s the point. You do this on one device and it automatically updates on all of your devices. It’s very good.

I remember a few years back when I discovered a tool called Text Expander. That’s not an AI tool, but it was a tool that completely changed my productivity because instead of having to copy and paste repeat text, I just set up all the things I often type with short codes and I still use that today. Well, Text Expander and Wispr Flow together has had a similarly huge effect on me, and I find myself using Wispr Flow every single day, not just for work, but for personal stuff too. So tell me, which AI tools would you recommend to me right now?

Why your MSP doesn’t stand out (and how to fix that)

It’s as simple as this… there are thousands of MSPs they could choose from, so why would they choose you? Most MSPs simply cannot answer this question, and yet it’s the most important marketing question to answer. What’s your USP? What’s the reason you stand out? Figuring out the answer to this isn’t easy. So let me share a couple of good ideas with you and see if I can give you some inspiration.

So I’ve got this friend, let’s call her Debbie, and she’s not in our world, she works in a different sector and sadly she was just made redundant a few months ago, which is not fun, especially after nearly a decade in the same business. It’s kind of left her at a crossroads. She was already thinking of changing careers, but of course we like to be in control of when we do these things, don’t we? I was chatting to her the other day and said, if you could wave a magic wand and do any job, what would it be? And her eyes completely lit up and she smiled and she said, I’d love to work with animals. In fact, she said, I’ve just applied for a receptionist role at my local veterinarians, and then the smile faded, but they told me they’ve had hundreds of applications, I’ve got no chance.

Well, now it was my turn to get excited. I said, No, wait, standing out is a marketing challenge and that’s my superpower. Five minutes later I devised a brilliant plan for her.

Number one, she was going to bake a really big delicious cake and she is a great baker.

Number two, she was going to print her CV, her resume on high quality paper.

Number three, she was going to hand write a covering letter to accompany it, saying something like, I know that hundreds of people have applied for this role and I wanted to make sure you saw my application. You’ll be jumping for joy if you give me this role because… and then list three benefits that the owner of this veterinarian practice will enjoy by hiring her. Maybe add a humorous fourth one about an endless stream of fresh cakes.

Number four, put all of that in a brightly coloured box to keep it together.

Then number five, hand deliver the box to the veterinary clinic, like now, no delay in that, it’s got to be done urgently.

So if she’d done all of this just doing that wouldn’t have got Debbie the job, but it would’ve got her an interview, you can almost guarantee that, can’t you? Because as an employer, wouldn’t you be intrigued by a candidate who went to this much effort? I know I would. Well, I saw Debbie a week or so after we had this conversation, and of course I said to her, how did you interview go? And she admitted to me a bit sheepishly, oh, I didn’t do the cake thing. I didn’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons, which to me is just flipping crazy. Although I do understand how much fear she must have felt at the thought of pushing that much outside of her comfort zone. But here’s the thing, for many job roles and especially those that don’t require specialist skills, employers are spoiled for choice.

To get people’s attention you have to do things that other people won’t. And marketing your MSP is exactly the same.

The ordinary business owners and managers that you want to reach have hundreds if not thousands of other MSPs that they can pick from. In theory, they could hire an MSP anywhere in the world, so you must stand out to them. And one of the tactics I recommend to do this is something called an impact box, which is similar to what I recommended that Debbie did, but systemisable.

Here’s what could go inside your impact box: You should do a handwritten short intro note, handwritten stands out because it shows that you’ve taken the time and put in the effort. And if your handwriting is terrible, you get someone else in the office to do that. You’d also put in your proposal, or if you’re only at the meeting stage you’d put a confirmation of the meeting or the confirmation of the follow-up meeting, depends where you are in the sales process when you send this impact box. You’d put in there your buyer’s guide, and if you don’t have one, we give one to our MSP Marketing Edge members, in fact we’ve just refreshed it for 2026.

You’d put in there a selection of printed case studies and now that’s a third piece of printed material but all of these play a different part in influencing people. In fact, one idea is to put a video case study in there on a USB because obviously your prospects would never plug a USB from a stranger into their laptop, would they? You’d also throw in there some edible stuff like chocolates, biscuits, sweets, candy, something like that. And then some merch, some merchandise, a mouse mat, pen, a mug, whatever really. Just make sure the box looks really nice inside, use sheets of that crumpled tissue paper, and on the outside you could have some stickers printed with your logo or something like that.

You deliver that box to the right prospect at the right point in their sales cycle and it will completely blow them away. Doesn’t guarantee that you get the sale, but it guarantees you a place at the table. Now, what else do you think you could do to make your MSP stand out to prospects?

All successful MSPs have this in common

Featured guest: Nicola Moss is The Fractional Marketeer. A senior B2B marketing leader and your dedicated Fractional CMO, with over 20 years of experience helping MSPs and B2B tech companies grow through effective and scalable marketing.

Nicola has led branding, communications, demand generation and customer engagement strategies across IT, cloud, security and digital sectors, delivering measurable results in both SMB and enterprise environments.

Creative, focused and results driven, Nicola helps tech companies build brand authority, generate leads and accelerate growth without the overhead.

The best piece of advice in business is this… if you want to achieve something big like growing your MSP, the easiest way to do that is to ask someone who’s already done it. What would you ask them? Would you ask them what they did, what worked the best and what was a waste of time? Well, you are in luck because my special guest right now has been growing MSPs their entire life. So just for you, here comes some ideas waiting for you to use.

Hi, I’m Nicola Moss. I am the owner of The Fractional Marketeer and I’ve been running this business for the last few months, having had a 20 year exciting career marketing within some of the smallest and largest of MSPs.

That’s brilliant, and thank you so much for joining us on this podcast, Nicola. Obviously you’ve got this exciting new business going forward where I know you are already working with some MSPs and you have some gaps, some vacancies to work with others. Let’s see if we can fill those gaps for you. So we’ll talk about that and what you do later on towards the end of the interview. First of all, I want to look back at the last 20 years because someone who has been there in the trenches actually physically doing marketing for MSPs for 20 years has an immense amount of value. We all know that if you’ve been there and you’ve done it, the chances of you figuring out what to do and how to do it, it just gets easier and easier and easier. So give us a brief rundown of your career. How did you get into marketing MSPs in the first place and what kind of MSPs have you worked at?

So that’s a really good question. When I left university, I managed to get my first marketing role in oil and gas actually, and thought that might be a sector that was quite fun and exciting, decided that it wasn’t. And I relocated, and with that location came a new job and that job happened to be born out of an engineering company but turned itself into telecoms. I joined there when it was very small, 30 odd people, very tiny company, and I was given the best opportunity of my career and I took it and I ran with it and did everything that I possibly could and stayed there for 10 years. I loved it. And then decided that the time was right to widen my experiences a little bit and join other MSPs. And I’ve been in MSPs ever since, really pretty much.

I think once you’re in the channel, it’s really hard to get out to the channel, isn’t it? It’s fun. And there’s so much change, you can’t ever get bored, let’s be honest. It’s not like being a dentist or something where you are waiting 20 years for a new drill to come in or something like that. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. So you started marketing MSPs around 20 years ago, so around about 2005. And obviously the world was different in 2005, nevermind the technology, nevermind marketing. What are the sort of the big shifts that you’ve seen that have made either been the biggest challenges or have made the biggest difference to MSPs over those last couple of decades?

So it’s an interesting question that actually, and I’ve been reflecting on that over the last couple of days, and I think there’s positives and negatives of this. I think some of the biggest shifts that I’ve seen are 20 years ago we were in analog marketing, so we had telemarketing, events and direct mail and pretty much that was all that we had, especially in small MSPs where budgets were limited. And I was in a small MSP. So 20 years ago you had to be really creative with marketing and you had to know where to spend the money to get the best bang for your buck. And I think I spent quite a long time perfecting that. I think they call it gorilla marketing now.

I did run some really, really high profile branding initiatives for Opal Telecom while I was there. It’s now Talk Talk Business. And they were fun and exciting and I guess in that day as well, what equally didn’t happen, I guess, which is different to today, is that we weren’t measured on things. There weren’t so many KPIs. We didn’t really look at return on investment in the way that it’s looked at now. And the measure was are we growing as a business and the measure was we actually doubled our turnover year on year, phenomenally, phenomenally quick, and it was hard to keep up.

So I guess those are the two sort of different challenges. I think now we’re in a much more digital world. We have been probably for the last 10 years or so, maybe slightly more digital and social. And my sort of thought process I guess for the future, I know you haven’t asked this question, is what are we going to do next? And are we about to change and are we about to flip? And I actually think that the answer is yes to that.

People have digital fatigue and I think there’s going to be changes in marketing ahead, but we don’t know quite what they will be yet.

Well, let’s go with that question, because you’re right, that was going to be my next question, which is if you’ve been doing something for 20 years and you’ve seen the evolution of that, what’s next? We are fully digital, and I recommend to my MSP Marketing Edge members that they occasionally do some analog stuff because analog stuff stands out. We give them a printed newsletter every month, and I say, print 50 to 100 copies, send that out to your hottest prospects to your Dream 100, the concept of your hottest small bunch of prospects. And the reason we do that is because 20 years ago, loads of printed newsletters landed in doors and today no one does that. So it gives you huge standoutability. So let’s look at that then the next couple of years you think there’s going to be a flip? Is that going to be based around AI or something else?

I think AI is going to play a role, it’s certainly going to play a role within SEO marketing anyway, and I don’t don’t know yet how that landscape is going to change, but when people are searching Google now, it presents the whole AI spiel before you even get to the number one. So fighting for that number one has become even harder, and we don’t really know how that landscape is going to evolve, I think. And you’re right in terms of that, so we talked a bit about digital fatigue and I think people are open to face-to-face communications, they’re open to that more personal touch, they’re open to that different side of marketing that was perhaps from back in the day. And perhaps we just need to evolve from back in the day and bring it into today’s kind of marketing. But I definitely think that there’s going to be a change.

Yeah. Well, you’re preempting all of my questions. Oh, by the way, I should clarify, we don’t pre-plan these interviews, so I never provide lists of questions or anything, these interviews are always just go with the flow. It’s clearly Nicola and I are thinking the same way, which is really cool. So we’ve looked at the past, we’ve looked at the future. Let’s talk about what’s working now. So you have, as you said earlier, a few months ago you came out of actually doing marketing for an MSP and now you’re working with a number of them. So obviously we have no idea really do we, what’s going to happen. And you and I as marketers are following trends, are reading and consuming and researching just as much as anyone else because I think we’re all just sort of finding our way into the future. But in terms of right now, so as this interview goes out late summer 2025, what’s working for MSPs now to generate leads and turn those leads into initial sales meetings?

That’s a really tough question, and I think with the MSPs that I’ve been speaking to, I actually think that there’s an area where, I mean, we could probably say that actually it’s quite tough right now for MSPs and certainly marketing is equally quite tough. And I think there’s challenges with who they’re marketing to. Budgets are tightened. I think IT projects are being undertaken, but they’re being selective about which projects they want to undertake and when. So I think that there’s certainly a lot of challenges for an MSP. And of course if you are selling managed services, there’s only really ever 3% in market, so to speak, that’s able to buy. Most MSPs actually do say that they retain kind of like 95, 97% of their customer base. So the market is sort of very small anyway, and they’re equally being quite cautious about who they’re engaging with and how.

What’s working with MSPs right now, I think they’re still using the more interruptive forms of marketing that there are, the telemarketing, the email side of marketing. I think the way that MSPs are and the way that marketing is measured, I think people want to try and see the return. And that’s where people can see the return and it’s measurable and you can send out a hundred emails and you get one response and you can figure out whether that’s a channel that’s worth investing in or not. I think what the smaller MSPs particularly, and I totally get it, what they’re perhaps not embracing so much is the brand side of things. So it’s all very much tactically lead driven activities. But what happens, you’ve got your 3% that’s in market and you’re doing a marketing campaign that lasts three months, what happens for the rest of the nine month period?

And that’s where I think the strategic marketing really should come into play. You really probably need to be looking at the peer review sites for example, a lot of the buyers, 70% of buyers Gartner say, actually do their buying before they even arrive on a company’s website. So unless you’re sort of present in those areas, it’s going to be very difficult for you. You are sort of battling uphill all of the time. And whilst the uphill battle, I think the MSPs are doing okay at, you’re going to become fatigued really quickly before you get to the top of that. And I think what we need to do is try and get MSPs to turn themselves around a bit and look more into that bigger picture, the branding side of things and things which are actually really quite difficult to measure, but that are so important in terms of turning a business from that sort of outbound interruptive marketing into that sort of inbound, Hey, I’ve just had 10 leads land in my inbox and I don’t know where they’ve come from, sort of MSP, but actually it’s around all of the periphery marketing activities that happen.

I agree. So there’s a couple of really positive things that come out of that. The first is, as you said, 97% of clients stay with their MSP. So it’s tough to win a client, but when you win them, you keep them forever. They don’t go anywhere until they go bust or they’re acquired or there’s some catastrophe which separates that relationship. So hard to win, but easy to keep is the first positive. I think the other positive is Nicola, is that everyone is in the same boat. And if you’ve got 20, 30, 40 direct competitors in your market, let alone the thousands of others you’re in competition with, because any MSP can service any client anywhere more or less, until they’ve got to get physically boots on the ground. Everyone’s got the same problems and everyone’s battling through it. And I’m sure you see this, the MSPs who win are the ones that keep going and keep investing in marketing. And even if it’s small amounts of money and small amounts of time, it’s always better to do little bits of marketing regularly. And I mean every weekday to be doing something every weekday than to do a campaign here and stop and do nothing for six months and do something and stop and do something for a few months and it’s just keeping going is such an important thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And well, like we say, there’s so many different channels now that are available to marketeers. And again, the challenge for marketing is we kind of really need to be present in all of these channels, but we’re sometimes very dictated by budgets. And it’s about trying to figure out which of those channels are going to provide the better ROI for that MSP. And that’s a learning curve, and there isn’t a marketing blueprint for that. Every organisation is different yet facing very similar challenges. And I think it’s the role of marketing is to go in and figure out and navigate how we can create that niche for that MSP and start to tell the narrative and tell the story and build the brand on an ongoing basis so that it’s not just that ad hoc campaign here, an ad hoc campaign there, but it actually starts to build a narrative around that MSP and why that MSP is unique and why that MSP is credible and why somebody should actually choose that MSP as their provider.

Yeah, exactly that. And you get that momentum from doing that and keeping that going. Nicola, let’s stop there. Thank you so much for your time. So you’ve come out of working for an MSP, you are now a fractional marketer, which let’s put that in slightly different terms. Most MSPs listening to this or watching this on YouTube will have heard of the VCIO virtual chief information officer. I would look at Nicola as a VCMO a virtual chief marketing officer. Tell us briefly, what do you actually do to help MSPs? Are you helping with strategy? Are you helping with implementation? And then finally, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Oh, brilliant, thank you. It’s a bit of both actually. So it depends on the MSP and what they’ve sort of got existing at the moment. Some MSPs that I’m working with, they already have a marketing function of sorts, and that marketing function can be sort of part of the commercial team or part of the sales team, and perhaps it’s sort of reached the limit of what the sales or commercial person knows about marketing and they’re wanting somebody to come in and help drive that strategy. Or it could be an MSP that kind of needs support and help and guidance in understanding actually what is their niche, what is their USP, what is their ICP, and how do we go about creating the messaging framework in order to be able to sell into them? And I can help along with those things as well. And very tactically, just some MSPs don’t have any marketing at all. So equally very happy to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in to. The best way to get in touch with me is via my website. It’s thefractionalmarketeer.co.uk. Or you can check me out on LinkedIn, search for Nicola Moss, and hopefully that will bring you to me and love to connect and see how I can help.

Paul’s Personal Peer Group

Lucas, from an MSP based in Denver, would like to know what is meant by the term “relevance increases results”?

“Relevance increases results” means that any piece of marketing needs to be as relevant as it can be to the person who’s reading it or watching it. Because the more relevant they perceive it is to them, the more likely they are to take action on it.

So for example, if you had a piece of content about laptop encryption, you’d say to your leads and your prospects: This is what a good IT partner does without having to be asked. When you’re looking for a new partner, book a 15 minute zoom with me.

With clients you’d say: Hey, laptop encryption. We do this automatically to protect you and your data. It’s why you need to tell us if ever you get a device elsewhere and start using it in the business. If you do, just call the help desk so we can check the encryption and other cyber security safety factors for you.

And then this is what you’d say to stubborn break/fixers who will not switch to managed services. You’d say to them: Do you want us to check all of your laptops and make them safe for you? There’s this thing called encryption, which you may not have switched on in your laptop. Why don’t we just check that it’s an easy thing to do and not expensive?

And of course, any kind of interaction like that with a stubborn break/fixer is a start of a conversation to talk about why they really should move over to being a managed services client of yours.

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, Nicola Moss, on LinkedIn, and visit The Fractional Marketeer website.
• Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.