The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge
Welcome to Episode 278 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…
- Optimize your MSP’s marketing for voice & AI search?: AI and voice search is on the rise – let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website.
- The perfect MSP sales promotion, that’s 1,000% GUARANTEED to work: What has worked really well for you in the past but for some reason you just stopped doing it? Perhaps it’s time to re-start it but with a better system in place.
- A simple MSP marketing framework you can swipe: MSPs are often at risk of making marketing way too complicated. My guest shares a simple marketing framework that you can adapt to suit your business.
- Paul’s Personal Peer Group: Do you perceive marketing as too creative or something outside of your comfort zone? It’s actually more logical than you might think.
Optimize your MSP’s marketing for voice & AI search?
Are you doing your MSP’s SEO wrong? Make sure you hear this first. Because if your MSP could really do with finding new clients and you need them to find your website, everything could be changing with search engine optimisation. Why? Because AI and voice search is on the rise. So let’s find out if you can use it to get more traffic to your website and whether you need to change your MSP’s marketing plan.
Tell me, how often do you search for answers using just your voice and how often do you use an AI tool to search? Whichever specific tools you prefer to use, I think we can all agree that sometimes it’s just easier to ask Alexa or Siri to search for something or get ChatGPT to do a whole ton of research for us. But have you yet considered how that might affect driving traffic to your MSP’s website?
We don’t talk a lot about SEO, search engine optimization, on this podcast or in these YouTube videos. I’m not an expert at SEO, there are much better people than me at this and I prefer to get on guests to talk about subjects where I don’t have a specific expertise. But I think we can take a holistic overview of the change in something as big as search. Now if you are as old as me, he says looking at his gray hair, you’ll remember when search was really clunky and difficult…yep, I’m talking about you AltaVista, back in the last millennium, and I’m feeling every single one of my 50 years right now. But honestly, if you weren’t alive back in the mid to late nineties, you have no idea how bad search was.
Yahoo was kind of doing its own thing by doing it manually. It was compiling manual links and editor driven lists of stuff. And then you had kind of basic search engines like AltaVista. There was a popular one here in the UK that was called Ask Jeeves, like a butler type character, and I think that was ask.com across the world. Now of course, we didn’t know that the search experience was bad until something way, way better came along, and that thing was Google.
Google really did change everything back in the day. Its method of crawling the web and ranking web pages according to backlinks, which is how many other sites actually connect to them. And also its ability to figure out what the page was about, that was revolutionary at the time. And you can argue that Google has been so utterly dominant in search in the last 25 years and even though that dominance is now under threat from a number of different ways, the next big shift after Google came along was of course the shift to mobile search. But what’s that, about 10 – 15 years since we all needed to make sure that our websites were optimised for mobile search and mobile access. But that’s all very much a routine thing in 2025.
Search itself is now undergoing it’s next revolution, which is where you’re doing the searching without accessing Google directly.
Let’s look at the first of those, which has been around for some time and that’s searching with your voice. There are all sorts of stats online about how much search is actually done just through voice. And you can summarise all the different stats, certainly just looking at what’s happening within Google, as a quarter of all searches in the Google app are now done by voice. I guess that’s when you hit the little microphone button to do that. To me, that’s not really voice search, that’s just an efficient way of adding text into the Google app without having to actually press anything.
So what about proper voice search like Alexa? I use Alexa two or three times a day for simple stuff, like what time my next reminders are or cooking timers, that kind of thing. Oi, I’m not talking to you… she just went off in the background. But I’ve been taught over the years by Amazon, the owners of Alexa, not to rely upon her for proper answers to anything other than trivia questions really. Because if I have to hear the phrase – an Alexa answers contributor has written or according to the website complicated url.com – you get the idea. It’s fine when you are with your family and you’re sat chatting and you want to remember whether or not a specific celebrity is dead without having to pull out your phone. That’s what it can be quite useful for.
But would I use Alexa or Siri to search for an MSP near me? I don’t think I would. Maybe I would use it to search for a restaurant that’s open and engage with them and maybe even ask what the menu is about. But would I do it for a managed service provider? I really don’t think so. Because don’t forget, managed services is one of the most difficult and complex B2B sales that there is. And that means that people need to go through a very big research phase and they can’t do that research phase while having a conversation with what is essentially a dumb voice assistant, because the intelligence is just not there. It’s deeply frustrating when you’re trying to do anything more than just look something up, something basic. So the obvious answer there surely is to get AI to do researching for us, and this is where I think new search gets really interesting. Because actually AI can do the searching and can do the research phase for you.
Just for this video and this podcast episode, I asked ChatGPT to do something for me. The instruction I gave was this exactly this: I am looking for a new IT support company. I’m based in Milton Keynes (which happens to be where I live here in the UK), please summarise the top five providers that I should be talking to and what the differences are between them. And you know what? ChatGPT did a great job. It pulled up five local companies and for each one it summarised what each of them would do for me. Now it specifically summarised a sentence for each as well called key differentiator. If I believed everything that ChatGPT told me, then this would’ve made my research really, really easy. I could now just book appointments with those five MSPs and the latest version of ChatGPT even gives you the website. So I could just click and have a look at the five different websites.
I’m sure in the future and probably not that far off, it will actually be able to book appointments for me, when it’s an agent and it can access Calendarly and access my calendar. It’s not quite there yet, but I’m sure that’s no more than a year off. I did a very similar search for the same terms: IT support Milton Keynes, on Google. And interestingly, I didn’t see the same five companies in the same order. They were there on the page, but not in the order that ChatGPT put them in. I don’t think that really means anything at this stage.
But let’s ask what this does mean in terms of what you are doing with your marketing right now. As I said at the beginning, I am not a technical expert at this, but it’s clear to me that the AI search and probably the voice search as well when it becomes smarter using AI, is just going to be a very efficient way of getting information out of your website and ordering it for someone.
So I think we may be about to enter a new era of optimisation on our websites. For years, it has been about search engine optimisation and trying your hardest to get your website to the top of page one. I can see how that’s going to change. I don’t know how it’s going to change. If I did, I would make a fortune selling that to Silicon Valley. 
And I’ve made it my mission for the next few months to find a real expert in this and get him or her onto a future YouTube video and also of course in the MSP marketing podcast. In the meantime, if you’ve gone in depth into this, and if you’ve done a lot of work on your MSP’s website, I would love to hear what you’ve done, whether or not it’s made any difference, any big difference to the leads that you’re generating from your website. I think we’re very much on day one of AI and voice search, but it’s so clear to see that this is the direction that we are headed in. We are going down that route and it’s going to become increasingly important.
My final thought on this is to remember that all we’re talking about here is new ways of getting your MSP in front of people. New ways of getting people to come to you and come to your website and see that you are around. It’s still humans that are making the buying decisions, not the AI, the AI doesn’t decide for you, it just summarises what you offer. And that means you need to keep focusing your overall marketing on showing people who the people are behind the business and don’t get too logical with it, give them emotional reasons to pick your MSP. I personally can’t see that changing for years and years. I could be wrong, but it’s something that we’ll keep coming back to.
Can you hear those crickets? There’s a good chance that’s the result of your MSP’s efforts to find new clients and drive sales. It’s a common problem. You’ve tried this, you’ve tried that. Well, this is going to be music to your ears. How does a 1,000% success rate guarantee sound? It’s a sales promotion for MSPs that have been in business for more than three years. Right now, let’s talk about what it is, how simple it is, and the boost it could give your MSP.
Now, this one doesn’t apply to brand new businesses, but it’s perfect for MSPs that have been around a few years or longer because there’s a sentence that I hear now and then from the MSP owners that I’m working with. The sentence is: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we used to do *insert thing here*. It worked really well, but we stopped doing it for some reason – and quite often the “for some reason” is no real reason at all. As in no one ever made a decision to stop it. It just stopped. Perhaps someone went on a vacation, maybe it just never started again after a long weekend away. Who knows? But it stopped and no one ever started it again. And this happens across the board in every area of the business. It can happen with the way that tickets are handled or with how client information is logged. Quite often it happens with sales and marketing processes.
One of my MSP Marketing Edge members said to me, “Oh yeah, we used to send out case studies to prospects before we met them, but we stopped doing it for some reason.”
And we then had a very long conversation about how sending those case studies out in advance of a meeting shows that your business is safe. This is solid powerful social proof, which works because most people prefer to do what they can see most other people doing. And if the prospect perceives that the business is safe before meeting with the sales guy, then guess what? The sales conversion rate and the overall order value will go up. Now, even if it’s a tiny shift upwards, that adds a lot of additional net profit over one year, three years, five years, whatever.
I promised you the perfect sales promotion, that’s 1,000% guaranteed to work. Let me tell you what it is. It’s something that you did in the past that worked really well, and then you either never repeated it or it became routine and it just stopped. And then no one ever noticed that it had stopped, so it never started again. Actually, it’s probably not one thing. It’s probably a whole series of different things that all worked together to give you overall a better result. Here’s an example. In a previous healthcare marketing business, which I sold and exited in 2016, we identified five key actions that had to happen before a sales meeting in order to give us a two in three close rate. So for every three meetings we took, we closed two of those prospects into clients. And these steps were to ensure that we had qualified our prospect properly and fully engaged with them at an emotional level and made sure that they’d absorbed some social proof and made sure that they’d locked off enough of their time for the appointment.
And these five key actions, they were that difference between a one in three close rate and a two in three close rate. So that’s a fairly major impact on net profit from small actions. Double the results for the same amount of work. So as you can imagine, I systemised the implementation of them and I built a warning system, which was a results dashboard to tell me when something had broken down. Now, back then, and bear in mind, this is like 2013 to 2016, we used to mail out physical DVDs featuring video case studies to our prospects. As I say, don’t judge me, this was a very long time ago. One day my admin person, she ran out of DVDs and she didn’t tell anyone. No one knows why, but she just carried on posting out the appointment confirmation letters, but without the DVDs. And I noticed within a few weeks as my dashboard showed that our overall conversion rate had slipped.
So that was my cue to follow the system through and to diagnose what was broken. And it literally took 20 minutes and one tense conversation and an order had gone in for a hundred more DVDs sent off to the DVD duplication people. So here’s your opportunity. Let me spell this out for you – Number one: spend a few hours looking back over old promotions strategies and tactics. What did you used to do that worked really well? What did you try once that was a hit but has never been repeated? And what are the small actions in your MSP that have the greatest impact on net profitability? Number two: bring them back, implement them. Number three: build yourself a warning system that tells you the next time they fall over. Simple as that.
What is that 1,000% guaranteed to work promotion that you could bring back for your MSP that you know is going to work?
A simple MSP marketing framework you can swipe
Featured guest: Eric Dingler is a global marketing strategist and digital nomad who has lived in 15 countries over the past three years with his wife and four teenagers.
Drawing on his firsthand insights as a perpetual first-time customer and data from hundreds of campaigns, Eric developed the Marketing Momentum Framework—a transformative approach to help simplify the work of a business owner to attract and retain customers.
Great news, the hair pulling can stop. When growing an MSP just feels confusing and complicated. You pull your hair out in frustration, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here comes a solution you can just swipe and adapt. I just can’t promise that your hair will return. MSPs are often at risk of making marketing way too complicated. So my special guest today is going to share a simple marketing framework that you can swipe and adapt.
Hey, my name’s Eric Dingler and I am a digital marketer, but I’m also a digital nomad and I’m excited to unpack that with you today.
Thanks for joining us on the show, Eric, and the first thing I’m going to ask you is what is a digital nomad? I may kind of know the answer to this because you are a guy from the US but you’re actually speaking to us from the UK.
That’s right. Yeah. My family and I. So it’s me, my wife and we have four teenagers, and we’ve been travelling full time for three years, and a little over a month and a half, two months ago, we landed here in the United Kingdom. And we plan to spend the next couple of years in this part of the world.
I love it. And whereabouts in the UK are you based at the moment?
Liverpool.
Liverpool, a fine city. There’s many good things and bad things about Liverpool, but let’s not have that conversation. I’ll just say I’ve only been to Liverpool twice, and one of those times I was threatened and pinned up against a wall by someone within 30 seconds of stepping off a train. But that’s a story we’ll leave for another day.
Let’s talk about marketing. So Eric, you are a marketing expert. I know you work with a growing number of MSPs and you’ve got a particular marketing framework, which we’re going to explore a little later on in the interview. But first of all, just tell us a bit about your background. So how did you get into this wonderful world of marketing in the first place?
Hey, that’s a great question and I’m going to do my best to give you the very succinct answer. So I was actually in ministry, and so because of that, I was the guy that also had to do all of our marketing. I ran a summer camp for 15 years and then my wife and I planted a church. And so we had to do all the marketing for that. And in that process, we also at one point decided we wanted to adopt two children. So we adopted two of our four children. We needed to make $50,000 to fund our adoption.
And so I started doing marketing for other people as a side hustle, just as a way to make some supplemental income. It blew up, people kept referring people to us, and by the time we brought our kids home, we had raised more than enough and decided to continue in the marketplace as a way to fund a nonprofit that my wife and I started. So we started a nonprofit. I moved from ministry space to the marketplace, and we now run our agency as a way to fund our nonprofit where we come alongside other families and help them with their adoptions.
I love this. You and I met like seven minutes ago and already I love your lifestyle; the travelling, the fact that you’ve adopted kids, the fact that you’ve got a nonprofit, the fact that you’ve got this marketing agency and it’s there to give you a great life with your children. I absolutely love everything you’ve said so far.
Let’s talk about marketing frameworks. So you and I, in the very brief pre-interview conversation we had, we talked about frameworks, and as anyone who’s ever listened to this podcast or watched our YouTube videos knows, I have a very simple three-step lead generation framework, which we give to MSPs: build audiences, grow relationships, convert relationships. And all my work is based around helping MSPs to implement that. Tell us about your marketing framework. So what is it and how did you come up with it?
So our marketing framework, we call it the marketing momentum framework, and ours has four parts to it. And really it developed as we were travelling full time because what I didn’t expect to happen was, I didn’t appreciate the fact that we were going to be become perpetual first time customers. And by that I mean every three to six months, it’s sometimes even a month, we move to a new city. So we have to find new barbers and hairstylists, new grocery stores, new dentist, eye doctor, our son, our 12-year-old needed new eyeglasses, so when we got to Liverpool, we had to find eyeglasses. I have to find coworking spaces, I have to find office equipment to replace a cable or something.
So we are just regularly finding new businesses all the time. And I started noticing patterns that I was able to start talking to our clients about. And over time, this just kind of coalesced to realising that the way we say it is, every dollar you’re ever going to make in business is going to start as a lead. And so that’s the first thing we look at, the lead gen, like you talk about. And the first part of our framework is awareness. Now there’s two types of awareness. Self discovered awareness and created awareness.
I don’t have to tell somebody they need a dentist, they know they need a dentist. But a company may not know that there is other people out there with the expertise to help come alongside them and take care of their technology, like MSPs do. And so there is some awareness that has to be created out there. When somebody becomes aware, then they move to consideration. That’s a second stage. Well, who am I going to buy to? Who am I going to give my money to? And then from there you have they move to the actual purchase experience.
Every single customer is one of three types: they’re either a raving fan, a roaring critic, or they’re silently satisfied.
Personally, I’m the silently satisfied customer of thousands of businesses because very few of them capture my contact information and begin to develop a relationship with me after the purchase. We may do transactions once a month, I may get a transaction email, but I’m not getting any nurture emails. And that’s fine and I’m happy, but I’m silent about it. And that’s the problem. And so what we do is we come alongside and we go, all right, if we’re going to create awareness, how do we do that? Where’s the best place to do it? Once somebody moves from awareness to consideration, how do we make sure you’re the easiest and obvious choice? During the purchase experience, what information are you gathering? Where are you storing it in a way that’s easy to leverage it for marketing? And then how do we turn silently satisfied customers into raving fans?
And each of those, there’s a multiple of different tactics in each one of those. And we work with each of our customers and we give them basically a, we call it a pantry list, and we tell them we have all of these ingredients in our pantry and you can go in and say, well, I like this one, this one, this one, and this one. And that’s the recipe for your marketing strategy that fits inside the marketing framework. So there it is. That’s the whole thing.
I love that. That’s just beautiful and you’ve covered off almost everything in the customer journey there, which is absolutely perfect. What you’ve got there is obviously is a strategy. And do you find that MSPs and some of the other businesses that you work with that often when you start talking about marketing, they just want to jump straight into talking about tactical stuff. They want to talk about what can we do on LinkedIn? What can we do on email? What should we do with our website? Do you find that you’re constantly having to reposition people back to, Hey, let’s get the right strategy in place first?
Yeah, because what we see is we’ll be talking about something and I’ll be walking through it with somebody and I’ll say, Hey, this would be someplace where maybe you want to use pay-per-click ads. And immediately I’ll get, Oh no, I did pay-per-click ads in the past they didn’t work. And 99% of the time I already know the answer to the question. And I’ll go, when you ran that ad, did it go to a landing page or the homepage of your website? And 99% of the time, the homepage of my website. Well, that’s why it didn’t work. See, running ads is just one tactic in an overall strategy. You have to know what’s happening before and after and you have to bridge all of that. And so somebody’s coming to a computer screen with a question in mind, they do a search. If your ad is addressing that question, now the next thing they see needs to continue that conversation or you’ve broken the story, you’ve created an open question, and they don’t want another open question. They want to answer their question they came to.
If you bring them to your homepage, now you’ve created a question of, Oh, now where do I go? And people, they’re just not going to do that, they’re going to click the back button and move on to the next thing. And that’s kind of the thing when almost all the time when I share that with someone, it’s like a light bulb for most of them. And they’re like, Oh, okay. And now they start to understand we got to take these tactics and put them into a complete strategy, just like you said, taking the customer on a journey. And that’s kind of where it comes into and where I see people struggling with tactics, but Paul, people are bombarded every day with, you got to be on LinkedIn, you got to be doing this, you got to be on this social media, you got to have ads, you got to have your website SEO, and they just get overwhelmed and they think they have to do all of those.
Yeah, I completely agree. We work with 700 MSPs and we try and make everything as easy and as small and simple as possible, and one of the hardest things is noise. Battling that noise. There’s so many great places out there to get advice, but as you and I know, there’s so much advice from so many people and sometimes it’s good advice, sometimes it’s bad advice. Sometimes the people giving the advice have done it. Sometimes they haven’t done it, but they tried it once. Like you say, the pay-per-click example, pay-per-click works for me because I did this once or pay-per-click doesn’t work for me because I did this. And this is the upside and the downside of the internet, isn’t it? Which is any idea or any opinion can be disseminated to absolutely anybody right now. I can’t imagine the internet is going to be exactly the same in 30 years time because that’s just too much noise and anybody can say anything, but hey, that’s what we’ve got in 2025, so we’ll just have to work with that for right now.
Let’s just finish up by looking at the first two parts of your formula, which were of your marketing momentum framework, which was awareness and consideration. So for the vast majority of MSPs, lead generation is the big thing. When they can get somebody in a sales meeting or even on an exploratory discovery call, then the vast majority of the time they can take that through and turn that person into a client. Their issue is getting those discovery calls. Their issue is getting in front of people in the first place. Their issue is even getting people to be aware of them. Now, I’m not going to ask you to drop down to a tactical level for the reasons we’ve just been talking about, but imagine if I was an MSP and you were starting to work with me tomorrow and we were starting to tackle that first and second stage of right, let’s increase your awareness, let’s get you so that people are even thinking to consider you, what are some of the specific routes that you might look at or the things you might consider to help me as an MSP?
Well, to get started, I would want to focus on doing less with more. So I’d want to focus on doing less things at the beginning with more focus and attention and really nail them. And so I would start out by explaining to you that there are only four ways to attract a new lead to get in front of a new lead. There’s only four ways. Now, within these four, you’ve got multiple options, but there’s only four: cold outreach, content creation, paid ads, referral and networking. And here’s a list of some options of what these look like. Which one excites you? Because that’s the one I want to start with.
If you’re really like, I love paid ads, I’m really excited about that, I see a lot of potential, alright, well let’s do that. Let’s do that because I’m not going to tell you, Well, we’re going to get you onto content creation and you’re sitting there going, What am I going to say? I don’t want to be on camera. I don’t want to talk in a microphone. Some people, they just, they’ll reluctantly agree because you’re the expert and they’re like, Well, if you’re saying this is what I got to do, then I guess I got to do it. But they don’t stick with it long term because they don’t enjoy it. Your marketing should be joyful, it should fun, and it should be rewarding. And so that’s the first thing we’re going to start out. Here are the four ways to bring in new leads. Which one of these excites you? Okay, what could that look like for you? And we just start brainstorming ideas and customise your strategy for that.
Then in consideration, we’re going to look at your entire online presence and we’re going to look at your website, any landing pages that you have, definitely your homepage, and if you’re a local business and meet the criteria for it, we want to look at your Google Business Profile and if you have a brick and mortar location, we want to look at your Apple Business Connect. We want to look at both of those, and then we want to come there. And so then what we do is we’ll ask you what are the most common questions you’re first asked by people and how can we answer those when people are pre-qualifying themselves? They’re showing up to your website with a couple questions in mind. Let’s answer those in a way that leads them to making contact with you or either leads them making contact with you or gets them comfortable immediately enough with you to take the next step, which is making contact. And those pre-qualifying questions, those vary industry to industry, and so we would have that conversation with MSP specifically for them.
Yeah, I love that. Thank you, Eric. You’ve been so helpful of this podcast. We’re going to finish with two very quick questions. The first of which is tell us about the services that you offer to MSPs and how can we get in touch with you?
Great, so we are a done with you marketing agency. We’re not going to ask you to turn the keys over to the kingdom, and we’re not going to do all of that. What we do is we come alongside, create a strategy, put all the pieces together. If we need to connect some software and things like that, we’ll handle all that kind of stuff, if you’re not comfortable with it. I told you before we started recording that in my experience, most of our MSP, they’re very comfortable with the techie side of it and they’re like, no, no, no, I’ll set all that up, they love that. They just need that strategy and that’s totally okay. If we need to tweak anything on their website, we help them with that. And so that’s our approach.
The best way for people to contact, I’ll give you two options. One, if you want to connect on LinkedIn and just connect there and get started on LinkedIn, ericdingler.com is going to forward you straight to my LinkedIn profile, you can do that. And then for some specific next steps for your business, if you go to my marketingscorecard.com, you are going to be able to download a one page marketing action plan. There’s a picture graphic there of the marketing momentum framework and some tactics for each of those stages. So you can look at that and what we’ve done is we’ve created a real quick, about four minute assessment that somebody can take, and at the end of that, it’s going to say, here’s where you’re doing great, here’s the stage where you might want to look at. You can take those results, put them onto the one page action plan, and then look down below and say, okay, here’s some things I can start to implement right away to elevate my awareness to increase customer activity in consideration. So my marketingscorecard.com gets you that assessment takes about four minutes, and then you get the one page action plan.
Paul’s Personal Peer Group
Neil from North Carolina is concerned about marketing his MSP because tasks that are too creative fall outside of his comfort zone. His question is: I’ve been wondering, is marketing an art or is it a science?
This is actually a really important question to ask, because if you consider yourself a scientific, logical person and yet you believe that marketing is an art, then that’s going to make you even less inclined to want to do marketing. And yet the only way to grow your business is to do marketing; to win new clients, to keep them, and to sell them more services. So let me give you my definitive answer on this.
I believe 100% that marketing is a science. Why? Because it’s a number of cogs that you can put in place that can be measured, analysed, and improved through testing. Well, actually, hang on a second, just thinking about that. It’s 80% science, the other 20% is luck. Mostly luck in getting your timing right. You’ve got to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. And what I’ve found over the years is that the more marketing you do, the luckier you become.
Put in place a marketing machine that operates systematically and consistently week in, week out, and you pretty much remove the luck element from it.
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, Eric Dingler on LinkedIn, and visit the In Transit Studios website.
- Got a question about your MSP’s marketing? Submit one here for Paul’s Personal Peer Group.