Your MSP Marketing Isn’t Broken… It’s Not Boiling Yet

The Moment You Stop Is the Moment It Was About to Work

Have you ever done everything right with your marketing? The emails went out. The content got posted. Maybe you even tried some cold outreach. And you got absolutely nothing back. Crickets. No traction, no leads, no sign that any of it was doing anything at all.

And then you stopped.

I’ve watched MSPs do this over and over. They run a campaign for a couple of weeks, don’t see any response, and convince themselves marketing just doesn’t work for their kind of business. They move on to a new idea. Then they do the same thing with that one. They never build momentum because they keep starting over at zero.

The Boiling Water Problem

Years ago I came across an analogy that completely changed how I looked at marketing. It sounds simple, but once you really get it, you can’t unsee it.

Put a pot of water on the stove. At 70°C, nothing happens. At 80, still nothing. 90, nothing. You get all the way to 99°C and if you looked at that pot, you might say: this isn’t working. Then one more degree – 100°C – and suddenly the whole thing is boiling!

MSP marketing works exactly the same way. The problem is that most MSPs expect it to behave like a support ticket. You fix a server and it works immediately. You close a ticket and you know it’s done. Marketing isn’t like that. Marketing is invisible right up until it isn’t.

So, you send an email and hear nothing. You post on LinkedIn and get crickets. You run a webinar and maybe four people show up. You make calls and hit voicemail every single time. And you think: this just isn’t working! But you might be sitting at 99 degrees…

What’s Happening Behind the Scenes

Here’s what your prospects are doing while you’re convinced your marketing is failing. They’re seeing your name. Again and again. They’re not ready to reach out yet, but they’re starting to think: “I’ve seen this company before.”

Then one day, someone calls and says they’ve been seeing your stuff everywhere. It feels like it came out of nowhere. You finally hit 100 degrees!

When we were building our MSP, we ran campaigns where weeks would go by with nothing. No calls, nothing at all. I remember asking myself whether it was even working. But we kept going because we knew we had to. Same message, same audience, same process. And then the leads would start coming in and appointments would start stacking up.

If we had stopped two weeks earlier (and there were weeks I really wanted to) we would have missed the whole payoff. That’s what most MSPs are doing right now!

What Keeping the Heat On Looks Like

Keeping the heat on isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the same right things without stopping.

1. The first is consistency. Not when you feel like it, not when things are slow: every single week. Emails going out. Calls being made. Content going up. Whatever your marketing focus is, that’s what gets done.
2. The second is repetition. You don’t need a new message every week. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I see. MSPs say something once, move on, and their prospect never even noticed it. The message needs to keep coming back around.
3. The third is surrounding your prospects. Email alone isn’t enough. You have to call. You have to mail. You have to show up in more than one place, because a single touchpoint is easy to miss and even easier to forget.

The Mistakes That Keep MSPs Stuck at 70 Degrees

• Campaign hopping. Something doesn’t work immediately, so you try something else. The problem isn’t the campaign; you just didn’t give it enough time. Staying focused long enough to see results is harder than it sounds, but it’s the only path to getting there.
• Start-stop marketing. Turning the stove on and off every few minutes doesn’t boil water. Running a campaign for two weeks, pausing for a month, starting again… that doesn’t build momentum either. You’re just cooling down and reheating over and over.
• Expecting immediate ROI. Marketing is a system, not a transaction. When you approach it expecting a fast return, you’ll always be disappointed and you’ll always quit too soon.
• Underestimating repetition. I used to worry that prospects were seeing my messages too many times and tuning out. But the reality: if they’ve seen it more than once, they probably don’t even remember it. And most of the time, they haven’t seen it at all. You have to keep going.

The 90-Day Commitment

Pick a message that actually matters to your audience. Security, maybe. Compliance. Cloud. Something real that speaks to a problem they already have. Then commit to it for 90 days minimum. Six months is better: twelve months is where you start to see what your marketing is really capable of.

Layer your outreach: email, calls, direct mail, networking. Surround your prospects. And whatever you do, don’t turn off the heat!

The only way this doesn’t work is if you stop.

Your Challenge This Week

Look back at your marketing over the past year. Where did you turn off the heat too soon? What campaigns did you walk away from? What messages never got a real chance?

Chances are, you were closer than you think.

Today’s quote is from Robert Collier: “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.”

If you feel like your marketing isn’t working, you might just be sitting at 99 degrees. Don’t quit now.

Have a great week and weekend!