Here are seven ways you can drive more qualified traffic to your MSP’s website… not vanity visitors or random clicks, but people who are genuinely more likely to start a sales conversation with you. Also this week, reasons to add a price estimator to your MSP’s website, and what to do if your referrals have dried up.
Welcome to Episode 335 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green, powered by the MSP Marketing Edge.
If you woke up tomorrow and your MSP’s website had received double its normal traffic, would that actually change your business? For most MSPs, the honest answer to this is no because…
Your marketing problem isn’t traffic, it’s qualified traffic… the right people, from the right businesses.
So right now, I’m going to give you seven levers that you can pull to drive significantly more qualified traffic to your MSP’s website. We’re not talking vanity visitors or random clicks, but people who are genuinely more likely to start a sales conversation with you.
Lever #1: Clarity beat volume. The clearer you are about who you want to attract, the easier it is to create content that pulls them in. If you try to speak to everyone, you’ll attract no one. But when you specialise, even if it’s just in your messaging, you become magnetic to a specific group. And that’s why vertical marketing works so well. When an accountant (CPA) lands on a page that clearly talks about accountants or a manufacturer sees content that reflects their world of production lines and deadlines, they instantly feel understood. Understood… that’s the keyword there because that recognition is what drives qualified traffic.
Lever #2: Relevance over randomness. Most MSP websites are full of really generic service pages about IT support and cyber security and backup and cloud, and that content really doesn’t attract qualified buyers because it doesn’t answer specific real world questions. Instead, think about what your ideal prospect is typing into Google or their AI tool late at night when they’re worried about their business. They type in things like “What happens if our server fails?” or “How do we pass a cyber insurance audit?” or “What does downtime actually cost a manufacturer?” So when you create content that calmly answers those questions, you attract people who are already thinking about solving a problem that they believe that they have. It’s because you’re talking about them and their issues and not you. That’s a real key thing in website content.
Leaver #3: Consistency. Because traffic compounds over time. One blog post won’t move the needle at all, but 50 might. 100 definitely will. 500 absolutely will. When you publish regularly, weekly blogs, weekly videos, daily LinkedIn posts that link back to your website, you just create more entry points and you stay more visible. You build familiarity. Qualified traffic rarely comes from a single piece of content. It comes from repeated exposure over time. The trick for most MSPs is to put in place a system whereby you have content going out on a regular basis, and that system does it 52 weeks a year with minimal impact on you as the business owner. And as a side note, if you want a system that puts content out there, go and have a look at my MSP Marketing Edge membership. It’s a system that we’ve designed and it’s trusted by hundreds and hundreds of other MSPs as a way of them getting content out every single day with minimal amount of work for them. Go to mspmarketingedge.com.
Lever #4: Distribution. Creating content is only half the job. You need to deliberately put it in front of the right people, and that means emailing it to your database, sharing it consistently on LinkedIn, even sending out printed newsletters in the mail. Content that just sits quietly on your website won’t drive traffic in of itself. Content that’s strategically distributed will drive content.
Lever #5: Social proof embedded into your content. Qualified prospects don’t just want information, they want reassurance. When your website includes reviews, testimonials and case studies from businesses like them, visitors are much more likely to stay, explore, and trust what they’re reading. And that doesn’t just increase traffic, it improves the quality of it. Trust is everything in your marketing.
Lever #6: Cornerstone content. Instead of publishing dozens of thin posts, create deeper guides that genuinely help people. A proper comprehensive guide on, let’s say, IT for law firms or cyber security for manufacturers, that becomes something worth sharing. So it keeps visitors on your site for longer and positions you as an authority and becomes an asset that you can reuse in multiple places. It’s really cool stuff like that.
Lever #7: Referrals done properly. One of the simplest ways to drive highly qualified traffic is to make your website so clear and useful that your existing clients feel confident sending people there. When your messaging clearly states who you help and how you help them, your website becomes a tool and your clients can use that tool on your behalf. There is a certain social risk that people take when they refer you, because if the person they refer has a bad experience with you, that makes them feel bad. So the very first step is to just have a good look at your website. If it’s clear and simple, that’s going to give your clients confidence to refer you. But if it’s generic and boring and complicated, it’s the exact opposite. That kind of traffic, referrals, is as qualified as it gets.
So in summary, if you want tons more qualified traffic, don’t chase numbers. Pull those seven levers that create alignment. Alignment between who you want to work with, what they care about, and what you actually publish both on your website and out there around the web. When that alignment is strong, traffic stops being random and starts becoming predictable. And you know what? Predictable qualified traffic is what’s going to help you grow your MSP.
There’s a marketing idea that absolutely freaks out a load of MSPs. And the funny thing is that the businesses that embrace it properly often see their lead generation jump up dramatically. I’m talking about putting a price estimator on your website. That’s a smart tool, which lets prospects get a rough idea of what IT support might cost before they ever speak to you. And I can almost hear the objections already, “It’ll scare prospects away… What we do is too complex for that… Our competitors will see our prices…” and these are the same reactions that I hear again and again and again.
But here’s the thing. When you approach this the right way…
A price estimator doesn’t scare away good prospects. It actually attracts them, builds trust and completely changes the dynamic of your sales conversations.
So let’s just step back for a second and look at buyer psychology. Buyers hate mystery. Hidden pricing creates anxiety for them and anxious buyers or anxious prospects don’t convert into buyers. Transparency on the other hand builds trust immediately. When someone can get just a rough idea of cost without jumping through hoops, that signals maturity, confidence, and that you’re not hiding anything. And that alone differentiates you from most of the rest of the channel.
There is some powerful psychological forces at play here. First, price anchoring. When prospects see a structured price range, they recalibrate what normal looks like. Second, pre-acceptance. If someone’s already seen and accepted the ballpark figure before they speak to you, you remove most of the awkwardness from the first conversation. And third, autonomy. Modern buyers want to explore privately. It’s not 2008 anymore. Whether they’re using AI or doing their own research, people don’t want to have to talk to sales during the early research stages. They want clarity first, and the price estimator gives them exactly that.
So let me give you some very practical reasons why this works so well. It eliminates tyre kickers because people with tiny budgets disqualify themselves. It attracts better prospects because serious buyers lean into clarity. It reduces price objections because they’ve already accepted the range before you ever speak. It speeds up the sales cycle because you move from curious to ready much faster. It filters your pipeline so it feels calmer and more predictable. It increases engagement on your website because people interact with the tool instead of just browsing. It gives you valuable data about what prospects choose, what they avoid, and what price brackets are most common. And it makes your future content stronger because you’ll start to see patterns in what buyers actually care about.
There’s also something else going on here. When a prospect customises their own solution, such as choosing the number of users, the service levels, add-ons like backup, they become emotionally invested. They’ve built it. And when buyers build something themselves, they’re far more likely to want it. That’s really powerful. So what does this actually look like? Well, it’s simple. It’s a clear tool on your website where prospects pick the number of users, they choose a service level, they select any extras, and they instantly get a rough idea of pricing. And rough is the key word. This isn’t a fixed quote, it’s guidance, just framing education, if you like.
And here’s an important practical detail. Before you give them the rough pricing, you ask for their name and their email address for them to see the full breakdown. Now, that alone can become one of the best lead generators on your website. And if they give you their phone number as well, you call them immediately. And I’m serious, immediately. Not in 10 minutes, not tomorrow. Now, the second you get the notification they filled in the form. Because someone who’s just completed a pricing estimator and volunteered their phone number is not browsing, they are ready.
Now, let me ask you something… If you were an ordinary business owner switching your IT support, would you contact a company if you had no idea what it might cost? Would you happily book a call with zero context? I mean, I wouldn’t. And if you wouldn’t, then your prospects probably wouldn’t either. Transparency isn’t scary. I can see why it seems scary, but it’s not. It’s powerful. And in a world where buyers expect clarity and speed, adding a price estimator to your website might just be one of the smartest marketing decisions that you can make. And hey, just in case I can make this easy for you, I’ve partnered with bestselling author, Marcus Sheridan, to create a price estimator just for MSPs. Go and have a look at msppriceguide.com.
If you’re a member of my MSP Marketing Edge membership, you now have access to May’s content. We released new content on the 10th of every month, so last Friday, May’s content appeared magically in the portal. It’s there in the content section and also in the content calendar, which shows you what to publish and when.
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Featured guest: Sara Nay is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she helps small businesses turn marketing strategy into scalable systems their teams can actually execute. Since 2010, she’s worked with thousands of business owners and fractional CMOs, blending big-picture strategy with scalable operations.
A passionate trainer at heart, Sara’s mission is to empower others to lead from their zone of genius and build marketing teams that can actually get the work done. Sara is also the author of Unchained: Breaking Free of Broken Marketing Models, with the mission to help small businesses take back ownership of their marketing, instead of renting it.
Here’s a common scenario for MSPs, and it’s a killer. You’ve been in business for a few years, and you’ve mostly grown through referrals. You didn’t actively solicit them, they just kind of turned up as a result of your great work, your care for your clients, and the sheer energy that you’ve brought to your business.
But then one day you realise it’s been some time since you had a referral, and you start to realise that the referrals have stopped. You get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach because you realise that you have no other consistent marketing that’s happening. If you’re in that situation, you can relax. It happens to almost every MSP. And my special guest right now is going to tell you where to get started with your marketing in this exact scenario.
Hello, I’m Sarah Nay, and I’m the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing.
And it’s so exciting to get you here on the show, Sara, because Duct Tape Marketing, which is both a book and an agency which has been around for many, many years, was one of the very first marketing books I ever read. It’s still available now on Amazon. I guess it’s on Audible as well. Most books are these days. And we were just saying before the interview, somewhere in my house, I have my original copy of this from like 20, 25 years ago. It’s probably falling apart at the seams because I read it again and again and again when I was just getting started about 20 years ago. So cool to have you here on the show. Tell us a little bit more about Duct Tape Marketing and how long it’s been running and what your story is within that business.
Of course. So we’ve been in business for about 30 years. We’ve always had specific target markets. We’ve always worked directly with small businesses where we come in as more of a fractional CMO. So we outline a marketing strategy for the business and then we go into a long-term retainer where we’re serving as their marketing leadership, essentially. And we also certify and train marketing consultants, fractional CMOs and agencies in our approach as well. But absolutely everything that we do is based on strategy before tactics. And that was a core theme in John’s book over 20 years ago. And so we’re still holding true to that line. And I would even argue that it’s more important now in marketing with the age of AI. And so my role at Duck Tape Marketing, I started as an intern about 16 years ago. I’ve had pretty much every role within the company over the last 16 years. And last December, I stepped into the CEO seat, so I’m about a year and a couple months into the CEO role.
Amazing. Congratulations. And I mean, 16 years in one company in itself is amazing. And to rise from intern up to being the CEO is fantastic. You’ve written a book yourself. So obviously there’s John’s book, Duct Tape Marketing from 20-odd years ago. What’s the name of your book that you’ve written?
Mine’s called Unchained: Breaking Free from Broken Marketing Models. And so that came out last year. Really the emphasis of the book is there’s a lot that’s broken and wrong in the marketing agency space today. And so I believe that small businesses really should be able to take ownership of their marketing. They should own the systems and the tools and the content that’s created. And so the emphasis of the book is really about taking ownership of what you’re doing and that marketing should be an incredible asset in the business that you own.
Yeah, I agree with you completely. There’s a few good agencies out there and there’s a lot of rotten agencies out there, and that’s the same in the MSP space as it is, I guess, in the whole world. So what we’re going to talk about today is we’re going to paint a real world scenario for a typical MSP, and then we’re going to look at what you would advise that MSP to do in this scenario. So very often I start conversations with MSPs who’ve either listened to the podcast or followed on YouTube or LinkedIn or however they’ve sort of come across the MSP marketing edge and what we do. And the most common scenario is, “Hey, Paul, we’ve been going three, four, five years. It’s me and a couple of techs. We’ve grown the business on referrals. Referrals has been really good for us. And I thought that was how it was going to go for 10, 20 years. And then six months ago, the referral stopped. And I don’t know why. I didn’t know I’d change anything, but the referrals stopped and we need to start doing some marketing and marketing seems really difficult. And I’m a great technician and I haven’t got a clue what to do about marketing. Where do I start?” So that’s a common conversation. I’ll have that conversation four or five times a week. I know that you’ve worked with lots of MSPs in the past as well. So in that scenario, and particularly since you have a passion about making sure you get a strategy right before you jump into tactics, what would you advise an MSP to do in that scenario?
Yeah. I mean, I would say first of all, it’s great that you’ve been able to grow based on referrals that shows that for the most part you provide a good service and clients like you and they’re happy. So that’s like check box one. If someone comes to me and they’re like, “We never get referrals and we don’t have great reviews online.” I’m like, “I don’t know if you can outmarket that, to be honest.” So the fact that you’ve grown based on positive experiences to this point, I first would highlight that because I think that’s a win. But I also always highlight that it’s hard to rely on referrals alone, especially if they are starting to slow down.
I’m a big believer in diversifying your marketing. You don’t need to be on every channel that’s out there, but you need to have a few channels that are performing well for you.
But instead of just like, “Okay, we’re now going to do paid ads and then we’re going to do SEO.” It’s taking a step back and saying, “Okay, who are our clients? Where do they hang out online? How do they make buying decisions? What keeps them up at night?” And really thinking through those things to then say, “Okay, what messaging really resonates with the people that we are trying to connect with and target and serve?” Because you really need to understand those two things first before you can decide what channel or how you’re going to approach the channel moving forward. So taking a step back and understanding your ideal clients and your messaging is step one and two. But then looking at your customer journey, and this is actually a foundational thing that we’ve been doing for years for clients as well. And John laid it out in his book, Duct Tape Marketing, but it’s looking at how can people get to know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer your business.
And why this is so important is because you can sit down and you can analyse what are we doing in each of these stages? Where are gaps? Where are opportunities to improve? And if you can really nail moving someone through each of those stages as they interact with your business, they’re going to become repeat customers, which is really important for most people. And then they’re also going to just naturally refer you, which then allows new people to move through your customer journey a lot faster. And so analysing what are you currently doing, what are your touchpoints, where is your room for growth. And then that should guide your marketing priorities moving forward. And it also should guide what channels you should focus on with what tactics. So again, you’re not just playing the guessing game, you’re taking a step back, you’re doing research, you’re putting a plan together that’s based on who you want to serve, and that’s going to give you a lot more clarity and direction moving forward.
Yeah. So I completely agree with everything you said there. Of course I do, because the book I read 20 odd years ago is the foundation for my own marketing knowledge. But it’s really interesting, so today, as we’re talking here early 2026, figuring out the two things you said at the beginning, which is, who do you want to work with, what’s your ideal client profile as we call it today? And then why would they buy from you, what’s in it for them? Which is of course your USP, your unique selling proposition. Figuring those things out like 5, 6, 10 years ago was required some hard work. It required sitting down with someone who knew what questions to ask, which directions to look, research was hard. Whereas these days, we just fire up ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude, and we have a two-way conversation with an AI bot that knows more about these things than we do. So of course it can shape us and guide us. And it doesn’t mean it won’t make mistakes, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than it was back then. And yet despite that, lots of MSPs, in fact, I’d say many MSPs, and I’m sure many of the other business owners, because I know you work with hundreds and hundreds of different types of business owners, still jump straight into tactics. Why do we do that? Is it just because it feels like we’re doing something if we just suddenly start a paid ads campaign or we just say, “Right, let’s do more LinkedIn.”
Yeah, I do think it’s just that it feels like you’re doing something like you’re moving the needle, you’re busy, even though I would argue you’re probably not doing the right things. And so I think it’s that and then it’s also, it’s really challenging in marketing right now because there’s all these AI platforms you should be on. And then there’s all these channels that you should be on. And people want to have multiple touchpoints before they’ll even reach out to your business. So there’s just kind of a lot of pressure in the marketing space, I believe, to do more. And so oftentimes when clients come and they start working with us, they’ll be like, “I’m doing this, this, this, this, this and this. ” And I’m like, “Okay, great. What’s working and what’s not working out of that list?” And they’re like, “I don’t know. We don’t know how to track it.” And so oftentimes we help people put actual tracking in place based on their efforts and then set goals of what would make this specific thing successful or not. And then if it’s not hitting the goals, that tells you either you should stop doing that thing or you should look at how you can do that thing more effectively.
It’s not enough just to create your list of tactics at the end of strategy, because that is kind of where strategy ends, but then to say, “Okay, if we’re going to do these things for the next 90 days, what’s the definition of success and how are we going to track that? ” Because that information is going to help guide if you should keep doing things or if you should shift and evolve to different areas.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And going back to our scenario of the MSP owner with just a handful of staff getting started with marketing, all of this is difficult, obviously, even with those AI tools. And actually, you mentioned about choosing platforms. I’ve certainly seen, and I guess you’ve seen the same, is the overwhelming choice of a few years ago is now over, over, overwhelming because there is literally a new thing every day. And I get 20 cold emails a day saying, “Hey, we can do you a lead generation system.” And often you look into it and it’s someone who watched a YouTube video and found used an AI tool and they’ve set themselves up as a marketing agency or whatsoever and it’s kind of crazy. So I’m seeing that all of this extra noise is actually creating more confusion. And the downside of that is that the genuine honest business owners like the MSPs are actually doing less because there’s too much choice and too much noise. Are you seeing a similar thing?
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And like LinkedIn is another example to email. I mean, I used to use LinkedIn very heavily. I would connect with people, message people. I’m still on there very frequently, but I rarely check my messages because it’s literally like outbound pitch, outbound pitch, outbound pitch, like AI spam. You can see it all there. And so that’s the same with email,
I get at least 20 a day, I feel like as well. And so it is more challenging to stand out because even if a human’s reaching out to me on LinkedIn authentically, I’m less likely to check my messages that frequently because I’m just tired of it. And so it is harder to get people’s attention and it’s harder to stand out. But that’s where I think if you approach marketing with a more authentic human feel to it and not just trying to scale with AI, there is opportunity for people to see your authentic selves versus spamming with AI platforms.
Yeah, I completely agree. I believe the AI tools are a way of taking your authentic personality and stretching it out to help you appear in more places through repurposing content. It terrifies me when an MSP says to me, “Oh, I’m going to go and use 11 labs to clone my voice or clone my video.” And I’m like, “Please don’t do that. ” Because even if we can’t spot it, it’s the most inauthentic thing that you can do. And actually, I think as AI slop gets greater and greater and greater, the actual real well, we’re two real humans talking to each other and that’s the most authentic thing. And I think we are going to seek that as humans as more AI content comes out there.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I’m not saying all AI is bad for content. We use it within our company and it is good for, if you for example, capture a leadership story of a company and then being able to transfer that into different forms of written content or this podcast, I’m sure you use AI to repurpose into clips and to blog posts and you might be using for that. So I think there is a place for AI, but where people miss is that slop component is they’ll just go to AI for the ideas and they’ll go to AI for the content and then it just sounds like anyone else. And so if you’re using AI, great. I do think you should be using AI, but you need to always remember human on the front end, like you need to give it insight, you need to give it direction, you need to give it your stories, and then you need to edit on the backend as well. And that’s where it can be powerful is it helps elevate you and your skillset and not replace your creativity.
Yeah, completely agree. I’ve just agreed with everything that you’ve said today. What a terrible interviewer I am. We should have conflict here, we really should. Final question for you, Sara. And unfortunately, I am going to jump into a tactical conversation because I do know that that makes an easy takeaway for the MSPs listening and watching this on YouTube. You’ve got a couple of hundred dollars a month, that’s it. You’re an MSP, it’s the same scenario as before. Where would you put that couple of hundred dollars right now?
Couple hundred dollars a month, I would do a couple things. I would look at content repurposing, and so content used to be really overwhelming to create, but with AI, you can do a lot more. And so starting with recording some videos on very specific topics that your target audience needs to know about, using those videos then to turn it into social clips and email newsletters and blog posts on your website. As long as you’re doing it thoughtfully and with purpose, I think that can go a long way. And so obviously there’s some costs and investing in tools to help to support you there. So that would be one area that I would lean into.
And honestly, in the B2B space, I would focus on you creating a list of people that you wanted to reach out to or connect with your ideal target market and then very thoughtfully calling them, texting them, reaching out to them as a human, because they’re going to immediately see how that’s different. And another one more I would add to the equation is a low cost thing is podcasting as well. I tell everyone in business that they should be podcasting because you’re essentially just spending your time to get in front of other people’s audience to spread word about your offerings and businesses in some cases. And so those are some low cost things that require time, but not a huge spend when it comes to marketing.
Yeah, excellently. And taking it right back to what you said at the beginning, if you know exactly who your ideal client is, and if we take just the podcast, for example, and you do a podcast that that ideal client would be absolutely fascinated with, it’s an easy match. And typically the smaller defined your audience and the more clear you are and the more narrower that is, the easier that gets. Sara, this has been great. Thank you so much for coming on. So tell us a little bit about what Duct Tape Marketing actually does to help MSPs and what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
Of course. As we’ve talked a lot about in this interview, we lead with strategy before tactics. And so with all clients, you would come in, we would create an overall marketing strategy for you, and then you would have the plan that you could either run with in your team internally or you could keep us on as a fractional CMO long term. And so you can find us at ducttapemarketing.com. And I’m also very active on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Sara Nay.
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