Why marketing feels impossible in your world
Read ten MSP websites in a row and try to remember one. Proactive support, cyber security, cloud solutions, response times, a partner logo wall. The services genuinely are similar, which is exactly why the marketing can’t be. Your buyer isn’t comparing feature lists; most of the time they’re not even in the market, because switching IT feels risky and painful, so businesses tolerate mediocre support for years.
Then one day the server’s down for six hours, or the contract renewal lands 40% higher, or the one engineer who knew everything leaves, and suddenly they’re very much in the market, with zero patience and a shortlist built from memory and Google. If you’re not already in their memory or on that results page, you were never in the running. Twelve years of B2B selling taught me this pattern applies to every grudge purchase, and IT support is the definitive grudge purchase.
If I ran your marketing, here's the plan
"IT support for small businesses" competes with everyone including the nationals. "IT support for law firms" or "for manufacturers" or "for accountancy practices" changes the conversation: you know their software, their compliance, their deadlines, their disasters. Pick the vertical where you already have your best clients, build one page that speaks its language, and take references from inside it. Sector trust shortens the most suspicious sales cycle in B2B. Effort: one page and a decision, then compounding.
The searches that matter aren’t "best MSP UK", they’re "how much should IT support cost per user", "signs it’s time to switch IT provider", "IT support contract renewal too expensive". Answer them honestly on your own site, real ranges and real red flags included, and you meet buyers at the only moment they’re movable. Almost no MSP will publish pricing guidance, which is precisely why the one that does gets the click, the trust, and increasingly the AI-tool citation. Effort: three or four honest pages, written once.
You can’t schedule an incumbent’s failure, so your name has to already be there when it happens. A short monthly or quarterly email to prospects and past enquiries, with something genuinely useful (a scam warning doing the rounds, one practical security fix, what a recent outage elsewhere teaches), keeps you the obvious first call without a single salesy line. Boring, consistent usefulness is the whole trick. When they’re furious with their provider at 9am, you want to be the email they remember at 9:05. Effort: one good email a month, forever.
Steal the plan. I'm not for hire and nothing here is for sale.
How many leads does a business your size actually need? → Pipeline Calculator