There is a version of the managed services business that works beautifully right up until it doesn’t. A provider opens its doors, does good work, and the referrals arrive. Ten years pass. Thirty employees later, nobody has ever written a marketing plan, because nobody ever needed one.
Then the referrals slow down.
Tanner McCarron, co-founder of DYAD marketing, has watched this pattern repeat across the MSP market, and his diagnosis is blunt: the problem is not reputation. It is that reputation was never a channel. “Most MSPs rely on repeat referrals, which is great, but they’re very unpredictable,” he said. “When your reliance is unpredictable, you get unpredictable results.”
The exposure runs deeper than slow months. McCarron points out that a large share of MSPs have a handful of accounts making up an outsized portion of revenue. Lose one of those anchor clients and the math turns hostile in a hurry. Headcount has not changed. Overhead has not changed. Revenue has. And the moment a provider decides to fix the problem with marketing is the moment marketing has become an expense it can least afford.
His recommendation is to stop treating demand generation as a discretionary line item. Marketing belongs in the same category as business insurance or the electric bill for the office, funded month after month whether or not this particular quarter feels comfortable.
Why inbound sits closest to a referral
McCarron is not an SEO purist. He likes paid media. He likes outbound. His argument is about sequencing rather than superiority, and it starts with what a referral-fed sales team is actually equipped to handle.
An MSP that has closed business on introductions for twenty years has a sales process built for warm conversations. The prospect already trusts you, already has a budget, and is more or less ready to move. That team is not set up to work a cold list.
“The next best thing to a repeat referral is an inbound lead,” McCarron said. “They found you, they chose to speak to you, and they have a need.”
The conversion gap backs him up. By his numbers, inbound leads close at roughly 20 to 25 percent, while outbound tends to land closer to 10 to 15 percent. Just as important, inbound does not demand infrastructure. You do not need a sophisticated CRM, a dedicated SDR function, or a formal sales methodology to convert someone who arrived at your site looking for exactly what you sell. Running paid acquisition or outbound at scale requires all of that machinery before the channel produces anything.
The other distinction is durability. Paid channels stop the day the card stops working. Search compounds. It costs more up front and it takes longer to prove out, but the investment keeps producing after the invoice is paid.
What “predictable” actually means
Predictability, in McCarron’s framing, is arithmetic rather than optimism.
Take a single Minneapolis keyword. Roughly 400 people a month search for managed IT services in the city. A third position ranking captures something in the range of 20 percent of those clicks, which is about 80 visits. If 10 percent of that traffic converts into a lead, that is eight leads. Close a quarter of them and one keyword is producing two new customers a month.
No individual ranking behaves that cleanly. Positions drift up and down week to week, and any one term can slip. The stability comes from volume. Once a provider is ranking across dozens of terms, the fluctuations offset each other and the aggregate output settles into a range. Maybe it is six leads in a slow month and twelve in a strong one, but it is a range you can forecast against.
That baseline is what unlocks the rest of the mix. Once organic search is reliably producing meetings, Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads become a throttle. Soft month, spend more. Strong month, dial it back. The aggressiveness of your marketing starts tracking the actual needs of your business instead of your anxiety level.
The strategy is services times locations
The execution model McCarron describes is unglamorous on purpose: publish content people genuinely want to read, and build backlinks, which function as Google’s proxy for whether the industry considers you an authority. Both need to happen continuously.
The targeting question has a straightforward answer. Start with the city your office sits in, then extend to whatever suburbs or neighboring municipalities you would realistically send a van to. Every service you sell gets a page in every location you serve. An MSP headquartered in Minneapolis needs pages for managed IT services, IT support, IT consulting, and cybersecurity in Minneapolis, then a parallel set for Saint Paul and any other market it covers. List the cities, list the services, and the intersection is your site architecture.
Providers with a vertical focus have a second axis available. If your book is weighted toward law firms, construction, or accounting practices, industry pages give you a second way to be found.
Traffic is not the same thing as trust
Ranking gets people to the page. Something else has to get them to the contact form, and McCarron is unambiguous about what that something is.
Handing your infrastructure to an outside provider is a high-stakes decision. The business runs on the technology, and the buyer knows it. The sites that convert are the ones stacked with evidence: Google reviews surfaced prominently, awards displayed, customer testimonials, real case studies.
Two things are worth noting for smaller providers who assume that arms race is unwinnable. First, McCarron’s team builds credibility through what he calls founder-led marketing, pulling insight directly out of the MSP’s executive team and turning it into content that speaks to the specific pains buyers actually feel. Stories and examples from someone who has lived the work are difficult to fake and difficult to copy. Second, a substantial share of industry awards are pay to play. Winning them is less a matter of scale than of identifying which ones matter and doing the work to qualify.
One provider’s numbers
McCarron described a client that grew from two people to forty over thirty years on referrals alone, with no marketing function at all. After 2020, competition in its market intensified and the referral flow thinned out. Eventually several months passed without a single new deal.
The wrinkle is that the company was already paying for SEO. It had an agency. The agency simply did not understand IT services, which meant it did not understand what to target, how to target it, or how to talk to the buyer. Effort was being spent. None of it was landing.
After the strategy was rebuilt, the company generated more than half a million dollars in pipeline within 90 days. The volume was enough to overwhelm the head of sales, who was buried in proposal work and considering leaving before the company brought on additional salespeople. It is now tracking toward more than half a million in closed revenue for the year.
Measure the chain, not the vanity metric
McCarron breaks organic performance into four sequential stages, and each one is a leading indicator for the next.
Rankings come first. Improving positions are the earliest signal that the strategy is working. Rankings produce traffic. Traffic produces leads. Leads produce booked meetings, which is where marketing hands off to sales and pipeline becomes real.
Reviewing performance means walking that chain in order. Are rankings trending up month over month, accepting that some terms will slip? Is traffic following? Are leads arriving, and what percentage of them convert? The check that catches most mistakes is search volume. A page can rank first for a term nobody searches, which generates no clicks and therefore no leads, and a report full of green arrows can still describe a program producing nothing.
What it costs and how long it takes
Timelines vary enormously by market. McCarron has seen clients rank for primary terms within days and others take eight months. Los Angeles demands patience. Spokane does not.
His rough benchmarks: most MSP SEO programs run between $3,000 and $5,000 per month in a metro of 500,000 or more. Markets around 200,000 people can often be competitive at $1,500 to $3,000. The top 20 US metros may require that $3,000 to $5,000 range and still take longer, because spend is only one variable.
The other variable is target count. Ranking in one city is far cheaper than ranking in ten. A provider in Los Angeles County contending with Pasadena, Santa Clarita, Burbank, Culver City, and the rest needs individual pages for each, and that page count has to be funded. Providers effectively choose between two levers: invest less and pursue fewer targets over a longer horizon, or invest more and move faster across a wider footprint.
One warning sign is worth flagging. If an agency pitches an identical package regardless of how competitive your market is, it has skipped the diligence. Assessing market difficulty and the investment required to compete in it should happen before anyone quotes a number.
The advice McCarron gives prospects is to commit to a figure they can sustain for twelve months. Not because twelve months is a contractual requirement, but because abandoning the program at month four means forfeiting everything spent to that point without ever reaching the payoff. He also structures his own engagements to share that risk, cutting fees in half until leads begin arriving so that the agency does not profit before the client does.
For providers who have spent their careers waiting for the phone to ring, that is the harder adjustment. Search does not reward urgency. It rewards patience, and it eventually stops requiring it.
