Judging an agency
How to rescue a failing MSP marketing program
A 90-day plan for an MSP marketing program that is not producing: what to diagnose first, what to stop, what to fix, and how to decide whether to keep the agency.
Rescue a failing MSP marketing program by diagnosing before changing anything: establish whether the problem is output, targeting, conversion or close rate, since the fix for each is completely different. Most owners replace the agency first, which resets the clock without identifying what went wrong, and the second engagement fails the same way.
Ninety days is enough to know. Here is how to spend them.
First, work out which problem you have
Four failures look identical from the outside, and each has a different fix.
| Symptom | Likely problem | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing changed on the website | Output | Page inventory, last-modified dates |
| Traffic but no enquiries | Targeting or conversion | Which queries, which pages, where visitors land |
| Enquiries but no proposals | Lead quality | Who is enquiring, and why they are not qualified |
| Proposals but no clients | Close rate, not marketing | Sales process, pricing, positioning |
The last row matters most, because it is the one most often misdiagnosed. An MSP getting proposals and losing them does not have a marketing problem. More enquiries at $2,500 each will make it worse, not better, and no agency change will help.
Week 1: capture what exists
You cannot fix what you have not measured, and the absence of a baseline is usually part of why you are here.
Inventory the site. Every page, its title, its meta description, its word count, whether it has structured data. This is the single most revealing hour of the whole process, and it usually shows that the service and location coverage everyone assumed existed does not.
Check the Google Business Profile. Last post, photo count from this year, unanswered reviews, categories, whether the address is public on a service-area business.
Pull the search terms report if you run ads. Read the bottom half.
Ask for the original baseline. Whatever was captured at the start of the engagement. Its absence is itself a finding, because it means no claim about progress made in the last year can be checked in either direction.
Week 2: find where it broke
Now compare what exists against what was supposed to happen.
Read the last three months of deliverables. Apply one test to the content: could a competitor publish this by swapping the logo? If yes, you paid for filler, and filler neither ranks nor gets cited.
Check for syndication. Find two other MSPs the agency works with and open the equivalent post. Two independently written articles on the same topic share roughly 4 percent of their phrasing. Above about 30 percent it is one article with the town name changed.
Trace one enquiry end to end. Where did it come from, which page, what happened next, did anyone call it back within the hour. Broken handoffs are common and invisible in every report.
Check the forms actually work. Submit one. It sounds absurd and it finds a real problem more often than it should.
The fuller version of this diagnostic is in 12 MSP marketing agency red flags.
Weeks 3 to 4: stop the bleeding
Before building anything, stop the losses. These are quick and they pay immediately.
Add negative keywords. If you run Google Ads and nobody has mined the search terms report, this alone often recovers a meaningful share of spend. The method is in Google Ads for MSPs.
Fix the Google Business Profile. Categories, service-area setup, respond to every unanswered review. An afternoon, and for a local service business it is usually the fastest available gain.
Fix the obvious on-page issues. Titles that truncate, missing meta descriptions, pages with no structured data. Cheap, fast, and they compound with everything else.
Pause anything with no attributable result. Not permanently. Just stop paying for it while you work out whether it was doing anything.
Weeks 5 to 12: rebuild the foundation
Close the coverage gap first. A page for every service you sell and every town you genuinely serve. This is almost always where the biggest gap is, and it is unglamorous rather than clever.
Fix the conversion path. Every service page needs a form and a phone number. Location pages need to answer the query they were built for rather than sending everyone to the home page.
Publish three genuinely specific pieces. Not twelve generic ones. Something only your firm could have written, containing a real client story or a real number from your own systems.
Set a real baseline and measure monthly from here.
Then decide about the agency
By day 90 you will know something you did not know at the start, and the decision becomes much simpler.
Keep them if the diagnosis showed real work that was aimed at the wrong thing. That is a briefing failure as much as an execution one, and a good agency given a clear diagnosis often performs completely differently.
Replace them if the diagnosis showed nothing reached the website, or content was syndicated across their client base, or they cannot produce a baseline or explain what changed.
Do neither, yet, if the real problem turned out to be close rate or capacity. Fix that first, because marketing spend into a broken sales process is the most expensive mistake in this whole sequence.
If you do replace them, the selection process is in how to choose an MSP marketing agency, and the checks that stop it happening again are the monthly ones.
What not to do
Do not fire the agency in week one. You will lose the only people who know what was done, and you will hire the next one with exactly the same brief that failed.
Do not start a redesign. It is the most common reflex and it consumes the budget that would have fixed the content problem. The structure and the content are the problem far more often than the appearance.
Do not add channels. A programme failing on two channels does not improve by becoming a programme failing on four.
Do not accept "it takes time" without a milestone. It does take time. Long games still have checkpoints, and the absence of one is the actual issue.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my MSP marketing is failing or just slow? Check whether output reached the website at all. Pages changed and structured data added means it is working and slow. Nothing changed in ninety days means it is failing, and those are different problems.
Should I fire my marketing agency if results are poor? Not before diagnosing. Replacing the agency without knowing what failed resets the clock and usually reproduces the same outcome, because the brief that caused it goes unchanged.
How long should I give a marketing program before deciding? Ninety days to know whether the work is real. Six to twelve months to know whether it produces revenue. Judging revenue at ninety days is unfair; judging output is not.
What is the fastest fix for a failing MSP marketing program? Usually Google Business Profile work and negative keywords. Both take under a day, both produce measurable effects within weeks, and both are routinely neglected.
What if the real problem is my close rate? Then stop spending on marketing until it is fixed. More enquiries into a sales process that loses them multiplies the cost of the problem rather than solving it.
Should I redesign the website as part of a rescue? Rarely. A redesign that changes the appearance but not the structure or content produces a nicer version of the same result, and it usually consumes the budget the actual fix needed.