The two flat months that made them call us
The MD had been in IT for 22 years. Founded the MSP in 2014. Built it up to £2M revenue serving law firms, accountancy practices and finance businesses across two counties. Strong technical bench. Cyber Essentials Plus. Helpdesk SLAs that actually held up.
For most of those years the business grew the way every regional MSP grows. A partner introduces a friend's firm. An old colleague leaves an in-house IT job and brings the new employer over. The cold caller dials a list and gets one warm reply in fifty. The MD does the close personally because he is the brand.
Then 2024 happened. Two large existing clients delayed renewals. The cold caller's hit rate dropped. Two consecutive months without a single new logo. The MD did the maths and realised that if the next renewal slipped, the year would miss target by 18%. The board would not be happy. Worse, he could not see what would change in the next 90 days that would fix it. The pipeline was empty.
That is the moment most MSPs we meet are sitting in. The work is good. The team is good. The problem is that nobody knows you exist inside the 1,500 firms in your delivery radius who would actually buy. The ones who do know you only think about you the day their current provider fumbles a ticket.
LinkedIn Ads, run properly, fix that. Three specific levers, in a specific order. Skip any one of them and the numbers do not show up.
What 14 booked calls and 4 signed retainers in 90 days actually looked like
Same MSP. Same MD. Same delivery team. The only thing that changed was that for the first time, the firm had a predictable, owned channel feeding the calendar. By day 90 the cold caller was working a warm list (more on that in lever 03). The MD's diary had 14 first calls in it. Four of those signed Managed Services retainers in the same window. Average contract value £23,500 in Year 1. Total ~£94k locked in, with a recurring base that compounds in Year 2 and beyond.
Anonymised first-party data, 90 day window. Full record on the case studies page.
Hold those four numbers in your head for the rest of this article. Every lever below ties back to one of them. If a tactic does not move booked calls, cost per call, signed retainers or Year 1 value, it does not belong in the playbook.
Upload the right list. Not LinkedIn's idea of one.
Default LinkedIn targeting hands an MSP a 400,000 person audience of "IT decision makers in the United Kingdom" and quietly burns the budget. Most MSPs press go on that audience because it is what the platform suggests. Three months later they conclude "LinkedIn Ads do not work for MSPs". The truth is that the targeting was wrong from impression one.
Running search ads too? Google will happily charge you for "it support jobs" and "iphone screen repair". Our negative keyword list for IT and MSP Google Ads blocks them.
The buying universe for a regional MSP is not 400,000 people. It is the IT decision makers at firms inside your actual delivery radius, at the firm sizes you can serve, in the sectors that match your bench. For the case above, that worked out at 1,800 named firms. Not "people who match a profile". 1,800 specific companies you could open a CRM and list out by name.
Cost per call lives or dies on this lever. The same £1,500 in monthly media split across 1,800 named firms produces booked calls at £71. Split across 400,000 it produces clicks at £8 and zero booked calls. The list is what compounds every other lever. Get this wrong, the rest of the playbook does not save you.
- 1,500 to 2,000 named firms, hand-built from Companies House and your CRM, not pulled from LinkedIn's "lookalike" guesswork.
- Filtered to the staff band your delivery model is actually priced for (typically 20 to 200).
- Inside a realistic drive radius if on-site visits matter for retention.
- Layered with IT decision maker job functions on top, not "anyone with IT in their job title".
- Match rate above 60% when uploaded. Anything lower means the list is dirty and needs cleaning.
Don't fancy spending a week scrubbing 1,800 rows of CRM data
We build the list, scrub it, upload it, and have it live in Campaign Manager inside week one.
Core retargeting is where the pipeline actually fattens
This is the lever most MSPs skip, and it did the heaviest lifting in the case above. Of the 14 booked calls in 90 days, our internal attribution showed 9 had been retargeted at least 4 times before they booked. The cold ad got their attention. The retargeting layer is what kept the MSP front of mind through the four to twelve week consideration window before the buyer was ready to talk.
Here is why that matters in IT specifically. The buying trigger for MSP services is rarely "I saw a great LinkedIn ad and decided to switch provider". It is "the helpdesk took six hours to respond to a P1 ticket again, the office manager has just rung me in tears, and I am done". You cannot predict the day that happens. You cannot manufacture it. But you can make sure that on the day it happens, your name is the first one in their head.
Retargeting is what makes that the case. Cold prospecting introduces you. Retargeting keeps you there for the 30, 60, 90 days it takes for the trigger event to land. Without it, you pay full freight to introduce yourself to the same buyer 12 weeks running because nothing remembers them. With it, you pay pennies per impression to the warmest audience you will ever own.
Booked calls and signed retainers both live here. Cold-only campaigns produced roughly 1 booked call per month in the case above. Adding the retargeting layer in week 4 took that to 5+ per month by week 8. Same media spend. Same list. The retargeting layer is the multiplier on every cold pound you spend.
- One always-on retargeting campaign against site visitors from the last 90 days.
- A second against video viewers (25% completion or higher) and ad engagers from your cold campaigns.
- Frequency capped so you stay present, not annoying. Three to five impressions per week per buyer is the sweet spot.
- Refresh creative every 4 to 6 weeks. The same buyer is going to see this ad set for months.
- Separate retargeting messaging from cold messaging. Cold ads introduce. Retargeting ads handle objections (price, switching cost, transition pain).
"Nobody changes MSP because of one ad. They change MSP the week their current one lets them down. Your job is to be the name they already trust on that day."
14 booked calls and 4 retainers in 90 days. We can plan yours on the call.
Bring your delivery radius and your average client value. We will model what the same pattern looks like for your firm.
Layer three formats against the same buyers
Single-format LinkedIn campaigns underperform for MSPs. The buyer needs to see you in different shapes across a few weeks before they will book a call with anyone, let alone an unfamiliar firm. The three formats below do different jobs. Run together, in sequence, against the same target list, they compound. Run individually, they each underperform.
The order matters. By the time the Message Ad lands in the buyer's LinkedIn inbox, the founder is already a familiar face from Thought Leader Ads. The pain points have already landed from the Image Ads. The Message Ad does not have to do all the convincing. It just has to ask for the call.
Founder or technical lead voice. Short, blunt takes on what good IT support actually looks like, posted as a personal LinkedIn update and promoted to the target list. Builds face recognition and trust faster than any logo can.
Direct angles on the cost of slow internal IT response. What proper cyber posture looks like post Cyber Essentials Plus. The pain made visible. These are the ads that get screenshotted and sent to the office manager who is already at breaking point with the current provider.
A one-to-one nudge to the warmest segment, offering a 30 minute IT risk review. Lands in inbox. Asks for the call. Only sent to buyers who have already engaged with at least 3 impressions of the other two formats.
Cost per call drops because the Message Ad converts at multiples of cold rates when the buyer has already seen the founder's face four times. We saw Message Ad reply rates of 11% on the warm segment versus an industry average of 2-3% cold. That is the difference between £71 per call and £180 per call. Same Message Ad. Different sequence.
- Thought Leader Ads from the founder run cold to the target list for the first 4 weeks. Building face recognition.
- Image Ads run against the same list and against retargeting, on rotating pain angles.
- Message Ads switched on once a buyer has hit 3+ impressions across the other two formats. Warm only.
- One conversion goal across all three: book the IT risk review call.
- Same landing page for all three. Same offer. Same calendar link. Buyers do not bounce between offers.
14 booked calls. 4 signed retainers. ~£94k Year 1 value. ~£3,200 in 90-day media spend.
That is a 29X return in Year 1 alone, before the recurring revenue compounds in Year 2 and beyond. MSP retainers do not churn the way one-off services do. Of the 4 signed retainers, 3 were still active 18 months later, which puts the lifetime return well into 50X territory.
The point is not the multiple. The point is that this is replicable. Same list discipline. Same retargeting commitment. Same three-format sequence. The MSPs we run this for now are inside that range, not as outliers.
Why most MSPs won't actually run this
The pattern is not a secret. The reason competitors are not running it is not that they have not heard of it. It is that it requires three uncomfortable things most MSPs avoid.
- 1.The founder has to actually appear on camera or in copy. "Thought Leader Ads" do not work without a thought leader. Logo-only versions underperform by 60%+ on every benchmark we have measured.
- 2.Someone has to build and maintain the firm list. Real work. Not a five minute job inside Campaign Manager. The list gets stale and needs a quarterly refresh.
- 3.You have to commit to 90 days before judging it. Most MSPs panic at week 4 when cold has not converted yet, kill the campaign, and conclude "LinkedIn Ads do not work for MSPs". The retargeting layer hits in week 6-8. Killing it at week 4 is killing it the week before it works.
The MSPs who get past those three things own the LinkedIn presence in their region. The rest keep running cold dial and hoping a referral lands.
Tools to plan your version of this
Plan a realistic monthly spend for an MSP-shaped target list.
Generate MSP angles that do not read like every other 'trusted IT partner' ad.
Sharpen the angle on the actual pain your IT decision makers feel.
Build the 1,500 to 2,000 firm list LinkedIn will actually match well.
Common questions
If you want us to run this for your MSP
- The hand-built target firm list, scoped to your delivery radius and ICP firm size.
- The three-format ad system (Thought Leader, Image, Message) written and produced.
- The retargeting layer that keeps you in front of the same buyers week after week.
- The IT risk review landing page and follow up sequence.
- Monthly reporting against booked calls and signed retainers, not vanity clicks.
Starter £975/mo, Growth £1,725/mo, Scale £4,025+/mo. Most MSP engagements sit in Growth, scaling into Scale once retargeting volume justifies higher creative refresh cadence.
Your firm sits in a different category?
Same shape of pattern, tuned for the specifics of your industry. You are reading the IT MSP playbook.
Named account lists, retargeting and Companies view for niche industrial buyers.
Advertorial ads, smart lead tools and founder-led chase lists for new service launches.
Advertorial expose ads, full-funnel retargeting and Thought Leader Ads for founder-led firms.