How Complexity and AI Will Collapse Your Current MSP Marketing Plan—And What You Need to Do About It Now

Back in 1995, when I started in direct marketing, small business owners had only a handful of ways to market their services:

• The Yellow Pages
• Direct mail
• Cold-call prospecting
• Local radio
• Fax broadcast
• Billboards
• Newspaper ads and PR
• Trade shows and networking events
• Canvassing with door hangers or flyers

Outside of the above, it was all word of mouth and referrals. Not easy, but simple and manageable.

Then came digital marketing—websites, SEO, pay-per-click, online ads, and e-mail broadcasts—and the game started to change. Media started fragmenting. Social media grew, requiring more than just a website. You need a social media “presence.”

Today, the complexity of marketing and lead generation has gotten to the point where a basic marketing plan requires a team of specialists with a high level of technical expertise and competence in their specific function: web design, SEO/GEO, Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail marketing, and PPC—not to mention the sophistication of marketing automation and CRM system, lists, and data.

If you’re not careful, you can get completely LOST in the confusion and complexity, waste a lot of energy and money trying to figure it all out, and get nowhere fast.

If You Think It’s Bad, It’s About to Get Worse

While I’m sick of hearing about AI, the reality is that it’s changing everything about how we compete in business—and one of the areas that is adopting AI the fastest is the marketing department.

From media channels to AI-driven content creation, graphic design, chatbots, social ads, direct messages, and inbound and outbound phone calls, EVERYTHING the marketing department has relied on in the last decade is changing radically… and it’s happening fast.

This presents a problem because no one really knows what “best practices” of marketing will look like a couple of years from now. That means you could spend a lot of time and money on a method of marketing TODAY, only to find it’s obsolete and worthless 12 to 18 months from now.

Let me give you a couple of examples…

For 25 years, marketers optimized for SEO rankings, clicks, and traffic. That model assumed every search ended with someone clicking one of 10 blue links—and ranking in the top three over your competition was the “gold standard” to get a consistent stream of inbound leads. That entire model is dead.

Sixty percent of Google searches now end without anyone clicking to visit a website—up from 58% in 2024—and the median publisher experienced a 10% year-over-year traffic decline in the first half of 2025, with non-news content sites down a full 14%.

Read that again. Six out of 10 searches go nowhere. Google gets the question, AI gives the answer, and your website and content never enter the picture.

Organic click-through rates for informational queries featuring Google AI Overviews fell 61% since mid-2024, while paid click-through rates (CTRs) on those same queries plunged 68%.

This isn’t a seasonal fluctuation. Based on 15 months of consistent decline across nearly every metric, the search landscape is fundamentally different now than it was 18 months ago.

Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 57% of search engine results pages as of June 2025, compared to just 25% in August 2024. That’s not a trend; that’s a freight train. And when an AI Overview is present, CTR drops from 15% to 8%, according to Pew Research—and only 1% of searches lead to users clicking a link *within* the AI Overview itself.

So, you rank #1. You get an AI Overview above your result. And your traffic still collapses.

Not even mastering your own corner of the marketing space means you’re safe. HubSpot’s marketing was genius and they had one of the most sophisticated SEO machines in the history of content marketing, beating every competitor in that category.

But HubSpot experienced a 70% to 80% decline in organic traffic from 2024 to 2025, with monthly organic visits plummeting from approximately 13.5 million in November 2024 to fewer than 7 million one month later. The company now reports that just 10% of leads come from blog traffic, down from what was once the majority of their pipeline.

Let that sink in. The company that wrote the book on inbound marketing lost most of its traffic almost overnight.

And remember how I opened this article with how a small business owner only needed to manage about 10 marketing media? Well, forget that.

There are now dozens of social media sites to manage, each one requiring deep expertise to know how to optimize it for lead generation and engagement—and that doesn’t even take into consideration the MILLIONS of searches on the multitude of AI platforms.

What This Means for MSPs Specifically

Here’s what I want you to understand: While media is changing fast, the fundamentals of human behavior never do. People still need to trust you before they buy. They still need to feel like you understand their specific problem and specialize in solving it. They still need a reason to call you, instead of your competition.

What AI has done is increase the complexity of media and findability. What it hasn’t killed (and can’t kill) is a real relationship, with a real audience, built on real authority.

Here’s what I would be doing right now:

1. Double down on establishing yourself as a TRUSTED AUTHORITY to a specific type of customer. Building deep expertise in specific niches becomes more important as the world gets noisier. Being the definitive source for specialized information can earn citations from AI systems and maintain organic search visibility, even as overall traffic declines. Stand out by being the MSP who serves health care in your city. The one who owns CMMC compliance in your region. The one who every dental practice calls first. Or, the MSP leading their customers into the AI generation. That’s not just a positioning strategy—it’s necessary for survival.
   
   
2. Publish AUTHENTIC content—not AI-generated shortcuts that provide information, but have no soul. Share YOUR story, YOUR client wins, and YOUR unique perspective on a specific challenge YOUR market faces. Proprietary data, case studies, original research, and personal narrative are the moat around your content strategy.
   
   
3. Focus on in-person marketing and strategic partners: referrals, networking groups, strategic partnerships, events, and, yes, sales outreach from a human that isn’t just spam. Part of your drip marketing with customers should be IN-PERSON events, QBRs, and other social interactions. DO NOT COMMUNICATE JUST BY E-MAIL. As AI takes over, the value of human referral networks skyrockets. Accountants, attorneys, insurance brokers, bankers—any people who regularly advise the same business owner you want to serve—become critical lead sources. This is how business was done before Google, and it’s how business will be done as Google search gets dismantled.
   
   
4. Put MORE effort into direct marketing with a list and channel you OWN. A quality, responsive e-mail list you’ve built on trust is more valuable today than it has been in a decade. Your list is the one audience the algorithms cannot take from you. If you’re not building it aggressively—via every touchpoint, every event, every client interaction—you’re leaving your business exposed to every future AI update.
   
   
5. Direct mail, as old-fashioned as it sounds to the digital crowd, has never been more effective by comparison. Users are changing how and where they ask questions—both in Google and in LLMs. But nobody has changed where they get their physical mail. The inbox is getting noisier. The mailbox is getting quieter. That’s an arbitrage opportunity. If not for prospecting, then at LEAST use it for staying in touch with your customers and your hot prospects.
   
   
6. Publish more bottom–funnel, trust-building assets. Content like case studies and pricing pages get the highest AI referral traffic, while top-of-the-funnel content like “what is” and “how-to” guides saw massive drops in the past two years.
   
   If your website is full of educational blog posts and light on proof—case studies, testimonials, specific results, clear offers—you’ve built the wrong thing. Buyers who come from AI platforms are further along in their research. They already know they need IT support and help. What they’re looking for is whether you’re the right choice. Give them the trust-building proof they want.
   
   
7. Pick a few channels and do LOTS of repetition. With ALL the choices, your customers will go directly to companies and brands they already know. The businesses that win in the AI era are the ones with enough brand trust and reputation that prospects will bypass search entirely and just call them.
   
   That means local visibility. It means industry events. It means a newsletter, magazine, or publication your prospects actually read. It means showing up consistently enough that when a prospect needs IT help, your name is already in their head.

The Bottom Line

This is not the time to panic.

It’s the time to get smarter, more targeted, and more direct than you’ve ever been. The core principles that I’ve founded my marketing and sales advice on, of value creation, specialization, and trust-based marketing, are critical.

The tools and tech are going to constantly change. Human nature doesn’t. EARN and build trust. Own your audience by providing real leadership and value. Deliver concrete proof of your expertise (not fake AI accolades). Be FOR a specific type of customer. Be bold in your messages. And deliver differential VALUE consistently so your audience SEEKS YOU OUT and welcomes your messages, whatever media they come from.

Here’s a critical question to ask yourself: If you stopped marketing and communicating to your audience today, would they miss you?

If the answer is NO, you’re dead man walking.

That’s how you win—not just today, but in every version of the future that’s coming.

Want more marketing insights from Robins? Learn why more money won’t fix your marketing problems here.