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Property Management Marketing Ideas That Fill Vacancies
Property management marketing ideas that actually move the needle fall into two categories: marketing to prospective residents (reviews, photos, local search) and marketing to prospective owner or HOA clients (your track record, referrals, transparent proposals). The two audiences read different signals, so a strategy built only around filling vacant units will miss half of what actually grows a management company. Most property management marketing advice treats these as the same problem, but a renter deciding whether to tour a community and an owner deciding whether to hand over their property are evaluating completely different things — one cares about living experience, the other cares about operational competence and financial transparency. Getting both right means a plan that can turn resident reviews into marketing for renters while separately building an owner-facing reputation for the business itself. Resident-facing marketing: reviews, photos and local search For prospective residents, the marketing fundamentals are local search visibility and an accurate, current online presence more than any paid campaign. A community's Google Business Profile, Apartments.com listing and ApartmentRatings profile function as the real storefront a renter actually evaluates before touring — our guide on Google Business Profile for apartment communities covers getting that foundation right, and apartment SEO covers the broader local search picture. Current, high-quality photos of common areas, amenities and unit interiors do more for conversion than most property managers expect, because they give a renter a reason to trust the review text sitting next to them — a strong rating paired with stale or sparse photos reads as less credible than the same rating backed by a profile that's clearly getting regular attention. Virtual tours and short video walkthroughs extend the same logic for renters evaluating a community from out of town, which is common for corporate relocations and off-market moves. Turning resident reviews into marketing, the honest way A steady stream of specific, detailed reviews is itself a marketing asset — it's free, continuously updated content written in a prospective renter's own voice, describing exactly the kind of day-to-day experience a listing photo can't capture. Building that stream means asking every resident the same way at consistent moments (after move-in, after a closed work order, at renewal), never filtering by how satisfied someone seemed and never offering anything in exchange. Our guide on how to get more apartment reviews covers the timing and request mechanics in detail, and why review gating is a legal risk explains why filtering who gets asked is a bigger problem than it might first appear. Responding to every review, not just the negative ones, is part of the marketing value too — a profile where a five-star review gets a genuine thank-you and a one-star review gets a calm, Fair Housing-safe acknowledgment reads as an actively managed, trustworthy operation to anyone scrolling through the full history. Our apartment review response templates cover wording for the situations that come up most. Word-of-mouth and referral marketing for residents Resident referral programs — a credit or small incentive for a current resident who refers someone who signs a lease — are a different category from review incentives and generally fine, since the reward is tied to a referral and a signed lease, not to writing a review or rating something a particular way. Keeping that distinction clear in how a referral program is structured and communicated avoids blurring it with the review-incentive rules that apply separately. Our broader guide on word-of-mouth marketing covers referral program mechanics that apply across any local business, including property management. Showing up in AI-assisted apartment search Renters increasingly run searches like "best apartments in [city] for pets" or "quiet apartments near [employer]" through AI assistants before they open Google Maps at all, and those answers draw on much of the same underlying signal set as traditional local search — review volume, recency and the specific detail written into review text across platforms. Our guide on getting apartment communities recommended by ChatGPT covers what's actually within a property's control here, which is mostly the same reputation fundamentals that drive traditional local search rather than a separate marketing channel to build from scratch. Marketing consistency across a growing portfolio A regional marketing push that works well for one flagship community doesn't automatically translate to every property in a portfolio — a newly acquired community often inherits a stale Google profile, outdated photos and no established review habit from the previous ownership group, which means it needs its own marketing setup rather than inheriting the portfolio's overall reputation by association. A fictional example: Cedarbrook Management acquires a 220-unit community with a strong local reputation under its previous owner but a Google profile that hasn't been touched in over a year. Treating that acquisition's marketing as a fresh setup — current photos, an active review request habit, a corrected category — rather than assuming the existing reputation would carry forward automatically, is what kept the community's visibility from quietly declining in its first months under new management. Centralizing marketing oversight — a shared standard for photos, review request timing and reply tone — while still allowing property-specific content (neighborhood guides, local amenity details) tends to work better than either fully centralizing to generic templated content or leaving every property to improvise its own approach independently. Seasonal and timely marketing moments Lease-up season, seasonal amenity changes (pool opening, holiday décor in common areas) and local community events all give a community something timely and specific to post about on its Google profile and social channels, which tends to perform better than generic amenity copy that reads the same in every season. Tying a review request campaign to one of these natural moments — for example, right after a popular seasonal amenity reopens — can also reinforce a positive, current impression at the same time a resident is asked to leave feedback, as long as the request itself still follows the same non-gated, no-incentive rule as any other ask. Owner-facing marketing: proving operational competence Marketing to prospective owner and HOA clients runs on a different set of signals: referrals from real estate agents and other owners, a clear and transparent fee proposal, and — increasingly — a visible review record that functions as a reference check an owner can read before ever calling. A thin or outdated review history, even with a decent average, reads as an untested operation to a board or owner doing diligence. Our guide on how to get property management clients covers referral channels and proposal strategy for both individual owners and HOA boards specifically. A separate Google Business Profile for the management company itself — distinct from each community's individual profile — gives prospective owners something to find when they search the company by name, with case-light proof points about service quality that don't name real clients unless they've explicitly agreed to be featured. Growing with existing owner clients is a marketing channel in its own right and often the lowest-cost one available. An owner satisfied with how one property is managed is the easiest person to pitch on a second property or to ask for a referral to another owner, especially at a natural check-in point like year-end reporting or a lease renewal. This kind of organic growth tends to convert at a much higher rate than cold outreach to owners who have no direct experience with the company yet. Fair Housing care in marketing and advertising Marketing copy, photos and social media for residential communities are subject to the same Fair Housing Act constraints as review replies — advertising can't express a preference for or against residents based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status or disability, and effect matters more than intent . Photos that exclusively depict one type of household, copy that implies a community is or isn't suited to families, or language that could be read as describing a preferred type of resident all carry the same risk in a marketing campaign that they do in a review reply. Routing marketing copy through the same Fair Housing-safe review process as public replies, rather than treating marketing as a separate, lower-scrutiny channel, is the safer default. What this costs None of this requires a large marketing budget to start — a consistent review request habit, an optimized Google Business Profile and current photos cost time more than money. Tools that handle review requests, monitoring and reply drafting run $5 a month per tool or $50 a month for the Full plan covering every tool, with the first month free and no card required, which is a modest cost relative to what a single additional lease renewal or a single new management contract is worth. What's the single highest-impact marketing idea for a small property management company? A consistent, non-gated review request habit, more than any single paid campaign. It's free, it compounds over time, and it directly supports both resident-facing marketing (filling vacancies) and owner-facing marketing (winning new management contracts), since both audiences read reviews before making a decision. Should property management marketing differ for HOA clients versus individual rental owners? Yes, somewhat. HOA boards respond more to transparent financial reporting, vendor management track record and references from other association clients, while individual rental owners often respond more directly to simple, clear communication and a visible resident-facing review record. Both still weigh reviews heavily, just reviews from somewhat different audiences, which is why a single blended marketing plan rarely serves both well without some tailoring to each client type. Can a property management company run paid social ads targeting renters? Yes, and paid ads can be effective for driving initial traffic to a listing, but any ad copy and audience targeting needs the same Fair Housing review as organic marketing — targeting or excluding audiences based on characteristics tied to a protected class is not permitted regardless of the platform or ad format used . Reviewing both the ad copy and the targeting settings before a campaign launches, rather than only checking the copy, catches the kind of audience-exclusion risk that's easy to miss. How do HOA-focused management companies market differently from multifamily managers? HOA managers aren't marketing units to renters at all — their marketing is almost entirely owner-facing, aimed at winning new association contracts rather than filling vacancies. That shifts the emphasis toward board references, transparent financial reporting examples and a review record built from other association clients, with far less weight on photos, virtual tours or resident-facing review volume compared to a multifamily-focused marketing plan. Single-family rental managers sit somewhere in between, marketing to two audiences at once — prospective tenants for each individual rental, and prospective owners deciding whether to hand over management of a property they already own. A fictional example: Northgate Rentals runs a small resident-facing review request habit for each scattered single-family property while separately maintaining a company-level profile and owner-facing proof points aimed purely at winning new owner clients, treating the two as genuinely different marketing tracks rather than one blended effort. Every review from Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Get Property Management Clients (Owner Acquisition)
Getting property management clients means winning the trust of property owners and HOA boards who are deciding whether to hand over day-to-day control of their asset to someone else. That trust comes mainly from referrals, visible local presence, and proof — especially a strong, honestly earned review record — that the company already does this work well for the properties it manages now. Unlike leasing, where the audience is a renter choosing where to live, this is a sales process aimed at an owner or a board comparing management companies on communication, maintenance handling and financial transparency. Before a prospective owner ever talks to a sales rep, they're usually already doing diligence online, which is why showing owners your review record matters as much as any pitch deck or proposal. Referrals and local relationships Referrals remain one of the most reliable sources of new management clients, because an owner trusts another owner's experience more than any marketing claim. Real estate agents are a particularly strong referral channel — agents who sell investment property regularly meet buyers who need a management company immediately after closing, and a relationship with a handful of active local agents can produce a steady trickle of warm introductions. Attorneys handling estate or divorce matters, accountants serving landlord clients, and local real estate investor associations are other channels worth building relationships in deliberately rather than waiting for word-of-mouth to happen on its own. Finding owners through investor and landlord networks Local real estate investor associations, landlord meetup groups and online forums for self-managing landlords are reliable places to meet owners who are close to deciding they're done self-managing — often after a bad tenant experience or a move out of state. Showing up consistently, answering questions genuinely without turning every interaction into a pitch, and being known as the person who actually understands the local market tends to produce more leads over a year than any single advertising push. A fictional example: Crestline Property Management's founder spent a year attending a monthly investor meetup before landing her first client from it, but that same group became her most consistent referral source for years afterward. Direct mail and digital ads targeting self-managing landlords can work as a supplement, but they tend to produce lower-trust leads than referrals and relationships — an owner responding to an ad is usually earlier in their decision process than one coming from a trusted referral, so the sales cycle and conversion rate look different for each channel. Budgeting outreach time accordingly, rather than expecting ad spend to replace relationship-building, keeps expectations realistic in the first year or two. Your review record is a sales asset An owner evaluating a management company reads reviews the same way a renter reads reviews about an apartment — looking specifically at how other owners and residents describe communication, maintenance responsiveness and how disputes got handled. A thin or stale review history, even with a decent average rating, reads as a company that hasn't been tested much; a steady stream of recent, detailed reviews reads as an operation that's actually running day to day. Building that record requires the same discipline as any other review request process — asking every resident and, where applicable, every owner client the same way, without filtering by how satisfied they seemed. Our guide on how to get more apartment reviews covers the timing and request mechanics that build this record consistently over time. Responding to every review, positive and negative, with the same consistent structure also signals something specific to a prospective owner: that the company is actively managing its reputation the way it would manage their property. Our apartment review response templates cover reply wording that stays consistent and Fair Housing-safe, which matters as much for an owner reading replies as it does for a resident. Tracking reviews across every community in a portfolio from one place also makes it realistic to pull together an honest, up-to-date review summary when a prospective owner asks for it directly — something that's far harder to produce credibly if reviews are scattered across a dozen logins nobody checks consistently. Marketing presence that supports the sales conversation A professional website, an active and accurate Google Business Profile for the management company itself (separate from each community's individual profile), and visible case-light proof points — without naming real clients unless they've explicitly agreed to be featured — all support the referral and outreach work rather than replacing it. Our broader guide on property management marketing ideas covers how reviews, photos and local SEO work together for both the resident-facing and owner-facing sides of a management company's marketing. Keeping that owner-facing presence separate from each community's individual Google Business Profile matters for clarity: a prospective owner searching for the management company by name should land on a profile describing the company itself, while a prospective resident searching for a specific community should land on that property's own listing. Blurring the two tends to confuse both audiences and dilutes the reviews each one is actually looking for. Writing a proposal owners actually trust A management proposal that leads with the fee percentage and little else reads as interchangeable with every other proposal an owner is comparing. A proposal that clearly explains the maintenance coordination process, the owner reporting cadence, and — critically — how the company handles and discloses issues when something goes wrong tends to stand out more, because it answers the question an owner is really asking: what happens when this isn't simple? Pointing to a specific, consistent review-response process as part of that answer gives a concrete, checkable example of how the company behaves under pressure, rather than just a promise. HOA management contracts specifically Winning an HOA management contract usually means pitching a board rather than a single owner, which changes the sales conversation: boards care heavily about transparent financial reporting, vendor management and consistent communication with homeowners, since board members themselves answer to the community if something goes wrong. A track record of clear, documented communication — and reviews from other HOA clients specifically describing responsiveness and financial transparency — carries particular weight in this pitch, since a board is effectively choosing a company its own reputation will be tied to for the length of the contract. HOA boards also tend to run a more formal RFP process than individual owners, often soliciting proposals from several management companies at once and comparing them on a scored basis. Showing up prepared with references from current HOA clients, a clear breakdown of what's included versus billed separately, and a specific answer for how homeowner complaints get handled and escalated gives a board something concrete to score, rather than a generic pitch that sounds similar to every competitor's. Growing with existing clients, not just adding new ones Getting more doors doesn't only mean winning entirely new clients — an owner happy with how one property is managed is also the easiest person to pitch on adding a second property, or on referring another owner they know. Checking in with existing clients at natural points, like a lease renewal or year-end reporting, creates an opening to ask directly whether they have other properties or know anyone looking for a management company, without it feeling like an unprompted sales pitch. This kind of organic growth tends to convert at a much higher rate than cold outreach, precisely because the owner already has firsthand experience to base the decision on. How long does it typically take to land a first property management client? This varies widely by market, niche and how active the referral and outreach work is, so there's no reliable industry-wide timeline to quote . Companies that invest early in referral relationships and a consistent review process tend to see steadier lead flow than those relying on cold outreach alone. Should a new management company discount its fees to win early clients? Discounting can win a first contract but risks locking in an unsustainable price before the real cost of maintenance coordination and after-hours support becomes clear. See our guide on property management fees for typical fee structures to price against before quoting a new owner. Can a management company ask its own clients — property owners — for reviews? Yes, following the same rule as resident reviews: ask every owner client the same way, at a consistent point such as after a lease-up or an annual review, without offering anything in exchange or filtering out owners who've had a rough month. See why review gating is a legal risk for why filtering who gets asked creates exposure beyond just an inaccurate rating. What do owners actually look for in a management company's online reviews? Mostly specifics: how maintenance requests actually got handled, whether communication stayed clear during a dispute, and whether the company followed through on what it promised. A vague five-star review with no detail carries less weight with an owner than a three-paragraph review describing exactly how a slow repair eventually got resolved, since the latter tells a prospective owner something concrete about how the company behaves under pressure. Is cold outreach to property owners ever effective? It can generate occasional leads, especially a well-researched call or email to an owner who's listed a self-managed rental for rent repeatedly or posted in a landlord forum about a problem a management company could solve. But it consistently converts at a lower rate than referrals, and it works best as a supplement to relationship-building rather than a primary strategy for a new company's first year. Do property management reviews matter as much as residential reviews for winning new clients? For the owner-acquisition side of the business, they matter more in some ways, because an owner comparing management companies is making a longer-term, higher-stakes decision than a renter choosing where to sign a one-year lease. A company's review profile — across Google, the Better Business Bureau and any owner-specific review channels — functions as a reference check that an owner can read before ever picking up the phone, long before any proposal or reference call happens. Every review from Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
Property Management Fees Explained: What Owners Actually Pay
Property managers typically charge through a combination of a monthly management fee (often a percentage of collected rent, sometimes a flat fee per unit), a one-time leasing or placement fee when a new tenant signs, and sometimes a renewal fee and a markup on coordinated maintenance work . The exact mix and amount vary by market, portfolio size and property type, which is exactly why unclear fee communication is one of the most common sources of owner disputes and negative reviews. Fee structures in this industry are genuinely confusing to a first-time owner, and that confusion is itself a reputation risk. An owner who doesn't fully understand what a "leasing fee" covers versus what's included in the monthly management fee is far more likely to feel surprised — and to say so publicly — when an invoice doesn't match their expectations. Getting ahead of that by explaining fees clearly before a contract is signed is cheaper, in every sense, than managing the fallout afterward; it's why we frame this guide around making fees clear before they become reviews rather than just listing numbers. The core fee types The monthly management fee is the recurring charge for day-to-day operations — rent collection, maintenance coordination, resident communication — and is most commonly structured as a percentage of collected rent, though some companies use a flat per-unit fee instead, especially for single-family rental portfolios where rent amounts vary widely . A percentage-of-rent structure aligns the manager's incentive with keeping rent collected (since a vacant or discounted unit lowers their own fee too), while a flat fee is simpler to budget around regardless of rent fluctuation. The leasing or placement fee is a one-time charge, usually assessed when a new tenant signs a lease, intended to cover marketing the vacancy, screening applicants and preparing the lease itself. It's commonly set as a percentage of one month's rent or a flat amount, and it's charged separately from the ongoing management fee because the work involved — advertising, showings, screening — is itself separate, concentrated work rather than ongoing operations . A renewal fee, where charged, covers the administrative work of renewing an existing lease — smaller than a full leasing fee since it doesn't involve marketing or screening a new tenant, but still a discrete piece of work. Not every management company charges a separate renewal fee; some fold it into the standard monthly management fee instead. Maintenance coordination sometimes carries its own markup on top of the actual repair cost, compensating the manager for scheduling vendors, following up and inspecting completed work. This is one of the fee types most likely to surprise an owner if it isn't disclosed clearly upfront, since it's easy to assume maintenance is already covered by the monthly management fee unless the contract says otherwise. Resident-facing fees versus owner-facing fees It's worth keeping two separate fee conversations distinct: what the management company charges the owner for its services, and what residents pay as part of the rental process — application fees, pet fees, amenity fees. The two are often confused in casual conversation, but they come from different parties and show up in different kinds of reviews. An owner complaining about an unexpected maintenance markup is a different problem from a resident complaining about an unclear pet fee or an application fee that wasn't disclosed before they applied, and each needs its own clear, upfront disclosure to avoid becoming a review. Resident-facing fees carry their own disclosure expectations, and in many states specific legal requirements around what can be charged and how it must be disclosed before a lease is signed . A pet fee or deposit that isn't clearly stated during the application process, discovered only once a lease is already signed, generates the same kind of "surprise fee" frustration that drives negative reviews on the owner side — just from a different party entirely. HOA and association management fees HOA and community association management fees work differently from rental management fees, since there's no rent being collected — instead, the fee is typically a flat monthly or annual charge to the association, scaled to the size and complexity of the community (unit count, amenities, common-area maintenance scope) rather than tied to any percentage of revenue . Additional charges may apply for specific services like transfer fees when a unit sells, or special project management for larger capital improvements, and these should be itemized clearly in the management contract rather than surfacing only when a specific project comes up. Why fee clarity prevents reviews, not just complaints Surprise fees are a recurring driver of both one-star reviews and Better Business Bureau complaints against property management companies, and the pattern is consistent: it's rarely the amount of a fee itself that triggers the complaint, it's the surprise. An owner who was told upfront that maintenance carries a markup rarely complains about it later; an owner who discovers it for the first time on an invoice often does, and often says so publicly rather than calling the office first. A fictional example: Crestline Property Management lost a long-term owner client who posted a detailed negative review after discovering a maintenance markup that wasn't clearly itemized in the original contract, even though the markup itself was within normal market range. The fee wasn't the actual problem — the lack of clear disclosure was. Crestline has since started including an itemized, plain-language fee summary alongside every new management contract, specifically to prevent that kind of surprise. The same logic applies on the resident side. A move-out deposit deduction or an unexpected charge that wasn't explained clearly in the lease is one of the most common drivers of negative apartment reviews, and no amount of careful review-reply wording afterward fixes the underlying frustration as well as clear upfront communication would have. Our guide on how to respond to apartment reviews covers how to handle a deposit dispute review once it's already been posted, but preventing the surprise in the first place is the better investment. Setting fees without underpricing the business New or growing management companies sometimes underprice their services to win contracts, which creates a different kind of reputation risk down the line: a fee structure that can't sustain the real cost of maintenance coordination, after-hours availability and accounting work tends to produce exactly the kind of service shortfalls — slow responses, deferred maintenance — that drive negative reviews. Pricing fees to reflect the actual cost of doing the work well, and explaining that value clearly to owners rather than competing purely on being the cheapest option, tends to produce both a more sustainable business and a stronger review record over time. Our guide on how to raise prices without losing customers covers the general mechanics of communicating a price change clearly, which applies directly to adjusting management fees for existing clients. What's a typical property management fee percentage? This varies meaningfully by market, property type and portfolio size, and quoting a single industry-wide number risks being inaccurate for any specific situation . Getting quotes from a few local management companies for a comparable property type is a more reliable way to understand the current local range than any general figure. Is a flat fee or a percentage-of-rent fee better for an owner? It depends on the portfolio. A percentage-of-rent fee aligns the manager's incentive with keeping the unit rented at a strong rate, which can matter more for a single valuable property. A flat fee is simpler to budget and can work out better for a higher-rent property where a percentage would otherwise be disproportionately large relative to the actual work involved. Should a management contract disclose every possible fee upfront? Yes. Itemizing every fee type — management, leasing, renewal, maintenance markup, and any HOA-specific charges — in plain language before a contract is signed is the single most effective way to prevent the surprise-fee disputes that turn into negative reviews and complaints later. A contract that bundles everything into a vague "management fee" without breaking out what's included tends to generate more disputes down the line, even when the total cost ends up being reasonable. Can an owner negotiate property management fees? Often, yes, especially for a larger portfolio where the per-unit cost of management work is lower relative to the total fee volume. That said, a fee that's negotiated down too aggressively can push a management company toward cutting corners on maintenance responsiveness or communication to stay profitable, which tends to show up eventually as the kind of service shortfall that drives complaints. A clear conversation about what's included at a given fee level is more useful than negotiating the number alone. Do property management fees include marketing costs for vacant units? This varies by contract. Some companies include basic listing and marketing within the leasing fee; others charge marketing costs — professional photography, paid listing placements — separately. Confirming exactly what's bundled into the leasing fee versus billed as an add-on before signing avoids one of the more common sources of owner confusion once the first vacancy actually comes up, well after the relationship has already started. Why do fee structures vary so much between property management companies? Local market rent levels, the mix of services a company offers, portfolio type and regional competition all push fee structures in different directions, which is why a national average figure is rarely useful for a specific decision. Comparing a handful of local companies managing similar property types, and asking each one to explain exactly what's included at their quoted rate, is a more reliable benchmark than any industry-wide statistic that may not reflect local conditions. Every review from Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
Resident Retention Strategies That Cut Turnover Costs
Resident retention strategies are the operational habits — fast maintenance turnaround, clear communication, well-kept amenities and timely renewal outreach — that keep residents signing another lease instead of shopping the market when theirs ends. Retention is cheaper than lease-up: a vacant unit costs turnover labor, marketing spend and weeks of lost rent that a renewed lease never does. Most of what drives a renewal decision happens months before the lease is actually up for renewal, in the accumulated small experiences of living at a community — how fast a work order got closed, how clearly the office communicated, whether the pool was usable all summer. Resident feedback that predicts renewals is sitting in reviews, work order notes and renewal-time conversations well before a resident formally decides to leave; the challenge is building a habit of actually looking at it. The mechanics of retention aren't unique to multifamily housing — fast response, clear communication and consistent follow-through drive renewal the same way they drive repeat business in almost any service industry. Our broader guide on customer retention strategies for small business covers those general principles; this guide focuses on how they play out specifically around leases, work orders and renewal timing. Maintenance responsiveness is the single biggest lever Across the complaints that show up in reviews and resident surveys, a slow or unresolved maintenance request is consistently the most common driver of dissatisfaction, and it's also one of the most controllable. A resident who submits a work order and hears nothing for days starts to generalize that silence into a broader judgment about whether the community is well managed, even if the eventual repair is handled fine. Closing the loop — a quick acknowledgment when a ticket is submitted, a heads-up if a part is delayed, a confirmation once it's done — costs almost nothing and changes how the whole interaction gets remembered. A fictional example: Thornbury Apartments tracked its average work order resolution time for two quarters and found that residents with a resolution time under 48 hours renewed at a noticeably higher rate than residents who waited longer than five days, even when the repairs themselves were comparable in complexity. The lesson wasn't that every repair needs to happen in two days — some genuinely take longer — but that communicating realistic timelines closed most of the gap even where speed itself couldn't. Tracking resolution time alone isn't enough if it's measured only at the ticket level — a community that closes most tickets quickly but has one recurring category (a specific appliance brand, a persistent pest issue in one building) that drags on repeatedly will still lose residents in that pocket even while the portfolio-wide average looks fine. Breaking resolution time down by issue type and by building, not just reporting one blended number, surfaces the pattern that a single average hides. Amenities and the day-to-day experience Maintenance and communication get most of the attention in retention discussions, but the condition of shared amenities — a pool that's closed more often than it's open during the summer it matters most, a fitness room with broken equipment that never gets fixed, a package room that's chronically backed up — accumulates into the same kind of quiet dissatisfaction a slow work order does, just spread across more residents at once. These issues are easy to deprioritize because no single resident's complaint about them feels urgent, but they show up repeatedly across a community's reviews when they're neglected, which is usually the first place they become visible to a regional manager who isn't onsite daily. Onboarding sets the tone for the whole lease term The first few weeks after move-in disproportionately shape how a resident feels about a community for the rest of the lease, since early friction — a slow response to an initial setup issue, confusion about how to submit a maintenance request, an amenity that wasn't explained — colors every later interaction through that first impression. A clear move-in checklist, a direct point of contact for the first thirty days, and a quick check-in call or message once a resident has settled in catch small issues before they calcify into a generalized sense that the office is hard to reach. Communities that treat onboarding as a one-time welcome packet rather than an ongoing first-month relationship tend to see more early-lease complaints land in public reviews, simply because residents haven't yet learned that reaching the office directly actually works. Communication and the renewal conversation Residents who feel like they can reach the office and get a straight answer renew at higher rates than residents who feel like they're chasing down information. This shows up in small things — a returned call, a clear answer about a policy, a heads-up before a planned maintenance shutoff — more than in any single grand gesture. Communication quality is also one of the easiest things to measure through reviews and renewal-time check-ins, because residents who feel unheard tend to say so directly when asked. Timing the renewal conversation itself matters. Reaching out 60 to 90 days before a lease ends, with a clear and simple renewal offer, gives a resident room to decide without the pressure of a shrinking window pushing them toward "just moving" as the easier option. A renewal outreach that arrives two weeks before the lease ends reads as disorganized and gives a resident less reason to extend the benefit of the doubt on anything that's gone wrong during the year. The renewal offer itself is worth treating as a conversation rather than a form letter, especially for a resident who's had a rough year. A short call or in-person check-in, where the office genuinely asks whether anything should change for the next lease term, tends to surface small fixable issues — a parking assignment that's never worked well, a maintenance request that technically closed but didn't fully resolve the underlying problem — before they turn into a decision not to renew. Residents who feel like the renewal conversation is just a rent-increase notice tend to shop the market out of principle, even when the actual increase is reasonable. Using resident feedback as an early-warning system Reviews and feedback aren't just a marketing asset — read consistently, they're an early signal of which residents are heading toward a "no" on renewal before they've said so out loud. A pattern of complaints from the same unit or building about the same unresolved issue is worth flagging to a regional manager well before renewal season, rather than discovering it only when that resident declines to sign again. This only works if feedback is collected consistently and from everyone, not just residents who happen to be upset enough to write something unprompted. Asking every resident the same way — after move-in, after a closed work order, and again at renewal time — surfaces the quiet dissatisfaction that would otherwise go unspoken until it's a lost renewal. Our guide on how to get more apartment reviews covers the timing and request language that works without filtering anyone out, which matters here as much as it does for public review ratings. For the reply side of that same feedback loop, see how to respond to apartment reviews. Consolidating that feedback across a portfolio, rather than leaving it scattered across separate maintenance software, a shared inbox and whatever platform a resident happened to post on, is what makes the early-warning pattern visible in the first place. A single review inbox across every community lets a regional manager see a cluster of similar complaints forming across properties, instead of noticing each one individually and only after it's already become a trend. Transparent fees support retention too Surprise charges at renewal — a fee increase that wasn't clearly communicated in advance, or a maintenance-related charge a resident didn't expect — are a reliable source of both non-renewals and negative reviews. Our guide on property management fees covers how clear, upfront fee communication prevents that kind of dispute from becoming the reason a resident leaves. How much does resident turnover actually cost? Turnover costs vary by market and unit type, but they generally include vacancy loss during turnover and re-leasing, cleaning and make-ready costs, and marketing or leasing commission spend to fill the unit again . That's consistently higher than the cost of the maintenance and communication improvements that tend to prevent a resident from leaving in the first place. When should renewal outreach start? Most communities see better results starting the renewal conversation 60 to 90 days before lease end, giving residents time to weigh the decision without feeling rushed, and giving the leasing team enough runway to plan for units that won't renew. Can retention efforts be targeted only at residents likely to leave? Retention outreach — like a renewal reminder or a maintenance check-in — can reasonably focus on residents whose lease is coming up. Review and feedback requests are different: those need to go to every resident the same way, regardless of how satisfied they seem, since filtering who gets asked for a review based on predicted happiness is review gating and carries its own legal risk. See why review gating is a legal risk for more on that distinction. Does offering a renewal discount actually help with retention? A modest, clearly communicated renewal incentive — the kind every resident in that renewal window is offered on the same terms — is a standard leasing practice and different from offering something in exchange for a review, which stays prohibited regardless of how the renewal pricing itself is handled. The bigger retention driver is usually what happened over the prior twelve months, not the discount offered at the end of it; a resident who had a frustrating year rarely stays just because the renewal rate is attractive, and a resident who had a good year often renews even without much of a discount at all, which is exactly why the maintenance and communication work described above matters more than the pricing lever most communities reach for first. Every review from Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
AppFolio vs Buildium vs Yardi: Property Management Software Compared
AppFolio, Buildium and Yardi are the three property management software platforms most commonly compared by property managers choosing a system to run leasing, accounting and maintenance. AppFolio and Buildium generally target small-to-mid-sized portfolios across multifamily and single-family rentals, while Yardi skews toward larger, enterprise-scale portfolios with more complex accounting needs — though all three have expanded their feature sets enough that the lines between them aren't as clean as they used to be. Choosing between them is a significant decision, since migrating leases, ledgers and maintenance history from one platform to another later is disruptive and time-consuming. Whichever platform a company lands on, pairing your PMS with review management is worth treating as a separate decision — the PMS runs operations, but it isn't built to be the system of record for reputation across Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp. What actually differs between these platforms The three platforms cover broadly the same core functions — online rent collection, maintenance ticket tracking, lease and document storage, and owner or board reporting — so the real comparison usually comes down to portfolio size and type, pricing structure, and how much depth a company needs in accounting and reporting rather than any single missing feature. A company managing 40 single-family rentals and a company managing 4,000 institutional multifamily units are rarely choosing between the same two options, even if both technically fall under "property management software." Treating the decision as a matter of portfolio fit rather than hunting for the single "best" platform tends to produce a better outcome, since what's overbuilt for a small portfolio can be exactly what a large one needs. AppFolio: built for growing multifamily and SFR portfolios AppFolio is commonly used by mid-sized property management companies managing multifamily and single-family rental portfolios, with a feature set spanning leasing, online payments, maintenance coordination and owner reporting. It's generally positioned as easier to onboard than enterprise-grade platforms, which makes it a common choice for companies scaling past a fully manual or spreadsheet-based operation . Companies evaluating AppFolio are typically past the point where spreadsheets and a basic accounting tool can keep up with lease renewals, trust accounting reconciliation and owner reporting across a growing number of doors, but not yet at a scale where the overhead of an enterprise platform makes sense. A mid-sized company managing a mix of multifamily communities and scattered single-family rentals is a common profile for this platform, since it needs to handle both property types without maintaining two separate systems. Buildium: a common starting point for smaller portfolios Buildium is frequently chosen by smaller property management companies and self-managing landlords, with core functionality covering accounting, leasing and maintenance tracking similar in category to AppFolio, though the two platforms differ in pricing structure and specific feature depth . Companies choosing between AppFolio and Buildium are usually comparing two platforms built for a similar size and type of portfolio rather than fundamentally different categories of software. Buildium is also a common fit for HOA and community association management specifically, since it generally includes association-focused features like board communication tools and assessment tracking alongside the standard leasing and maintenance functions . A company running a mixed portfolio of HOA communities and smaller rental properties often finds this dual focus more useful than a platform built primarily around multifamily leasing. Yardi: the enterprise option Yardi is generally associated with larger, institutional-scale portfolios and offers a broader and more complex suite of products beyond core property management, including modules aimed at commercial real estate and investment management . Companies managing a few hundred units rarely need the full depth Yardi offers, while a portfolio operating at institutional scale often outgrows what AppFolio or Buildium are built to handle. The tradeoff with an enterprise platform is usually implementation complexity and cost relative to need — a Yardi deployment often involves a longer setup process and more dedicated administrative overhead than a smaller company would want to take on, which is exactly why it tends to make sense only once a portfolio's accounting and reporting requirements have genuinely outgrown what AppFolio or Buildium can handle . How to actually decide between them Rather than starting from feature lists, it helps to start from three questions: how many units and what mix of property types does the portfolio manage today and plan to manage in two years, how complex does owner or board reporting need to be, and how much internal administrative capacity exists to manage the software itself. A company answering "under 500 units, straightforward reporting, limited administrative staff" usually lands on AppFolio or Buildium. A company answering "thousands of units, complex institutional reporting, a dedicated systems team" usually lands on Yardi. Getting a live demo and a direct quote from at least two platforms based on actual current portfolio size, rather than relying on marketing pages alone, is the only reliable way to compare current pricing and feature depth . Bringing a short list of real, specific workflows to each demo — how a particular maintenance escalation gets handled, how an owner statement actually looks once generated, how a mid-cycle lease change gets processed — tends to surface more useful differences than a generic feature walkthrough built to showcase a platform's strengths rather than its actual rough edges. Integrations and third-party tools All three platforms support some degree of third-party integration — accounting exports, tenant screening services, payment processors — though the specific partner ecosystem and depth of integration varies by platform and changes over time . Review and reputation management is a good example of a workflow that typically sits outside any PMS's native feature set regardless of which platform is chosen, which is why it's worth evaluating as its own system rather than assuming a PMS migration will also solve reputation tracking. At a glance PlatformTypical portfolio sizeTypical property typesGeneral positioning AppFolioGrowing small-to-mid portfoliosMultifamily, single-family rentalsEasier onboarding than enterprise platforms, scales with a growing company BuildiumSmaller portfolios, self-managing landlordsMultifamily, single-family rentals, HOA/community associationsCommon starting point, includes association-focused features YardiLarge and institutional-scale portfoliosMultifamily, commercial, investment managementEnterprise depth, more complex accounting and reporting modules Treat this table as a general orientation rather than a specification sheet . All three vendors adjust pricing tiers, bundle different modules together, and shift target-market messaging periodically, so a direct quote based on actual portfolio size is the only reliable source once a company has narrowed its options to one or two platforms. What none of these platforms do well: reputation across the public web All three platforms are built to run internal operations — leases, ledgers, maintenance tickets — not to monitor or respond to what residents and owners are publicly saying on Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp. A management company running any of these three still needs a separate way to see every review landing across every platform and every property in one place, and to make sure replies follow a consistent, Fair Housing-safe structure regardless of which onsite manager is handling it that week . This is where a dedicated review management tool complements rather than competes with a PMS choice — it sits on top of whichever system runs daily operations, pulling reviews into one inbox filterable by property and platform. Our guide on property management reputation management covers the full picture of what that inbox needs to do, from monitoring to Fair Housing-safe reply drafts to consistent review requests. Choosing a PMS as part of a broader systems decision A new or growing company evaluating these three platforms is really making a decision about which operational workflows to standardize around, not just which software looks the most polished in a demo. Our guide on how to start a property management company covers how this choice fits into the broader systems-building work — accounting, leasing, maintenance and reputation — that needs to be in place before taking on a first managed property. What to actually check before signing a contract Beyond the headline feature comparison, a few practical questions tend to matter more once a platform is actually in use day to day: how easy is it to pull a clean owner or board report without manual reformatting, how does the platform handle a portfolio that mixes property types (say, multifamily communities alongside a handful of single-family rentals), and what does the onboarding and data-migration process actually look like in terms of staff time required . Asking for a reference call with an existing customer managing a similar portfolio size and type is usually more useful than anything in a sales demo, since a vendor's own demo environment is built to look clean regardless of the platform's real-world rough edges. Contract terms are worth reading carefully too — length of commitment, whether pricing is locked for a defined period or subject to change at renewal, and what happens to historical data if the company later switches platforms. A company that's just signed a twelve-month management contract with a new owner doesn't want to discover mid-year that its own software contract renews automatically at a higher tier. Accounting and reporting depth The biggest functional gap between these three tends to show up in accounting and reporting rather than in day-to-day leasing or maintenance workflows. A small portfolio generally needs straightforward trust accounting, owner statements and basic P&L reporting, which all three platforms handle at some level. A large, institutional portfolio typically needs consolidated reporting across many entities, more granular general ledger structures, and integration with broader financial systems — the kind of depth that's usually where Yardi's additional complexity starts to pay for itself, and where AppFolio or Buildium can start to feel limiting . Which is cheaper: AppFolio or Buildium? Pricing on both platforms depends on portfolio size, unit count and which modules are included, and changes periodically enough that a specific comparison would go stale quickly . Getting a current quote directly from both based on actual portfolio size is more reliable than any general comparison. Can a management company switch from one of these platforms to another? Yes, though migrating active leases, financial history and maintenance records is a substantial project regardless of which two platforms are involved, and it's worth planning around a natural break point like a fiscal year-end rather than mid-cycle . Does switching PMS platforms affect review and reputation management? Not directly — reviews live on Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp regardless of which PMS runs daily operations, so a review management process built independently of the PMS choice continues working through a software migration without disruption. Is Yardi worth it for a smaller portfolio just starting to scale? Usually not. The additional implementation complexity and administrative overhead tend to outweigh the benefit until a portfolio's reporting and accounting needs genuinely require that depth, which is typically well past the point where AppFolio or Buildium stop being adequate. Choosing an enterprise platform too early mostly adds cost and setup time without a corresponding operational benefit . Does the choice of PMS affect how a company manages HOA clients specifically? It can — Buildium's association-focused features give it an edge for companies managing HOA and community association clients alongside rental portfolios, while AppFolio and Yardi are generally built with more of a straightforward landlord-tenant leasing model in mind . A company planning to grow its HOA business specifically should weigh this more heavily than general multifamily feature comparisons, since a platform that handles board communication and assessment tracking well can save significant manual work compared to one built primarily around a straightforward landlord-tenant model. Every review from Google, ApartmentRatings, Apartments.com and Yelp in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
MSP Reviews: Where Clients Actually Leave Them and How to Get More
MSP reviews are the Google, G2 and Clutch reviews that a managed service provider collects from the businesses it supports, and they matter because most IT buyers can't easily get a reference call before signing — they read reviews instead. A thin, stale review profile reads as a smaller, less established shop than you actually are, even when your ticket resolution and uptime numbers are strong. Most MSPs could be collecting far more reviews after onboarding and closed tickets than they currently do. The relationship with an MSP client is long and mostly quiet — nobody emails to say the backups ran fine again last night — so unless you build asking into a routine, months pass between reviews. That's the core problem: it's not that MSP clients are reluctant to leave reviews, it's that almost nobody asks them at a moment when they'd actually want to. Why MSP review profiles stay thin A managed services contract runs for years, not weeks, and most of that time is uneventful by design — the whole point of good IT support is that nothing breaks. That makes it easy to go a full year without a natural moment to ask for a review, unlike an agency that wraps a project every few months and has a built-in reason to check in. Add in that IT decision-makers are busy, that reviewing a vendor isn't on anyone's to-do list unless someone puts it there, and that the person who'd write the most informed review — an office manager or IT point of contact who deals with tickets weekly — usually isn't the one who signed the contract and gets asked for feedback. The result is MSPs doing solid work for years with five or six reviews total across every platform, while a newer competitor who simply asks consistently ends up looking more established. This matters more for MSPs than for most B2B categories because a managed IT contract is a long commitment with real switching costs — a buyer evaluating vendors is trying to avoid a multi-year mistake, not just a bad single purchase. Lacking a reference call, they default to reading whatever reviews exist, and a profile with three reviews from two years ago reads as either a very small shop or one that doesn't have happy clients willing to say so. Neither is the impression most MSPs actually want to give. G2 reviews for MSP: claiming and building out your category G2 runs dedicated categories for managed service providers and broader IT services, and buyers comparing vendors in those categories use review count and recency as a filter before they'll even take a call. Claim your G2 profile if you haven't, fill in the services and verticals you actually support — backup and disaster recovery, cybersecurity, cloud migration, help desk — and route review requests there from clients who've been with you long enough to speak to the full relationship, not just one ticket. A client who's only had one support interaction can still leave a Google review about that interaction, but a G2 review reads better when it reflects a few months or years of working together, since G2's audience is comparing vendors for a long-term engagement. Pay attention to which G2 category your profile actually lands in. An MSP that only sells help-desk support belongs in a different category than one that also runs managed security or cloud infrastructure, and landing in the wrong one means you're being compared against vendors who don't do what you do. For the mechanics of getting a client through G2's review flow, including how G2's own verification works, see our guide on how to get G2 reviews. Google reviews for IT company: local search still decides shortlists A large share of MSP buyers are small and midsize local businesses that search "managed IT services near me" or "IT support in [city]" rather than browsing B2B directories, so your Google Business Profile carries weight G2 and Clutch can't replace. Google reviews also show up directly in the map pack and local search results a prospect sees before they ever click through to your site, which makes them the review most likely to be seen by someone who hasn't heard of you yet. If you visit client sites rather than having clients come to you, set your profile up as a service-area business and hide your office address rather than listing a home address or a shared office you don't actually see walk-in traffic at — a mismatched address is one of the more common reasons local profiles get suspended. Keep the review flow steady rather than front-loaded at launch: a profile with twelve reviews, all from two years ago, raises more questions with a careful buyer than a profile with half as many spread evenly over recent months. We cover the setup details, including category selection, in Google Business Profile for agencies and MSPs. Clutch reviews for MSPs Clutch isn't just for marketing agencies and dev shops — it runs IT services categories too, and some enterprise buyers check it alongside G2 when they're comparing managed service providers for a larger account, especially for projects that look more like a one-time infrastructure build than an ongoing support contract. The bar is higher than a star rating: Clutch verifies each review with a short interview or detailed form, which is exactly why a handful of Clutch reviews signals more credibility than the same number on a lighter-touch platform. That verification step is also why Clutch tends to matter less for the smallest local MSP clients, who are far less likely to sit through a fifteen-minute interview than a larger IT director evaluating a bigger contract. Decide which platform fits which client before you ask, rather than defaulting to the same one for everyone. A small local business you support on a flat monthly retainer is a better fit for a quick Google review; a mid-market client with a dedicated IT director managing a multi-site rollout is a better fit for the fuller Clutch or G2 review, since they have more to say and are used to that kind of format from evaluating other vendors. If you're building out a Clutch presence from scratch, our guide on how to get Clutch reviews walks through the verification step and timing in more depth. Triggering review requests from your PSA The two best moments to ask an MSP client for a review are also the easiest to miss if you're relying on memory: right after onboarding wraps and the client has their systems running smoothly for the first time, and right after a major escalation ticket closes well, when the relief of a fixed problem is still fresh. Both of those moments live inside your PSA — ConnectWise, Autotask or HaloPSA, among others . Wiring a review request to fire automatically when a ticket status changes to "resolved" or an onboarding project closes removes the dependence on someone remembering to ask. Until that connection exists, the same effect can usually be built with a webhook or a scheduled export from your PSA into whatever tool sends the request. Whichever trigger you use, ask every client who hits that moment the same way — not just the ones whose account manager is confident they'll say something glowing. Skipping clients you're nervous about is its own kind of review gating, and it leaves you with a review profile that's technically accurate but not representative of the full relationship. In practice, a workflow that holds up looks something like this: a fictional MSP, Harborline IT, closes an onboarding project in its PSA and tags it "complete." That status change triggers a review request by email the next morning, pointing the client's primary contact to the review link for whichever platform — Google for a smaller local client, G2 for a larger account that cares about B2B comparison sites. A second trigger fires whenever a ticket is marked resolved after being escalated past a certain priority level, since that's the moment a client remembers most vividly a few days later. Neither trigger depends on an account manager remembering to send an email manually, which is the part of this that usually breaks down first. Handling a negative review as an MSP A negative MSP review is usually tied to a specific outage, a missed SLA, or a billing disagreement, and the reply matters because a prospective client reading it is trying to judge how you handle things going wrong — which, for an IT vendor, is the whole job. Acknowledge the specific issue without re-litigating it in public, note what changed as a result if anything did, and invite the reviewer to continue the conversation privately rather than arguing the timeline in the review thread itself. A defensive, point-by-point rebuttal tends to read worse to a future buyer than the original complaint did, even when the rebuttal is factually correct. If the review came from a client whose contract you terminated, or from someone who was never actually a client — a disgruntled former employee of a client company, for instance — most platforms have a process to flag and verify the reviewer's relationship to your business, which is different from disputing a real client's account of a bad experience you simply see differently. Our guide on how agencies should respond to a negative review from a former client covers the reply framework in more detail, including what not to say when there's an NDA involved. How many reviews does an MSP actually need? There's no fixed number, but since most MSP profiles sit in the single digits, even five or six recent, detailed reviews across Google and G2 puts you ahead of most local competitors. A steady pace — a new review every month or two from onboarding or ticket-close moments — matters more than a one-time push to hit a round number. Should we ask every client, or just the happiest ones? Ask every client who hits a review-worthy moment, not only the ones you expect to rave. Asking selectively is a form of review gating, which Tailwind doesn't build for and which most review platforms' terms prohibit outright — it also quietly skews your rating upward in a way that eventually looks suspicious to buyers comparing you against competitors with a more natural spread. Can we offer a discount for a review? No. Offering a credit, discount or free service month in exchange for a review is an incentivized review, which the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits , and both G2 and Clutch run their own verification partly to catch it. Ask with nothing attached and let the review speak for itself. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
Best B2B Review Sites for Agencies and MSPs Compared
The best B2B review sites for agencies and IT service providers are Clutch and G2 first, Google Business Profile for anything with a local search angle, and UpCity, GoodFirms and DesignRush as secondary options worth a profile but not a lot of extra effort. Most firms get more value from being consistently active on two or three of these than spread thin across all six. Buyers evaluating a marketing agency, dev shop or MSP almost always check at least one B2B review site before the first call, and which site matters most depends heavily on what you sell and who you sell it to. A development shop pitching enterprise clients and a local MSP pitching small businesses are reading from completely different shortlists, even though both categories live under the umbrella of "B2B services." Getting all your B2B review sites in one place instead of checking each one separately is less about convenience and more about actually noticing when a new review — good or bad — needs a reply within a reasonable window, rather than finding out three weeks later that a client left something on a platform nobody on your team checks regularly. The practical challenge with B2B review sites isn't finding them — most agencies already have at least one profile somewhere — it's that each one has a different review flow, a different verification standard, and in some cases a different audience of buyers entirely. Treating them as interchangeable leads to wasted effort: pushing clients toward a site your buyers don't actually check, or ignoring the one that would have mattered most to the deal you're trying to close. Clutch: the default for agencies and dev shops Clutch is usually the first stop for buyers comparing marketing agencies, web design studios and development shops, and it's built around a verification process most lighter review sites don't bother with — a phone interview or a detailed written form where the client confirms project scope, budget range and what was delivered. That makes Clutch reviews slower to collect than a one-click star rating, but it's also why they carry real weight: a review that required a client to get on a call reads as much harder to fake than a quick rating. Clutch also runs Leaders Matrix rankings by category and region that factor in review volume and recency among other signals , so a steady review habit compounds into visibility beyond the review count itself — appearing on a Leaders list puts you in front of buyers browsing the category even before they search your name directly. Because the verification bar is higher, Clutch review counts stay lower industrywide than on self-serve platforms, which means even a small, steady stream of reviews is enough to stand out. An agency with eight recent, detailed Clutch reviews often reads as more credible than a competitor with eighty one-line reviews on a platform with no verification step at all, because the buyer reading them understands implicitly which kind of review was harder to fake. See our dedicated guide on how to get Clutch reviews for the specifics of timing and verification. G2: the default for MSPs, IT services, and software partners G2 runs categories built specifically for managed service providers, IT services firms and implementation or reseller partners of larger software platforms, which makes it the better fit than Clutch for firms selling ongoing technical services rather than project-based creative work. G2's review flow leans more self-serve than Clutch's — no verification interview — but G2 does run its own checks to screen out reviews that look incentivized or fabricated. If your firm straddles both categories, agency and IT services, a profile on both Clutch and G2 covers more of the buyer journey than either alone. G2 buyers also tend to compare vendors through side-by-side grids and "alternatives to" pages the platform generates automatically from review data, so a thin review count doesn't just lower your score — it can mean you don't show up in that comparison view at all when a buyer is actively narrowing a shortlist. Our guide on how to get G2 reviews covers the request flow in more detail, including what G2's own incentive guidelines allow and don't. Google Business Profile: the one that shows up before anyone clicks a review site Google reviews surface directly in search results and the map pack, which means they're often the first signal a prospect sees — before they ever navigate to Clutch or your own site. This matters more for MSPs and studios serving a specific metro area than for agencies that work fully remote with national clients, but even a remote-first agency benefits from a Google profile with a handful of recent, substantive reviews, since prospects often search your business name directly to sanity-check you before a call. We go deeper on category selection and service-area setup in Google Business Profile for agencies and MSPs. Google reviews also feed a second audience most agencies don't think about: AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT or a similar tool to recommend an agency or MSP in a given city or niche, the answer tends to lean on the same kind of signal a human researcher would — reviews, case studies, and how a business is described across the web, including Google Business Profile data. A thin or stale Google profile is one more reason an AI assistant might skip over you in favor of a competitor with a more active one. See how to get recommended by ChatGPT for more on that angle. UpCity, GoodFirms and DesignRush: useful, but secondary UpCity, GoodFirms and DesignRush are all B2B directories with their own review and ranking systems, and each is worth claiming a free profile on even if you don't actively push clients toward them — a claimed, filled-out profile with a few reviews is strictly better than an unclaimed one with none, since buyers who stumble onto these sites independently will judge you by whatever's there. Their verification and ranking methodologies vary and are worth checking directly on each platform rather than assumed to work like Clutch's, since some lean more heavily on paid placement than organic review volume. Treat these as a backstop rather than a primary channel: claim the profile, keep it current, and don't build your review-request workflow around them the way you would Clutch or G2. That said, don't dismiss them entirely — some buyers in specific niches (local SEO, web design for small business) do shop UpCity or DesignRush specifically, and a stale or unclaimed profile there is a small but avoidable gap if a prospect happens to land on it. For a closer side-by-side of how each one actually works, see our comparison of Clutch, UpCity, DesignRush and GoodFirms. Trustpilot: more relevant if you serve small or consumer-facing businesses Trustpilot matters less for agencies selling to other B2B marketers under NDA, but it becomes relevant if a meaningful share of your clients are small, consumer-facing businesses — a local retailer or restaurant group, for instance — who are more likely to recognize and trust Trustpilot than a B2B-specific site like Clutch. If that's a sliver of your client base rather than the majority, it's reasonable to skip a dedicated Trustpilot push and focus effort on the sites your actual buyers check. Partner directories: Google Partners, HubSpot, Shopify, Microsoft and AWS If your agency holds a partner status with a platform you build on — Google Partners, the HubSpot Solutions Directory, Shopify Partners, or a Microsoft or AWS partner finder — those directories often carry their own client review or rating component, separate from Clutch or G2. These directories tend to reach buyers who are already committed to a specific platform and are shopping for an implementation partner, which is a narrower but often higher-intent audience than a general B2B review site — someone browsing the HubSpot Solutions Directory has already decided to use HubSpot and is specifically looking for help with it, which is a very different, further-along buyer than someone typing "marketing agency" into Google. Worth maintaining if you hold the partner status already; not worth pursuing the status solely to get access to the directory, since the requirements for earning partner tiers usually involve certifications and revenue thresholds that take time regardless of review strategy. If you hold multiple partner statuses, it's worth a quick check of each directory's current review requirements rather than assuming they're all the same — some pull reviews automatically from a connected CRM or require a separate client survey, and the mechanics change often enough that last year's process may not match what's live today. Choosing which sites to actually focus on Rather than trying to be active everywhere, map your buyer's actual research habit: an enterprise software implementation partner should prioritize G2 and whatever partner directory applies, a local MSP should prioritize Google and G2, and a marketing agency or dev shop pitching mid-market and enterprise clients should prioritize Clutch first. Claim profiles everywhere relevant so you're not caught with an empty page if a prospect checks, but build your actual review-request workflow — the one your team runs every week — around the one or two sites your buyers check most. A reasonable way to decide: pull your last ten closed-won deals and ask each account manager which site, if any, the prospect mentioned or referenced during the sales process. If nobody can remember a client ever mentioning UpCity or DesignRush, that's a signal those sites don't need active management — a claimed profile is enough. If Clutch or G2 comes up repeatedly, that's where the weekly review-request habit belongs. This kind of lightweight audit beats guessing, and it's worth repeating once a year as your client base and niche shift. It's also worth tracking replies, not just requests. A review that sits unanswered for two months — good or bad — signals the same thing to a buyer regardless of the star rating: nobody's minding the profile. Centralizing notifications from every site into one inbox, rather than logging into five separate dashboards on a rotation nobody consistently keeps up with, is usually what actually fixes the reply-time problem, more than any change to how reviews get requested in the first place. Do we need a profile on every B2B review site? No. Claim a free profile on the sites relevant to your category so an empty, unclaimed page doesn't undercut you if a prospect looks, but build your ongoing review-request habit around the one or two sites — usually Clutch or G2, plus Google if there's a local angle — that your actual buyers check most often. Which review site matters most for a new agency with few reviews? Start with whichever site your specific buyers check — Clutch for most marketing and dev work, G2 for IT and software-adjacent services — and focus every early review there rather than splitting a handful of reviews across five platforms, where none of them look substantial on its own. Can we offer an incentive to get reviews on these sites faster? No. Offering a discount, extra deliverable or account credit in exchange for a review is an incentivized review, which the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits , and most of these platforms run their own verification specifically to catch it. Ask every client the same way and let volume build through consistency instead. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How Agencies Should Respond to Negative Reviews
To respond to a negative review as an agency, acknowledge the client's specific concern without re-litigating contract details in public, state that you take it seriously, and invite them to continue the conversation privately — never share invoice amounts, scope documents or anything that could identify confidential project details, even if the client already disclosed some of it themselves. A negative review from a former client reads differently than one from a current customer complaining about a single bad experience, because the context is usually a terminated contract, a billing dispute, or a relationship that soured over months rather than one bad interaction. Agencies that handle this well tend to use AI reply drafts that keep client details private as a starting point rather than writing from scratch under pressure, since the instinct to explain your side in detail is almost always the wrong one in the moment. Why former-client reviews are different A current client leaving a critical review usually still wants the relationship to work — they're flagging a problem, not ending one. A former client who's already left is often writing from a place of genuine frustration, sometimes months after the relationship ended, and the review may be the first time you're hearing their full perspective on what went wrong. That combination — distance from the relationship plus no ongoing incentive to keep things civil — is why these reviews tend to run longer, more detailed, and more pointed than a typical star review. It also means there's often an NDA or a signed scope-of-work document in the background that constrains what you can say publicly even if the client doesn't observe the same restraint. That asymmetry is uncomfortable, but it doesn't change the right move: your reply needs to hold up under the same confidentiality obligations regardless of what the review itself discloses. There's also a timing problem specific to agencies: a former client's review often lands on Clutch or G2 weeks or months after the relationship ended, sometimes right when you've moved on and stopped checking that profile as closely. A fictional example — a studio called Fernwood Creative wraps a six-month rebrand project, the client goes quiet, and four months later a two-star Clutch review appears describing frustration with the final handoff. Nobody at Fernwood notices for three weeks, because nobody's checking that profile weekly once the project closes. The lesson isn't to check more profiles manually — it's to get a notification the moment it posts, so the reply window doesn't quietly turn into a month. The reply framework: acknowledge, don't litigate, invite a private conversation A reply that works has three parts and rarely needs more. First, acknowledge the specific thing they raised — not a generic "we're sorry you feel that way," but something that shows you read the review. Second, state briefly that you take the feedback seriously, without agreeing or disagreeing with their account of events. Third, invite them to continue the conversation privately, by phone or email, so there's a clear next step that doesn't depend on a public back-and-forth. Keep the whole thing short — three or four sentences outperforms a long rebuttal almost every time, because length reads as defensiveness to anyone else reading it. What to leave out matters as much as what to include: don't quote invoice numbers, don't describe the scope-change history, don't name individual employees on either side, and don't suggest the client is wrong about what happened even if you believe they are. A buyer reading this review later is evaluating how you handle conflict, not refereeing who was actually at fault. A reasonable template, adapted per situation: "Thanks for sharing this — we take feedback like this seriously and would like to understand more about what happened. Please reach out to [contact] directly so we can talk it through." That's it. It doesn't defend the work, it doesn't dispute the client's account, and it doesn't promise a specific outcome — it just signals that you're a business that responds like an adult when something goes wrong, which is often the actual thing a future buyer is checking for. Billing disputes and scope creep: the two most common triggers Most former-client negative reviews trace back to one of two disputes: a disagreement over a final invoice, or a sense that the project's scope ballooned without a clear conversation about added cost. For a billing dispute, a reply like "we understand invoicing didn't match your expectations here, and we'd welcome the chance to go through it together" acknowledges the issue without conceding a specific dollar amount in public. For scope disagreements, acknowledging that the project grew beyond the original plan — without assigning blame for why — tends to land better than defending every change order as justified. A third, less common trigger is a disagreement about creative direction or results that never had a clear, written definition of success up front — the client expected a redesign to move a specific metric, it didn't move as much as hoped, and the review reflects disappointment rather than a factual dispute about deliverables. These are often the hardest to reply to well, because there's no invoice or scope document to point to, just two different impressions of the same project. The same framework still applies: acknowledge the disappointment as real without conceding that the work itself was deficient, and move the detailed conversation private. When a review comes from someone who was never a client Occasionally a negative review comes from a competitor, a rejected job applicant, or someone with no actual relationship to a completed project. This is different from a real former client's bad experience, and it's worth checking before you assume it. Clutch, G2 and Google all have a process to flag a review for verification if you believe the reviewer was never actually a client, though the bar for getting a review removed is generally high and the process can take time. Don't use this as a first resort for a real client's account you simply disagree with — platforms are usually able to tell the difference, and a failed dispute against a legitimate review tends to draw more attention to it. What not to say: legal threats and defamation claims Threatening legal action in a public reply, even if you genuinely believe a review is defamatory, almost always makes the situation look worse to anyone reading it later — it reads as an attempt to intimidate rather than resolve, and it can draw more attention to the original review than it would have gotten otherwise. If a review crosses into territory you believe is actually defamatory — false statements of fact rather than a negative opinion — that's a conversation for a lawyer to have privately with the platform or the reviewer, not something to announce in a public reply. Using AI reply drafts without losing the human judgment call A drafting tool that generates a reply in the right tone — acknowledging, non-defensive, free of specific client details — saves time on the cases that come up often: a late-delivery complaint, a billing disagreement, a general dissatisfaction review with no specific incident named. Our negative review response generator is built around exactly that framework, producing a starting draft that skips the specifics it was never given rather than inventing details to fill the gap. It's still worth a human read before posting, especially for reviews that reference specific disputed facts, since no draft tool knows the full context of what's safe to say about a particular client relationship. For the general mechanics of tone and timing on replies, see our guide on how to respond to negative reviews, and for getting ahead of the problem with a steadier flow of reviews in the first place, see how to get Clutch reviews. Should we respond to every negative review, even old ones? Yes, within reason. A recent negative review should get a reply within a few days. An old one that's sat unanswered for months is still worth a brief, calm reply rather than leaving it dangling — a late reply reads better to a future buyer than no reply at all, even if it's not as timely as you'd like. Can we delete a review if the client agrees to take it down? Most platforms let a reviewer remove or edit their own review voluntarily, but offering anything — a refund, a discount, a settlement — specifically in exchange for removing a review is the same incentivized-review problem in reverse, and it can violate both the platform's terms and FTC guidance on review manipulation . If a dispute resolves on its own and the client chooses to update their review, that's fine; engineering it with an offer attached is not. What if the review reveals something about the client's business that should stay private? If the client disclosed their own confidential details in the review, you're still bound by whatever NDA or confidentiality clause governs the relationship — their disclosure doesn't release you from it. Reply in general terms regardless of what they shared, and if the disclosure is serious enough to cause real harm, that's a conversation for legal counsel rather than something to address in the review reply itself. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Offer Reputation Management Services to Your Clients
To sell reputation management services to clients, package monitoring, review requests, reply handling and basic local SEO into a recurring monthly service, price it either as a flat retainer per client or as an add-on to existing SEO or marketing work, and run every client's account from one place so adding a tenth client doesn't mean managing a tenth login. Agencies already selling SEO, PPC or social media management are often the best positioned to add reputation management, since they already have the client relationship and the reporting cadence — the new service slots into a meeting that's already happening rather than requiring a separate sales cycle. Getting this right starts with the toolkit agencies use for client reviews, since the operational setup matters as much as how you price it. What a reputation management service actually includes A reputation management offering for clients typically covers four things: monitoring new reviews across Google, Yelp and any industry-specific site as they come in; sending review requests to the client's customers at the right moments; drafting and posting replies in each client's voice; and a monthly report showing rating trend, review volume and response time. Some agencies extend this into local SEO basics — Google Business Profile optimization, citation consistency — and increasingly into checking what AI assistants say about the client when someone asks for a recommendation in their category and city. Decide upfront which of these your team will do by hand and which you'll automate through a tool. Monitoring and request-sending are the easiest to automate; reply drafting benefits from automation as a starting draft but usually needs a human read before posting, especially for anything negative or specific to the client's business. Which platforms you cover depends entirely on the client's category. A local dental practice mostly needs Google and maybe Healthgrades-style industry sites; a B2B software client needs G2 and Capterra-style categories instead; a restaurant group needs Google and, carefully, Yelp — carefully because Yelp's own terms prohibit businesses from soliciting reviews at all, so any service you sell for a Yelp-heavy client needs to be framed as monitoring and response, not review requests, or you risk the client's profile getting a consumer alert flag. Scope the platform list per client rather than selling a one-size-fits-all package, since a generic package tends to either miss the platform that actually matters to that client's buyers or waste effort on one that doesn't. Packaging service tiers Most agencies land on two or three tiers: a basic tier covering monitoring and review requests only, a standard tier adding reply management, and a premium tier adding local SEO and AI visibility reporting. Price each tier as a flat monthly fee rather than per-review or per-reply, since clients find usage-based pricing for this kind of service harder to budget for and harder for you to forecast revenue against. What you charge the client and what the underlying tooling costs you are two separate numbers — Tailwind's own pricing runs $5 a month per tool or $50 a month for the Full plan covering every tool, with the first month free and no card required to start, which gives you a predictable cost basis to mark up from regardless of how you structure client pricing. For a broader look at how the market generally prices this kind of service, see how much does reputation management cost. Resist the temptation to price the basic tier too low just to win the deal. A reputation management service that's priced like an afterthought gets treated like one internally too — it's the first line item cut when a client trims their budget, and it rarely covers the actual time your team spends on monthly reporting and reply drafting once you account for it honestly. A fictional example: a six-person agency, Alderbrook Digital, initially bundled reputation management free with every SEO retainer as a differentiator. Within a year, roughly a third of their client base expected monthly reply drafting and reporting with no incremental revenue attached, and the service quietly became unprofitable labor rather than a differentiator. Pricing it as its own line, even a modest one, keeps the economics honest from day one. Running it operationally: one account, many clients The operational failure mode in this business isn't underpricing — it's letting the tooling overhead grow faster than the client roster. Logging into a different dashboard per client, or worse, giving each client their own paid subscription you have to manage separately, falls apart somewhere around client five or six. Running every client from a single account, with separate inboxes, reply voices and review-request settings per client, is what keeps the operational cost of adding a new client low enough that the margin on each one actually holds up. Tailwind supports running multiple client accounts from one login, and offers a tier of branding where client-facing review pages and request messages carry your client's name instead of Tailwind's. A fully white-label setup — your own name and domain throughout, with Tailwind's branding removed entirely — is available on request rather than as a standard, self-serve plan; agencies planning to build reputation management into a resold, branded offering at scale should reach out directly through the agencies page to confirm current pricing and setup for their specific client count, rather than assume the per-tool consumer pricing applies to a resold tier. Think through roles before you onboard client five, not after. Someone on your team needs read access to draft replies and run reports; someone else, maybe the account manager, needs visibility into just their own clients rather than the full roster; and whoever owns billing needs a clean way to see cost per client without digging through an invoice meant for a single consolidated account. Agencies that skip this step tend to end up with one shared login and a spreadsheet tracking which client is which — workable at three clients, painful at twenty. Client reporting that justifies the retainer A monthly report that just lists star ratings doesn't do much to justify a recurring fee next to a client who could, in theory, check their own Google rating for free. A report that shows review volume trend, response time, and specific reviews you handled on their behalf — including a negative one you defused well — makes the service visible in a way a bare rating number doesn't. If you're also running local SEO or AI visibility checks as part of the package, include those trends in the same report rather than a separate document, so the client sees one coherent story about their reputation each month instead of three disconnected metrics. Renewal conversations go easier when the report has been consistent from month one, rather than assembled retroactively right before a contract comes up for review. Clients rarely churn from a reputation management service because the rating didn't move enough in absolute terms — they churn because they can't tell what you actually did for the fee, and a thin or inconsistent report is usually the root cause of that disconnect, not the underlying work. Handling a client's negative review as the agency running their account When you're managing reviews on a client's behalf, a negative review raises an extra question: who decides how to reply, and in what voice? Set this expectation at onboarding rather than mid-crisis — agree on which replies you'll draft and post without sign-off (routine, low-stakes reviews) versus which ones need the client's approval first (anything naming a specific employee, a safety concern, or a dispute the client may want to handle personally). Clients who feel blindsided by a reply posted in their name, even a reasonable one, tend to trust the service less going forward, regardless of how well the reply itself was written. Why fake reviews and gating are off the table — for you and your clients The FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits buying, writing or soliciting reviews from people without a genuine experience, and prohibits review gating — asking only likely-positive customers for a review while suppressing or routing away negative ones . This applies directly to you as the agency running the program, not just to the client whose name is on the reviews. . If a client asks you to only request reviews from customers you're confident will leave five stars, or asks you to filter negative responses away from the public request flow, that's a liability for both of you — not a growth hack. Build every client's review-request flow to ask the same way regardless of expected outcome, and be explicit with clients about why, since some will ask for gating without realizing it's against the rules. The same applies to incentives: never offer a client's customers a discount or gift card in exchange for a review, even if the client suggests it as a way to speed things up. It's a short-term volume boost that creates long-term platform and regulatory risk for the client's business, which eventually becomes your problem too if it surfaces. Write these rules into your client contract or statement of work, not just into your internal process. A clause stating that you will request reviews from all eligible customers without filtering by expected sentiment, and that neither party will offer incentives for reviews, protects you if a client later asks for something you shouldn't do and later claims they didn't know the rules. This is also the kind of clause worth a quick pass from a lawyer familiar with FTC advertising rules before it goes into a standard contract template, rather than something to draft purely from a blog post. Starting the business: positioning and first clients If reputation management is a new line of business rather than an add-on to existing services, the fastest path to first clients is usually inside a book of business you already touch in some other capacity — web design clients, local SEO clients, or referrals from complementary vendors like a CRM consultant or a local marketing meetup. Lead with a free audit: pull a prospect's current review count, rating and response rate across Google and whatever industry site matters for their category, and show them the gap plainly rather than describing the service abstractly. A concrete number — "you've responded to 2 of your last 14 reviews" — sells the service better than a feature list. Early on, it's worth running your own agency's reviews through the same process you're selling — if you're asking clients to trust you with their reputation but your own Clutch or Google profile is thin and unanswered, that gap is an easy objection for a prospect to raise. Treat your own account as the first client on the roster, not an afterthought you'll get to later. See how to get Clutch reviews for building out your own agency's profile alongside your clients'. Once you have a handful of client case studies to point to, lead with those rather than generic claims about what reputation management can do — a specific before-and-after for a real client (name withheld or anonymized if the relationship is under NDA) is more convincing than an industry-wide statistic, especially since most of the commonly cited stats about review influence on purchasing decisions vary widely by source and year and are worth verifying before repeating to a prospect . How much should we charge clients for reputation management? Pricing varies by market and scope, but most agencies land somewhere between a modest add-on fee bundled with existing SEO or marketing retainers, and a dedicated monthly fee for reputation management as a standalone service. See how much does reputation management cost for a broader view of how the market prices this, and build in enough margin above your own tool cost to cover the time your team spends on reply drafting and monthly reporting. Can we offer a fully white-label version under our own brand? Yes — Tailwind offers a branded tier where client-facing pages carry your client's name, and a fully white-label tier with your own agency's name and domain throughout, available on request. Confirm current setup and pricing for your specific roster through the agencies page before quoting a client on a white-label offer. Do we need a separate Tailwind subscription for every client? No. Run every client from one account with separate inboxes and settings per client rather than a separate paid subscription for each — that's the setup that keeps your margin intact as the client roster grows. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
Google Business Profile Management for Agencies and MSPs
A Google Business Profile for an agency or MSP works like any other local business profile — it needs the right category, an address setup that matches how clients actually reach you, and a steady flow of reviews — but agencies and MSPs face specific wrinkles around virtual offices and whether to list an address at all, since many don't take walk-in visitors the way a storefront does. Getting this right matters because local search is still where a meaningful share of small-business buyers start when they search "marketing agency near me" or "IT support in [city]," even in categories that feel like they should be fully national and remote. Once the profile is set up correctly, the next step is building Google reviews for your agency's own profile rather than treating the profile as a static listing you set up once and forget. It's easy to treat a Google Business Profile as something you configure once during initial setup and never touch again, especially for an agency that spends most of its marketing effort on channels that feel more directly tied to new business — paid ads, outbound, referrals. But the profile keeps working in the background whether you tend to it or not, surfacing in searches for your own name and in local category searches you may not even be tracking, which makes a few hours of setup and an ongoing review habit disproportionately valuable relative to the attention most agencies give it. Setting up as a service-area business If your agency or MSP visits clients, works fully remote, or doesn't take visitors at its office, set the profile up as a service-area business (SAB) rather than a storefront listing, and hide the address so it doesn't display publicly. An SAB lets you define the cities or regions you actually serve without implying there's a physical location clients can walk into, which matters because a mismatch between what's listed and what's real — a storefront listing with no actual walk-in presence — is one of the more common reasons Google suspends local profiles. Define your service area realistically; listing fifty cities you've done one project in each for looks thin to anyone checking, and it also dilutes your local relevance in the metro area that actually matters most to your pipeline. For the general mechanics of setting up a service-area business correctly, see our broader guide on service-area businesses on Google. There's a judgment call here for agencies with a genuine office that clients do occasionally visit — a studio with a conference room where pitch meetings happen, for instance. In that case, a storefront-style listing with a visible address can make sense, as long as the location is genuinely staffed during business hours and matches what's on your website and other citations. The failure mode to avoid is a mismatch: claiming a storefront presence at an address that's really just a mailbox or a desk at a coworking space you visit twice a month, which is exactly the setup Google's guidelines are designed to catch. Virtual offices and coworking addresses: a real suspension risk Google's guidelines have historically been strict about addresses at coworking spaces, virtual offices, or mailbox services with no genuine, staffed presence — profiles set up this way get flagged and suspended often enough that it's worth treating as a real operational risk rather than a technicality. If your agency's registered address is a coworking space you don't staff full-time, the safer path is almost always the service-area setup with the address hidden, rather than listing that address as a storefront and hoping it doesn't get flagged. Suspension isn't just an inconvenience — it typically wipes out your accumulated reviews and local ranking history along with it, which is a much bigger cost than the few minutes it takes to set the profile up correctly from the start. If you're already running a profile at a coworking or virtual-office address and haven't had an issue, that's not necessarily evidence it's safe — enforcement isn't applied evenly or immediately, and a profile that's gone unnoticed for a year can still get flagged later, often after a competitor reports it or an automated review catches up. Switching to a correctly configured service-area listing now, before anything triggers a review, is lower-risk than waiting to see what happens. Choosing a category: marketing agency, web designer, or computer support Google's category list has specific options — "Marketing agency," "Website designer," "Computer support and services" among others — and picking the one closest to your actual primary service matters more than it might seem, since category affects which searches you show up for. An MSP that picks "Marketing agency" because it was the first result in the search box will show up for the wrong searches and compete against the wrong set of local businesses. Pick your primary category as precisely as possible, and use the secondary category slots for adjacent services you also offer, rather than trying to capture every service you provide in the primary slot. Revisit the category choice if your services shift — an agency that started as a web design shop and grew into full-service digital marketing should update its primary category to reflect that, rather than leaving a category selected years ago that no longer matches most of the work actually being sold. It's a small setting, but it's one of the more commonly neglected ones precisely because it's set once during initial onboarding and rarely revisited afterward. Building a review habit on your own profile Many agencies that are diligent about requesting Google reviews for their clients never apply the same discipline to their own profile, which is an easy gap for a prospect to notice if they check. Build your own review requests into the same milestones you'd use for any client — after a project closes, after a strong quarterly result, at renewal — and ask every client the same way rather than only the ones you're confident will leave five stars. For MSPs specifically, review requests tied to onboarding completion or a well-handled escalation ticket tend to convert better than a generic periodic ask; see MSP reviews for more on timing those requests against your PSA. A thin Google profile is also worth fixing before it becomes a problem in a sales conversation. Prospects who search your agency's name before a first call are, in effect, doing informal due diligence, and a profile with three reviews from two years ago reads differently than one with a dozen recent ones — even if the underlying quality of your work hasn't changed at all. Treat the gap between where your profile is and where it should be as a solvable operational problem, not a reflection of client satisfaction you need to worry about separately. If a negative review does land on your own profile, the same reply discipline applies as it would for any client's profile: acknowledge specifically, don't argue the facts in public, and invite a private conversation. See how agencies should respond to a negative review from a former client for the fuller framework, including what to avoid saying when a former client's NDA or contract terms are part of the context. Should an agency with only remote clients still set up a Google Business Profile? Yes. Even a fully remote agency benefits from a profile with a handful of recent reviews, since prospects often search your business name directly before a call to sanity-check you, and a Google listing with reviews shows up in that search even when local map-pack ranking isn't the goal. What happens if our profile gets suspended? A suspended profile typically loses its accumulated reviews and ranking history, and reinstatement can take time and isn't guaranteed. The address and category mismatches covered above are the most common preventable causes, so getting the initial setup right is worth more than trying to fix a suspension after the fact. Can we list multiple service areas if we work with clients nationally? Yes, a service-area business listing supports multiple cities or regions, but keep the list realistic and tied to where you actually have client relationships or do active outreach, rather than listing every major metro area to maximize theoretical reach. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Get Your Agency Recommended by ChatGPT
Agency AI search visibility means showing up when someone asks ChatGPT or a similar assistant to recommend an agency, MSP or IT services firm in their city or niche. These tools lean on the same signals a careful human researcher would — reviews, case studies, and how your business is described across the web — so improving your visibility mostly means strengthening those underlying signals rather than finding a trick specific to AI. More B2B buyers are starting their vendor search with an AI assistant instead of a search engine, asking something like "recommend a marketing agency for a mid-size SaaS company" or "which MSP handles HIPAA compliance well," and getting a shortlist back without ever opening Clutch or Google directly. Checking what ChatGPT currently says about your agency is the first step, since you can't fix a gap you haven't looked at. For a mid-size agency competing against a handful of regional firms with similar service offerings and similar pricing, getting named first — or named at all — in that kind of AI-generated shortlist can matter as much as ranking well in traditional search, since a prospect who asked an assistant for a recommendation is often skipping the comparison-shopping step entirely and going straight to whichever firm got mentioned. That makes this a channel worth checking even for agencies that have historically relied entirely on referrals and outbound, since it's a new way prospects are finding vendors without the agency doing anything to earn or lose that visibility deliberately. Why AI assistants lean on review sites and case studies AI assistants generally don't have a live, verified directory of every agency and MSP to query — what they have is a broad sense, built from training data and in some cases live web lookups, of what's said about a business across the sites that write about it. Clutch and G2 profiles, case studies, press mentions and a well-maintained Google Business Profile all feed that picture, which is why a firm with a thin, outdated web presence tends to get skipped over in favor of one that's well documented, even if the actual work quality is comparable. A recommendation engine can't vouch for quality it has no record of. This also means recency matters in a way it might not for a human researcher who's willing to dig. If the most recent thing written about your agency online is three years old, an assistant pulling from more current sources may simply not surface you for a fresh query, even if your actual client work has only improved since then. It's also worth understanding that different assistants pull from different sources and update on different schedules, so what one tool says about your agency today and what another says can genuinely differ — this isn't a sign that one of them is "wrong," just that they're drawing from different snapshots of the web at different times. Checking across more than one assistant gives a more complete picture than optimizing for a single tool's current behavior, which may shift independently of anything you do. What actually feeds AI visibility for agencies A handful of concrete things move the needle more than any specific AI-optimization trick: verified reviews on Clutch and G2 that describe what you actually do and for whom, case studies published on your own site with specific, real outcomes, consistent descriptions of your services across your website, directory listings and social profiles, and a Google Business Profile that's current and reasonably active. None of this is exotic — it's the same groundwork that helps a human prospect find and trust you, which also happens to be what an AI assistant is drawing from. One signal worth calling out specifically: mentions of your agency on other sites, even ones that aren't review platforms — a guest post you wrote, a "best agencies in [city]" roundup you were included in, a podcast appearance transcript — all add to the pool of material an assistant might draw on. These don't need to be engineered specifically for AI visibility; they're the same kind of digital footprint that's always been good practice for B2B marketing, just with a newer reason to keep doing it consistently. Checking what ChatGPT currently says about your agency Before changing anything, find out what's actually being said. Ask a few variations of the query a real prospect might use — your niche, your city, your specialty — across ChatGPT and at least one other assistant, and note whether you're mentioned at all, and if so, what's said about you. A dedicated tool like our AI visibility checker runs this check systematically rather than one manual query at a time, which matters since results can vary by phrasing and by which assistant you ask. Steps to improve what AI assistants say about you Start with the reviews, since they're the input most directly in your control: a steady flow of recent, detailed Clutch and G2 reviews gives any assistant pulling from those sources more to work with, and more recent material to prioritize over older mentions. Alongside that, publish case studies with specific details rather than vague claims — a named industry, a described problem, a concrete outcome — since specific case studies tend to get cited more usefully than generic "we help businesses grow" copy. Keep your service descriptions consistent across your site, Clutch, G2 and any directory listing; conflicting descriptions of what you do across different sources make it harder for any system, human or AI, to form a clear picture of your agency. A fictional illustration of this working end to end: a six-person studio, Millbrook Digital, specializes in e-commerce replatforming but had described itself generically as a "full-service digital agency" across its website and directory profiles for years. After narrowing its Clutch and website copy to specifically describe e-commerce replatforming work, naming the platforms it specializes in, and collecting a handful of fresh Clutch reviews that mention those same specifics, a query like "which agency handles Shopify Plus migrations" started surfacing Millbrook by name within a few months — not because of any AI-specific tactic, but because the underlying material finally said clearly what the studio actually does. Where this fits with general AI visibility practices Agencies and MSPs aren't a special case for AI visibility in the mechanics — the same practices that help any local business get recommended by an AI assistant apply here too, just with B2B review sites standing in for the consumer review sites a local service business would focus on. See our broader guide on how to get recommended by ChatGPT for the general mechanics, including how llms.txt and structured data factor in. Structured data is one piece worth not skipping even though it's easy to overlook: markup on your site that clearly states your services, location and reviews gives both traditional search engines and AI crawlers a cleaner signal than prose alone. This doesn't replace the review and case-study work — structured data describes what's already true, it doesn't manufacture credibility that isn't there — but it does make the true parts easier for a system to parse correctly rather than guess at from unstructured page copy. Worth separating from all of this: general brand awareness versus AI visibility specifically. An agency can be well known in its region through conferences, sponsorships and word of mouth while still being invisible to an AI assistant, if none of that reputation has made it into a form the assistant can draw from — a review, a case study, a mention on a site it crawls. The two reinforce each other over time, but one doesn't automatically produce the other, which is why checking your actual AI visibility directly matters even for an agency that feels well established offline. Can we pay to get recommended by ChatGPT or similar tools? Not in the way you can pay for search ads. There's no confirmed paid placement mechanism for AI assistant recommendations at this stage , which means the practical path is the same one that helps with organic search and B2B directories: strong, current reviews and case studies that an assistant can draw from. How often should we check what AI assistants say about us? A quarterly check is reasonable for most agencies — frequent enough to catch a meaningful shift, infrequent enough that you're not chasing noise from query-to-query variation, which is common with these tools even when nothing about your actual online presence has changed. Will AI-driven recommendations eventually replace traditional B2B directories? Unlikely in the near term — AI assistants currently draw on directories and review sites rather than replacing them, which means the two reinforce each other instead of competing. A strong Clutch or G2 presence helps both a human researcher and whatever an AI assistant surfaces when asked about your category, so there's no tradeoff between investing in one versus the other. Does this replace the need for Clutch and G2 reviews? No — it depends on them. AI visibility for agencies is largely downstream of the same review and case-study groundwork covered elsewhere in this cluster; see how to get Clutch reviews for building that foundation rather than treating AI visibility as a separate initiative. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Get Clients for a Marketing Agency
To get clients for a marketing agency, narrow your positioning to a specific niche or service rather than marketing yourself as a generalist, build a referral habit with past clients and complementary vendors, publish content that demonstrates specific expertise, and treat your own reviews and case studies as a sales asset you maintain continuously rather than something you assemble right before a pitch. New business is the hardest, most consistent problem in agency life — even agencies with strong client retention need a steady input of new logos to replace the clients who eventually churn or shrink their budget, and the agencies that handle this well tend to treat new business as a system rather than a periodic scramble. Among the inputs to that system, reviews that close agency deals deserve more deliberate attention than most agencies give them, since they're one of the few assets that work passively, influencing a deal, while your team focuses on client work. Niching down instead of staying a generalist A generalist agency competes with every other generalist agency on price and vague promises, because there's nothing specific to differentiate on. An agency that specializes — in a vertical like healthcare or legal, a channel like paid search, or a platform like Shopify — competes in a much smaller pool, can speak credibly to a prospect's specific situation in the first call, and can build case studies and reviews that all reinforce the same positioning instead of scattering across unrelated work. The fear most agencies have about niching down is turning away revenue; the more common reality is that a narrow, well-defined niche converts better per lead than a broad one, because prospects self-select in more accurately before they ever reach out. Choosing a niche doesn't require abandoning existing clients outside it — it's a go-forward positioning decision for how you market and who you actively pursue, not a requirement to fire your current roster. Over twelve to eighteen months, a consistent niche focus in marketing and sales naturally shifts the client mix even without any disruption to existing relationships. Picking the niche itself usually comes down to one of two starting points: work backward from where you already have the strongest results and the most compelling case studies, or work backward from a vertical you understand well enough to speak its language fluently in a first call. The first path is faster to activate since the proof already exists; the second takes longer to build credibility in but can land a more defensible position if the vertical is underserved by specialized agencies. Either way, resist the urge to pick a niche that sounds impressive in a pitch deck but doesn't match where your actual best work has happened — prospects in a specific vertical can tell quickly when an agency is reaching for relevance it hasn't actually earned yet. Referrals: the highest-converting channel most agencies under-invest in Referred prospects close at a higher rate and with less price sensitivity than almost any other channel, because a referral comes pre-loaded with trust from whoever made the introduction. Despite that, most agencies treat referrals as something that happens to them rather than a channel they actively build — no process for asking happy clients for an introduction, no habit of nurturing relationships with complementary vendors (a web dev shop, a PR firm, a CRM consultant) who serve the same buyer but aren't direct competitors. A simple fix: build a referral ask into your existing client success cadence. At a quarterly business review where results look good, ask directly whether the client knows another business that could use similar help, rather than hoping it comes up organically. Do the same with complementary vendors — a standing habit of swapping warm introductions with two or three firms who serve your same ideal client from a different angle compounds over time in a way a one-off coffee meeting doesn't. Make the ask specific rather than open-ended. "Let us know if you hear of anyone who needs help" rarely produces a referral, because it gives the client nothing concrete to act on. "We're looking to work with one or two more dental practices like yours this quarter — do you know another practice owner who might be a fit?" gives them a specific person or business type to think of, which is far more likely to surface an actual name. The same specificity helps with vendor partners: tell them exactly what your ideal referral looks like, rather than a vague "send us anything marketing-related," so they can actually recognize the fit when it comes across their desk. A referral program with a modest incentive — a credit toward a future invoice, a gift for the referring client rather than anything tied to a review — can formalize this further, as long as it's kept separate from review requests specifically, since incentivizing referrals is a different and generally permitted practice from incentivizing reviews, which carries FTC restrictions covered elsewhere in this cluster. Directories and marketplaces: Clutch, G2, and partner directories as a lead source Beyond their role as social proof, B2B directories like Clutch also function as an actual lead source — buyers browsing by category and filtering by review count and rating are, in effect, a pre-qualified list of people actively shopping for an agency right now. A complete, actively maintained Clutch profile with recent reviews shows up more favorably in that browsing experience than a sparse or outdated one, which makes profile maintenance a lead-gen activity, not just a reputation one. Our guide on how to get Clutch reviews covers building that profile out, including the verification process that makes Clutch reviews carry more weight with a browsing buyer than a lighter-touch platform's reviews would. Content and outbound: building a pipeline that doesn't depend entirely on referrals Referrals are high-converting but hard to scale predictably, since they depend on the pace of your existing client relationships generating introductions. Content — case studies, a point of view on your specialty published regularly, speaking at industry events in your niche — builds a pipeline that compounds independently of any single client relationship, though it takes longer to show results than a referral push does. Outbound, done well, means targeted outreach to a specific, well-researched list of prospects who fit your niche precisely, not a broad cold-email blast to anyone with a marketing title; the former gets replies, the latter mostly gets marked as spam and does low-grade damage to your domain's deliverability over time. Most agencies that sustain steady growth run more than one of these channels simultaneously rather than betting everything on whichever one worked best last quarter — referrals for warm, high-converting leads; content and directory presence for prospects who find you independently; targeted outbound for specific accounts you want to land deliberately. Qualifying leads and running a discovery call that closes Not every inbound lead is worth a full proposal, and treating every inquiry the same way wastes time that could go toward prospects who actually fit. A short qualification step before the first call — budget range, timeline, decision-making process — filters out tire-kickers without the awkwardness of asking those questions live. On the call itself, resist the instinct to pitch immediately; a discovery call that spends most of its time understanding the prospect's actual problem, rather than walking through your service menu, tends to produce a more targeted and more convincing proposal afterward, because it's responding to something specific the prospect said rather than a generic capabilities overview. Proposals that win tend to mirror the discovery conversation back clearly — the prospect's stated problem, your specific approach to it, and a price tied to that scope — rather than a templated document with their logo swapped in. A proposal that could be sent to any prospect in your niche without edits is usually a sign the discovery call didn't surface anything specific enough to build on. Pricing and packaging: making it easy for a prospect to say yes How you price affects close rate independently of the price itself. A single large retainer with a long list of included services can feel risky to a prospect who isn't sure yet how the relationship will work; a smaller starting engagement — a paid audit, a single-channel pilot, a 90-day trial scope — lowers the commitment required to say yes and gives both sides a lower-stakes first project to prove the fit before a larger retainer. This isn't about underpricing; it's about structuring the first yes to be easier to get to, with a clear path to expand scope once the relationship is proven. Be explicit about what's included and what isn't in any package, since scope ambiguity at the proposal stage is one of the most common sources of the billing disputes that later show up as negative reviews. A proposal that clearly states deliverables, timeline and what counts as additional work protects the relationship well before it becomes adversarial. Reviews as a conversion asset, not just a reputation metric By the time a prospect is deciding between your agency and two competitors, they're usually looking for a reason to eliminate options rather than a reason to pick one — and a thin or stale review profile is an easy, low-effort reason to eliminate you from that shortlist, even if your actual work is comparable to the competitor they picked instead. Treating review collection as an ongoing operational habit, tied to project launches, quarterly reviews and renewals, rather than a one-time push before a big pitch, keeps your profile in a state where it actually helps close deals rather than merely existing. This is also where a negative review, if one exists, needs a considered reply rather than silence or a defensive rebuttal — a prospect doing diligence reads the negative review and your reply together, and a calm, professional response to a legitimate complaint often does more to build trust than having no negative reviews at all would. See how agencies should respond to a negative review from a former client for the specific framework. Case studies: turning client work into a sales asset A case study that a prospect can actually picture themselves in — a specific industry, a specific problem, a specific measurable outcome — closes better than a generic highlight reel of logos you've worked with. Getting there requires client approval, which means building sign-off into your project close-out process rather than scrambling to get permission months later when you suddenly need a case study for a pitch. Our agency case study template covers the structure and the approval process in more detail, including how to handle clients under NDA who can't be named directly. Partnering with complementary agencies instead of competing with them A web design studio, a PR firm, and a performance marketing agency can all serve the same client without competing directly, which makes them natural partners rather than rivals. Formalizing a small set of these relationships — two or three agencies that cover services you deliberately don't offer — gives you a referral source that understands your work well enough to make a credible introduction, and gives you somewhere to send a prospect who needs something outside your scope rather than losing the relationship entirely to a generalist competitor who claims to do everything. These partnerships work best when they're reciprocal and specific: each side knows exactly what the other does well and refers accordingly, rather than a vague "let's collaborate sometime" agreement that never produces an actual introduction. This kind of partnership also pairs naturally with joint content — a webinar co-hosted with a complementary partner, a case study describing a project where both firms contributed — which reaches each partner's audience without either side needing to build that audience alone from scratch. Common mistakes that quietly undermine new-business efforts A few patterns show up repeatedly in agencies that struggle with new business despite putting in real effort. The first is inconsistency — running a content push or outbound campaign hard for six weeks, seeing modest results, and abandoning it before it had time to compound, then repeating that cycle with a different tactic every quarter without ever letting one channel mature. The second is treating every lead the same regardless of fit, which burns proposal-writing time on prospects who were never going to be a good match and leaves less time for the ones that are. The third, and the one most relevant to this cluster specifically, is neglecting the agency's own reputation — a thin Clutch profile, an unanswered Google review, no recent case studies — while spending real budget on lead generation that then runs into exactly those gaps the moment a prospect does their own diligence. None of these are particularly glamorous fixes. Consistency, lead qualification, and a maintained review and case-study base aren't exciting tactics, but they're disproportionately responsible for the difference between agencies that grow new business steadily and agencies that lurch between feast and famine depending on which referral happened to come in that quarter. Pulling it together: a system, not a campaign The agencies that solve new business sustainably treat it as an ongoing system with multiple feeding channels — referrals, directory presence, content, targeted outbound, and a maintained base of reviews and case studies — rather than a campaign that runs for a quarter and then stops. Each channel reinforces the others: a strong case study feeds your content and your Clutch profile, a referral conversation goes better when the referred prospect can independently verify your reputation, and a steady review habit makes every other channel's job easier by removing the "do they actually deliver" objection before it's raised. Assign ownership for each part of this system rather than leaving it to whoever has spare time between client work. Someone should own the review and case-study pipeline specifically — checking in with clients at the right project milestones, tracking which reviews are overdue, keeping case studies current — the same way someone owns outbound or content. Agencies that treat new business as "everyone's job in their spare time" tend to find that it's nobody's job in practice, and the reputation side of the system is usually the first piece to slip once that happens, since it has no hard deadline forcing attention the way a client deliverable does. How long does it take to see results from a new business system like this? Referrals and directory-driven inbound can show results within a quarter if you already have a reasonable base of client relationships and reviews to draw on. Content and niche positioning typically take longer — six months to a year of consistent effort before it becomes a reliable pipeline input — since it depends on building a body of work and search visibility rather than activating an existing relationship. Should a small agency niche down even if it means turning away some current work? Niching down is a marketing and sales focus decision, not usually a requirement to turn away paying work outside the niche. Most agencies that successfully niche down do so gradually, shifting what they pursue and how they position themselves in new-business conversations while continuing to serve existing clients regardless of fit. Is cold outbound still worth doing for agency new business? Targeted outbound to a carefully researched list in your specific niche can still work well; broad, generic cold email to any marketing-titled contact generally converts poorly and risks your sending domain's reputation. The difference is specificity — a short message referencing something real and specific about the prospect's business outperforms a templated pitch sent at volume. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Start a Marketing Agency
To start a marketing agency, pick a niche narrow enough to differentiate on, decide whether you'll bill by retainer or by project, line up your first few clients before you quit a stable income if you can manage it, and build the habit of collecting your first client reviews from day one rather than treating reviews as something to worry about once you're established. Most agencies start the same way: a freelancer or small team doing good work for a handful of clients, deciding to formalize into an agency once there's enough demand to justify it. The business fundamentals aren't exotic — niche, pricing, service delivery, new business — but a surprising number of early-stage agencies stumble on the same few avoidable mistakes, several of which are easier to fix before you have ten clients than after. Choosing a niche before you choose a name The single highest-leverage decision in starting an agency is what you specialize in, and it's worth making deliberately rather than defaulting to "full-service" because narrowing feels like it limits your market. A generalist agency competes on price against every other generalist in its market, with nothing specific to differentiate on; a specialist agency — in a vertical like healthcare, legal or home services, or in a specific channel like paid search or SEO — competes in a much smaller pool where it can speak with real authority in a first call. Pick a niche where you already have credible proof of results, even if that proof comes from freelance or in-house work rather than agency clients specifically. A niche you understand but haven't yet proven results in is a riskier starting bet than one where you can point to a concrete outcome, even a small one, from day one. A useful exercise before committing: write down the last three to five client or employer results you're proudest of, and look for the pattern — the industry, the type of problem, the channel. That pattern is usually a more honest starting point for a niche than a market-size spreadsheet, because it's grounded in something you've actually proven you can do rather than a category that merely looks attractive from the outside. It's fine to narrow the niche further over time as you learn more about which sub-segment of it responds best to your work; starting specific and narrowing further is a much smoother path than starting broad and trying to narrow down after you've already built a generalist reputation. Services and pricing: retainer vs. project Project-based pricing — a fixed fee for a defined deliverable, like a website redesign or a brand identity package — gives a new agency predictable, bounded scope and is often easier to sell to a first-time client who isn't ready to commit to an ongoing relationship. Retainer pricing — a recurring monthly fee for ongoing work like SEO, paid media management or social content — produces more predictable revenue over time and is the model most agencies eventually want to grow toward, since it smooths out the feast-and-famine cycle of constantly needing new projects to replace ones that just ended. Many agencies start with project work to build a portfolio and cash flow, then shift the mix toward retainers as the service offering matures and clients are ready for ongoing engagements. Whichever model you lead with, write a clear scope of work for every engagement — what's included, what counts as additional work, and how changes get priced — since scope ambiguity early on is one of the most common sources of client disputes that later surface as negative reviews. Resist underpricing out of fear of losing a deal, which is one of the most common early mistakes. A price that's too low to sustainably cover the actual hours a project takes creates pressure to cut corners, work unpaid overtime, or rush deliverables — all of which eventually show up in the quality of the work and, downstream, in how the client describes the relationship when asked for a review. It's better to lose a price-sensitive prospect at the proposal stage than to win the work at a rate that makes it impossible to deliver well. Building a team: contractors first, employees later Most new agencies are better served starting with contractors and freelancers for specialized skills — a designer, a copywriter, a paid media specialist — rather than hiring full-time employees before revenue is predictable enough to support fixed payroll. Contractors let you scale capacity up and down with client demand, which matters a lot in the first year or two when revenue is uneven and client churn is harder to predict than it will be later. As specific roles become consistently full-time busy — enough work to justify forty hours a week reliably, month over month — that's usually the signal to convert that function into an employee rather than continuing to coordinate a rotating cast of contractors for ongoing client work. Whoever you bring on, contractor or employee, train them on how client communication and review requests work from day one. A client's experience of your agency is shaped as much by the account manager or project lead they interact with regularly as by the strategic quality of the work, and a team member who doesn't understand the "ask every client the same way, never gate" rule can quietly undo a review habit you've built carefully elsewhere. Tools and software: enough to run the business, not more A new agency needs a project management tool, a way to track time if you bill hourly or need to understand true project profitability, a place to store client files and contracts, and basic accounting software — the specifics matter less than picking tools your team will actually use consistently rather than the ones with the most features. Add a reputation and review management tool early rather than treating it as something to adopt once you're bigger; the habit of asking for reviews and responding to them is far easier to build into your process from client one than to retrofit once you have thirty clients and no established workflow for it. Resist the urge to buy every tool that looks useful before you have the client volume to justify it. A lean stack that your small team actually uses consistently beats an elaborate one that sits half-configured because nobody had time to learn it properly during the early months when client delivery takes priority over internal tooling. Cash flow: the quiet reason new agencies fail More new agencies struggle with cash flow timing than with a lack of demand for their services — a project-based client who pays 50% upfront and 50% on delivery, with a thirty-day invoice term, can leave you covering payroll or contractor costs for weeks before the second payment lands. Get comfortable asking for deposits on project work and requiring retainers to be paid at the start of the month rather than the end, and keep a cash buffer sized to cover at least a month or two of fixed costs, since even profitable agencies can run into real trouble from payment timing alone rather than any underlying problem with the business. The legal and operational basics Forming a business entity, separating business and personal finances, and having a standard contract template reviewed by a lawyer familiar with your jurisdiction are worth doing before your first client, not after you've already run into a problem a proper contract would have prevented. This guide doesn't cover entity formation or tax structure in depth — those decisions depend on your specific situation and are worth a conversation with an accountant or attorney rather than general advice from a blog post. What is worth building into your standard contract from day one: clear scope definitions, payment terms, and language about how reviews and testimonials will be handled, since getting that agreement in writing early avoids an awkward conversation later when you want to ask a client for a review or case study and haven't addressed it in the contract. Building your service stack without overcommitting Early-stage agencies often say yes to anything a client asks for, which can mean delivering services outside your actual expertise through subcontractors or scrambling to learn as you go. This is a reasonable way to land a first few clients, but it's worth being honest internally about which services you're genuinely good at versus which ones you're delivering adequately while you figure them out — the gap between those two tends to show up eventually in client satisfaction and, downstream, in reviews. As you get more selective about which clients and projects to take, lean toward the services where you have the clearest track record, and consider partnering with other specialized agencies for the rest rather than building in-house expertise in every adjacent service. Landing your first clients Your first clients almost always come from your existing network — former colleagues, past freelance clients, people who know your work personally — rather than from cold outreach or paid advertising, which rarely work well before you have any proof of results to point to. Be explicit with your network about what you're building and what kind of client you're looking for; a vague "let me know if you hear of anything" produces far fewer leads than a specific ask tied to your niche. Price your first few engagements fairly but don't give the work away entirely — a client who pays something, even a modest amount, treats the engagement more seriously than one who's getting free work, and you need actual paying clients to build the track record and cash flow the rest of the business depends on. For the broader playbook on sustaining new business once you're past the first few clients, see our guide on how to get clients for your marketing agency. Collecting your first client reviews from day one It's tempting to defer thinking about reviews until you have a bigger client roster, but the earliest reviews are often the hardest to get later if you don't build the habit from the start — your first few clients are the ones who knew you when the agency was smaller and more personal, and they're often genuinely willing to help if asked at the right moment. Ask after your first project wraps successfully, not months later when the relationship has cooled and the ask feels out of place. Set up a Google Business Profile and, if your niche fits, a Clutch profile before you have a large client base, so the infrastructure is ready the moment you have a result worth asking about. Ask every client the same way once a project or milestone concludes, rather than only the ones you're confident will say something glowing — asking selectively is a form of review gating that most platforms' terms prohibit and that skews your profile in a way a careful buyer can eventually sense. Never offer a discount or credit in exchange for a review; that crosses into incentivized reviews, which the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits . Our guide on how to get Clutch reviews covers the specifics of timing and verification if your niche leans toward Clutch as the primary platform. Building a Clutch or G2 profile as a new agency A brand-new agency with zero reviews on Clutch or G2 isn't at a permanent disadvantage, but the first few reviews matter disproportionately, since they're what separates your profile from an empty one. Don't wait for a large client base to start this — ask your very first client, assuming the project went well, and treat that first review as a milestone worth celebrating internally, since it's the foundation everything else on that profile builds on. A profile with three detailed, verified reviews from your first year reads as more credible to a prospect than an empty profile does, even though the prospect has no way of knowing how small your current roster actually is. Resist the temptation to over-explain your agency's size or newness when asking for a review, or to treat the ask as something that needs apologizing for. A client who had a good experience doesn't need to know they're your third client ever — the ask should be as straightforward as it would be for an agency with a hundred clients: "we'd really appreciate a few minutes to share your experience on Clutch," with a direct link, nothing more elaborate required. Branding and positioning: enough to be credible, not a distraction A polished logo and a well-designed website help, but they're not what determines whether early clients trust you — results and clear communication do far more of that work in the first year than visual branding does. Spend enough on branding to look credible and professional, since a sloppy, clearly unfinished site can cost you a deal before a prospect even gets to the first call, but don't let branding become a months-long side project that delays actually pursuing clients. A simple, clean site with a clear statement of who you help and how, backed by whatever proof points you have, outperforms an elaborate brand identity with no client work behind it yet. As you land your first few clients and build real case studies, revisit the positioning and site copy to reflect what you've actually proven rather than what you hoped to prove when you started. Early positioning is often a reasonable guess; it's worth updating once you have real data about which clients you serve best and which results you can speak to most credibly. Common early mistakes worth avoiding A few patterns show up repeatedly among new agencies: taking on any client regardless of fit just to generate revenue, which tends to produce the hardest, lowest-margin, most dispute-prone relationships; underpricing out of fear of losing the deal, which makes it harder to deliver well and starts the relationship on a strained footing; and neglecting the agency's own marketing and reputation while focused entirely on client delivery, which leaves you starting from zero on new business every time you need to replace a client who churns. None of these mistakes are fatal individually, but agencies that avoid most of them in the first year tend to reach sustainable footing faster than ones that have to unwind bad habits established early on. A fictional illustration of how this plays out: a two-person agency, Thistledown Marketing, took every client who could pay in its first six months — restaurants, a dental practice, a regional furniture retailer, a software startup — with no particular focus. Results were inconsistent because the team's actual strength was retail and e-commerce marketing, and the software and dental clients churned within a few months, frustrated with results in a category the team didn't understand as well. By month nine, Thistledown repositioned specifically around retail and e-commerce, turned down inquiries outside that niche, and within a year had a tighter, more defensible set of case studies and a Clutch profile with reviews that all told a consistent, specific story — which closed new retail prospects faster than the scattered six-month period ever had. The lesson generalizes: the discomfort of saying no to revenue outside your niche in the early months is usually smaller than the long-term cost of a scattered reputation and a set of case studies that don't reinforce each other. How much revenue do we need before quitting a full-time job to run the agency? This varies enormously by personal financial situation, cost of living and risk tolerance, and there's no universal number — a common approach is building the agency as a side practice until it reliably covers a meaningful share of your target income before transitioning fully, rather than quitting on the strength of a single client or a short burst of revenue. Do we need a formal portfolio website before taking on clients? A simple site with your services, a way to contact you, and whatever case studies or testimonials you already have is enough to start — an elaborate portfolio can wait until you have more real client work to showcase, and an overbuilt site before you have proof points to put on it is often time better spent on actual client work or outreach. Should a new agency specialize in one platform or stay flexible across tools? Specializing in a specific platform or channel, within your broader niche, can be a strong differentiator — it lets you speak with real depth about that platform's specifics rather than a generic overview, and it often shows up favorably in how B2B directories categorize and surface your profile to buyers specifically searching for that specialization. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Start an MSP (Managed Service Provider)
To start an MSP, choose a pricing model — per-user, per-device or tiered — that matches the client base you're targeting, build a tooling stack around RMM and PSA software before you take on your first client, line up contracts and liability insurance early, and start collecting reviews for your IT business from the first client rather than waiting until you have a larger roster to worry about reputation. Most MSPs start the way most service businesses do: an experienced IT professional, often with a background in-house or at another MSP, strikes out on their own with one or two clients and grows from there. The technical skills to deliver good IT support are usually already in place by the time someone starts an MSP; the parts that trip up new owners more often are pricing, the operational tooling stack, and the slow habit of building a review profile that makes the next client easier to land than the last one. Pricing models: per-user, per-device, and tiered Per-user pricing charges a flat monthly rate for every employee covered, which simplifies billing and scales predictably as a client's headcount grows, but can undercharge for clients with heavy device counts per person — multiple monitors, shared workstations, specialized equipment. Per-device pricing charges by the number of devices supported instead, which better reflects actual support load for device-heavy environments but can feel punitive to a client who's trying to equip employees well and gets charged more for doing so. Tiered pricing — a small number of defined service packages (basic monitoring, standard support, full managed services with security add-ons) — gives clients a simpler menu to choose from and tends to be easier to sell to a prospect comparing MSPs, since it mirrors the way they're used to buying software subscriptions elsewhere. Rather than anchoring to a specific published rate, benchmark against a few MSPs serving a similar client size and vertical in your region, and price to cover your actual delivery cost — technician time, tooling licenses, overhead — plus a sustainable margin, rather than copying a competitor's rate card without understanding their cost structure. Whichever model you choose, decide early what's included in the base fee versus billed as a project on top — a server migration, a new office buildout, a major software rollout — since managed services pricing generally assumes a baseline of predictable support, not unlimited large-scope work. Clients who understand this distinction upfront are far less likely to dispute an invoice later than clients who assumed "managed services" meant literally everything was covered no matter the scope. Put this distinction in writing in the contract, not just in a sales conversation, since verbal understandings are exactly what billing disputes end up hinging on months later. Building your stack: RMM and PSA tools An RMM (remote monitoring and management) platform is what lets you monitor client systems proactively and push patches and fixes without an on-site visit for every issue, and a PSA (professional services automation) platform is what runs your ticketing, billing and client records. These two tools, more than any other part of the operational stack, determine how efficiently you can support a growing client base without proportionally growing headcount. Popular options in this space include ConnectWise, Autotask, and HaloPSA among others for PSA, and a range of RMM platforms that often integrate with whichever PSA you choose — confirm the current integration landscape before committing, since this space changes and consolidates periodically. Pick your stack with review and reputation workflows in mind from the start, not as an afterthought. If your PSA can trigger a webhook or notification when a ticket closes or an onboarding project completes, that's the hook you'll eventually want to use for sending review requests at the moments clients are most receptive — right after a problem gets fixed well, right after onboarding wraps smoothly. Beyond RMM and PSA, a new MSP typically needs a documentation platform for client network details and passwords, a backup and disaster recovery solution, and baseline security tooling — endpoint protection at minimum, with more layered security as a sellable add-on tier rather than a baseline assumption for every client. Resist the urge to buy every tool in the category before you have clients to justify the cost; a lean stack you actually know how to use well beats an expensive, half-configured one, and most of these platforms charge per endpoint or per technician, so the cost scales with you rather than needing to be paid upfront for capacity you don't yet use. Defining service level agreements clients actually understand A service level agreement that promises vague "fast response times" doesn't protect you or the client — define specific response time targets by ticket priority (an hour for critical outages, same business day for routine requests, for instance) and put them in the contract where both sides can refer back to them when there's a disagreement about whether the service lived up to what was promised. Clients who understand exactly what to expect, and when to escalate if those targets aren't met, are far less likely to end up frustrated enough to leave a negative review over a miscommunication rather than an actual service failure. Contracts and insurance A managed services agreement needs to cover scope (what's included in the monthly fee versus billed separately), service level expectations (response times by ticket priority), and liability limits, since IT support carries real exposure if something goes wrong with a client's systems or data. This is an area worth a lawyer's review before you sign your first client, not something to draft entirely from a template found online — the specifics of liability caps and data breach responsibility vary by jurisdiction and by what kind of data your clients handle. Errors and omissions insurance and general liability coverage are standard for MSPs and generally considered non-negotiable before taking on paying clients, given the scale of potential damage a serious IT failure can cause a client's business. If your client base touches regulated data — healthcare records, financial information, anything subject to HIPAA or similar frameworks — factor compliance requirements into your contract and your insurance coverage from the start rather than after a client specifically asks about it. Clients in regulated industries will often ask directly whether you've worked with compliance requirements like theirs before, and a confident, specific answer backed by your contract language is a meaningfully stronger sales position than a vague assurance that you'll figure it out. Getting your first clients Like most new service businesses, the first MSP clients usually come from an existing network — former colleagues, past employer relationships (where appropriate and not in conflict with any non-compete), referrals from IT vendors or managed security partners who serve the same buyer from an adjacent angle. Local networking — chamber of commerce events, industry-specific meetups for the verticals you want to serve — tends to work better for MSPs than broad digital advertising early on, since IT support is a trust-heavy purchase and a face-to-face introduction does more to establish that trust than an ad ever will at this stage. Price your first few clients fairly but don't give the work away — an MSP relationship that starts underpriced is hard to renegotiate later without an awkward conversation, and you need the engagement to be sustainable enough that your service quality doesn't suffer trying to make the economics work. Vertical-specific outreach often outperforms generic local marketing for a new MSP. If you're targeting dental practices, for instance, attending a regional dental practice-management conference or getting introduced through a dental equipment vendor reaches a concentrated, relevant audience far more efficiently than a general small-business networking event where only a fraction of attendees are even a potential fit. This also feeds naturally into the review and case-study profile you build later — a cluster of dental-practice reviews and a case study specific to that vertical is a much stronger pitch to the next dental prospect than a scattered mix of unrelated client types. Common mistakes new MSPs make A few patterns show up repeatedly among new MSP owners. The first is underpricing out of fear of losing early deals, which creates a margin so thin that service quality or technician retention eventually suffers — a client who signed at a bargain rate rarely appreciates it enough to offset the operational strain of running the account at a loss. The second is delaying the move from informal, memory-based client tracking to a real PSA discipline, which works fine at three clients and becomes a liability at fifteen, often right around the time growth should be accelerating instead of being slowed down by operational chaos. The third is treating sales and marketing as something to figure out "once the technical side is solid," which leaves a gap in the pipeline the moment an early client churns or a referral source dries up. A fictional example of the pricing mistake: a solo MSP owner, Garrison IT, signed its first three clients at a steep discount to win the business quickly, reasoning the volume would make up for the lower per-client margin. Within a year, Garrison had grown to nine clients but was working close to unsustainable hours, because the discounted rate never actually covered the support load those particular clients generated. Renegotiating existing contracts upward was far harder than pricing them correctly from the start would have been — existing clients resisted an increase they hadn't budgeted for, and two churned over the renegotiation. Pricing new clients sustainably from day one, even at the cost of a slower initial ramp, avoided that whole category of problem for the clients Garrison signed afterward. Growing past the solo-owner stage The transition from an MSP run entirely by its owner to one with a small technical team is where a lot of the earlier operational groundwork pays off or doesn't. If ticket documentation, client network details and standard procedures live only in the owner's head, bringing on a first technician means either a slow, informal knowledge transfer or the new hire learning by making mistakes on live client systems — neither is a great outcome. Documentation that was built as a habit from client one, even if it felt like overkill with only three clients, becomes the asset that makes this transition smooth rather than chaotic. The same applies to the client relationship itself: clients who are used to reaching the owner directly for everything need a deliberate transition to trusting a technician instead, which goes more smoothly if it's introduced gradually — the new technician handling routine tickets first, with the owner staying visible for anything escalated — rather than an abrupt handoff that makes clients feel like they've been demoted to a lower tier of service. Building a review habit from the first client It's easy to defer review collection until "later," once the business feels more established, but the earliest clients are often the most personally invested in your success and genuinely willing to help if asked at the right moment — after onboarding goes smoothly, after a tricky issue gets resolved well. Set up your Google Business Profile as a service-area business if you work on-site at client locations, and consider a G2 profile early if you're targeting clients who evaluate vendors the way they'd evaluate any other B2B software or services purchase. Our guide on MSP reviews covers the specific timing and platform choices — G2, Google, and in some cases Clutch — that matter most for an IT services business. Ask every client the same way once they hit a review-worthy moment, rather than only the ones you're confident will leave a glowing review — asking selectively skews your profile and most platforms' terms treat it as a form of prohibited review gating. Never offer a discount or free service month in exchange for a review; incentivized reviews are prohibited under the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) , and the credibility of your reviews depends on them being genuinely unprompted by any reward. Scaling past the first handful of clients The operational jump from three clients to fifteen is usually harder than the jump from fifteen to fifty, because the first jump is where informal processes — the owner personally handling every escalation, tracking client details from memory — start to break down and need to be replaced with documented runbooks and a real ticketing discipline. Build your PSA usage habits correctly from client three or four rather than waiting until the informal approach visibly fails; it's much easier to establish good ticket hygiene and documentation standards early than to retrofit them onto a backlog of undocumented client history later. The same applies to review collection: build the habit and the workflow while it's simple — a handful of clients, an owner who remembers to ask — so that by the time you have enough clients that memory alone won't cut it, you already have a system (PSA-triggered requests, a consistent timing rule) rather than scrambling to build one retroactively across a larger, less personally-known client base. As the business grows past the owner personally knowing every client well, the review habit also becomes a useful internal signal, not just an external marketing asset. A sudden dip in review sentiment from a particular technician's accounts, or a cluster of complaints about response time in a specific service tier, surfaces operational problems earlier than they'd otherwise be noticed by an owner who's no longer personally handling every ticket. Treating the review stream as a feedback channel, not just a reputation metric, gets more value out of the same data you're already collecting for marketing purposes. What's a reasonable number of clients to target before hiring a first employee? This varies by average contract size and how device- or user-heavy your typical client is, but a common signal is when the owner can no longer handle both new business and day-to-day ticket response without one of them suffering — that's usually the point to bring on a technician, even part-time, to protect service quality for existing clients. Do we need a specific industry focus, or should an MSP stay generalist? A vertical focus — healthcare, legal, dental, manufacturing — can be a strong differentiator for an MSP, particularly in verticals with specific compliance requirements (HIPAA for healthcare, for instance) where deep familiarity is a real selling point, not just a marketing angle. A generalist local MSP can still succeed, especially in smaller markets with less competition, but a focused MSP usually has an easier time building a distinctive review profile and case study set. How soon should we start asking clients for reviews? From the first client, once the first real milestone — onboarding completion or a well-handled support issue — has happened. Waiting until you have a bigger roster means losing the easiest, most willing reviewers: the early clients who feel personally invested in a business they watched get started. Is it worth joining an MSP peer group or franchise model when starting out? Peer groups can shortcut some of the pricing and operational learning curve by letting you compare notes with owners a few years ahead of where you are, which is often more useful early on than figuring every operational decision out independently. A franchise-style model trades some independence for a more prescribed playbook; whether that tradeoff makes sense depends on how much you value building your own brand and pricing structure versus having a tested system to follow from day one. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
Agency Case Study Template: How to Write One Clients Actually Read
An agency case study template needs five parts: client context, the specific problem, your approach, the measurable result, and a client quote or review — in that order, written specifically enough that a prospect in a similar situation can picture their own project. Getting client approval before publishing, especially for numbers and quotes, matters as much as the structure itself. A case study is one of the few sales assets that works passively, influencing a prospect while your team is busy with client delivery rather than actively selling. Agencies that turn client reviews into case studies systematically, rather than scrambling to produce one when a pitch suddenly needs it, tend to have a deeper, more current library to draw from when it matters. The case study template Start with client context: industry, size, and anything relevant to why this client's situation matters to the prospect reading it — two or three sentences, not a full company history. Then state the specific problem as the client experienced it, in their language where possible, since a problem description that sounds like internal agency jargon doesn't resonate the way a client's own framing does. Your approach section should describe what you actually did, specifically enough to be credible but without giving away proprietary methodology you'd rather keep for paying clients. The result section needs real numbers wherever the client has approved sharing them — a percentage change, a specific metric, a timeframe — since vague claims like "significant improvement" convince nobody who's seen enough marketing copy to be skeptical of unquantified claims. Close with a client quote, ideally pulled from an actual review rather than written and attributed to them after the fact, since a review the client actually wrote and stood behind carries more credibility than copy your team drafted on their behalf. A sixth element worth including when you have it: a brief note on what changed in the relationship after the initial result — did the engagement expand into a larger retainer, did the client refer another business, is the relationship still active years later. This signals something a one-time result can't: that the relationship held up over time, which matters to a prospect who's less worried about a single good project than about whether an ongoing engagement with your agency actually sustains itself. Keep the whole document to roughly 400-600 words for a standard written case study — long enough to be specific, short enough that a busy prospect actually reads the whole thing. A one-page PDF or a dedicated page on your site both work; what matters more than the format is that it's easy to find and share, ideally with its own URL you can link directly in a proposal or follow-up email rather than burying it in a longer portfolio page. Getting client sign-off and handling NDAs Build case study approval into your project close-out process rather than asking for it separately months later, when the client has moved on mentally and the ask feels like an imposition. At the point a project wraps successfully, ask directly: would they be comfortable with a case study, and if so, what level of detail and what numbers are they willing to have shared publicly? Some clients will approve everything; others will approve the story but not specific numbers, or will want to be referenced anonymously by industry and size rather than by name. For clients under an NDA or confidentiality clause, check the actual agreement rather than assuming what's allowed — some NDAs permit case studies with client approval despite a general confidentiality clause, others don't, and the safest path is a specific written approval for the case study itself rather than relying on a general sense that "they seemed fine with it" in conversation. Keep a record of what was approved — which numbers, which quotes, named or anonymous — so a case study doesn't drift beyond what was actually signed off on as it gets reused across different sales materials over time. Put the case study permission language directly into your standard contract template, as a simple opt-in or opt-out clause, rather than treating it as a one-off conversation that happens or doesn't depending on who remembers to raise it. A client who's already said yes in writing during onboarding is an easier conversation to revisit for specific details later than a client who's never been asked at all and now has to make a cold decision about something they haven't thought about before. Using only real, client-approved numbers Never round a client's actual result up to make a case study more impressive, and never publish a number the client hasn't specifically confirmed as accurate and shareable. Beyond the honesty issue, an inflated or unconfirmed number creates real risk if a prospect later asks the client directly during a reference call and hears a different figure — that gap damages trust far more than a modest, accurate number would have in the first place. If a client's result genuinely wasn't dramatic, a case study can still work by focusing on the specificity of the approach and the relationship rather than manufacturing a bigger number than what actually happened. A fictional example of this done well: a fictional agency, Copperfield Studio, ran a website redesign for a regional furniture retailer that produced a modest, honest result — a 12% increase in online form submissions over three months, not a dramatic transformation. Rather than inflating that figure or skipping the case study entirely for being unimpressive, Copperfield built it around the specific redesign decisions that drove the improvement and included the client's own detailed Clutch review describing why the process itself felt collaborative and low-friction. That case study closed more deals for Copperfield than a flashier, higher-percentage case study from a different client, because prospects reading it recognized their own modest, realistic expectations in the story rather than a number that felt too good to apply to their own situation. FTC endorsement guides and disclosure If a case study includes a client testimonial or quote, standard advertising-disclosure practice applies the same way it would to any other endorsement: don't imply the client received anything — a discount, free work, a referral fee — in exchange for appearing in the case study, unless that's disclosed clearly. Most agency case studies involve a client who genuinely isn't being compensated for appearing, which is the simplest and safest position to be in; if your agency does offer something in exchange for a client's participation in a case study, disclosure requirements likely apply and are worth confirming with counsel rather than assumed away. Turning an existing review into a case study starting point A detailed Clutch or G2 review, written by a client describing a specific project, is often most of a case study already written in the client's own voice — reusing that language, with permission, saves time and keeps the story grounded in what the client actually said rather than what your team wishes they'd said. This is one more reason a steady review-collection habit pays off beyond the review platform itself: a library of detailed, specific client reviews becomes raw material for case studies, social posts and sales decks, not just a profile metric. Our review card generator turns a strong review into a shareable visual quickly, which works well alongside a longer-form written case study rather than replacing it. How many case studies does an agency need? There's no fixed number, but having at least one strong, specific case study per major service line or niche you sell into matters more than having many generic ones. A handful of detailed, client-approved case studies that each speak clearly to a specific type of prospect outperforms a dozen thin ones that all read the same. It's worth revisiting this library at least annually, retiring case studies that no longer reflect your current services or team, and prioritizing production of new ones for any niche or service line where your current examples are thin or outdated. A sales team pitching a service your library doesn't yet have a strong case study for is working at a real disadvantage compared to one pitching a service with two or three current, specific examples ready to send. Can we publish a case study if the client won't let us use their name? Yes — an anonymized case study ("a 40-person SaaS company in the logistics space") still works, as long as the details shared are accurate and approved, and as long as the anonymization is genuine enough that the client can't be easily identified from the specifics included. Should case studies be updated once published? Revisit older case studies periodically, especially if the relationship with that client has continued and newer results are available, or if the client's circumstances have changed enough that the original framing no longer reflects reality accurately. A stale case study with outdated numbers can undercut credibility if a sharp prospect notices the dates don't add up. Who should write the case study — the account team or a dedicated writer? Either can work, but whoever writes it needs direct input from the people who actually ran the project, since a case study drafted entirely from secondhand notes tends to miss the specific details that make it credible. A common workable setup is the account lead providing the raw facts and client quote, with a dedicated writer or marketer shaping it into the final template, rather than expecting either role to do the whole thing alone. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
MSP Marketing Ideas That Actually Fill the Pipeline
The MSP marketing ideas that actually win local business clients are local SEO and a well-maintained Google Business Profile, a vertical niche focus rather than generic "we fix computers" positioning, partner co-marketing with vendors who sell to the same buyer, and a steady habit of collecting Google and G2 reviews for your MSP rather than treating reviews as a one-time setup task. Most MSP marketing fails not because the ideas are bad but because they're inconsistent — a local SEO push for a month, then nothing for a quarter, a review request campaign that runs once and never again. Local IT buyers aren't moving fast through a sales funnel the way a consumer purchase might; building visibility and trust over months, through channels that compound rather than channels that spike and fade, tends to work better for this category than any single clever tactic. It helps to separate the ideas in this guide into two buckets: channels that build long-term, compounding visibility (local SEO, content, reviews) and channels that generate a specific, immediate response (an event, a webinar, a targeted outbound push to a specific list). Most MSPs need both, but it's worth being explicit internally about which bucket a given activity falls into, so a slow-compounding channel like local SEO isn't judged by the same short-term metrics as an event or webinar, and vice versa. Local SEO for MSPs "Managed IT services near me" and "IT support in [city]" are real, high-intent searches, which makes local SEO one of the highest-leverage channels for an MSP serving a defined geographic area. The basics matter more than anything exotic: a correctly configured Google Business Profile (set up as a service-area business if you don't take walk-in visitors), consistent business name, address and phone number across every directory and citation site, and location-specific pages on your website if you serve more than one metro area distinctly. We cover the profile setup specifics, including category selection and the risks of a mismatched virtual-office address, in Google Business Profile for agencies and MSPs. Local SEO compounds slowly rather than producing fast results, which is exactly why inconsistent effort hurts it more than inconsistent effort hurts a paid channel — a few months of neglect can undo citation consistency and review momentum that took much longer to build. Treat it as an ongoing maintenance item with a specific owner, not a project that gets "finished" once the profile is set up. Beyond the profile itself, local SEO benefits from signals that are easy to overlook: a few genuinely local backlinks (a chamber of commerce member directory, a sponsorship of a local event with a linked mention), consistent service-area pages if you cover more than one city, and schema markup that clearly states your services and location in a format search engines parse reliably. None of these alone moves the needle much, but together they reinforce the same local-relevance signal Google is already drawing from your Business Profile and citations. Vertical niches: dental, legal, and other specialized IT An MSP that specializes in a vertical — dental practices, legal firms, medical offices — can speak credibly to that vertical's specific compliance and software needs in a way a generalist MSP can't, which matters a great deal in verticals where HIPAA or similar regulatory requirements make buyers specifically look for a vendor who already understands their compliance landscape. Marketing to a vertical niche also means your case studies and reviews reinforce each other: a dental-practice prospect reading three reviews from other dental practices gets a much stronger signal of fit than the same prospect reading three reviews from unrelated industries, even if the actual quality of service is identical. Niching doesn't require turning away work outside the niche, especially early on, but it does mean your marketing — the case studies you publish, the events you attend, the content you write — should consistently point toward the niche you want to be known for, rather than trying to speak to every possible local business at once. A fictional illustration: a generalist MSP, Pinegate Technology, served a mix of local businesses with no particular focus for its first three years, then deliberately repositioned around dental and medical practices after noticing that roughly a third of its client base, and most of its best reviews, already came from that vertical. Pinegate rebuilt its website copy, case studies and a HIPAA-specific webinar series around that focus, and within a year was winning dental-practice prospects faster than before, because the new positioning let a prospective client immediately recognize relevant proof — reviews from other dental practices, a case study about a HIPAA-related server migration — rather than having to extrapolate from unrelated client examples. Events and partner co-marketing Local business events, chamber of commerce meetings, and vertical-specific trade shows or conferences put you in front of exactly the buyers who are hardest to reach through digital channels alone — small business owners who aren't searching for an MSP today but will remember a face and a conversation when their current IT situation becomes painful enough to look. Co-marketing with vendors who sell complementary services to the same buyer — a CPA firm, a business insurance broker, a commercial real estate agent — can extend your reach further than either party would get alone, through joint webinars, shared referral arrangements, or simply introducing clients to each other when the fit is obvious. Pick co-marketing partners deliberately rather than opportunistically. A good partner serves the same buyer you do but offers something you don't, has a client base of a similar size and sophistication to yours, and ideally already has some credibility with that buyer — a well-established local CPA firm referring you carries more weight than a brand-new vendor with no track record of its own. Formalize the relationship enough that both sides know what a good referral looks like and follow up on introductions promptly; a co-marketing relationship that exists only as a vague agreement to "help each other out" rarely produces consistent results. Content that demonstrates expertise, not just activity A blog that publishes generic "5 cybersecurity tips" content indistinguishable from a thousand other MSP blogs does little to differentiate you. Content that's specific to your niche and genuinely useful — a breakdown of a compliance requirement relevant to your target vertical, a plain-language explanation of a recent security threat and what it means for a small business specifically — builds more credibility, even with a smaller audience, than generic volume content aimed at ranking for broad keywords. This kind of content also tends to get shared by the vertical-specific communities and associations your target clients are part of, which is a distribution advantage generic content doesn't get. Consistency matters more than volume here. A new, specific, well-researched article once a month, sustained over a year, builds more search visibility and credibility than a burst of ten generic posts published in a single week and then abandoned. If content feels like a stretch for a small MSP team to sustain alongside client delivery, it's reasonable to start with a narrower commitment — one solid piece a quarter tied directly to your niche — rather than an ambitious weekly schedule that quietly stops after six weeks once client work gets busy. Reviews and webinars as ongoing trust-building Reviews and educational webinars solve a similar problem from different angles: both let a prospect evaluate your credibility before committing to a sales conversation. A webinar on a topic relevant to your niche — a compliance deadline, a common security mistake — attracts prospects who are actively thinking about the problem you solve, and a recording extends its reach well past the live date. Reviews do similar work passively, letting a prospect checking Google or G2 independently verify that other businesses like theirs have had a good experience, without needing to attend anything live. Build review requests into your onboarding and ticket-resolution workflow rather than a separate periodic campaign — see MSP reviews for the specific timing and platform choices that tend to work best. Ask every client the same way regardless of how glowing you expect the review to be; asking selectively is a form of review gating most platforms prohibit in their terms, and it's also prohibited more broadly under the FTC's rule on fake and deceptive reviews (16 CFR Part 465) . Never offer a discount or free service in exchange for a review — the same rule covers incentivized reviews regardless of how small the incentive seems. Putting the channels together into a sustainable routine The MSPs that market consistently well tend to run a small number of channels on an ongoing cadence rather than a larger number of channels in occasional bursts: a local SEO and citation maintenance routine that never fully stops, a content calendar tied to the specific niche being targeted, a standing habit of attending two or three recurring local or vertical events rather than a different one-off event every month, and a review-request workflow triggered automatically by PSA events rather than remembered manually. None of these individually produces a dramatic result quickly — the compounding effect across months is what actually builds a pipeline that doesn't depend entirely on the owner's personal network. Assign clear ownership for each channel rather than leaving marketing as something the owner handles in whatever spare time exists between client escalations. Even a small MSP can designate one person — the owner or an office manager — to own the review-request workflow and local SEO maintenance specifically, checking in monthly rather than letting it slide until a prospect's diligence check reveals how stale the profile has become. The MSPs that keep this consistent over years, not just months, are the ones that end up with a marketing engine that doesn't collapse the moment the owner gets busy with a difficult client situation. Measure progress with a small number of concrete numbers rather than vague impressions: review count and average rating on your primary platforms, local search ranking for your core service terms in your city, and the share of new client inquiries that mention finding you through a review, a referral, or a specific piece of content. Tracking even these three numbers quarterly gives a much clearer read on whether the marketing routine is actually working than relying on a general sense that "things feel busier lately," which can be driven by factors that have nothing to do with the marketing effort itself. What's the single highest-priority marketing channel for a new MSP? For a local MSP, a correctly configured Google Business Profile with a steady review habit tends to produce the most reliable early return, since it captures the high-intent local searches a small business actually makes when looking for IT support, and it compounds the longer you maintain it. Is paid advertising worth it for MSP marketing? Paid local search or social ads can work as a supplement once your organic presence — reviews, local SEO, a credible case study library — is solid enough to convert the traffic the ads bring in. Paid traffic sent to a thin, unreviewed profile tends to convert poorly regardless of how well-targeted the ad itself is, since the prospect still does the same diligence check before committing. How do we market to a specific vertical without alienating our existing generalist client base? Niching your marketing and new-business targeting doesn't require changing how you serve existing clients outside that niche — it's a forward-looking positioning choice for where you focus content, case studies and outreach, not a requirement to drop current relationships that don't fit the niche. How long before a local SEO and review push shows results for an MSP? Expect a slow ramp rather than a quick win — meaningful movement in local search ranking and review-driven inquiries typically takes several months of consistent effort, since both citation authority and review volume build gradually rather than jumping after a single push. Treat the first quarter as setup and the following two or three as where the compounding effect starts becoming visible in actual new-client inquiries rather than just improved vanity metrics. Every review from Clutch, G2, Google and UpCity in one inbox → Try Tailwind free.
How to Respond to Negative Self-Storage Reviews
How to respond to negative self-storage reviews: thank the tenant for the feedback, keep the tone calm and specific rather than defensive, move account details offline, and never discuss a balance, an auction, or who's at fault in the public reply. The goal of the reply is to show the next renter reading it that the facility is responsive, not to win the argument with the person who wrote it. Most negative reviews at a storage facility cluster around a handful of recurring situations — a rate increase, a break-in, a noisy or messy unit nearby, a gate code that stopped working, or a lien sale after missed payments. Each one needs a slightly different reply, but the same underlying discipline applies every time: acknowledge, don't argue, don't overshare, and give the person a way to keep talking somewhere private. Having AI reply drafts for every facility ready in your voice makes it realistic to answer every one of these instead of only the ones that feel easy. Rate increase complaint response template A tenant who got a rate increase notice and wrote a review about it is venting about a decision they had no say in, not asking you to reverse it in public. A reply that gets defensive about "market rates" reads badly to the next person scanning your profile. "Thank you for the honest feedback, [name]. We know a rate increase is frustrating, especially when you weren't expecting it. We review rates periodically to keep up with facility costs, and we try to give as much notice as we can. If you'd like to talk through your specific unit and rate, please call the office at [number] — we're happy to see what we can do." Don't quote their current or new rate in the reply, even if they posted it themselves. For the mechanics of planning and announcing increases before they turn into reviews in the first place, see our guide to self-storage rate increases. Break-in or theft complaint response template A break-in review is emotionally loaded, and the tenant is often scared or angry about more than just the review itself. The reply needs to show real concern without admitting liability or making any promise about what will be covered. "We're very sorry to hear this happened, [name] — that's upsetting for anyone to go through. We take facility security seriously and are looking into what happened on our end. Please reach out to the office directly at [number] so we can go through the details with you and talk about next steps, including your tenant protection or insurance coverage." Don't state what your security cameras did or didn't catch, don't promise a specific insurance payout, and don't speculate publicly about how the unit was accessed — all of that belongs in a private conversation or with your insurer, not in a review reply. Noisy unit or neighbor complaint response template Reviews about a neighboring tenant running equipment, loading trucks loudly, or leaving a mess in a shared aisle are really about facility management, not about the facility's own service — but they still land on your profile. "Thanks for flagging this, [name]. We want every tenant to have a clean, quiet place to access their unit, so this isn't what we want to hear. Please call or stop by the office so we can look into it and follow up with the tenants involved directly." Avoid naming the other tenant or their unit number, even in general terms — that's their private rental information, not something to air in a public thread. Gate access complaint response template A gate code or access-hours complaint is usually the easiest of the bunch to fix and the easiest to turn into a good second impression, because it's often a quick technical issue rather than a judgment call. "Sorry about the trouble getting in, [name] — that shouldn't happen. Gate issues are usually quick to fix once we know about them. Please call the office at [number] so we can get your access working right away and make sure it doesn't happen again." Storage auction and lien sale complaint response template This is the category that calls for the most restraint. A review about an auction or lien sale almost always comes from someone defending their side of a payment dispute, and responding with any detail about their balance or payment history turns a private matter into a public one — which can create problems well beyond a bad review. "We're sorry to see this review, [name]. We don't discuss individual account details publicly, but we're glad to go over everything with you directly — please call the office at [number]." Lien and auction procedures for unpaid units vary by state — check your state's self-storage facility act rather than citing a general rule as if it applies everywhere, and route anything beyond a short, neutral reply to whoever handles your facility's legal questions. How fast to respond, and who should reply Speed matters almost as much as content. A reply posted within a day or two shows up to the next several renters who read that review while it's still near the top of the feed, while a reply added three months later mostly helps whoever happens to scroll that far back. For a single-location facility, the manager or owner is usually the right person to reply, since they know the specific tenant and situation. For a multi-location operator, it's worth deciding in advance whether replies come from a regional manager, a corporate team, or the on-site staff at each facility — inconsistent ownership of this task is the most common reason reviews sit unanswered for weeks across a portfolio. Whoever replies should stick to a consistent voice and a short list of do's and don'ts rather than improvising tone facility by facility. A reply that sounds warm and specific at one location and curt and templated at another tells a renter comparing both that one is better run than the other, even if the underlying service is identical. Monitoring reviews across Google, SpareFoot and Yelp A negative review doesn't always land on Google first. SpareFoot (Storable Marketplace) collects its own reviews from renters who booked through it, Yelp picks up reviews in denser markets, and Facebook recommendations show up occasionally too — each with its own notification system, or sometimes none at all, which makes it easy for a critical review on a secondary platform to sit unanswered for weeks simply because nobody was checking. Pulling every platform into one inbox, rather than logging into four separate dashboards per facility, is what makes it realistic to actually hit the one-to-two-day reply window above across more than a handful of locations. See our guide to SpareFoot reviews for how that platform's review system works alongside Google's. What not to say: admitting fault or discussing account balances A few things are worth avoiding in every single reply above, not just the auction one. Don't apologize in a way that reads as admitting fault for damage or loss — express concern instead of fault. "We're sorry this happened" reads very differently from "we're sorry we let this happen." Don't quote a tenant's rate, balance, or payment history, even if they posted it first; repeating it in your own words still makes it part of your public record, and it can look like retaliation to anyone reading closely. Don't argue point by point with the substance of the review in the comment itself — if the facts are disputed, that's a conversation for the office, not the thread, and a public back-and-forth almost always makes the facility look worse regardless of who's technically right. Don't delete or flag a review just because it's negative. Flagging is for reviews that violate a platform's actual content policy — fake reviews, reviews from someone who was never a tenant, or reviews containing someone else's private information. Flagging a legitimate complaint because it's unflattering usually backfires if the reviewer notices and posts again. Don't let a draft sit unposted waiting for the "perfect" wording. A reasonable reply posted the same day beats a polished one posted a week later. Our broader guide on how to respond to negative reviews covers the tone and structure behind all of this in more depth, and the full playbook for the industry is in our guide to self storage reputation management. Should I respond to every negative self-storage review, even old ones? Yes, within reason. A reply to a review from last week shows the facility is paying attention now; a reply to something from two years ago can still help, since renters comparing facilities often scroll back further than you'd expect, especially when a listing doesn't have many recent reviews to scan instead. Can I offer a discount or refund in a review reply to make a complaint go away? Avoid putting any specific offer in the public reply. Move the conversation to a phone call or email first — not because an offer is wrong, but because doing it in public invites every future reviewer to ask for the same thing, and it can read as paying to make a bad review disappear. What if the review is about something that happened months ago and already got resolved? Reply anyway, briefly, noting that you're glad it got resolved and inviting them to reach out if anything is still outstanding. A short, current reply on an old review still shows up to anyone scrolling through, and silence on an old complaint can look the same as an unresolved one. Who should write the review replies for a multi-facility storage operator? There's no single right answer, but there should be one clear answer for your company — either a regional or corporate team handling all replies in a shared voice, or trained on-site managers following the same set of templates and guardrails. What matters most is that it's someone's explicit responsibility, checked regularly, rather than an informal task that falls to whoever happens to notice a new review first. Every review from Google, SpareFoot and Yelp in one inbox → Try Tailwind free. Drafting replies by hand for a dozen scenarios across a portfolio of facilities is slow — Tailwind's negative review response generator drafts a reply in your facility's voice in seconds, which you can edit before it posts.
Self-Storage Rate Increase Reviews: How to Respond Without Making It Worse
A self storage rate increase is one of the most common triggers for a negative review, because it's often the first time a tenant hears from the facility since move-in, and it arrives as a bill change rather than a conversation. Raising rents without tanking your rating comes down to notice, clarity, and tone: tell tenants early, explain the change plainly, and give them a way to ask questions before they vent in a review instead. Existing customer rate increases, often shortened to ECRI inside the industry, are a normal and necessary part of running a storage facility — rates track rising costs for the facility, and a tenant who signed a lease two years ago at an introductory rate is usually paying well under what a new tenant pays for the same unit today. The problem isn't that rates go up. It's that a notice letter is often the only communication a tenant has had with the facility in months, so it reads as the facility reaching out only to ask for more money, with no relationship behind it. Why existing customer rate increases (ECRI) drive negative reviews A renter who's been paying quietly for a year or two has mentally filed the facility as "set it and forget it." A rate increase notice breaks that assumption, and because it usually lands as a letter, email, or line on a statement with no other context, the tenant's first instinct is often to vent somewhere visible rather than call the office. That's compounded by the fact that an increase notice is one of the few moments a facility proactively contacts a tenant at all — unlike a hotel or a gym, there's rarely a built-in touchpoint in between move-in and the next bill, so the increase becomes the whole relationship in the tenant's mind for that moment. Catching rate-increase complaints across locations before they spread matters more for an operator running many facilities, since the same notice typically goes out to a batch of tenants on a similar schedule, and the reviews tend to arrive in a similar cluster. State notice period requirements for storage rate increases Most states that regulate self-storage require some minimum notice period before a rate increase takes effect, and the exact number of days, the delivery method, and whether a reason has to be stated all vary by state. Rather than treating any specific number of days as a national standard, check your own state's self-storage facility act, and if you operate across multiple states, keep a simple reference table per state so notice periods don't get applied inconsistently across your portfolio. Build in extra buffer beyond whatever your state requires as a minimum — tenants rarely complain about getting more notice than expected, and they frequently complain about getting the legal minimum and nothing more. How big an increase is too big? There's no universal percentage that's automatically safe or automatically review-triggering — a modest increase on a tenant who's already frustrated about something unrelated can still generate a review, while a larger increase explained clearly and early sometimes passes without comment. That said, a few patterns show up consistently across operators: increases that bring a long-tenured tenant's rate close to or above the current rate for a brand-new tenant tend to feel unfair even when the math is defensible, since the tenant sees new customers "winning" by signing up fresh rather than being rewarded for loyalty. Staggering a large catch-up increase across two smaller increases, spaced several months apart, often lands better than one large jump, even though the end rate is the same either way. It's also worth tracking increases against local market rate for the same unit size and amenities, not just against your own facility's internal cost structure. A tenant who searches and finds a comparable unit nearby for meaningfully less is far more likely to post a review about the increase than one who checks and finds your new rate is still competitive. Segmenting increases by tenant tenure and unit type Not every tenant needs the same increase on the same schedule. Many operators find it useful to think in terms of a few rough tenant segments: newer tenants still within their first year, who are more price-sensitive and more likely to leave outright rather than complain; long-tenured tenants who've likely never seen a rate change and may be more surprised by the first one; and tenants in units that are hard to re-rent (oversized, oddly shaped, or in a less convenient part of the facility), where losing the tenant costs more than a smaller increase would have. None of this needs to be complicated — a simple internal policy of "cap first-year increases lower" or "give long-tenured tenants more advance notice" goes a long way without requiring a fully custom approach per tenant. Rate increase letter template A short, plain letter beats a long, defensive one. Tenants read increase notices quickly, looking mainly for the new number and the date it takes effect. "Dear [tenant name], this is to let you know that your monthly rate for unit [number] at [facility name] will change from $[old rate] to $[new rate], effective [date]. We review rates periodically to keep pace with the cost of running the facility, including [one or two general reasons, e.g., property taxes, insurance, maintenance]. If you have questions about this change or your account, please contact us at [phone/email] — we're glad to talk it through. Thank you for storing with us." Avoid language that sounds like boilerplate legal cover with no human behind it, and avoid over-explaining with specific cost figures that invite a tenant to argue the math. State the change, give a brief honest reason, and open a door to a conversation. Communicating increases before tenants leave a review The single biggest lever for keeping rate increases out of your review feed is timing the first notice well before the change takes effect, not just meeting the legal minimum. Sending the notice by mail and email together, rather than relying on one channel, cuts down on tenants who say they "never got any notice" — a claim that shows up in reviews even when a letter was technically sent. A short personal note or a call for long-tenured tenants facing a larger-than-usual jump can head off a review entirely; it's a small amount of staff time for the tenants most likely to otherwise post something public. It's worth being precise about what this buys you: communicating increases clearly and early is good service, not a guarantee against a bad review or any kind of legal protection. Some tenants will still be upset and will still write about it, and that's fine — responding to the review itself calmly, without quoting their rate or arguing the increase in public, is the next line of defense. For the broader question of how to raise prices without damaging a customer relationship across any kind of business, see our guide on how to raise prices for a small business. Training staff and call scripts for increase conversations When a tenant calls about an increase notice, the person answering the phone has as much influence on whether a review gets written as the letter itself did. A quick script helps front-line staff stay consistent: acknowledge the frustration first, explain the general reason briefly, and either offer a concrete next step (a short extension, a smaller unit at a lower rate, a payment plan) or clearly explain that the rate is firm and why. Staff who are caught off guard and either over-apologize or get defensive tend to escalate the exact calls that a calm, prepared response would have resolved quietly. It's worth explicitly training staff on what they can and can't offer — a facility that lets individual staff improvise discounts to avoid a review ends up with inconsistent pricing and tenants comparing notes on what they each negotiated, which creates its own set of complaints down the line. Handling increases for tenants who are already past due A rate increase notice landing on a tenant who's already behind on payments is a particularly common source of an angry review, since it can read as the facility piling on rather than addressing an existing problem. Where possible, avoid stacking a rate increase notice on top of a past-due notice in the same communication or the same week — space them out, or address the past-due balance first through your normal collections process. If a tenant eventually ends up in a lien sale situation, the earlier rate increase isn't something to relitigate publicly either way; see our guide on how to respond to negative self-storage reviews for handling a review that touches on both an increase and an unpaid balance. How much notice should a self-storage facility give before a rate increase? Check your state's minimum notice requirement first, since it varies and is a legal floor, not a best practice. Many operators give meaningfully more than the legal minimum specifically because it reduces both calls to the office and reviews written out of surprise rather than genuine disagreement with the new rate. Should the rate increase letter explain exactly why rates are going up? A brief, general reason is usually enough — rising costs, facility upgrades, market adjustment. Avoid a detailed financial justification; it invites a line-by-line argument and rarely changes how the tenant feels about paying more. What should I do if a tenant threatens to leave a bad review over a rate increase? Offer to talk it through directly rather than reacting to the threat itself. Some tenants are genuinely deciding between staying and leaving, and a short call can resolve that regardless of whether a review follows. If a review does get posted, reply the same calm way you would for any other rate-increase review — see our templates in how to respond to negative self-storage reviews. Keeping increase timing consistent across a multi-facility portfolio An operator running several facilities often runs rate increases in batches — a round of notices going out to a group of tenants across multiple locations within the same week or month. That efficiency is reasonable from an operations standpoint, but it also means a spike in rate-increase reviews tends to hit several facilities' profiles at once rather than trickling in one at a time. Having a shared view of reviews across all locations, rather than checking each facility's Google profile separately, makes it realistic to notice that spike quickly and get replies out before it looks like an unanswered pile-up on any one profile. It also helps a regional manager spot whether one specific facility's letter language, notice timing, or staff training is generating noticeably more complaints than the others running the same increase. Does a rate increase review hurt my overall star rating much? A single rate-increase review rarely moves an otherwise healthy rating much on its own, but a cluster of them arriving close together — common right after a batch increase — can create a visible dip in your recent-review average exactly when new renters are comparing you against competitors. That's the main reason timing, clear communication, and a prompt reply matter more than trying to prevent every single complaint. 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