Blogs may be the talk of the nation, but it’s all the “little things” that count.
by Rick Telberg
At Large
Not too long ago, the accounting profession was actually debating whether CPA firms could or should “do” marketing.
It was a silly debate. Every business — even a CPA business — starts with a sale. No sale: No business. So marketing was always part of the profession. Many just didn’t want to deal with the fact — or know how to.
Today, some still don’t want to deal with marketing. Don’t worry about them. They’ll be out of business soon enough.
But there’s a new cadre of CPA firms who do understand what marketing means. And these are the ones you need to watch.We asked several high-ranking officials of the Association for Accounting Marketing to decipher for us the current state of affairs in CPA marketing.
It’s the “little things” that count.
Neil Fauerbach at Smith & Gesteland in Madison, Wis., sees two big waves: One is the labor shortage; it’s forcing firms to expand their vision of marketing from just building revenue to attracting talent. The other is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is drawing the attention of national and super-regional firms and pushing small- and medium-sized business into Fauerbach’s lap.
Karen Love at Houston-based PKF Texas is also focused on recruiting as never before. With billings up 30 percent over the past year or so, PKF’s biggest challenge, she says, is “matching the opportunity to the talent.” The firm has won a “best places to work” award three times, which doesn’t go unpromoted, and PKF is active in a college business-plan competition, where partners hobnob with the judges, all local business leaders. Then there’s the Fast Tech 50, where the firm started to recognize tech leaders in Houston, and the new IT-oriented blog, which doubled traffic to the firm’s Web site, spawning an estimated $32,000 in free PR, and paid for itself with the first new client.
Blogs, in fact, may be the wild card in professional services marketing. Few people, let alone CPA firms, really know what to do with them, or about them.
Still, Jamie Trayner at LBA CPAs in Jacksonville, Fla., is a big fan. “They are a terrific opportunity for CPA firms,” Trayner says. But you need a committed, high-profile partner to pull it off.
To Lisa Rozycki, at LR Marketing Group, blogs are simply becoming as much a part of the landscape as business cards and Web sites. “The best reason to have a blog,” she says, “is that it will get your Web site a higher ranking with Google and other search engines, and to not have to pay for top search engine rankings is a benefit. Most of the people I see out there touting the benefits of blogs are the blog consultants themselves.”
Meanwhile, don’t forget the nuts and bolts. Fauerbach notes that most new business still comes in the old-fashioned way — referrals from bankers and lawyers, and, especially, happy clients.
Marketing isn’t about sales. It’s about calculating the value of your target market’s wants and needs — and delivering on them. It’s about all the little things a firm does, from how its reception area is carpeted to how its tax returns are bound in personalized covers.
So ask yourself what these top marketers ask themselves every day: What sets you apart from the competition, and how do you show it?
[First published by the AICPA]