Top 5 Marketing Mistakes CPA Firms Make with Matthew Banker

Tom

Welcome to today's episode of the Modern CPA Success Show. I am joined by, like usual, by my cohost in this, Adam Hale. Adam is a partner with Anders CPA and advisors. Hi Adam. Doing really well.

0:00:31

Adam

How's it going?

0:00:32

Tom

Our guest today is Matt Banker. He is a founder and visionary, Benchmark Growth. Matt is a lead strategist at Benchmark Growth and this is a marketing agency for accounting firms and he helps businesses communicate in a way that is authentic. So Matt, thanks very much for joining us.

0:00:47

Matthew

Yeah, thanks for having me.

0:00:48

Tom

So we talked about five marketing mistakes that CPA firms make. Could you start us off and just tell us what those five are and then we can dive in and explore a little bit?

0:00:58

Matthew

Yeah, well, I mean there's probably more than five. These are the five that I see a lot when I'm working with county firms. So yeah. Number one, accounting firms often don't actually know who their customer is or what it is that they sell. They haven't done the work to figure that out. Number two, they send good traffic to a bad website in my mind. And that website is such a key piece of the marketing puzzle and so many CPA firms get it wrong.

0:01:27

Matthew

Number three, they're working with the wrong marketing partner. I've seen so many accounting firms that try to, they try to do weird, weird tactical things that aren't good for their industry or they try to work with a firm or a freelancer that doesn't really understand what, what it is that they're trying to accomplish. And so they just go down the wrong path and they just make the wrong choices on what to spend money on.

0:01:48

Matthew

Number four, they think of it as an expense, not an investment. So it's a lot of turning it on, turning it off and they think of it as a short term thing. And then five, they just try to do too many things. Either they're trying to do it all at once or they just jump from thing to thing to thing and they don't ever make a choice of a strategy with their marketing. So those are my top five. What do you guys think? Have you seen that?

0:02:13

Adam

Kind of been there for all of them. I don't know if there was a particular order there, but that first one I think is mission critical. And that's something that whenever we're working with folks that join our VCFO community, that's one of the very first things that we talk about is you have to understand what your brand promises, who your customers are, what services you're going to deliver. Because we talk really and I'm sure from a marketing perspective, you love the idea of developing a niche because that just makes it a lot more honed in. You kind of know.

0:02:45

Adam

So by understanding that, you determine, hey, if I'm working with inventory clients, well, then maybe I want to call out that I'm going to do this inventory thing. But if I'm not working with inventory clients, I don't want to call out the fact that I do inventory because that's what's on everybody else's website. So understanding what service packages you want to deliver and then those service lines that you're going to do within those packages for us was very important because before we had a really deep understanding of what that was. We didn't know what to market. We didn't know what to say during our sales pitch and talk through stuff.

0:03:19

Adam

And then with that, then we were able to kind of develop that brand promise that we wanted to make sure was all the way through our marketing and the BD process. So talk to us a little bit about how you help or what you've seen, kind of work for people to kind of get around that.

0:03:35

Matthew

Yeah, well, like you said, as a marketer, I love it when a firm has a niche. It's very easy when you can target a specific industry or demographic. And when I think about a niche, the thing that I want to say is it's not just choosing a title or creating your own box of your audience. When I think about a good niche, it's something where you could go to a conference. I'm not saying you should buy a list, but you could buy a list or you could join an organization because these are people that identify themselves as part of this niche. So if you just say, well, we like to work with service based companies, that's great, that's definitely moving in the right direction. But that's not the same as saying we work with marketing agencies or design firms or we work with architects and engineers because those are people that self identify. No one says I'm in a service based industry. They say I'm an architect, I'm a lawyer.

0:04:32

Matthew

That's more helpful from a marketing standpoint. The other side of that though, is I know most firms are generalists. That's just the reality. They have a lot of different types of customers and really their niche is geographical, right. They're saying we're in this location and so we're going to focus our marketing efforts on our city or our town, and that's okay as well. But you have to be fully honest about who it is that you're targeting. Are you going to be a generalist and say, hey, we're after small businesses in this area or we're after a really specific niche. We're going to go to the conferences, but we're going to be national in our focus. So I think those are two pathways that you can go down when you.

0:05:13

Tom

Mentioned the niche and I'm curious if you like this definition. I recently heard the definition around. You know, you've got your niche defined if you've got between ten and 200 competitors and you've got between 2010 thousand prospects.

0:05:26

Matthew

Yeah.

0:05:27

Tom

And how do you feel about that?

0:05:28

Matthew

Go ahead.

0:05:29

Tom

No, I'm just curious what you realize.

0:05:31

Matthew

I've heard that too. I think you don't want to be so small that there's no competitors. You're niche being so small because it means someone else probably figured out that there's no money to be made here already and that's why no one is competing in this space. But you also don't want to be lost in the noise. If you have too many competitors, it can be hard to stand out and you should probably niche down further.

0:05:51

Tom

Yeah, that makes sense.

0:05:54

Matthew

Yeah.

0:05:54

Adam

I mean, for us we focus heavily on creative agencies and I would say that's probably about 50 or 60% of our business. And so we focus all of our marketing efforts and we'll develop other niches, but we'll use all of our marketing efforts going towards that niche. And then of course ancillary things happen.

0:06:12

Matthew

Right.

0:06:13

Adam

Creative agencies have friends that own other businesses or maybe the owner owns a different type of business and so we will do other things. But we focus our energy primarily on that niche and we let the rest of it come out. But I have had where whenever folks come into the community they're like, hey, I don't really necessarily want to focus on dental practices and be nationwide. I want to focus on Knoxville, Tennessee, you know what I mean?

0:06:42

Adam

And I just want to be the go to person in that city. So I assume that whenever you're doing all your tags and all that kind of stuff, do you just focus heavily on what you're okay with then it sounds like being a generalist and focusing on a city then.

0:06:54

Matthew

Yeah, well, for myself there's actually a lot of overlap. There are similarities between owning a marketing agency and an accounting firm in terms of the types of clients you're looking to work with. And so I understand that feeling. There's a lot of fear in niching down and choosing a vertical to be in. And I like to think about it in terms of there's your target, which is pretty narrow, and then there's your market. So the target is this is who we're after and this is who we're marketing towards.

0:07:23

Matthew

We've got an ideal customer profile, we know who they are, we know the job titles, and we're focused on their problems and needs with our marketing. And then there's a market which is that these are all the people we will work with, but we're not necessarily focusing our efforts. And I think one of the mistakes that a lot of firms make is they don't make a choice on who their target is and they just try to focus on this broader market and say we'll work with anyone in this big box.

0:07:47

Matthew

And the reality is, it's actually harder to get good customers if you're focusing too widely. And like you said, a great customer might come through a referral. They're not your exact target, but you know that it's a warm lead because they already trust you through the friend that referred them. It fits with your business model. You want to take them on as a client, but if they go to your website, they may not see your marketing or your messaging targeted towards them. And that's fine.

0:08:16

Matthew

I like to sometimes I'll just say with the headline on a website, it'll say, well, we work with, let's say, architects and engineers. And then underneath you can have a little link that says, not an architect or engineer. And you click through there, and you find a page that explains how you can work with them, even if they're not your exact market. But still, there should be some criteria that says, if you're an ecommerce business, maybe that's a step too far away from that target or that market, and that falls outside of who you'd want to work with.

0:08:46

Adam

Yeah. Whenever I've spoken with people on the geographic side, I've often told them, I wonder, and I'd love to get your input on this is, like, niche based on the service that you're offering. So, again, I get it generally, like, hey, we'll do your taxes. We'll do right up work, but if there's something that you can do that's different than everybody else, the core of our service is financial forecasting. Well, there's not a whole lot of firms out there that lead with that, but if you lead with that in Knoxville, Tennessee, then maybe that's what differentiates you and then from going to somebody like yourself.

0:09:20

Adam

Matt, would you be able to then kind of take that and run with that? Even though you're not going after a specific industry, but you're saying, hey, there's a specific service across a wide variety of businesses?

0:09:32

Matthew

Yeah. If you're in a major metro area, having an offering niche, as well as saying, we're focused on this geographic area, can make a lot of sense. As long as there's enough clients in your city, the decisions you make about who your customer is helps determine the tactics that you're going to use. I've got a client who they're a five person team. They're in a small town in Alabama. It's not a major metro area, and they don't really have a niche in terms of the industry. And so they just focus on they get involved with chamber of commerce activities.

0:10:15

Matthew

They do a lot of work with local SEO. So when someone types in accountant near me, they want to be at the top of that list where they invest their marketing efforts. And dollars is really based around the geographic area and just being kind of a generalist. And there's other firms that have a client that just works that mostly works with auto repair shops, and they go to national conferences, and they are focused on keywords rather than accountant. Near me, they want auto shop accountant. Those are the types of terms that they're going to focus on.

0:10:52

Matthew

I like the niche direction. I think there's a lot more options in that direction. But I just met so many firms that are struggling to make a decision, and some of them don't know what their niche is yet. Sometimes if you're starting out, the niche might find you and you don't know what it is yet. And so you're still in that process. And so I understand that. And we can work with as a marketing agency, we can work with you if your focus is in a geographic area.

0:11:21

Matthew

But I generally push my clients towards, like, hey, move in the direction of narrowing your focus. There's more money there. It's easier to find clients there. You get to build on top of your expertise so that you're not reinventing the wheel with every new client. There's so many great reasons to do that.

0:11:37

Tom

I know it scares people. I think what Adam said, which I think is really interesting, we have targeted this specific niche really strongly for years. And Adam, you said 50% to 60% of our clients are in that niche. And so there's still a lot of business that we have outside that area. And so I think someone would say, if I pick a niche, I limit my opportunities, I limit all these things. No, you can still get a lot of clients because you provide good service even while you're really going after that particular niche.

0:12:41

Matthew

Yeah, I totally agree.

0:12:42

Tom

Yeah. So do you want to go ahead and move on to the second one? So now you're sending oh, sorry, we'll.

0:12:47

Adam

Just recap there because I'm taking notes to make sure because this is good. So the first one, the big mistake, you're saying that what I heard you say is the geographic location is okay, but whenever you're thinking about niche, it can be both or either or industry or service offering. So there's a lot of different ways to slice that. But the biggest thing is just be intentional about thinking about who you want to service and what you want to service, what services you want to provide to them. And then once you kind of have that on paper, then you can kind of figure out the marketing strategy.

0:13:20

Matthew

Yeah. You have to make some choices at the front end. So if I had to really simplify it, the mistake that they make is that they don't choose and they don't make any choices about what their niche or what their strategy is going to be.

0:13:35

Adam

Got it. Okay, cool. All right.

0:13:38

Matthew

Yeah.

0:13:38

Adam

Now we can start sending good traffic.

0:13:41

Tom

To a bad website. That's just a catchy way to say it. I'd love to hear more about what you're finding there.

0:13:47

Matthew

Yeah, I look at a lot of accounting firm websites and a lot of the work that we've done has started with a website redesign. And what I keep finding is firms that are spending a lot of money on Google Ads or social media ads or SEO, and they're doing all of this downstream work when the website is not set up to actually turn their people into customers. I think there was a study a couple of years ago that said your buyer or buying committee, they want to do about 80% of their purchasing decision before they talk to a salesperson.

0:14:25

Matthew

And I can't tell you how many websites I go to for accounting firms and CPAs and CFOs. They don't clearly articulate what it is that they do, the problems they solve, their differentiators when I say a bad website design is part of it, but really it comes to messaging, that's the biggest problem, that they're not communicating. So people can't actually make any sort of informed decision from the information they find on the website as to whether this is a good fit or not. And so they keep spending money to drive traffic. There is no one converting because the website is not doing its job to say.

0:15:04

Adam

It is like it is now. It's boilerplate crap. It's like you go on there, they service every single industry. These are the industries we serve, and there's like 400 of them listed and then everything has these pop words and then just like this canned language underneath it. And there's no content, like you said around either. The industry that they're serving, they don't get really super deep because I've looked at them too, and we used to use I can't remember what the name of it is. Probably because I don't mention it anyway, but it was like a canned website for accounting firms.

0:15:37

Adam

And they had a lot of good generic content. But it wasn't really around the services that we provided. There was a lot of tax information on there, like that was part of their newsletter and all that kind of stuff. We didn't want to do taxes. I mean, we will, but we didn't want to really lead with that by any means. And it didn't have anything about our industry. So, like, focusing on putting content up like you said, so that it lands there. The other thing, do you usually advise, like, for us what we found super helpful? And I like what you said that they usually want to do most of their buying decisions before they talk to anybody.

0:16:10

Adam

Not only did we put service packages on the website and list out everything that they do, but we also put, like, price averages right on the top just to get rid of the tire kickers, you know what I mean? Like, they know. Here's a profile of who should pick this package. We've made that at the very top of the package. If you're between this size and this size, and you do this and you do that, this is probably the package you're going to want to look at. And so whenever we did get it on BD call, we had, like, a little calendar where they could schedule a call. Whenever they did call us, they would already self identify and say, well, I think that I'm probably more into this package, but how does that work? Is it customizable?

0:16:47

Adam

And then it was more of a discovery call than it was a sales call.

0:16:53

Matthew

When a visitor lands on your website, if they're a business owner, they're looking, they're qualified for your services. They have questions that they want answered before they talk to a person. And the number one question they want to know is the price. And I know I have pricing on my website. On a lot of the firm websites we design, we put a pricing tab there. Now, you don't necessarily have to list your prices.

0:17:20

Matthew

You can have three packages starting at these different prices. But you have to answer the question of how are you going to determine the cost so that when they talk to you, it's not a surprise. And so if that means that you have a paragraph on your pricing page that says every business is different, every client has different complexity needs. And so we put together a custom proposal. Here are some of the factors that are going to make it more expensive or less expensive, but we can't give you a price here on the website because we don't know about your business.

0:17:49

Matthew

That's fine. That answers the question of price, even if it doesn't have pricing listed. But I 100% believe that if you have a pricing link in the top menu of your website, that will probably be the number two or three most clicked links on your site. You know, usually it's the home page, the about page. So the home page is a sales page. In my mind, the about page is a humanizing page. Hey, you know, the home page sold me. I think you can do what you say, but what kind of people are behind this firm, and do I trust them and what do I know about them? That's why they go to the about page.

0:18:23

Matthew

And then the pricing page is the cost page. Those are the top three questions they want. Can you do what you say? Who are you, and do I trust you? Because you are in a trust business. Anytime you're dealing with people's money, there has to be a lot of trust built up there. And then three, what is it going to cost? If you can answer those three questions convincingly, then you can start spending some money to send people to your website. But if you're not answering those questions, well, I think it's usually a waste of money to spend money on ads and SEO. If you don't have those foundational things figured out, that's really good advice.

0:18:55

Adam

So any other table stakes that you have on the website, obviously answering those three questions, but whenever you look at a website, is there anything that's like, hey, it has to have this, this, and this.

0:19:05

Matthew

Probably the simplest one is you only have about 5 seconds to hook someone when they land on your website. And so you need a baseline performance, right? So it can't take forever to load that's one piece from a technical standpoint. But then above the fold on that first page, you need to be answering the questions. What is it exactly that you do so there can be no jargony language. You need to be speaking at the level of probably like an 8th grader in terms of the language, because your clients might be quite sophisticated, but they're not spending a lot of time thinking about this language. They need to go in and they need to immediately understand what it is that you do, how you're going to make their life better, and then how do they get it or what is the next step.

0:19:50

Matthew

So I'm a big fan of having a nice call to action button right there on the front page. Even if most people aren't ready to click that button in the first 5 seconds, they know what the next step is immediately. And it's usually to schedule a call or set up a consultation, something like that. But yeah, what it is that you do, how you're going to make your life better, how do you get it? You've got 5 seconds to communicate those three things. And if you don't do that on the front page, the hero section above the fold on the home page, you're definitely missing out, because people are opening six, seven tabs of different firms or options, and they're just kind of scanning through each of them, and you need to hook them so that they continue down the page and learn about your services.

0:20:33

Adam

So with those things and don't try to oversell it by making it too sophisticated. Talk like an 8th grader. I like that. I usually tell people, third grader for me, but somebody like Tom could clearly get it at the 8th grade level. You might miss me in that. But you'll probably not get a good customer anyway. 

0:20:53

Tom

Things that are in there that your advice to people would probably be get your website right, and you don't have to change it constantly where I think many people feel like there's a constant activity of like every week. It's got to be something different. And at least what you're describing doesn't sound like that would be a huge part of your approach.

0:21:08

Matthew

No, there are fairly static pages. You redesign your website once every five years or so seems to be about the pattern business changes. You need to make sure that it's updated and in alignment with what your current business is. But once that's done, that doesn't change very often. Once a person is a customer, they don't really ever come back to your website. Your website is for new business primarily, and you might have a link to a client center or login, but they don't really care what is on your website.

0:21:38

Matthew

If you have changing content, you're adding to your blog, or you're sending out articles through a newsletter, that kind of stuff continues to turn over and evolve over time. But the core of your website, five to ten pages, makes it pretty straightforward and static once you've done it. I don't know. I often think people focus on the wrong things and weird things when it comes to marketing, and one of them is when they get caught up in they think that their website needs to be refreshed. It's just because they've been looking at it over and over again for months and months and years and years, and that may not be true. Now, if their website messaging is not good, or if they don't communicate those things, for sure you need to redesign it. But if you're just bored of it because you've seen the same design for three years now, that's probably not the most important thing.

0:22:35

Matthew

But some people just like to refresh every once in a while, that's okay too. If they want to come and pay us to refresh their website, make it look pretty again, change the images, I'm happy to do that, but it's not usually the top priority.

0:22:48

Tom

Yeah. Do you mind if we jump around a little bit to another one? So you said treating marketing like an expense and not an investment. And I heard you also talk about sort of I turn it on, I turn it off. Kind of depending on how it feels like things flow. That feels like a really important one to have people look at.

0:23:06

Matthew

Yeah. Marketing is expensive. There's no way. Two ways around it. It's either going to cost you time or it's going to cost you money, or it's going to cost you both. And there are smaller firms and there are definitely firms where it makes a lot of sense for the owner to do a lot of the marketing work. But again, it's still expensive. It's expensive for their time in order to do it and to do it well.

0:23:33

Matthew

And in general, people don't like spending money on marketing because there's no guarantee that's going to come out of it. And so it's a hard thing to want to put into your budget. What I would say is that I like to think about marketing as an engine, right? You start it up, it gets warmed up and then it gets running. And it's much less expensive to keep something running than it is to start it up from scratch every six months. And so if you think about it as something where whenever I need leads, I need to go do marketing, you're already three months behind when that marketing is going to start paying off in terms of building those leads. And so the piece of it that I think is really important for firm owners is to make sure that they figure out a way to budget for marketing as something that happens year round every year. It's very seasonal for a lot of accounting firms that get really busy during tax season.

0:24:29

Matthew

I've talked to a lot of firms who say we can't even take on new business between February and April. Well, I think that's kind of a mistake because that's when business owners are feeling the most pain around their financials and so that's when they most need help and they want to talk to someone. But they'll often just turn off the marketing during those months because they can't take on any new business. But like I said, that's the best time to be connecting with potential clients because that's when they're feeling the need most acutely. So there's different ways to budget for it. But I would say the first step they need to do is think, we're going to put 6% of our revenue into marketing. We're going to your market to do that. Or we're going to have some firms, they'll have like a one X annual revenue per client, like as an acquisition cost. So if we get $5,000 out of a client a year, that's kind of our budget.

0:25:29

Matthew

We can spend $5,000 to get a new client. Now we want twelve clients. Now we've got our budget for the year. So there's different ways to do it. But you have to come up with a realistic budget and you have to have a plan to be spending and investing in marketing. I have a long list of what you should do first and what you should do next. But the firms I think that really miss out are the ones who just do one or two things and then they stop and then they come back. And then it turns out those one or two things say it's a website redesign or getting some social media up and running. They have to start over again. And like I said, it's pretty expensive to do that.

0:26:06

Adam

I think one of the stats that I saw a long time ago, because we're kind of outliers, is that I think the average accounting firm spends like 1% on marketing, whereas like most businesses it is 5%. To 10% and then obviously ecommerce jumped up to 20% or whatever. But for us, we've always spent like 6% to 7% on marketing. So we've always been kind of a little bit of an outlier there, but we've seen a lot of really good results. Now, I will say that and you'll tell me it depends.

0:26:38

Adam

I already know where you're going to go with this one. But we've always done SEO and never invested in pay per click. And partly because of the budget, I guess we couldn't really afford it. We played a little bit of a long game and we weren't going after commoditized services. So we felt like, and again, this could be totally incorrect, but we felt like if we were going after tax returns and things of that nature, that the PPC stuff, whenever you're doing the pay per click would be really good stuff. Now, I personally skip all the paid media stuff whenever I do my own Google searches. I always go past all the ad stuff and then I click on whatever the article is.

0:27:18

Adam

So some of that was maybe self biased as well, but we've always just pumped out a ton of content. And again, long play, right? We're not going to see a return on that for a while. But like you said, if it's consistent and you build that engine and you just kind of keep it going, we've always really had success with that. So when you're working with accounting firms, especially maybe even smaller ones or bigger ones that are like, hey, I need more of an immediate return or faster one, your strategy, is it usually mixing and matching paid media with SEO or do you usually lean one way or the other?

0:27:52

Adam

What have you found work best in this industry?

0:27:54

Matthew

Yeah, well, I will start off by saying as of, as of 2023, I'm probably a little bit more on the SEO skeptic side of things going forward. And that's mostly for newer businesses. So one, one aspect, it is a long play. If you are a generalist firm and you're focused on an area, investing in local SEO is probably a lot more beneficial than investing in keyword SEO. If you have a really strong niche, keyword SEO might make a lot of sense.

0:28:28

Matthew

But if you're just a generalist accounting firm and you're writing a lot of articles about small business accounting topics, the competition is really high. And part of it is actually so many companies are well established in the SEO space. It's a pretty mature channel at this point that is very difficult to break into those top spots unless you have some specific keywords. The other piece of that is it is an ongoing investment. Some SEO, I'm on a little bit of a soapbox or a rabbit trail on SEO, but SEO companies love to say, hey, you invest in this now and then it pays off over time. It's organic and then you're getting free clicks.

0:29:11

Matthew

And that is true to a point. But I've also never met an SEO company that says, and then after two years, you don't have to pay us any money anymore and we can just go away. This is a long term thing. So even if you're doing SEO, you're committed to that strategy. Now, I don't think SEO is the wrong play for certain firms. It's a wrong play to say we're going to do it for three months and then we're going to see what happens.

0:29:37

Matthew

You really have to be committed to the long term. The question about paid media, there are some things you can just throw money at. I like to think about it. There's a difference between demand capture and demand creation. And so Google search ads, that's all about demand capture. People who are already looking for your services. You just need to show up when they're looking. And in a lot of ways, it's the sort of thing you can just throw money at. You don't have to spend much time on it. You can hire a decent search agency to set those up. It's not the most expensive thing. You can get a certain amount of traffic. Now, again, make sure your website is ready to convert if you can do that. But that's something you could just throw some money on at most of the other stuff. When it comes to creating demand, it's educational, right? You're trying to make 99% of the market that you're after don't realize that they could benefit from the thing that you do, yet they don't understand what a virtual CFO is. They don't understand why they need a monthly accountant versus annual tax CPA.

0:30:46

Matthew

They're just living over here thinking, this is the way we do it. They don't realize the difference. So to create demand, you need to educate. You need to create content that is going to help them understand these things. Podcasts are a great way to do that. You're helping move them from one place to another. And when you can make them shift through your content, they're not going to go to Google and look for an accounting firm near me. They're just going to go right to your website because you're seen as the solution to the problem that they realize that they now have.

0:31:15

Matthew

So there are a lot of different tactics that you can employ. The baseline ones are usually fix your website, spin up some Google ads to see if there's demand that you could capture that you're not getting currently while you're waiting for your local SEO or your keyword SEO to kind of catch up, to be able to put you in those search rankings. And then you can move into social media content creation through social media channels or through podcast feeds, things like that, to work on creating that demand in your ideal customer base.

0:31:53

Adam

So basically it depends.

0:31:56

Matthew

You said you knew where I was.

0:31:58

Adam

Going with that, to summarize. But it does sound like that the paid media probably works better whenever you're talking about that geographic region because you're trying to position yourself above the folks that are in that space. Whereas maybe if you have more of a very developed niche that's very specialized, then you could do a little bit more also with the SEO, because now you're not just writing general articles on Qbo and hoping that somewhere in Ethos somebody's clicking on that and going, oh, you're my Qbo expert, along with the other 30,000 folks that do it.

0:32:33

Matthew

Yeah. One thing that I would say, maybe content, the type of content you create, the way that I've seen it evolve is I think there was a time when it was really important to understand what keywords you were after and you could really build a strategy just around that. As the market has matured, as SEO, as a channel has matured, and it's become more competitive, that isn't as straightforward of a winning strategy. And I think the thing that's really important now is that you have a clear point of view that you actually have something interesting to say. Now writing generalist articles about QBO is probably not going to get you anywhere, but if you are really strong everyone should be on QBO.

0:33:17

Matthew

I think Qbo is the best for this industry for ABC reasons. Now you're getting somewhere and you're not going to be the right fit for everyone. You might not even be right on all of these points, but having a point of view sometimes is more important because you stand for something. One of my taglines that I use a lot is different is better than better. You need to be seen as somebody who's offering something different, not something that's just slightly better than what the competition or what their current solution is.

0:33:47

Matthew

And so having a point of view, something that really differentiates you, makes you stand out from what everybody else is saying, can go a long way when you're coming up with what you want to talk about with your marketing content.

0:34:00

Adam

Really good point. I think that makes a lot of sense.

0:34:03

Tom

Are we ready to move to another? Is that okay? You try to do too many things for me.

0:34:10

Matthew

Yeah, let me combine this with number three, which is the wrong marketing partner. I think that a lot of firms try to do too many things. Either it's the start stop or they're trying to be on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and TikTok and podcasts and YouTube and Google Ads. All these things where they don't actually pick a strategy. And what I would say is it's best to pick a channel to start with.

0:34:44

Matthew

Pick one thing, get it running. First, You try to get it so that you're being productive. It happens every week or month. Then you start to see, are we getting some signals to say that this is working. And then if you start getting those signals, you invest a little bit more. Once it's up and running, now you look for a new channel that's going to work, but if you try to do too much, it just comes back to that.

0:35:08

Matthew

It's the cost equation of time or money, and a lot of times it's the time piece. If you don't have enough time to devote to each one of these channels, I think it's a waste of money. Basically, spending $1,000 a month on something that doesn't work at all is more expensive than spending $5,000 a month on something that brings in a lot of business, right? And so choosing the right things, focusing on them until you know that they're working or that you can cut them, is really good. And also, if something's not working, don't be afraid to just eliminate it.

0:35:41

Matthew

If Instagram is not working for you, cut it out of your marketing plan. Just focus on LinkedIn. Don't spend that extra time on things that you've decided are not part of the main strategy.

0:35:54

Adam

What about on the SEO side? Because I hear a lot of people talking about, like, you can multipurpose a lot of the same content, right? So if you have the SEO piece, then why not just go out and throw it on to LinkedIn, instagram, again, if it's just content, throw it on. Have some kind of system in place where it goes to all those different platforms. Is there a reason not to do that?

0:36:19

Matthew

Well, I love right now, I think video is great, right? So if you're a firm owner and you've got a point of view, the number one thing I would say is set up a nice little studio in your office or in your house. Record short videos that show off your expertise and help the clients that you're trying to serve. And then, yeah, repurpose that. There's so much great technology now that can transcribe from video and audio. You almost have an article written.

0:36:49

Matthew

Edit that into a blog post, send it out in your email. I think that that kind of repurposing is really helpful. The problem I think I see happening is when I would say social media channels are one. Trying to be on too many social media channels, you kind of dilute every one of them is different. The type of content you want on LinkedIn is going to be different from what you have on Instagram. You have to have an image that goes with it. If it's going to go on to YouTube as a video, that's going to be different than if it's going to go on to TikTok as a video. And so generally, as you're repurposing, I think you should have one social media channel, at least maybe two.

0:37:30

Matthew

And if you have two, they shouldn't be owned by the same company. So don't be on Facebook and Instagram, because if you get locked out of one, you're going to get locked out of both. So be on LinkedIn and Facebook or LinkedIn and Twitter or whatever that is. And then a blog article, a video or a podcast feed, a weekly email, and a social media channel. That's a pretty killer combination. That's all coming from one piece of content, but it's still somewhat limited. And if you had to choose, start with two of those things and then add a third one once you get comfortable and know what you're doing, and then add a fourth after that. So you're going to build over time, but don't try to start and do everything all at once.

0:38:12

Adam

I just want to know what these accountants are doing to get kicked off.

0:38:18

Matthew

I don't know.

0:38:20

Tom

He said, be different.

0:38:21

Matthew

You could be really different, right?

0:38:23

Tom

I would guess so. We're sitting here in the New Year's resolution time, which makes me think of doing too many things. Is that part of the reason for one or two to get comfortable? Because I could see people saying, I'm a small firm owner. I'm going to put out a blog and a video every single day. And maybe after two weeks I get busy and all of a sudden I just stop doing it for months and months. Is that part of your rationale of like, hey, get it in your routine, it's good. Before you start adding, don't burn yourself out 100%.

0:38:50

Matthew

And to be honest, I know a lot of firm owners and they have great intentions. Now, there's an important piece here. A firm owner is the subject matter expert. You can't outsource your expertise to a marketing agency or an intern, right? Like, you are still the person with the insights and the knowledge that matter to your audience. And so if you're not part of that process, it's not going to be great content. It's just not going to be very good getting out there.

0:39:23

Matthew

However, all of that time stuff, I think there's a lot of tips and tricks that you can do to help automate or streamline it, using a virtual assistant, or hiring a part time marketer to help you with the distribution, or turning that video that you make into an article, having them edited. Those are all really good things to do in most cases. I've rarely seen a firm owner who has the discipline to run a marketing department themselves.

0:39:54

Matthew

There's just too many things that are going on. They need help to get a lot of that stuff done, especially if you're trying to do too many things. And so it's better to be consistent than to be productive for a couple of weeks at a time. And so build into your system something that you can do. The thing that gets done is better than the thing that you plan that you never do, right? So, yeah, you just can't overburden yourself with this marketing stuff in a way that's unrealistic for who you are as a firm owner. Yeah.

0:40:30

Adam

We always found it helpful just to do the recording and then let somebody else write the article. That may sound a little bit better. You want it to be in your voice, obviously, so then you critique it and modify it. But yeah, that is a pretty big list for us, saying, hey, everybody on the team just does a blog once a week or once a month. Everybody's like they'd spend five times as much trying to figure out how to type it up, as opposed to if you would ask them a question or three questions, interview them, they would go right down the line and just answer it and knock it out in 20 or 30 minutes.

0:40:58

Tom

And I would emphasize that when I first started working here, as you know, this is my first remote job. And so our marketing team said, would you write an article about working like being a remote worker for the first time? And it was intimidating. I had not written a blog article and they said, look, just put something together, we will turn it into a good article. And so I probably spent 30 minutes coming up with the ideas and they came up with a really nice looking article.

0:41:19

Tom

I'm sure you could hire an editor, or do something similar. But to me, that was intimidating, saying, how am I going to format and make sure it all looks beautiful and all that stuff. And they were like, here's a way to do it. And they really took the burden off and I could be sort of the expert in that piece and they could be the one to get it out there.

0:41:33

Matthew

Yeah.

0:41:36

Adam

So do you think that it would be true then? I heard the five mistakes and they all make good sense to me. So just basically do the opposite of all those. And that's how you kind of really get started. Like, make sure you understand who your target audience is. Do the brand, hire a good agency, make sure your website is dialed in intentional with spending money on a consistent basis.

0:42:00

Matthew

Yeah, I mean, I mentioned it earlier, I think of it as like a marketing engine. And for me, there's four main pieces to that that you kind of invest in one at a time, but you want to get them all up and running together. So the first piece of that is getting your brand foundations right, understanding your ideal customer, getting a good marketing message dialed in, understanding what is your three sentence pitch, getting a really good website, all of those things. Establishing a point of view. It's all that background stuff that sets you up.

0:42:34

Matthew

And then the next thing to really run this is creating unique weekly content of some sort. And like I said, I love video as the starting point for that. But you should at least be emailing your client list and your prospect list once a week. And the important thing about this is, well, there's two things. One, you get better and you become more insightful through the process of writing and figuring this stuff out. So it's not just something that your clients are benefiting from, but you're actually benefiting from it yourself just by going through and doing that work.

0:43:10

Matthew

But that weekly content, weekly unique stuff is pretty important. A lot of firms, they get blog posts from a content farm for CPAs, and then they send it out to their list. That can be okay for your email list, but if it's going on your website, it's not really helping you from an SEO standpoint, because it's showing up on everybody else's website. Google doesn't like duplicate content.

0:43:36

Matthew

If you're mostly focused on business accounting and you're getting a lot of articles about tax, it's not really dialed into your audience. They're not getting a ton of value out of it. And so even if you use that as a starting point and then you write the article, that makes sense for your audience, that's something that I would love to see them do. And then you get into getting it distributed out across social media, email, podcast feeds, things like that. And then finally, the last piece is that demand capture piece, making sure that you've got some way that when people are out looking for you, that they're able to find you. Whether that's through your SEO program, local SEO, which again, I think of as a separate running webinars on LinkedIn or opt in campaigns, things like that. You have to have that final thing that gets them into your funnel.

0:44:24

Matthew

I tend to focus a lot of my effort on my clients. On the awareness side of things, there's so many programs out there about the funnel. Like, once they get to your website, how do you run them down the funnel? And the real problem most CPA firms have is that nobody knows they exist. They don't have any traffic to their website. It's not doing the basic stuff well. And so having a nice funnel set up would be great, but if no one knows about you, you gotta start somewhere else. You got to get a little bit of that awareness out there.

0:44:57

Adam

Yeah, and I think that although we talked about all that marketing stuff, I think that there's a huge benefit to the BD process as well. And I know a lot of solo entrepreneurs and firm partners, they're really good at selling their services. But whenever you're really intentional about that brand promise and all that discovery work that you're doing, and you have this whole plan, it's really easy then to just kind of put that in with your sales process. So whenever they do call you, you're able to kind of talk about being different and how all that matters.

0:45:28

Adam

So I think that it's been very helpful for us just going through that exercise on the marketing side.

0:45:33

Matthew

Yeah. There's a very fuzzy line between sales and marketing, and I think it's getting fuzzier and fuzzier. I don't even know if it makes a lot of sense these days to try to draw strong boundaries between them. What's more important is that the marketing and the sales team are really in good communication, because all of that foundational work you're doing for marketing 100% translates into whatever your sales team is doing as well.

0:45:58

Matthew

And whatever your sales team is doing in terms of prospecting on LinkedIn should be tied in with whatever content process you have for your social media as well. So very closely on LinkedIn I would agree. I think that having a marketing engine and having a dialed in sales team together are your ideal scenario. I find it hard to imagine that you can do one or the other in a lot of cases. For most of these firms, someone's got to be in that sales function and somebody's got to be thinking about it from a marketing standpoint, and you can.

0:46:32

Tom

Certainly help people in doing that. And so if they want to get your advice and a good marketing partner, that's what you make yourself available to do.

0:46:40

Matthew

Yeah, for sure. I'm happy to talk. We just work with accounting firm owners. Well, at least go and call back. Our target is accounting firm owners, and we have a couple of clients who are a little bit outside that, but mostly accounting firms.

0:46:54

Tom

Yeah, that's great. Well, Matt, thank you very much. This is really valuable and I hope people take some really good things away and then come into it with a plan to get someone to help me put myself in order so that I've got a good marketing plan going forward and executing it well.

0:47:08

Matthew

Yeah, for sure.

0:47:09

Tom

Great.

0:47:10

Matthew

Thanks for having me.