Category: Marketing Advice

Many accountants feel adrift on the subject of marketing in today’s world. Between “Tickety Tocking”, “Vulnerability Posts” on LinkedIn, and all the hype around Inbound Marketing, even veteran marketers have trouble staying on top of what works and what doesn’t these days — not to mention your average accountant.

Everywhere you look, it seems that people are talking about Social Media’s vital role in brand awareness. But a quick trip to Twitter leaves even the most optimistic of us feeling downtrodden and shocked at the state of the world.

And that’s where we’re supposed to build a brand?

Well, yes. To understand why, we need to appreciate what we’re talking about when we say “brand”.

Brands are not simply “brands” anymore.

Eighty years ago, the concept of a brand came down to having a good logo, readable ad copy and a probably decent newspaper-advertising budget.

In this super-connected world where everyone feels entitled to an opinion and often blasts that opinion far and wide regardless of their credentials (or lack thereof), brand has become far more complex.

Brand has always meant identity — how you portray your company to the world.

But never has the perception of that identity rested in so many hands which are so far out of your control. One wrong word and the seemingly ubiquitous cancel culture might lower its mighty sword on you, even when they’re wrong.

That’s perception. Brands are no longer defined by a great logo or a wonderful photo op at the local human rights rally — brands are determined by the things you do every day and how you take care of your customers.

Do you need a brand if you are small?

When people think of brands, they tend to think of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Amazon, and so on. They think of the giants and believe the world these giants tread on is different from our own world.

When Amazon creates an ad that brings people to tears, it is watched by millions. If your small accountancy practice created an ad of the same impact (costs aside), would it be as effective?

It’s a question of the global stage and the local stage. Macrocosm and microcosm. Every person is a king (or queen) in their own corner.

When determining if you need a brand as powerful as the giants’, take the size-factor out of it. Think, instead, of people who walk past your practice’s door every day. Think of the 1,000 or 2,000 followers you have on LinkedIn. Think of the 100 visits your website gets every week. Even though that isn’t millions of people, those people will indeed respond to your brand when they see it.

Given two accountancy practices that offer pretty much the same thing, which one will someone choose? Would they choose the practice whose brand and ethos communicates (1) “Helping Bring Jobs to Your City through Good Accounting” or will they choose the brand that says, simply, (2) “Chartered Accountants”?

It’s all about perception.

Customer Service

There are two crucial phases in marketing:

• Getting new customers
• Keeping existing customers

As an accountancy practice, you need to be sharp on both points.

“Getting new customers” requires branding that works well on a first-impression basis.

“Keeping Existing Customers” has more to do with customer service. What you do will translate into how those customers perceive your brand more than the marketing material you send them.

The initial perception — logo, colour scheme, those vital photo ops — can only take you so far. These days, what people really want to know is what others are saying about you.

As Warren Buffett so aptly put it, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

To build a strong brand as an accountancy practice you must serve your clients with the utmost professionalism and jump on any dissatisfactions immediately. If you make yourself available for clients to reach you, and help them willingly with their problems, they are far less likely to run off to Twitter and post their discontent before reaching out to you first.

You also need to proactively get clients to positively review your business or talk about it positively online. A good way to do this is with follow-up emails to check if the client is satisfied. Have a link in the email that sends them to an online review platform if they were pleased with your service. Or give them a “one-click” option to tweet something positive about your service.

As you can see, social media plays a crucial role. The best way to win at social media and avoid catastrophes is to take a proactive role in it.

Prepare social media posts long in advance, always sticking to posts that match how you want potential customers to perceive you.

And always keep your existing clients happy and encourage them to engage with you online.

Target markets

You can’t appeal to everyone, and not everyone will perceive your brand with the same enthusiasm.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you’re trying to reach out to small mom-and-pop businesses, a friendly, approachable brand might be necessary. Funny, quirky videos would be a great way to get that type of brand’s message across. So would light-hearted social media posts that don’t touch on anything heavy or controversial.

But if you serve primarily large businesses, this type of approach is unlikely to garner much interest.

It doesn’t really matter if you go for the staid, serious brand or the playful, quirky brand. It all depends on your target market. (Some companies are looking for staid and serious.)

But you do need to take a two-pronged approach: (1) The first impression to new clients and then (2) the nurturing of existing clients, encouraging them to review your services online or to post positive messages about your practice on social media.

Brand is about perception, and you need to constantly work on that perception to avoid the pitfalls of a super-connected world that is quick to judge and quicker to pass sentence.

Accountants are terrible marketers. Yes, I know that might be a generalisation, but it also happens to be mostly true. In our experience, the accountancy firms we take on either have no email marketing strategy in place or they have a horrible one.

Email marketing can take on many forms — cold emails, emails to subscribers, emails to clients, etc.

Too many firms that we deal with think that email marketing is simply a matter of collecting up your clients’ email address and then blasting out a mail to them now and then telling them about something in which they might or might not be interested. Official guidance on whether this is legal is murky, covered under the heading of “soft opt-in”.

But, whether legal or not, the approach is clunky and cumbersome at best. We’ve seen some practices simply add all the email addresses of their clients into the BCC (or, worse, the CC) field and then simply send the mail out!

How many people opened the mail? How many clicked on links in the mail? How many people marked it off as spam? If someone unsubscribes, how do you handle it? Do you keep the name on a list? How will you guarantee that you never send a marketing email to that person again?

All these questions come under the heading of Marketing.

Sending an initial marketing mail to a client might generally be considered acceptable (if the client is in the UK). Still, it does become a violation of applicable laws if the users “opt out” of such emails.

And what if you’re running a cold email campaign alongside your campaign for existing subscribers? It starts to get a little confusing, and that’s why most accountancy practices just give up at this point.

You need a system that manages mails, subscribers, non-subscribers, opt-ins and opt-outs seamlessly and professionally so that all you have to do is prepare the email and send it off.

The mail also needs to look professional.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that make all of the above possible.

1. MailerLite, MailChimp, GetResponse

If you’re looking for a platform which does only emailing then MailerLite, MailChimp or GetResponse might be the answer for you.

When I say “only” emailing, I don’t mean that the tools are not sophisticated. They are. And they offer advanced reporting, which can give you an idea of how each of your campaigns is performing.

The only “problem” (at least with MailerLite and MailChimp) is that they tend to be something of sticklers when it comes to taking on new accounts with existing email subscribers. They want to make sure that their platform is not used to send out spam and wish to know, specifically, where a list of subscribers was obtained from, and whether or not those subscribers are opt-in subscribers.

If you’re planning on sending emails to your client base, this might be a problem when MailChimp/MailerLite start vetting your account. You could contact their support team and discuss the matter with them, but it’s not guaranteed that they will allow you to open the account.

If you plan on getting new subscribers, however, each of the above options is relatively straightforward to use. They offer all the “usual” features of email marketing:

1. Easy design interface
2. Advanced reporting of user engagement
3. Unsubscribe feature
4. Audience profiles so individual emails can get sent to specific groups

These are the best options if your email campaign is simple. For larger accountancy practices, however, you’re probably going to want something that can integrate with your CRM.

2. Keap (previously InfusionSoft)

Although there are plenty of email marketing tools out there that only do emailing, an accountancy firm of any respectable sized is better off using email marketing software that integrates with its CRM.

Keap is one of our favourite options in this respect. The software is “robust” and “effectively streamlines your marketing by combining your CRM, sales and marketing automation software and online store into one platform.”

It has all the expected features of an emailing software:

1. Design-tools for creating professional-looking emails easily
2. Analytics to be able to tell how much engagement the email obtained
3. Tools to improve “deliverability”

“Deliverability” is an immense subject which gives every email marketing company nightmares. It is a complicated topic which has to do with ensuring that your email lands in someone’s inbox and not in their junk folder. The issue is out of the scope of this article, but you must know this: If you’re running your own in-house “marketing” campaign with your local email program, your deliverability will almost certainly eventually suffer.

3. Salesforce’s Email Studio and Marketing Cloud

Salesforce’s Email Studio forms part of its trailblazing Marketing Cloud platform which leverages sophisticated AI to best market to your clients. This is a premium offering, and definitely something to consider if your accountancy firm is somewhat large.

It does far more than merely managing email campaigns, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll stick with that feature.

Email Studio offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop design tool. You can build email campaigns that respond automatically to triggers and send a follow-up email to users depending on the actions they take.

The tool has a steep learning curve because it can do so much, and if your accountancy firm is a high-end firm, this might be the platform for you.

Don’t ignore the tools

The backend and complexity of email campaigns are far more complicated than you might imagine. I touched briefly on the subject of deliverability. But there is far more to know about this:

1. Where is the mail originating from?
2. Is it coming from a “trusted” source?
3. Does the email contain text which might be considered spammy?
4. Does the email read like some spam currently doing the rounds on the internet?

If you send mail which gets incorrectly triggered as spam, it might have a detrimental effect on your ability to send your clients valid business emails in future, because your business mails will start landing in their junk folder.

Companies specialising in email campaigns go to great pains to provide you with the tools necessary to ensure your emails don’t get marked as spam.

On the subject of email campaigns, investment is the answer. Invest in a solution that saves you time and brings in a high ROI because your marketing emails are actually arriving, being opened, and being engaged with by their recipients.