112 11 Fall Marketing Ideas for your Accounting Firm

A special time of year. The leaves are changing, there's a crispness in the air, and pumpkin spice is pumping through your veins. Let's run through some fall themed marketing ideas for your accounting firm. And I get it. I know you're not a marketer. I know this is the last thing you want to do right now, but the goal here is to swap out one of your stanky old clients with a better client. So I'm going to give you a whole pile of ideas, stuff that's simple to execute and we'll see if we can't find some killer new clients. Come on in. It's Jason Daly, Pumpkin Spice Edition. Okay, So I asked Chat GPT to generate 50 marketing ideas. GPT 4 is really good at marketing stuff. Either it's really good or I'm just really bad. And so when I see it, do it at an okay level. It looks really good. I a lot of them were bad. It started looping back on itself but a good number of them were good. So There were like 11 here that I really liked that I pulled out. But let's start with the stuff that I didn't like that it generated which is still cycled in like common advice for firm owners. Tell you why I didn't didn't like some of these things. They're kind of my in my mind like the lowest ROI ways of getting people to engage with you. By the way, this episode pairs nicely with my newsletter from last week where we used a new ChatGPT plugin to generate marketing graphics with canva. Super super easy. Takes like less than 60 seconds. If you're not on that newsletter, pull the car over to the side of the road, put the emergency flashers on and go to newsletter JSON CPA and sign up. You can see the most recent newsletter there where we cover that super simple. Okay, some of this may be pushing you outside your comfort zone with marketing stuff. The idea of doing this but my goal here is to make it as easy as possible for you to just start and if you are a whiz at this stuff, maybe get a couple new ideas for new stuff, new kind of unique stuff to try. So first off the stuff I didn't like that it generated which is still very much in the kind of general advice that I think marketers give accountants. One anything discount related. Just don't set that precedent. When you set the precedent that something can be discounted then people will expect discounts in the future. This is just a really I don't like never negotiate on price Negotiate on scope, not on price. So discounts just set a bad precedent. Don't do that. Number two, everything SEO related that it gave me SEO. We did a whole episode on this. But it's getting exponentially more crowded because AI is better at writing than you. Takes a long time to make. Hey there. When you could literally go out to social media and post something that pops up right now. So why am I investing in SEO? Don't invest in SEO. Invest in social media and audience building on social media. If you got to scratch that itch of writing blogs do it. And that may be worthwhile for your client base for them to get value from it, but don't do it to attract new clients. I think there's a shorter path to doing that these days through social media. 3 paid AdWords. You don't even need that, just go organic. Maybe there's situations where you can do adwords around like a killer offer, but that is like what goes into that is building something that is like irresistible for people and maybe you're capable of doing that. Most of us as accountants are not. So for some people maybe paid acquisition makes sense. But for most of us we just need to start by posting on social media for the first time, trying to be helpful to your ideal client. Fourth thing I didn't like, like FAQ sessions, like general open ended stuff in my mind it's not actionable enough to drive a certain type of person to it. I think you need to be specific, specific in the value that you're providing, not just making yourself available. And then five direct mail campaigns because it's mail. Okay, 11 things I really did like number one, a countdown campaign on social. So those countdowns could be to tax deadlines, could be to ideally something very specific to the type of client that you want. That could be regulatory something for beekeepers or you know, whatever that super specific niche or micro niche or type of person is. Countdowns are a like a kind of a great excuse that to, to post a social they kind of have some urgency built in. Like that's the value of it to me is the inherent urgency and the likelihood that people will then share that with their peers who have that same deadline coming up. And where this is really valuable is in deadlines that maybe they're not even aware of. So I love the share ability of countdowns and it's kind of this trojan horse with which you can deliver value. Don't just post a picture that says 12 days until X post a picture and give them two or three sentences of value. That's the way to do it in my mind. So countdown campaigns on social media. I like that. Number two, tax prep workshops says how to prepare stuff. I would extend that to how to comprehend what's on your return. In general, I don't have any problem giving away the playbook of how to do something. I think it's actually a great way to attract folks. How many people have you talked to who are like, yeah, I'm just, I'm going to start doing my own bookkeeping. And then they get into it and they're like, wowee, this is the last thing in the world that I wanna do. I'm really bad at it and I just want somebody to do it for me. Well, it turns out if you give people an easy way to show them how to do a thing and they then discover I don't want to do the thing, which is what happens 80% of the time, you're then in the driver's seat to be the one to do it for them. And so the call to action as you do that workshop is like, hey, if you find you don't like this, if you find you don't wanna do it, you don't have time for it, choose us. And they're probably gonna pick you because they already have a relationship with you and you've got a level of trust with them that nobody else has with them. So workshops showing them how to do the thing that you do, or even it can be as simple as how to comprehend a thing that they already have. So that could be a workshop where everybody turns up with their financial statements and you help them to understand them. Could be where everybody turns up with their tax return and you help them understand what they see on that tax return. To don't worry about giving away the farm because you know better than anybody else, when it gets messy, they're not going to want to do it themselves. Number three, a tax checklist download. I would extend this to financial statements also. I don't know. There's something satisfying for people about checklists. It's also a thing that you can make once and people can come and get value from forever. So as with all of these things, what makes this really, really good is when it's very specific to a type of person. And many of the insights and the advice that's within the checklist may be general and may apply to everyone. But what you're going to do is you're going to put it through the language of a specific person to show that you have a deep understanding of exactly what the pains are of that type of entrepreneur. So this can be as simple as what are the 20 most common things you see people get wrong or not understand about their tax return or their financial statements when you pick up a new client? What are the common things that you're amending for if you do tax work? Or what are the common activities accounting system issues you see when you pick up a client? Stuff like still mailing out paper checks or not having a bill pay system that integrates with your accounting system. And that creating a bunch of duplicate effort stuff like that is gold. You've probably got it rattling around on the top of your noggin already. Create that checklist as a lead magnet and to just be helpful and give value to people the one thing I don't like about PDFs, I prefer a website to a PDF here because you want to create something that is short, shareable, as easy as possible for somebody to link to a buddy to somebody else that's in the same line of work. And when you put PDFs behind email signup walls, that's not particularly shareable. Now if that checklist was super valuable, that honestly ought to be incentive enough for them to sign up for your newsletter or whatever to get more information from you. But I think too often we try to put stuff behind a barrier like email signup form or something like that. I think too often we do that at the expense of reach. Because if having to provide an email and some demographics turns away a third of people, then you now have a third less people like resharing that out externally and stuff like that. So just focus on being helpful. The rest of the stuff will take care of itself. So that is a tax or financial statement checklist. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folk at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not gonna get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said, you know what? We're gonna build Our own pipeline in the Philippines. Gonna pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms firms basically. That's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like oh geez. Like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out. Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com gang this episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Live Flow is the easiest way to sync that QuickBooks data back and forth to your spreadsheets. You may have seen this actually had a big announcement lately. So this fall G2 gave them the top spot in their fall 2023 report as the leader in the financial analysis category. That's right. They won number one. Nice work. If you've been around my channels for a while, you've seen life float kindly. They have sponsored quite a bit of stuff. And I'm not, I mean I'm not saying I'm taking credit for it, but that was probably why I'm not familiar with Live Flow. Super easy way to sync that stuff. Sync your QuickBooks data back and forth with Google Sheets. They got a whole pile of templates too to make the process of building that stuff for the first time as easy as possible for you. Stuff for managing cache, AP KPIs, like everything you can imagine. Sync that data into your existing sheets to make them smarter. Get it to auto sync or build your like custom new sheets that talk with QuickBooks totally from scratch. Pretty cool tool. Check that one out at Lflow IO. Number four. Oh, I forgot. Gosh darn it. I came up with some pumpkin spice theme names for all of these on ChatGPT. Gosh, I was so proud of myself for doing this. So we gotta go back now. Okay, the first one, the Countdown campaign. We're gonna call that one the Savor the saving spicy countdown. Naturally. Number two, the workshops. We're gonna call this Whip your returns into sweetness. I don't know about that one. Number three, Tax checklist Download the one we just did. We're going to call that checklist Charm Spice up taxes. I'm going to be honest, these are a little rough. Okay, number four, Referral incentives. This was one of the suggestions it came up with. I like this, but I think you need to pair it with urgency. If you leave the door open and just say oh yeah, you can refer this type of client to us anytime, you might get Some. But I think what's actually way more effective is if people can do it for a window of time. And this goes back to some of The Alex Hermosi $100 million offer stuff we've talked about in the last couple of months where you need to be thinking about, you know, urgency and scarcity and how you combine all these different things into a. Giving somebody a really compelling reason to take action today. Right. It's one thing to give them this cool thing or convince them that something is worthwhile. It's another thing to get them to make the decision and do that thing today. That's ultimately what you need to give them as a reason to do it now. And so I like referral incentives, but I think you have to pair it with urgency. So to me, that looks something like, hey, Steve, heads up. We've got, you know, four of 30 slots left for this beekeeper tax planning sort of thing that we're doing, and it closes in three weeks. If you got anybody in your network that you think would benefit from this, I wanted to share this with you before. Before we go out and put it public. Right. So it's like you're doing Steve a solid, like letting him, his friends in on a great thing before you go out and offer it up to the world. That is a better version of asking for referrals. I think that is much more likely to convert because you've paired it with something that's urgency and that's urgent and needs to happen, like, right away or within the next couple of weeks. And you better believe we have a pumpkin spice name for that. Refer and rush for a sweet reward. That's nice. I don't know that you actually need to reward Steve. In fact, I think that keeps us from asking for referrals. Sometimes. This notion that we have to somehow, like, incentivize them or give them something to do that what's actually really valuable that they get from that is being the one to introduce that person to a cool thing that actually is really valuable. And in my mind, value enough. If they believe in what you do and they think you're super helpful and really great, they will be happy to share that stuff because then they are associated with the value that other people pick up from that. Like, that is reason enough. You don't need to give them a discount. You don't need to do all these things you see, like, I don't know, commission programs from software companies and stuff like that. And I have heard from firms that have used that stuff to Good success. I don't know that it's necessary though. So maybe there's a, like a referral commission based program there that makes sense. But know that that absolutely isn't a requirement. If you're really good at what you do, people will happily refer to, refer their friends to you because they want them to have that positive experience as well. Number five, client testimonial campaign. So these can be hard things to ask for on an ongoing basis. Testimonials from people. And it may be easier just to do that once a year. Maybe once you're over filing season, pick out those five or 10 people that had a killer experience this year or who you did an especially good job with or, you know, pulled a rabbit out of the hat. Save them a bunch of money or find some cool thing in their accounting system or something like that. Make a push to gather that information from clients and then build a little testimonial campaign around it. And we're gonna call that Satisfied Sippers Share Sweet Success. Okay, Number six, a tax planning webinar. So more just showing them how to do it coming up on the end of the year is generally the most important time because it is the last time that you can actually in most cases make decisions that will impact that filing season. Brandon Hall's done this to good effect. He runs webinars for prospective clients showing them how to do tax plan planning and giving them like a simplified worksheet and stuff like that. We know how complex this is and how it's like, well, nobody could do this right without my tax software. And you kind of have to get over that. You got to give them a very simplified way to estimate something helpful. But as you know, when it gets down to brass tacks, that's a very hard thing to do. Well, and I'm of the belief that actually the more people understand what we do, the more respect they have for what we do. Because when you don't understand any of it, you don't understand the complexity and you probably undervalue just what that professional is doing for you. So taxpaying webinar that is showing them how to do it or giving them some resources to do it. And we're going to call that the plan and prance and pumpkin profits. Number seven, partnership marketing. And we don't do this stuff enough. So cross promote services with other complimentary people, with audiences. So this is in the social media game. People call this audience hacking. Who are the people that have the eyeballs and the earballs of the people that you want to serve? Are they consultants? Are they podcast hosts? There's a bunch of those people out there. Where are the folks who you want to serve? Congregating already and figure out, how can I provide value to the person that has control over that audience? Generally, these people are creating a bunch of content. And a great place to start is to say, here's this super valuable thing for your audience. I'm happy to let you use it to guest write your newsletter, to go on a podcast and talk about it. And usually those people will happily agree because they're trying to feed the beast. Like, they're trying to keep that content machine running. If you can make that easy for them, man, they're gonna be happy to do that especially. And oftentimes that will be enough. Like, that is enough. And you don't have to complicate it any more than that. But sometimes there's even gonna be, like, a mutually beneficial situation where your clients may actually benefit from the services of what that person does, that consultant or whoever it is. So cross promoting with people like that, I think, is something we don't do enough. As with any time you have a call to action and you're trying to get people to do a thing, think how you can pair that messaging with scarcity, with urgency, so that when you. When people listen to that thing or read that newsletter, it's like, oh, there's three of these slots left. I need to do that thing right now. You gotta give them a reason to act today. Number seven, that was called Blend services for a spiced surprise. Number eight, tax quiz. Could also be an accounting quiz or, like an accounting systems quiz. Start with, like a clickbait sort of question. Something that'll surprise them, something that they'll really want to know the answer to. Something like the most expensive make, most expensive mistake that beekeepers make, or auto repair shops make, or something like that, where they're like, I might know the answer to this, but if I don't, I sure wanna know, like, what the correct answer is to this. Right? That could be with an actual sort of quiz platform, but it can also be as simple as, like, an image slideshow, where the first image is the question and the next image is the answer. That's pretty easy to do on an Instagram post where there's several images. It shows the first one, which could be the question, and then you just click the button to go to the next one, and that's the answer. On LinkedIn, you have carousels, which are basically PDF uploads. And it shows one page at a time. And that'll display similarly to the Instagram post on Twitter. That can be as simple as getting them to, like, unfurl the thread or putting it below the line of the max character cutoff so that you have the question up here. And then they have to click the show more or click the show thread to see the next tweet, which is the answer. That stuff is super optimized for social also because, like, the biggest factor in whether that post will get showed to more people or not is whether people actually engaged with it. And. And having to go to the next image or having to unfurl it, that is an engagement. And that's gonna make it much more likely that other people, that the algorithm will show that post to other people. So that's some sort of quiz. We're gonna call that quiz time. Unveil the spicy secrets. Hey, let me just record this podcast. Not. I can't because my computer's broken. It isn't really broken, but if it was, and I was in an accounting firm, you know who I call Tech Guru. That's right. This episode is sponsored in part by Tech Guru IT for accounting firms. Because you got better stuff to do than fix your broken computer. Now, if you don't have a partner yet for managing this stuff for you, buddy, I don't know what to tell you. You're doing it wrong. And the nice thing about finding a IT group that works specifically with accounting firms is they understand, like, the actual tools that we use. When you show them your tax software, they're not like, what is this absolute poc? I spent myself a lot of money training non accounting firm IT groups on how to understand things like cch, engagement. Whereas if you go to a group like Tech Guru that actually works with accountants, they already understand this stuff. They know to leave UTF alone during busy season. And so, like, the cadence of how they plan and strategize with you is actually catered to your firm. And like the cycles that your firm goes through, check out Tech Guru. Put a link in the show notes because you get better stuff to do. Okay, this episode. Oh, this episode is sponsored in part by contests. You know what? I don't enjoy spinning the old wheel of does this person I just hired know what the hey they're doing? Because I can tell you that more times than not, the answer was no. Because how in the world do you actually figure out if this person can be productive based on, I don't know, a resume based on the firmness of their handshake, you can't. But account tests, it's gonna give you a little more information than you had otherwise. So account tests is a super duper simple way of doing skills testing for the people that you're going to hire. Basically you generate a link, you can run them through these skills tests. It's nothing super sweaty, but you know what it is is information. Information that you wouldn't otherwise have unless you sent them this little quiz. They got tests for accounting stuff, for Gap stuff, for tax stuff. Whatever you're hiring for, they probably got a test for you. Super cost effective because let me tell you, it is a whole heck of a lot cheaper than hiring the wrong person and then training them for months and then realizing I have made a huge mistake and we just wasted months of our time with the wrong person. Boy, do I have a whole closet full of those T shirts. So that's something that keeps you up at night. Check out account tests. We'll put a link in the show notes number nine. Tax filing. Oh I love this one. Tax filing reminder texts. And this is fixating on tax filing. This could be anything. This could be any sort of compliance related thing really. Any sort of date or deadline tax related. Whether it has anything to do with the work that you do or not. Reminder deadlines that are helpful for a very, very specific type of person. So again we are talking about beekeepers, we're talking about NFT holders with like real estate, you know, virtual, real est related NFTs. Like we are going hyper niche here. We want this to be super specific and text reminders, that's so easy to set up on a schedule to go out to a ton of people. And then you know what you do is you include a little helpful link on those reminders as well. To say like hey, if you need help with this, we've got four slots left, opt in right here. And that just smart. It's kind of like that Countdown campaign, the very first one where it's shareable because people want to be helpful to their peers and they'll be like, hey, did you remember that this thing or that thing's coming up? And oftentimes when you have them on that list, you may surface a reminder to them of something that they either forgot or didn't even know was a thing. And then like the value of them being aware of that is associated to you. Right? So you're just being helpful in a way that is shareable and still has a call to action if they need help with that thing. And obviously we're going to call that TikTok time to spice and file number 10 free initial consults. Now, I think generally there needs to be either. I don't know how I feel about paid consults or if like the filtering is actually the problem there. Paid consults are fine. Ultimately, if it's going to be a good client, they're not going to be afraid to pay a few hundred bucks to have an initial call. But where I often see this used is as like the only level of filtering before anybody can book with you, like before they can even find your calendar link or whatever it is, there needs to be a lot of filtering happening there to, to say that, okay, this person has confirmed that they're a beekeeper, that their business is doing over X and revenue, that they have, you know, this specific pain point, like your filtering needs to just do much more before they even get there. And honestly, if my filtering is really good, I probably don't care if they have to pay or not. But like, sure, maybe make them pay. I will say the nice thing about having paid consults is that in a certain window of the year you can do free initial consults. So that's specifically what I liked about the idea of free initial consults is that you can time block it to this month or these three weeks of the year. These are the only time this year or the only time this quarter that we're going to do these consults. Maybe it's the only time you do it free. Maybe it's the only time you do new client consults at all, period. And that creates a massive like, sense of urgency to pull new people in, to get existing people to refer new people. Because that's a window of time where that's the only time that that's going to be possible. We've talked now about, about a number of different things that we can build urgency around. And to me, the ultimate marketing strategy is at any given time you have at least one thing that is urgent. Because throughout the year you have all sorts of different reasons that there ought to be urgency. And as you're planning out this sort of marketing strategy throughout the year, you know, this is what clothing brands and DTC and all these companies do. Like you can legitimately create urgency around, I think pretty much the entire calendar year because there's always different things happening and different things that people need to prioritize. And so we're constantly leaning into this elements, these elements of scarcity and of urgency about why they need to take action Today. And you can totally do that around initial consults, where there is a certain type of consult that maybe you only take during one point in the year, or. Or there's one time in the year when it's free. Maybe it's 500 bucks, but for a few weeks in the fall, it's free for new people. We're going to call that one the Consultant Crave Creamy Cash Returns. Okay, maybe back to the drawing board on that one. And then last number 11 here. Invoice inserts. That. That was kind of interesting. A little thing to go with an invoice inserts is probably. That's probably more referring to like something you stick in with a physical invoice. Maybe you still mail out physical invoices. But what I like there is the notion that that invoice is actually also an advertising surface. So you could build this stuff even into your product descriptions that show up on invoices. What is the thing that you want to upsell a person into who has a specific product? Like, maybe you actually build that visually in there. Maybe that's a link to something. Maybe that's a QR code. But then more generally, just on the invoice itself and the header and the footer, maybe seasonally you're gonna put information there to incentivize people to, you know, go opt into your 1099 service or to doing a, you know, annual tech review, that sort of thing. But I thought that was interesting. On invoices, it's not something that you would normally build marketing into, but it's something that all of your clients have to look at. And I don't know if there's any science to like, at that point in time, they have their wallet out already. I don't know if that makes that a better or a worse time to put something like that in front of them, but I can tell you at that point in time, they're thinking about you and you've got attention. Whereas when it comes to an email, newsletter, social media, or something like that, you're always kind of fighting to get their eyeballs to something when it comes to the invoice, like, they're already there. So that may be an interesting way to get something in front of somebody that maybe they weren't otherwise aware of. We're gonna call that one the insert spice wisdom comma, reap rewards. I'll tell you what ChatGPT does a lot when it's writing copy for you, it'll put, like, colons and commas in it. When I just want one short little brief statement. So the the prompt that I use to generate those mediocre titles and in practice what I would probably do is if I was going to do one of those campaigns, I would have it generate 40 ideas and I would pick and choose the bits that I liked about them the most. Or I would give it one example or ten examples of copy that I really liked. And if you can give it examples like that, then the ones it generates are much more likely to be in line with what you want. But the prompt I used I copied and pasted the list of 11 things I had already come up with or that I had pulled from the list that this other conversation had generated. I said give items 1 through 11 below funny pumpkin spice theme clickbait Header copy based on what the marketing effort is. Keep the copy to six words or less and each should be a spin on a pumpkin spice latte joke. Use alliteration, rhyming and no colons. And it still used colons on about half of them I was on a AICPA webinar this week around how to use AI in your tax practice. And I think the place to oftentimes the place to start with AI is not in domain expertise. Our our minds immediately go to like oh, I just did this really technical thing that is like the most technical thing that you know how to do and that's immediately what you throw at the AI to say can it really do this? Does it really know that when the reality is that's always going to be the last thing that AI can do because these are general tools and for them to then rise to the level of doing super nuanced things that are pushing the limit of what professionals can do. That's not realistic, right? At least not today. Probably the better way to use AI most of the time is in all of the stuff that you're not a domain expert on, right? Because AI from a tax standpoint knows more about tax than a normal person would, right? Doesn't mean it's always right, but it knows more than a normal person would from a marketing standpoint. I'm not a marketing expert. It's going to know more about marketing than than I will. So it's like a helpful assistant there. So if you're a tax pro or an accounting pro, honestly, I think the ways that we use AI, we probably look at it too much through the lens of the really technical hard stuff that we do when where it's probably really helpful and maybe the first place you ought to be using it is in all the stuff that you're not good at at writing, at marketing, at I don't know all these other things that we are not domain experts in yet for whatever reason I think we immediately jump to how do I use this in my area of expertise and it can be helpful for that and it will keep getting better there. But don't forget about all the other stuff too because I do a whole lot of things every day that are not accounting or tax related and sometimes AI is more helpful there because I'm not a domain expert at that thing but it can be an assistant kind of like get me up to a higher level in those things I'm not an expert in. There you go. Hope you got the pumpkin spice coursing through your veins. If you've got any fall marketing initiatives you're doing, would love to hear about them. Feel free to drop something in the comments, share some ideas and I'll see you in the next one.