515 Marketing Pro Explains: How Accounting Firms Can Get Ahead

Buddy, do I have a surprise for you. Today we're talking with Karen Rayburn, who runs arguably the coolest marketing agency out.

There for accounting firms.

They've been doing this for a long.

Time, and every conversation with Karen's like, oh, my gosh, like, I always pull a few nuggets specifically around, like, how.

Do I just get the most out of my time? I'm a. I'm a busy guy. I got stuff to do. I'm not going to sit around playing patty cakes and marketing stuff all day. So just tell me what the most.

Important things to do are.

Karen's agency, the profitable firm, they've been around for a while.

If you haven't heard of them, I.

I almost guarantee you have seen their.

Work because they've helped so many firms with this stuff.

But today we're talking about, like, what's.

The DIY version of marketing where I, like, start small?

What are the things I need to.

Be measuring to ensure that I'm actually working on the right things? But then, like, what does it look.

Like to start to get some help?

And how much of marketing can I actually successfully delegate? Because the notion that I can just hire someone or pull in an agency and spend a bunch of money on.

Ads or something like that, and they actually perform, as many of you know, like, that's.

That is.

That is a mirage.

I've yet to actually see that happen in the wild.

So how involved do I have to be?

Because I got stuff to do.

Man, this was a good conversation.

I think you're gonna like it. Without further ado, who's Karen?

Karen.

Pleasure as always. Thanks for being here.

Yeah, let's ju.

Let's just jump straight into this. We. We talk. We talk a bit of marketing on this podcast. Just through the lens of, like, to be visible, you got to show people that you exist. Otherwise, like, those connections and the serendipity doesn't really happen.

If you were to send someone down.

A DIY path of, like, here are maybe the most important few things that they could do for themselves. Just to be out in the world and people know about what they do, where would you steer them?

Great question, because that is where everyone begins. Everyone begins at the DIY stage. Whether you're just starting your firm, whether your firm's been around for a while, and you're becoming aware that you need to improve your marketing, you are naturally going to start with diy. It's rare, to the point of impossible, that people are going to leap to, hey, I need to spend five grand A month on having help with this because we tend to try stuff ourselves and that's good. And I support that. I've always said I love to see accountants being involved in their own marketing. And when you are at that stage, either because you're beginning or you literally don't have the budget yet, or you don't think you have the budget budget yet, then the first place. There's a couple things I would recommend you start with. One is, and I know we've talked about this before and you have but crystal clear about who your audience is. If you are not clear, they will not be clear. And if it takes them extra brain calories to figure out if they are your kind of person, they will go away. And especially now where people are a little more nervous, they need more information, they are wondering, curious, maybe talking to more people, maybe delaying it. If you say we work with small business owners, nobody's going to be like, I feel so seen. This is incredible. I didn't know there was somebody out there who worked with small business owners. So even if it's just a couple bullet points to say my ideal client, the person that I most want to work with is this kind of person who has this kind of business and has these kinds of problems. Could be an industry, doesn't have to be. Could be a category, geography, gender, et cetera. But usually it's somebody with a particular problem. Maybe they happen to be craft breweries with that problem or creative agencies with that problem and then you can match that to what you serve. So I would start with audience for sure.

What are some cool examples you've seen of that? Because that sounded like a bit of demographics, but also like the problem with like you brought up problem specifically. Are there. What are some of the favorites that you've seen in the wild that you remember?

Yeah, some of them would be the. The thing that the business owner, I'll use that as the example, is the most worried about right now. So maybe it's hiring or staff retention or how am I going to afford these premises, these assets, whatever it be, I want to grow. There is something that they think is the core problem. Now we all know that there could be five or six sub problems underneath that, which is, you know, to do with not knowing what their most profitable product or service is, not having a good culture, whatever those things are underneath, they don't know that. So if you say you need to improve your culture, they'll be like, no, I don't. I just need these people to work harder. That's what I need. So going in with the thing that is weighing on them that they think is the problem, whether it's cash or team or hiring or profitability or making more sales. And I would argue it's the same for accountants. We get accountants that are like, I need more leads. And we're like, do you, though? Like, do you. How many clients do you have? What's your average fee? What's your client churn rate? What's your retention? What's the referral rate from existing clients? And they go, well, a lot more of our clients are leaving and we're not actually getting as many referrals. And we're like, okay, so that could be part of your marketing strategy. So it's the same for the accountant. If you have an industry, it does make it simpler. You can say, are you in craft brewery? And you have this issue with paying for all of your supplies? But if you do not have that, don't get obsessed with it and freaked out about it and be like, well, Jason said I have to, so I guess I'll pick one. And we see people doing that and they just pick one that they have no experience in. And they're like, we serve dentists. I'm like, do you, though? And they're like, no, but I thought it could be really profitable. So pick an industry if you have some experience, but otherwise get to the. And I mean, the core problem that they tell you, because you're going to think that it's profits or cash or cash flow forecasting or something, but. But you're the accountant. You're thinking of from the accountant perspective. So what is it that the last three clients or prospects said? I'm really worried about this, or I'm wondering or I'm really excited about this.

Yeah, I feel like we like to project accounting and tax problems onto a client situation, but a lot of the problems you just rattled off have nothing to do directly with accounting or tax. Like hiring. Like, what business do I have holding myself out to say, like, if you're a $1 to $3 million creative agency struggling to hire or struggling to get out of client work or something like that. Like, what business do I have putting myself in that conversation?

And. And that is why we encourage accountants to consider that in their marketing. Because then it's your job to say, listen, we know your accountants. We are. Or we could be your accountants and we look at the numbers and the, and the profits and the these things. But how much you pay your team and how you retain them and how Effective you are affects your final numbers. And when we're sitting there looking at your profit and loss account every month and your profits are going down because every new hire is costing you twice as much. We're not pretending to be HR people, but there's a direct impact here. So some of it is the natural connection that accountants can have with saying, listen, we know HR people, we know talent recruitment people or whatever it be, but this is impacting your numbers. And if we're analyzing the numbers, then you know what problem to be solving and then you can address the fact that you're like, you think it's a staff problem, but actually you don't. You have seven products, four of which are only profitable. So why are you selling these other three? You fix that, then you can fix your team problem. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I'm real geeked on LinkedIn headlines right now. I think like that's just, it's probably the 10 most important words of copy about someone. If you're doing anything on social media right now, like a thousand times as many people will see that as every see your website. But usually those headlines for accountants are very accounting or tax centric. We help you make sense of our numbers. There's usually some jargon in there that's kind of accountancy jargon, like do we have any business putting something on there that is like I'm helping creative agencies that are blocked on hiring or that have culture issues or like is that, is that a weird roundabout take if ultimately what we identify as is as accountants and it's usually the framing of what we do is more through the lens of the accounting and the tax rather than maybe the advisory, which is more open ended.

It's a really good question and I would argue there's a big, big difference between a personal statement on your own personal LinkedIn profile and a, you know, hero message on your website, which is a different platform. And that's a such a good point. The messages that go on your website, your social media posts, different platforms of social media, your own LinkedIn profile and your emails, they're all going to be different versions on the same thing. So whilst, yeah, it's such a good point, you, you don't, I would argue you don't want to put that on your LinkedIn profile because then people think you're a hir recruitment specialists, staffing.

Yeah, yeah.

And you don't want to confuse them. But what is the core thing that you're fixing for the creative agency owner? So you might say, you know, Accountant for the creative agency owner who isn't as profitable as they'd like to be, who isn't reaching their goals, or who has big goals and doesn't know how to achieve them. And then your content can sprinkle those issues throughout. I literally just had a conversation with a firm today in the UK who asked that same question and they decided to run a webinar on attracting good talent. And I said, I'm very curious how this webinar is going to go compared to your other ones because you're not HR people. And he said, yeah, but a lot of our clients have this issue. So they ran it and they didn't have very many people come. And we said, well, first off, doesn't matter if not very many people come. It matters what they do afterwards. Did they get in touch with you afterwards for accounting? And they said, no, not really. We're like, okay, that's a good learning. Every marketing task you do gives you a good learning, whether it's a fail or not. And we said, maybe the webinars do need to be more on accounting topics, but then you can mention the staff thing within it, or you run a staffing event with a HR person there and then they can see the connection. But we said, you have to address the, why is my accountant talking to me about this thing? And you're saying I'm talking to you about it because it's worrying you, right? That is impacting your numbers, which is impacting your ability to do this work that you want to do and to achieve those goals. So let's look at those goals. But I would still circle back to the issues. Yes, but also the qualities and personality as well of the person. Are you ambitious? Are you, you know, do you own multiple companies? Are you somebody who's experimenting with different things? Are you tech focused? It. You have that combination of the issue and the type of person and of course, industry, if you can wrangle it.

Do you think of someone's personal LinkedIn as. I mean, there's a, there's a version of a headline that is more like a resume and then there's a version of it that is optimized for. Here's the job that I'm trying to do with my personal LinkedIn right now. Those are kind of two different things, right? What do you mean? Like you said, you said, maybe I run multiple companies. Like, do you think, do you think of that headline as more like this reflection of my identity or I have these specific goals for my personal LinkedIn, right? Now and the headline is going to be tailored to that end.

I was going to say, I think, as with all marketing, your LinkedIn header, your website message, your email core messages need to change with what you are focused on at the time and it's good for it to change. If somebody's LinkedIn profile has the exact same wording that was there five years ago, 10 years ago, the subtle message to people is, this person hasn't changed. They're the exact same person they were 10 years ago. Probably not true, but that doesn't inspire like, wow, I'm seeing that person grow and change and become better at what they do and more focused. The other thing to be aware of is little, you know, seasons of things that you focus on. You see that? I was talking to one of our strategists at PF about people like Daniel Priestley, who does bursts of things towards a particular focus. You know, we're going to talk about scorecards for everywhere. Everywhere you go, it's going to be about scorecards and then for a couple months it's key person of influence. And everywhere you notice, you notice key person of influence. The fact is, people like that, with many, many strings to their marketing bow, are picking different areas of focus for what they want to promote. So when I think of Daniel Priestley, I think of key person of influence because that's something I'm working on. So I notice it and it becomes very subtle. It's not like every call to action is the same. It's not like you go to his website and you go to his LinkedIn, you go to his social and the words are the same, but the gist that you get is the same for a period of time because they want you to get that gist. So I believe that accountants could do the same and you could adjust your LinkedIn profile. We have a couple of clients doing this right now with a scorecard, speaking of scorecards. And they use a scorecard app and they have a scorecard for the business owner, maybe the hospitality business owner or the creative agency owner, and they promote that on their own LinkedIn as the call to action because they help hospitality business owners. And oh, by the way, here's a hospitality scorecard and then it goes to the webs. That's not the only thing they do. They're not the hospitality experts for all ever in time immemorial, but it's for that time and then you can tweak it.

Yeah, there's a certain seasonality to people's problems too. That's something in my business we're actually trying to be more mindful of right now is those themes like, and accounting firms obviously are very cyclical, but there's times of the year where they're uber focused on a specific problem. But then three months later, it could be a completely different sort of problem. And we're talking more about that. Like, it's clear down to my LinkedIn headline. Like, people are going to get past the October 15th deadline and spend about a month scrambling to get their tech lined up. It's like, do we. Do we just, like, change all of the messaging then around? Like, I'm going to help you do this in the next 30 days. And then after that it's about renewal season and getting all of your clients to re up. We got a lot of content around that. Like, do we then just kind of swing things toward that aspect? That's kind of top of mind.

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We riff on this with my team oftentimes and it's, it's one of those things that you know is a bad idea but we still like imagining doing it at some point. Do you ever think about launching an accounting firm?

Do I ever think of launching a. Yeah, I have thought before that if I had one it would help immensely because if I'm talking to accountants and saying I too am going through this and I was actually thinking the other day about some of the apps that I have seen be the most successful and they are people who either own or are part of an accounting firm. And then they can get in. Here's the other thing. They can get into all the accounting industry things. You know, like your community is just accountants. Right. It's not people selling to accountants.

Yep. Yeah.

So this person is legit an accountant. And they also sell their app. You're not going to chuck them out because they're legitimately an accountant. And I'm like, that is actually, it's first clever. But secondly, it makes sense because I know multiple of these people and when they say, I know how you feel, last month in my firm, this happened and the person's like, oh, my God, me too. I feel seen, I feel heard. So I do think that the benefit of that is that direct connection, which is back to what we were saying about marketing and the audience. You're trying to help the audience go, oh my God, I thought it was just me. I thought I was the only one dealing with this. And I relate to you. It's what comedians do. You know, they tell us something and we go, oh, I thought I was the only one who had a drawer like that. Everyone has a drawer like that with old mobiles and batteries and, you know, take away menus, like everyone does. And I thought it was the only one, which is what makes it funny. So, yeah, I think it's a, it's a, it's a clever approach.

So to pull on the string more, if you did this, what would that. What, How. What would that elevator pitch be? Who would you serve? What would their problem be? Like, what's something that's kind of associated with Karen and her background? Maybe it's creative agencies. Like, what. What do you think you would build that firm around? And how. I'm trying to get to, like, what is a great example of positioning and if anybody ought to be able to position accounting for Karen. Right. So, like, what's an example of this done?

Well, well, yeah, that's such a good question, I think. I mean, I would hesitate to use my experience as running an accounting firm, because I haven't. But I have worked in an accountancy firm myself and, and run the marketing for them and, and then all of the accountants that we're working with. But I would circle back to, if I was going to start one, I would think about who am I best placed to connect with in the best possible way. It could be creatives, creative agency owners, people in that, that sort of industry. And I love talking to those people because then we have so much of an affinity. And again, I can say, well, I run a marketing agency, and in my agency this happens. And I do see accountants doing that a lot, you know, talking to their clients as business owners. So whoever it is, it needs to be people that you have an affinity with and a connection with and some experience of helping. So that's actually why I created pf because I'm like, I am a cpa. I have worked as an auditor. Then I worked as in an accountancy firm doing accounting and auditing. Then I became their marketing manager. Then I set up a consultancy firm for them, and then I started serving lots of accountants. So I love accountants and I understand how they think, but I don't have a current accountancy firm. But, you know, I'll just. I'll just create one. Jason, as soon as this podcast done, just go and create one. How hard could it be?

You know, how hard could it be? Okay, so creative agencies, how would we drill into that further? How would you, like, qualify that and what are the problems you think you would sort of talk about to attract the right sort of fit for?

Yeah, so I think it is helpful to have an idea of the size of the business that you're working with. Do you work with startups? Do you work with established agencies? Do you work with people who are becoming, you know, they're transitioning from. We worked with an accountancy firm who had four levels of creatives. You had the solo person just doing it for themselves. Then you had the transitional period of the solo person becoming a small agency, one to four people. Then you had the five to 12 people, and then you had the established one million plus. And what he discovered, which I'm sure I would too, if I was going this route, is that of those four, there's one that you're the best at. And so if we were establishing this imaginary accountancy firm and we're going to serve creative agencies, I think it is healthy to start with multiple categories so that you can drill down because you want to start a little bigger at first if you can. If you start super, super tiny, your. Your pool is tiny. And then you might discover, God, I am really good at serving these solo ones, but I don't enjoy it and it's not profitable. And then you have to sort of start over and go, oh, you know how our minimum fee was like 495, it's now 2,500. And they're all going, what? I thought you served small. So then the brand awareness is confusing. So start a little broader and allow yourself room to get more and more specific and figure out who you like, who's profitable and who you can get results for.

Okay, so to bring this full circle, starting with the DIY version, first things first, figure out who you're talking to. More like action oriented. Where do you show up? Like, where would you recommend that they be engaging? Obviously they are busy and that's always the enemy of thinking about these things and doing these things. So what do you think are the highest impact? Couple things they could do, and that.

Is a tough one because it depends on the audience. So that's why we start there. If you are serving creative agencies who tend to physically get together and go to creative agency events, then you need to be there. You need to be going to agency networking events, if you can, or speaking to agency owner or connecting with people who then connect you with agency owners, like making those connections. And this is where I think a hybrid of in person and online is going to do you good, especially at the DIY level. Because we all know that in the early days you get the fastest signups and new clients from physically meeting somebody at an event, at a networking, a referral from somebody who knows you personally and they say to their friend, so do that combined with a presence in the place where those people are. So if all of those people are on LinkedIn, you blast the heck out of LinkedIn. If they're on Instagram and TikTok, you better figure that out and get on there. And one of the dangers, like you said, there's so many and you're so busy, you're thinking, I got to be on LinkedIn, I got to be on Instagram, I got to be on Facebook, I got to be on TikTok, I got to be on YouTube, I need to have a whole YouTube plan. And that means I need to be recording videos every day. I'll do a podcast and I will also run an event. And then you're starting to overwhelm both yourself and them. So pick the things that are possible. Pick one social media platform that you, that they hang out at and you can get good at. And then if that gets good and you want to cross post to another one, you can begin doing that. And don't neglect the actual in person things, whether it's an online event or an in person event or a networking or an exhibition or a conference or something that physically puts you in front of these people. Because if your buyer's a little bit nervous, they're going to be reassured by having met you in person.

Okay, one more Question before getting into how would I begin to get help with this? What should we be measuring? Because yes, great. There's definitely this allure of tracking like chasing vanity metrics and this is oftentimes the fear of going specific. But you said something earlier. You said even if you run an itty bitty webinar, what matters is what people do next. So where should we be measuring that?

Is that click throughs from social.

Is that just new clients? Like what? How do we approach that?

That is such a great question. We' becoming much more obsessed at PF with analytics of the kind that each firm needs. So it's always different. If you're at the DIY level, I would start with knowing what is the overarching analytics. The numbers, the data that you are shooting for. Do you genuinely need more clients or do you not actually need that many more? You need a higher value per. So instead of 10 more clients at 500, you need two clients. Spending four grand or whatever it be to make that math does not work out. But you know what I mean, it's figuring out what that high number is. We call it a headline goal, you can call it a top line goal, but it's the thing that all of your marketing is driving towards. So it doesn't matter what your website views are. If your average client fee is going down and down and down and you're going, something's not right here. So how do we fix all these other things? Because this headline goal is or isn't being reached. So you got to know that. And then the things you track lead you to that. So say for let's use the average client fee as an example. A lot of our clients want to and could do this. Their average client fee is £800 or dollars a month and they want it to be 1500 or 2500, that's a big jump. We work with a firm who has a very specific number of clients spending at least 1,000amonth. And right now they have 12. And then they have this big number that they want to get to, but they will get to it because you know once you start tracking it, you get obsessed with it. So if they need to increase that average fee, the things they need to track are what is the average fee, where is it coming from? What size of clients are these? How long are people staying with us? And then on things like the website probably be tracking views and bounce rate and engagement on the pages that have to do with the people inquiring, the pricing page, the contact page, the asset Lead generation page. Like they have a page with a questionnaire on it. How many people are filling in the questionnaire? And the broad view is, what is the progression that people are going through? They are progressing from coming to your social, then going to your site, then going to your questionnaire, then booking a call, then getting a proposal. So you track every step of your progression. And it might. I know I'm throwing around a lot of numbers, but it might only be five numbers. Your average client fee, your website visits, the number of people who to a page, number of people who fill in the questionnaire, number of calls and number of proposals and maybe conversion rate and that's it. And then you can add more as you have time and energy and help to add more. But if you obsess over the analytics, right down to the bounce rate on a page that nobody's even going to, how is that helping you? When actually you could just send six emails to existing clients saying, I know you do your own bookkeeping. Did you know that we could do that for you for this? And here's a quick video of some things I noticed in your bookkeeping that wasn't quite right. That could get you further. But we do. Well, I'm saying we because I do this too. It's more fun to design a new website page and create a new social media account than it is to pick up the phone and ring a client or email them or, you know, face rejection because you're like, yeah, but if I send out this email to 3,000 people, which takes me four days to craft and put together and figure out my CRMs, oh, I need a CRM system. And then you finally send your email and you're like, no, nobody's signing up. I did all that work for nothing. Where you could have emailed three people or texted them and they'd be like, no, that's not really what I need.

Yeah, no, I feel like you're personally attacking me right now. It like there's. That's a great thing about social media. People talk about this with DMs and social media strategy as well, where it's like you put all this effort into stuff that everybody can see and you've got people on the threshold and you're like, you know, if you just responded to that DM or just that dm, like, you know, ask them, like, do you want to hop on a call and riff on this thing you were just talking about? Like, that's actually how you get people over the line.

Yeah. And that is that is the hard one. Because I believe a lot of times what we're trying to do is push the marketing away from us or the sales. And we're like, oh, if I spend ages of time on this beautiful webpage and, you know, crafting these design of these images, I can push away the hard work of going, hey, is there anything about this offer that does not land, you know, which side? Note, that is a great opportunity with something like ChatGPT. Use your AI tools. Can you act as a creative agency owner making at least a million who's struggling with this, this and this? Here's the offer. Can you tell me all the reasons that would not suit you right now? And there isn't. I mean, I would still recommend asking real humans as well, but it can gather in the aggregate and be like, well, I might be wondering this. You haven't mentioned pricing. You've been super vague. I'm worried it's going to cost too much. I don't trust you. I don't know you. And if you get it to rip some holes in it, then you can fix those and then your offer can be a little better. But I'm a big fan of minimum viable. You know, here's, here's an idea, here's a thing, and see who picks up on it.

There's, there's so much to what you said too, about the fear around sales. Like, there's like, marketing is hard for accountants to make time for, but sales is almost on a whole nother level where there's this element of discomfort as opposed to marketing, which can sometimes feel like a little bit more of like a creative escape and you're using a different part of the brain. But it comes down to sales, which is like where the rubber meets the road and you're facing rejection and you're worried about your reputation and marketing can like, get them to the door, but it's, it's sales that ultimately is going to like, close that new client at a price that you want and all that. And it's, it's. I honestly think that it actually keeps people from, from doing more marketing because there is this sort of looming fear of just.

I do have a lot of accountants that are like, actually, you get them in the door and I'm good. You know, the door, the I can call door, whatever. Like, if I can get a call with them, I can help them understand how we can help them. I can listen, I can do this. And I'm always thinking, but why isn't your marketing doing that for you? Your marketing, your videos, your posts, your website pages, your pricing. It's supposed to be doing so much of that so that by the time they come, there's not much convincing to do so. I wonder too, I think some of what you've said is relevant for some people who don't enjoy the sales, but I think there's people who do enjoy the sales part, but they enjoy the hunt of it. Like, oh, I have to have a 45 minute call, then a 30 minute call, then an hour and a half proposal when. What if your marketing was so addressing their needs and issues that you had a 15 minute call and they signed for two grand a month? That's actually really good marketing. And you're going, I don't know what to do with that because I'm supposed to talk to them for an hour and a half and say the same things that I said to every other person for the last 15 years of my life.

This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing.

Here's the thing about client billing.

You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't. You can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide, you don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money.

That's not what I did. I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them. And so I would just, I just eat it. Don't do that.

This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accountants and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our air, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to build all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com. i'll put a link in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Mercury. Mercury is the FinTech that over 200,000.

Companies now trust for banking and running Their finances.

I'm a happy user myself. Long before they sponsor this podcast, my money has been with Mercury because it's just like, man, traditional banks, they don't really seem to be going anywhere or getting any better. And you know all too well that struggle, in fact, and it's dumb to even say out loud, but the greatest upside of your clients using better banking solutions might just be access. Not having to do two factor authentication Olympics, not having to have clients like Forward UK codes. You know, the codes they get over text, the text that say, never share this code with anyone. And then the process that we communicate to our clients is, hey, when you get this, send this to me. The just the janky things we got to do to get access to things.

Because traditional banks, they don't let you.

Handle like micro user stuff. Did I say micro user, multi user stuff, Granular permissions for the different people in your team. And even in the scenario where a client does give you your own login, then your entire team team is like sharing your login buddy. There's like so many problems with that and so much risk in that where if you're just a little more opinionated and we're like, hey, hey, just so you know, all this fuss and headache around like getting access to this thing, there's a better way that we recommend.

Come over here and check out Mercury.

Sometimes we're like apologetic about what a pain it is to do this banking stuff. Stop apologizing, say client, go use this better alternative. There's a solution to this and it is your fault that you're not on the right platform. I'd encourage you to give Mercury a look. It is, it's genuinely really good. More information about Mercury down in the.

Show notes, we talk diy. How does somebody begin to get some help with this? Because there's definitely folks that don't even want to touch diy. They just want to abdicate the whole thing and that doesn't really work. But for this person that's dabbling in it and at least thinking about these things and putting a bit of effort into it, what does it look like to step into getting some sort of help?

Yes, great question. So the first thing is to understand where your gaps are. And that is hard to do on your own because you need some objective help. For somebody to look at the numbers with you, the marketing numbers, and take what's in your head, like your gut feel, your understanding of where your client's at. Equally as valuable is that raw data from your website. So I think Getting a, we call it a preliminary marketing analysis, but it's just looking at your core numbers. What are your website numbers, what are your social numbers, what are your email numbers? And that identifies the gaps. That's the first place to start. Because when you know what the gaps are, then you know what marketing you need help with. So we get people that go, I need a new website. And where our question always is, do you? I mean maybe you do, but what is your goals? What is it you want to achieve? What's your website doing right now? Do you have a website? How is it performing? What are the pages, who's visiting, who's not? What assets do you have? We might look at all that and go, actually a couple little tweaks to your existing site is going to get you further. And yes, it could look a lot more beautiful, but again, we could spend six months creating the world's most beautiful website. And then you have the same problem. You basically just dressed up and fancied up your old website with a new jacket and it's still not delivering. So we got to figure out what's not delivering and then what you need to do. So get some kind of a gap analysis first to figure out where those gaps are. Then fill your biggest gaps fast. So you might have a gap in your brand because even though you say you work with small businesses, your website talks about these big charities and nonprofits and large companies and audits and the small business owner is like, well obviously it's not for me. So then they don't get in touch. So that's a gap that is preventing you achieving if you want more small business clients. So you figure out what those gaps are, fill the bigger ones first and then you can be doing the consistent stuff which you might need some help with. You can do some, you could have an intern do some, you can have an agency do some consistent work for you. But it's very important that you do it along what those gaps are.

Is this a risk of just running out and hiring a web designer? Like you're almost self diagnosing and just saying this is what I need. Just go do this.

I mean imagine if your client did that to you. Your client says, listen, I don't need bookkeeping, I don't need help with payroll, that's fine. My mother in law does that for me. She's great. And you're going, I bet, I bet that is fantastic. So a lot of accountants I know do that sort of thing. You do that thing yourself. As an accountant, you're like, let's do an analysis of your bookkeeping. Let's see where your bookkeeping's at. If it's awesome, great. We can get to the advisory part. But if you're not willing to do that yourself, then you are saying, I know I need a new website because a website will bring me clients. And I can tell you right now, if you get a half decent website designer and developer to make it look nicer, that isn't going to magically bring you more clients, even if you adjust the wording a bit. So it might be that just fixing some of the messaging and a better call to action and a bigger button and one lead magnet could solve all of what you're hoping to do with your big website project. But again, you're so tempted because a website project is kind of fun, you know? Yeah, like people are going to be asking me for stuff. We'll do a photo shoot, maybe I'll come up with some clever ideas for landing pages. My website developer will say, what pages do you want? And I will, I, the accountant will decide. And I'm like, that's not how it works. Like, you need to figure out what pages your buyers want and then give those. And maybe you need to spend three days recording videos about your pricing, your approach, your team, your process, the issues so that that can be used on your website.

Yeah. Okay. So full to the end of the spectrum. I know, I know your agency does. I think you call it fractional cmo, like Chief Marketing Officer. And that framing might be. It might sound. What's the right way to put this? I mean, that might sound like if I'm thinking of hiring a cmo, what I'm going to say is, this is your job now and so glad you're here so that I can go do something else. Like how much can you write? How much can you actually push to another team versus what you have to stay engaged in yourself?

Really great question. I would argue, you know those three levels. Diy, do it yourself. Done with you and done for you. I would argue that true done for you does not exist for marketing if you want to get the good results and have your marketing represent you authentically. Because the concept of done for you is an abdication. It's hand it off now, I will go and serve my clients. Whereas true marketing is meant to say what clients? And what are they talking about? What are they worried about? This month, you know, I've worked with a firm who runs a group for their ideal client. You know, one of these everybody Gets together and talks about what's bothering them that month and that's all it is. They just talk about it and throw ideas around and encourage each other. That's like a month's worth, six months worth of marketing content because they're hearing from their ideal client. This is what we're worried about this month. So you can turn that into content. So any support you get, outsourced CMO support, you know, even, even hiring an intern or people per hour, any of that kind of stuff has to be done with you to some level. It's just what level of done with you is there? And that is where in the early days it's going to be heavier, you're going to need to do more, you're going to need to share more. Here's our clients, here's their issues. In the sort of middle days, you can pull back a little bit and say, now that we've got that strategy set, things can tick over and I can focus on recording the videos, showing up at the events, doing the speaking, you know, things that come best from your mind. And then you could get to the point where the whole team is doing that. So you're needing to do less because you're not the only one doing it. Those would be the stages, but you still need to be involved.

I talked to so many people who are like, I spent so many tens of thousands of dollars with an agency on paid acquisition and these ads just aren't going anywhere. And I'm like, man, they're going to keep taking your money as long as you say you got a budget for it.

That's. And, and this is. We see that all the time too. We see people who are like, do you know it's a self diagnosis. Do you know what we need to do ads? And I'm like, maybe. How good are your website pages? What are the bounce rates? What are people landing on? What are they clicking? How long does it take them to go? And they're like, I don't know, I don't think very many people go to our website. I'm like, well then your ad is going to be a complete bust because your ad sends them somewhere. Where is it sending them? What is the progression? And if you don't know the progression from I've never heard of you, I've vaguely heard of you. This sounds interesting. I will take a free thing, I will pay for a small thing, I will book a call. That could take somebody two years. So you have to know that process and have something for them at Every stage. And we're back to the temptation that we will hire a marketing agency or person and in two months time we'll have more leads than we know what to do with. And that is unrealistic.

Sounds good.

It sounds great though, Ken.

And if anyone out there has done that, please tell me and I will happily put it into practice. But 13 years of serving accountants and marketing and I haven't found that one. Actually, I will say though, the one thing that turns around the fastest is talking to your existing clients.

Karen, it is always a pleasure does here kicking off like a, like a series on this stuff, like a workshop sort of thing for firms.

Yeah. So we do a series eight week. It's a coaching group. So for people, whether you're diying it or you're thinking of getting some help with it, or you already have a marketing person, this is eight weeks of accountability and keeping you directed in the right way for your marketing. So I started it about 10 years ago to help train accountants into. Here's what you need to know about marketing and the positive side. I've seen a lot of accountants being involved in their own marketing and they are. You are doing it. They're using ChatGPT, they're creating emails, they're writing posts. But it is a bit haphazard. So this eight weeks is. Let's just remind you of what's important, in what order? What is your audience exactly? Okay, good. All right. And what are their issues? And what is your core asset? Do you have one? You don't have one. Okay. You need to create that one. So it's a group and there's 10 to 30 people in it. So a small enough group that you will be heard. And it's very interactive and we spend a little bit of time saying this is why audience is important. But most of the time saying, Jason, what's your audience? Well, this is mine. And everybody learns from each other. And then you put it into practice because my philosophy is all of the accountants listening. You're already doing marketing. You are, you're doing some kind. So wouldn't it be helpful for an hour a week to make sure that you're focusing your marketing in an area that's going to get you more of what you want? Plus be reminded that you are not the only one who's like, I'm not sure why this isn't working or I don't know what to do. And as a bonus, we will review any content you create. You write a LinkedIn post, you send it to us me and my team will go. This could be better, actually. This is amazing. Change that a little bit. This is vague. Here's how to improve your website page, and that alone, when people use it, is very, very powerful.

Very cool. Okay, well, we'll have that down in the show notes. We'll also share at Karen's website, Karen's agency, all that stuff, how to find Karen. And thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for helping accountants with their marketing in all different kinds of ways, because it connects with their systems, their AI, their tech, their people. So it's. It's an integral part of it. Appreciate what you help them with.

Cool.

Thank you, Karen. Thanks, Jason. Bye.