Choosing The Right Time To Market Your Firm

All right.

Hey, welcome to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Podcast where we talk about marketing for accounting firms, obviously. My name is Matt Banker, and today I'm very excited. I have Geraldine Carter on the show, and we're going to talk about when is the right time for accounting firms to do marketing and when should you hold off or when do you need to not spend and invest in marketing yet? Because there's other stuff you got to figure out. So, Geraldine, why don't give. Give us kind of an introduction. Who are you? What do you do for accounting firms? I know you're not a marketing expert yourself, but you work with a lot of accounting firms, so I think you know a lot about their experience with marketing and marketing agencies.

Yeah. So I work with CPAs, and I help them get down to 40 hours. As listeners know, there are a lot of them who are overworked and kind of feeling like they're on a hamster wheel that they don't know how to get off of. And I help them get off that hamster wheel primarily by focusing on their ideal buyer and figuring out who they want to work with so they're not running all over the place. And then we figure out what those buyers need and what they want to buy, and. And then we figure out how to message and package up and offer to those buyers what they want to buy. And that makes business. You do those things all in the right order, and it makes running your business so much easier. And then we can disengage so much of the extra work that is necessary, and we bring the value up and bring the prices up. So most of my clients are in the sort of mid six figures, very early seven figures, just because we like to make change quickly. And with those kinds of clients in those spaces, it's pretty easy to make rapid change. I'm neither. I should say, I'm neither a cpa, never wanted to be one, never will be one, nor am I a marketer. But I've come into those spaces through a variety of other paths and sort of picked up, understand enough of what I need to know to be able to make a meaningful difference.

Yeah, well, you and me both. I also, I don't have an accounting background, and I found myself in this. In this niche. We're talking at the end of April, so this is a time of year, I would guess, where a lot of accountants are thinking about that. 40 hours sounds pretty nice based on just coming through tax season. So they probably feel that right now, when you have worked with clients before, what Are some of the mistakes or complaints, pain points that you have found with your clients when it comes to marketing, how have you seen that as kind of the outside. You're not the marketer, you're the third person, the, the outside consultant person here who's hearing about it, Right?

Yep. So they don't tend to complain so much about marketing. It's more like they seem to believe that throwing money down a marketing hole is just an evil necessity and that that's what marketing is. They're either, you know, they're either spending money on marketing to the tune of four figures a month, and they know they should be doing it, and they see that it's not working and they don't know what to do about it, but they don't know how to fix it. And they don't know why it's not working. But they still seem, some of them, like, we know that marketing, when done well, works. So they, they know that they ought to be doing it, but it's not working and they don't know how to fix it. And some of the, But I think more often what we'll see in terms of symptoms of your marketing not working, what I see on LinkedIn is, which is mostly where I hang out, is that, you know, posts are not getting traction. They're being seen by, you know, relatively few people. They're not getting, they're getting likes, but not comments, no engagement or if they are getting comments, you're getting comments from other CPAs, not your target buyer. And I think the tendency, when people go on, you know, social media and talk about, try and promote their businesses, they talk about tax and they talk about accounting and they try and train their buyers on accounting. That's the last thing their buyers want. Because if their buyers wanted to learn about accounting, they would have become accountants. They would have become accountants. But they, in the absence of knowing who you're talking to, what else are you going to talk about? So you can talk about the thing that you know, which is tax or accounting. So that's, I think, how it, that's how I see it playing out for our buyers.

Yeah, you know, I can even from my own experience, and maybe you found this as well. I am a marketer, and so when I first got on LinkedIn, all the people I was connecting to were other marketers. And the thing that I'm thinking about every day is marketing. And so when I post about, I have other, other folks in my circle who are interested in it. One of the analogies or the, the Frames that I like to use is if you're, if you're a wedding photographer, you need to be talking about weddings, not photography, because that's the thing that your client base is really interested in now. Your service supports that thing that they care about and so there's an opportunity to sell. But when it comes to generally you want to be talking about business or you know, whatever it is that if you're. I work with a lot of firms that primarily serve, they're doing monthly business accounting. So you want to talk about business, not accounting because your clients want to hire someone to think about accounting for them. They don't want to learn it themselves as much. The other piece of it is you need to really actually know who your audience is. Because if you just start posting on LinkedIn, you're going to get other accountants, more or less, you're going to get your, your immediate circle of people. You're not going to get the audience that you actually want. But knowing who that audience is is pretty tough. And I know that's a lot of what you. Not, not tough. But it's not work that a lot of firms have done to know who they're talking to. Can you unpack a little bit your approach to niching or kind of your perspective on that? Who needs to be doing it? When do they need to be doing it? What does that process look like?

Yeah, so, so before I even answer that, I'll go a step upstream just to explain how accountants got here. Cause I think understanding how they got to where they are might help them or might help some of them. And part of this is because of hourly billing. And when you're billing by the hour, it doesn't matter what you do and who you do it for. The money is the same. So historically, because the industry billed by the hour, there was very little incentive to choose a target market. Coupled with the fact that historically it's been geographically based. You worked with people within a 30 mile radius of your zip code and people needed accounting. Businesses have always needed accounting. So that was what was sold. But times have changed and there's also been increasing clarity that billing by the hour is a ridiculous way to price what you do because just because of the amount of money that you leave all over the table. And so if you take those two things, billing by the hour, coupled with now, especially since COVID getting up onto the Internet, it's become so much easier to focus on a target market, on an ideal buyer. But part of the thinking that we need to get past when we narrow down who we work with is that it's going to limit revenue, right? Because we think I'm going to limit the number of people I can work with, therefore I'm going to limit revenue. But nothing could be further from the truth. Because when you focus on your ideal buyer and you work with the same kinds of people, you instead of having expertise that is a mile wide but an inch deep, you have expertise that goes a mile deep. And that expertise is much more valuable. And when you learn how to price for the expertise and the value that expertise creates, then your prices can follow in, can follow right along. So that's what makes narrowing, focusing on a target buyer, an ideal buyer, a target market worthwhile. It makes your marketing easier and more clear. It makes your sales conversation so much more clear, it lifts your prices and it makes your delivery so much easier because you can deliver consistent high value results. So to your question, how do I help CPAs do this? Right. First you have to make the case for why, right? Because if they don't see the value in why, they're not going to do it. But the value in why is that you make a heck of a lot more money and you don't have to work as hard for the money that you make. So then the question becomes how? And with my clients, I take them through a very simple process which is focusing at the top 40% of their current client roster and finding out who it is that they enjoy working with, what kind of work they want to be doing, and what kind of business do they want to build. The going model, the tendency or at least the sort of like the big energy, the voices in the accounting space, at least as I see them, tend to be around big, big, big scale, scale, scale, grow, grow, grow. But not everybody wants that are plenty content to take home 2, 3, 4, $500,000 a year and just work a 30 hour work week and be good. So when we start with what people actually want compared to what they think that they're supposed to want, then we start building the firm that they want to have and fill it with the clients that they love working with, doing the kind of work that lights them up. So it's really talking, it's really finding out, like letting the accountant have to actually explore that. And when we do, the answer is usually right there at the top. It's usually like, I love working with X, you know, the professional service providers, maybe it's the construction people, maybe they love working with physicians, maybe they love working with farmers, maybe they love stock Option planning. They know it's just that they haven't had time and space to let it surface. So when we have those conversations, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly.

Well, there's a real fear. Right. I found. And this happens in the marketing world too. But with accountants, anyone who is in a business, they have the option to niche. The fear is, well, I'm just leaving money. Well, there's two fears. I'm leaving money on the table. Why would I say no when there's someone in front of me who's willing to give me money even though they're not an ideal client? And then the other piece of it that I think a lot of firms struggle with is like, well, my current roster is really diverse. What are my current clients going to think if I choose a niche? What's your advice? Maybe more to that second group.

My current client roster is diverse. What am I current clients gonna think? Yeah. So it's a great question. Number one, your current clients don't look at your website.

Yep.

So don't worry about it.

That's what I tell them to.

But we still need to assuage the fear. So here's the script that I give my clients. And listen, you say to them something like, hey, I want you to know that the direction that we're going with our accounting firm is this. We're going to be working increasingly with more construction companies in the three to $10 million range. And you're a great client, we love working with you. We're happy to continue working with you. You'll see, you may notice from the outside looking in that we're looking to work with more construction companies. And we're still committed to serving our existing clients and delivering the great high quality level of service that you expect. There may come a time in the next one, two, three years, you decide whatever, that we begin to phase out clients who are no longer serving our niche. But I will not. That will never come as a surprise to you. And we will help you make, if that time comes, we'll help you find another great person and help you make that transition to another person who might in fact be a better fit for you. Right. So when you know that, that you can have that conversation and that you're not pushing your existing clients out the door and they're not looking at your website anyways, that makes it way easier. And the transition from all over the map clients to fully niche is typically a, you know, if you have a full client roster, that can be a two to three year transition.

Marketing is expensive. I know this because I sell marketing services. I also know this because a lot of my clients have come to me and hired me after they've been spending four or even five figures a month with a marketing agency for a long time, and they're just not really seeing the results that they want. And one of my. One of the things I often see is common between the ones who feel like they're wasting money is that they don't have clarity about who they're trying to reach. And so they're spending marketing dollars in a very broad way, and it's not really impacting any. Any of their individual prospects. And so it's just like it's floating out into the ether and disappearing. Larger firms now, the ones who can afford four or five figures a month on marketing, I think they especially struggle with switching or pivoting to have a niche. And what I've found is that a smaller firm, it's much easier to go all in and say, hey, this is who we're going to serve. Now you can kind of turn that ship a little quicker. The larger ones, it's more of a struggle. One of the things I've recommended to them is you don't have to. You don't have to fully choose a niche at first, but you do want to start developing specialties in a few areas. So that. Because I'm coming at this from a marketing standpoint, I know the best way to spend your marketing dollars is in a narrow target market. You know, you want to find people whose job titles and industries you can identify on LinkedIn. You could go to a conference for people who have this same, you know, that are in this industry. You could even. I don't really recommend buying email lists, but if you could buy an email list, that's a good indication of this being a reasonable niche from a marketing perspective.

Yeah.

And you don't. You don't want it to be too big either. You want it to be, I think, from. From the marketing side of things, you know, I've heard numbers somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000 prospects is a good niche. And you also actually want there to be some competition in there, too. You don't want to. You don't want to find yourself in a niche where nobody else is doing it, because if no one else is doing it, it's possible someone's already figured out there's no money to be made there. Right. So for a big firm, I say specialize. And for a small firm, though, I think you have more opportunity and it's often easier. I mean it's easier to do it, but it's also, it makes your life easier over time when you do choose a fairly narrow and really position yourself in a clear niche. But if you haven't done that, generally my experience is that your marketing dollars don't go nearly as far if you don't have a narrow audience. So one piece of advice and tell me, I think that we're on the same page here is if you don't know who your customers are, you're probably a little early to be spending much money on marketing. Yeah, right.

Yes, 100%.

I mean we could spend your money. There's ways, easy ways to spend the money.

Yes, that is the problem. I mean this is what we were talking about in the green room. Is that for. Because niching is scary, because it feels limiting. There are a lot of business owners and accountants included who don't want to narrow, but they know they need business and so they spend money on marketing and the money goes down the drain. It gets no tractions or comments or whatever, no engagement. And what they don't know as the spender on the marketing is have they not given their marketing enough time to take hold or are they too general and they don't know how to tell the difference? So there's, I mean there's a lot to say in here. The sure is, there's. Yeah. And I do, I work with people who have been spending money on marketing that isn't grabbing and it's to me it's imminently clear why not? And I think the best way to know the difference of have you spent enough time waiting for your marketing to take hold or not is really who is commenting on it. And if you're getting people from your own industry commenting on your marketing, that's a telltale sign. The other thing I would say is actually you can know if you're, you can know if your marketing is specific enough because if you, if your client roster comprises 16 different industries or even 4 industries or even 2 industries, it's going to be very likely that your marketing is too broad and not speaking to anybody. And the reason that I say that is because when buyers out there, when your people, what your people will respond to is an under is expertise that goes beyond what they can find on Google and what they and those things are if you're just, if you're in construction, for example, Talking about operational KPIs and markup versus margin and how to know if your projects are going off the rails and what to do about it. If your niche is restaurants and bars, you're not going to talk about markup and margin. You're going to be talking about having a million transactions and your clients, your bartenders who overpour and over serve and you know, take 100 bucks out of the till before it goes to the bank and how to prevent those problems. And if your niche is stock option planning, then you're going to be talking about how to know when to sell, when to hold, when to buy, and those kinds of things. So you can gauge whether your marketing is too specific by simply knowing who you're talking to and about the pain points that they have. And if you can't drop down and give me 20 pain points about your specific niche, then it's time to get more narrow.

There are a limited. Now let me see how I want to frame this. I, I understand most, most accounting firms that I work with are generalists. I and, and they have to figure out a way to market themselves to a certain degree. There are certain things that you can do if you're a generalist. You mentioned it earlier, you know, geography and hourly building, billing. If you're a generalist, your niche is essentially within 30 miles of your office. You are a local accounting firm. So if someone goes to Google and says accounting firm near me, that is your target market. And so you should be investing in local SEO. You should be trying to get as many people in your area. But if you want to be able to, I almost think of it as like outbound marketing. You want to go out and market to the people you want to work with. You need to have a very clear idea of who they are and in a way that you can find them. Right. So it's not enough to say I want to work with, with values based businesses or I want to work with people who are interested in growing their business. That's not a niche, that's a, that's not enough to go market, that's not enough to go like market to them. Right. You can identify who you like to work with, but if you can't put a label on them that they also use as a label for themselves, it's very difficult to find them. And you really should focus more or less on your local area. And that's going to be, that's going to be the best way for you probably to spend your marketing dollars is to focus locally. The problem with that is every new client has different needs and so it's very difficult to build on your expertise and build the processes that are very easy to be replicating, you know, client to client. To train people to serve these different clients, you. You require people who are better at either being being generalists themselves or thinking on their feet. You don't have as much control over the processes that you build in your firm. And if I don't know if I'm stepping into your territory, what I found is when that happens, usually that's a great role for an entrepreneurial problem solving person who's usually that firm owner. But if you want to work less than 60 hours a week, you need to find ways to be able to train people. And having a niche allows you a lot of that flexibility to put in more, you know, repeatable processes and things like that, as well as the marketing advantages.

Yeah. Is there a question, like a specific question in there that you want me to jump on? Because I totally agree.

That's a great. Yeah. All I wanted to know was do you agree with me? No. Let me.

Well, I would there but there is something that I want to contrast take a different angle on and that is that the focus locally as an accountant? As a. Yes, I agree on the marketing strategy, but I don't agree on the business strategy. So a business strategy can sound really highfalutin and important and MBA ish and it doesn't need to be. I think a business strategy ought to be and can be simple and without one. It's like having a sailboat without a point at the front and no rudder and no keel. And then what you have is basically an inner tube and you put wind on the sail and it spins in a circle and then it luffs and it goes nowhere.

Yes.

So as a. You're an accounting practice is still a business and it needs a strategy to get where it wants to go. And without one goes in a circle. And you know, that's how. That's part of how accountants end up on the hamster wheel. So I think so where I find my own CPA clients being really taking off and when the wind hits the sail and the boat takes off is as a having a business strategy which is focus on a certain target audience, demographic, niche. Call it what you like, yammer, sweet potato, I don't care. And close enough to the same thing and understanding what their problems are because people are paying for outcomes, end results and certain solutions. When you focus on your target market, your ideal buyer, it allows you to deepen your understanding of their problems. It helps you come up with more effective solutions because your buyers want an end to their pain. And they want it as quickly as possible. An Advil that takes six months to take hold does no good. Right. You want that pain reduced in a handful of minutes. And the more effective you can get at providing fast, effective, predictable solutions, the more value you create for your client. The more value you create, the more money you make. So from a marketing standpoint, you know, zip code. Okay, I get it. Yes. You know, before there was the Internet. Yes. But now there's the Internet, and if you don't take advantage of that, you're gonna just get trounced. So the. So we're talking about niche, ideal market, and marketing to those people. And I would say that from a business strategy standpoint, if you want to be working 30 hours a week, part of it comes with what you were talking about. You focus on your niche, you bring in those clients, you study them, you get to understand their problems. You provide fast, effective, predictable, high quality, valuable solutions. And it facilitates processizing, systematizing the delivery of your solution, optimizing for that solution. And then when you have that systematization, that's how you can train your people to deliver that solution consistently. And that's how you start getting free from the day to day and like toiling away at your keyboard.

When. So there's a little bit of the. We've got a build the plane while we're flying it here. Right. You can't, you can't pause operations in your business in order to spend six months figuring out, you know, your niche and repositioning and all this. You're kind of, you're doing the work as you're evolving. And I think the maybe the. And the kind of focus maybe of this episode is. So what is the point when you know you've got enough of that in place in your firm that it starts to make sense. Sense to. Now we're going to put some money into marketing now that we've got this direction, this business strategy, and some of the processes are starting to get into place.

It's a great question because I think, like we've been talking about, if people spend money on marketing before this point, it ends up kind of evaporating. So the process that I take my people through is figure out the business that you want to have, not the one you think you're supposed to want to have. Figure out who the clients are that are going to get you there, disengage the ones who aren't going to get you there. Always manage to cash flow. Right. Never get yourself into a Money, I mean, I don't want to say never, but avoid getting yourself into money scarcity because we're just not as effective when we are in that space. So manage to cash flow and then we price and package or package and price services designed based on the solution that will provide the solution that the buyer wants. And then we make updates to the website and the messaging, and then we update the online profile so that it's all consistent. Right. Because if it's divergent, your buyers are confused, they're not going to buy. And once that's consistent and then once you start doing so with my folks, we start free first and we test the free stuff first and we see what sticks. And once we have the stuff that sticks, then you can start spending money on it.

Yeah. So you're looking for. I like to say you're looking for signals, right? You're looking for. This isn't revenue yet, but you. I. One of the, One of the ways I frame it is you've got phase one, which is production. You have to be able to produce something. So if you're marketing to your new niche or you're posting on LinkedIn, you need to post consistently. So phase one is get into the habit. Make sure that you can make it happen. Phase two is to look for signals of what is working. And so you're seeing what are people commenting on, what you doing are. Do they want more information on what you know, what are you getting good feedback from? And then you can start thinking about how does this turn into real engagement and then eventually revenue. So I like that idea. You know, you start with the free. And I like to say everything, everything in marketing. Well, everything really. But in marketing, everything costs. It's expensive. But you can pay in time or money, right?

Yeah.

And so if you want. And at the beginning, you don't want to spend a lot of money with an agency or a marketing freelancer. You want to spend time to make sure that it's working. And then later you can spend money on the things that you know are working and you can amplify your message, you know, with the platform or whatever else can. Let me go back. I have a question about when you get to that phase of pricing your packages and services. This is, this is a. One of the problems I run into a lot with my clients is they don't actually have in their mind or in their budget a way to pay for marketing. And so what they do is they think like, what's the cheapest way that I can get some marketing out there. So it's. It. There's these two things where on one hand I totally see so many firms overspending or spending poorly on marketing, and it feels like a black hole that they're pouring money into. And then the other end is they want to spend $500 a month, no more, but they really want it, they really need it to drive a lot of leads because, you know, for whatever reason. So do you help them build that in or think about the cost of marketing and what.

I don't know.

What are your thoughts on that?

So one of the things I want to address is the idea that marketing is expensive. And I would say if you don't market, it's expensive. That's also true because if you don't, if you're not marketing in your business or promoting your business, and when I say marketing, I'm not necessarily just talking about paid marketing, but all the activities that come with telling people that your business exists. So if you don't do that, it's expensive in the form of a gigantic opportunity cost. But I get that it's scary to plunk that money down because of the black hole thinking. So to your question about, you know, how do we start or what's kind of the smallest investment? But you don't want to undershoot because if you don't spend enough, you're not going to be working with people who know what they're doing. So how do you sort of, how do you. What's the on ramp? Yeah, and you and I operate in slightly on slightly different playing fields in terms of spend size, size, if you will. So for your people, they may come at it with more to spend and more to invest out of the gate. So I think the answer depends on who's listening. Right. So you're the, you know, I don't want to comment for your buyers who I think are have more of a budget than the folks that I work with. So I'll just answer for mine. And that is first get to the place. I mean, I think most CPAs aren't even to the place where those marketing dollars are going to be effective. So don't even think about the question yet. First, think about the strategy of your business, who you want to work with, what's going to what they want to buy and what to sell to them. And then get your messaging down and then we can talk about, okay, how much do we want to invest in marketing? But if there are people who are there, then I think reasonably, you're looking at you Know, starting out with thousand dollars a month, maybe $500 a month if you're really trepidatious. But be judicious about testing stuff rather than simply pouring the money at the marketing firm or company and then walking away and be like, you know, you guys take care of it. If you, if you don't stay engaged with what's happening, you're then you're surely going to pour the money down the black hole. But if you stay engaged, then you can learn from what the money is or isn't doing. So I think it's less about how much you spend and more about how you show up for those dollars that you're spending and learn the lessons with the dollars that you're spending. Learn them in the first month and the second month and the third month rather than burning a year of marketing budget cash and then coming back and being like, harrumph, well, you guys didn't do it. Good job. Yeah, but if you pay attention, you'll learn from the, from what you're spending.

One of the ways that I frame it is there's three things you have to pay for in marketing. You have to pay for a strategy, good ideas on what to do. You have to pay for labor. You know, someone's got to write stuff or design stuff, and then you have to pay for distribution. So that could be through paid platforms or through organic posting. And I think one of the things you're describing here is having a niche is a big part of that strategy piece. Like, what is your go to market strategy? If I come in and I work with a generalist firm, they need a strategy of how they're going to market and go to market with this offer. And so you have to pay a strategist to help figure out what I would say is a harder puzzle. Like, how do you market a generalist large firm? The easier one is how do you market a niche firm? And if you're doing that work already, you probably don't need to pay a strategist as much for strategy because it's built into, you know, the direction you're going. So now you have to think about that labor piece and that distribution piece. But that's, you know, you already cut out a third of potentially what you need to, what you need to pay for. And so then when you, like you're saying, you can get to the point of, all right, this is our strategy to market to a specific target audience. Now we can look at how do we spend a little bit of money to make sure that's really effective. There's kind of a, there's overlap, I think, between what you do with your clients and what I often do. We, we spend a lot of time on messaging and identifying an ideal client. But if a person comes to us and they already know this is exactly who we serve and this is, you know, this is the value proposition that we're bringing or this is how we're going to approach it, you're already a lot further the way than if you're starting from scratch and you need someone to help you figure, figure all of that kind of stuff out. And I, you know, website, I, we do a lot of websites. I consider that marketing, I guess, but it's not. Most people think of marketing as just like driving traffic or leads and there's all these overlapping circles. I think of different pieces. But if you're a small firm, I think getting that website and messaging updated, that's probably, that's where you, I would pay an expert to help you with that website and messaging and then I would look for opportunities to kind of bootstrap, build your own audience or you know, develop your own thought leadership within your niche or something, Something like that. What do you, when you're working with your clients, do you, do you give them any recommendations on the website process or when they get to that point? What does, when, when is that point when you're working with them? And what do you usually say?

Yeah, that's week 12. In week 12, perfect. Yeah, it's weeks 12, 13 and 14 and down to 40 hours. CPA mastermind. That is what we do. And let's see, there's a lot to say here. I agree that a website is key. It's not the be all, end all. You can't just throw up a website and expect foot traffic. But what's the first thing that people do when they hear a name? You know, they get a referral. Somebody suggests, oh, you should check out, fill in the blank. They go to your website. What we do is help our CPAs make a super simple, clean, clear three or four pages website homepage about you, about your company, the portal and the contact us done right. It is a simple bill because boy, can you go down a rabbit hole with a website. And we don't want that. We just want something that is compelling and speaks right to your target buyer. So that when they land there, they see their own list of pain points written out and they think, oh, this person understands my problems even better than I do. And when they think that they keep on reading and then they see the solution. Like you can have, you can understand your money, you can have a sense of where your cash has gone and how much of it you're going to need. You can make better decisions because we can run scenarios so that you can understand blue sky best case, worst case, most likely case, and make better decisions sooner and stop guessing in your business. And those are the things that we say, those are things, that's the messaging that I help my clients come to because otherwise they're talking about accounting and tax on their websites and people are like, I don't want to buy business valuation, I don't want to buy a four pound bag of cost segregation. So when just coming back, high level, a super simple, clear website to get away from. The website of the 1940s that has a brick building on it, talks about all this accounting jargon that nobody understands or wants to pay for and then I mean, what we do. So we're headed in the direction of one to many, right? A lot of the accounting space works in a one to one format and that works. But what works even better is one to many and scaling with digital products and courses and you know, one to many CEO roundtables and workshops and those kinds of things and writing ebooks and selling them for 9 or $17 on the Internet and making money, waking up and there's more money in your bank account that you made while you slept, that you didn't do any work for. And to get there, we need the whole ecosystem, right? And the website is the North Star. You've got five points, right? You've got the website, you've got your message, you've got your email subscriber list, you have social media and you have webinars. And without all five points together, you have four points, you've got a square, and that star doesn't shine anywhere and nobody sees it and they can't use it as guidance. So we start with, we get the messaging on the website, we make sure it's consistent and we do the things that lead to one to many work. Now that transition is like, you know, more months down the line and we start up at the headwaters, which is business strategy. So to me it's like your business is, this is more than just accounting. It needs all these pieces and we take the smallest, we build the smallest possible piece that we need to plug in so that we can take the next step and then we keep on going. So that's a long winded answer, but I couldn't agree more. That website at the top is the, is the core of it.

There's. There's so much, there's so much here that we, that we can talk about. I think if I'm just going to kind of summarize the conversation, I think the advice to firms is know who your audience is first before you do anything. For marketing, I would generally then say, make sure I always say don't, don't send good traffic to a bad website. It's like that's the biggest waste of money that you could possibly make. And, you know, I've, I've seen, I've seen several of my clients. All they do in a year is redesign their website and update their messaging so it's more clearly targeted towards the people they want to work with. They didn't drive any more traffic, but they saw their qualified leads, you know, double over the next year just because there's some people already getting there and they don't actually know that you're the right fit because your messaging is not clear or you're talking about the wrong things. The one thing that I'll. Maybe I'll insert there, if, if you're going to add another page to your website of the ones that you mentioned, I would very much recommend adding a pricing page. And that's not necessarily that you need to list your prices, but the way I put it is you need to answer the question of how much does it cost? So if the answer is it depends, you can explain what it's going to depend on, and that's going to be a real helpful page to get people to click that schedule a call button or whatever it is.

I absolutely agree with pricing, a sense of pricing on the website because you save time for your buyer and you save your own time, and it gives them a sense of like, are we even on the same playing field when it comes to money? So I couldn't agree more. If you want to make it the same page, you know, a new page, great or not, just stick it on the homepage. It can go in either location, but get pricing on the website for sure.

So know your audience, get your messaging and your website in order. If you don't, if you haven't done the website, don't invest in SEO, don't invest in paid ads, don't spend money on social media. I would say don't start spending money on social media until, like you said, you've tested out for free. You know, you've been posting organically some of this content to find out what works. I like LinkedIn, because you can target industries. But I would think of the paid ads on LinkedIn more as guaranteed distribution of your content, the best content, rather than like a, you know, buy now, hire me for your accounting needs sort of funnel system. And if you're spending a ton of money on marketing right now and you're not getting the leads, I would, I would go back and look and say how narrow and targeted is your audience first, because that's probably why you're wasting money, is that you don't have a clear target.

Yep.

And that's where I would, I mean, I don't know if I would say, cut all spending today, but, you know, turn off the, the faucets that aren't working and then go back to the drawing board when it comes to niching or specialization and. Yeah, and all of that. Geraldine, what, how can people find you, work with you? What's the. What is, what would be the next steps if they were interested in, in what it is that you help firm owners with?

Yeah, they can find me at my website. It's geraldinecarter.com and for folks who want all kinds of free resources, including how to, you know, increase your prices and seven reasons that it's great to raise your rates, you can get it@geraldinecarter.com 7 and that'll get you onto my email list where I give out one business strategy tip a day for accountants. So that's the best place to go. Or you can stalk me on LinkedIn. I'm Geraldine Carter, the only one over there, I think, as far as I know. And you can also listen to my podcast, which is the business strategy for CPAs podcast. Yes.

And so, Geraldine, if, if someone was going to self identify as like the right, the right person to work with you, what's, what's like the one or two factors that, that people should, if they're looking at their own life and firm, that they're going to know, yes, I should definitely go and work with or check out Jolene's stuff.

If you think to yourself, I'm really smart, why am I working so hard? I'm exhausted.

That's, that's perfect. Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you think you're really smart, but you're working too hard and you don't know why you're exhausted all the time from so much work, you should, you should go check that out. This has been really, this has been really great. I love this conversation. We could, we could go on and on about it. So maybe we'll have to schedule A follow up at some point. And yeah, this has been great. Thanks for coming on the show. Any final thoughts of wisdom?

Final thoughts of wisdom? Well, what you said right there at the end, if your marketing isn't getting traction, turn the spigots down, I think is worthy advice. I would leave listeners with that.

And this is from a person who sells marketing services. I would say if you're, if your marketing firm or agency or whatever is just telling you the only problem is you need to spend more money. I don't know. Take, take a breath.

Did you hear my deep breath in?

Yeah, that's a, that, that's a, that's. There are some cases, you know, where you're spending so little that it's not getting any traction. So it's a, it's a waste of money at that low end. But if, if the, the firm or the agency you're working with is just saying all you need is to spend more money, spend more money, that's usually not the case. There's good ways to spend money.

Yeah.

And you can spend a lot of money in good ways. But usually the answer is not, you know, if you just spend more, it's going to fix things. So. All right.

And I would just say marketing back to the earlier piece. Marketing well done is a really valuable investment.

Yes. If it's, if it's well done, if it has a good strategy behind it. If it's, yeah, there's all these, there are these little caveats there. And there is an element of you get what you pay for. You know, you don't want to. You mentioned earlier, don't. If your budget is too small, you might not get people who know enough about what they're doing to get you the traction. So, you know, we just try to be honest and transparent here. I want to help accounting firm owners make the most of their marketing, make sure that it is as effective as it can be. We don't beat around the bush. Marketing is a big investment either in time and, or money. And so you want to make sure you've got as much, you know of your ducks in a row before you start spending on marketing. So you can really get that, the highest ROI from it and not just throw money down that black hole that I feel like is such the experience of so many business owners. So. All right. This has been the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Geraldine Carter has been here today with us. Again, thank you so much for being on the show. And yeah, you can find us at marketingforaccountingfirms.com or the podcast on whatever podcast, you know, listening program you Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Find us like subscribe all of that. Jo, thanks for, thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Matt. It was great to be with you.

This podcast, marketing for Accounting Firms, is brought to you by Benchmark Growth Marketing, a marketing agency that helps accounting firms get more calls booked through their website. You can find us@benchmarkgrowthmarketing.com Connect with me Matt Benker on LinkedIn.