Content Marketing for Accounting Firms

All right, cool. I'm here today with Aaron Fultz and we are going to talk some more about marketing for accounting firms. And specifically I want to talk today with Aaron about content. So you start off, you get a new, you start off in marketing, you get a new website, you've got a great strategy, you position yourself well, you figure out the right sales language and now you're thinking, okay, everyone says I need to add content to my website. You hear about content marketing and maybe SEO or inbound marketing. All of these things are kind of interrelated. But the big question that I think most people have is accounting firms, what should they be writing?

Yeah, well, let's start with what you should not be writing about. Right? Like nobody cares really what's going on internally with your company. Like if you just had a retreat, you know, whatever the things that you do internally, like your, your clients really don't care about that. Right. So we need to think about content marketing as it relates to the sales process. So Matt, think about like when's the last time that you purchased something significant online? What did you do before you bought?

Well, let's see. Last significant purchase online. Usually I go actually to my Slack channel of peers and ask them what they think and get a recommendation. I suppose that's probably my first stop.

Yeah, but you're researching, right? Like we all research things in the sales process, especially if it's going to be a significant purchase or it's going to be in the case of choosing an accounting firm, it's a long term relationship typically. Right. It's not a one and done transactional. This is a lot like who am I going to trust to open up my financial information to and have that conversation and have them come alongside me in that That's a significant decision. And so we need to have a high level of trust before we make that kind of a decision. So if you're running an accounting firm, your clients or your prospects, they're going through the same process and going, who can I trust this information with? Who can I trust? You know, not just your taxes. If you're working with small businesses, if you're working, you know, there's all the facets, you know, of the types of services you offer. And so trust is key. And so if we think about the safety process and if we're going to go and search for things online, our prospects, your prospects are going to be doing the same things. What are the kinds of things that they're going to want to know before they pick up the phone and call you before you know, there is that first point of contact. And so if we think about what are those questions in the sales process, that can be a great kind of markers to figure out what categorically should we be talking about when it comes to creating our content. And so there's a great framework, you and I, Matt, before you hit record, we're talking about they Ask youk Answer as a fantastic kind of inbound marketing philosophy and framework. And the case that Marcus Sheridan, the author of that book and the kind of the creator of that philosophy framework makes the case for is there's five main categories of content that any buyer is. Like the kind of questions they're asking before they buy. And so it's questions like how much does it cost? Like, you know, pricing, what is that going to be? What are the problems? Like what are the things that I need to be aware of? What, at what point is a product or service a good fit and at what point is it not a good fit? Because you know, all of us, you're in a service based business, I'm in a service based business, the accounting firms listening to this, you're in a service based business. Your services are not a perfect fit for everybody who calls you or walks through your door. And so how do we, how do we be upfront about saying, hey, this is who it's a good fit for, here's a who it's not a good fit for, or here's where this is not going to solve this problem, but it will solve this problem. You know, like how can we sort of answer the potential problems or what could go wrong or those kinds of questions. How can we just answer those outright in the beginning before we're even in the room with somebody? So those are a couple, there's a few more. So things like reviews, I mean reviews are huge. And especially if you're serving a local market, if you've not already talked about Google My Business, that's a great. From a local marketing perspective, that's important. But people want to look at reviews and go, have other clients had a good experience with them or have they not? I mean, think of how many times when you're buying something on Amazon, say, Matt, do you go and do you look at reviews before you?

I look at, I look at reviews and I don't know if this is where you're going. But I, at this point I basically ignore the five star reviews and actually I often ignore the one stars as well. But I'm looking for those two star Reviews. Because that tells me, like, someone actually used this. But it wasn't just like, I don't know, they had, they had a real experience and then. But I want to find out what's the worst case scenario. Right. Like, that's usually why I go to reviews.

Yes, exactly, exactly. And our clients are doing the same. Right. They want to see what are other people saying. And it's almost always, I mean, they, you may kind of glance at the good reviews, but immediately it's like, well, what's the worst case? Like, what's the worst possible scenario? And so that's what people are looking for. Like, you know, having reviews online but also reviewing. Well, in the case of an accounting firm, I'm not sure it could be reviewing where services and things like that. If that's the kind of thing where you're trying to direct clients toward using a particular, you know, are you going with QuickBooks or are you going with whatever else is, you know, QuickBooks Online versus QuickBooks, you know, desktop. My husband is in a CPA and he has very strong opinions about QuickBooks Online versus, like the desktop version. So, you know, those sorts of things. If it applies to your particular clients, you know, best of who's the alternative? You know, if they're not going to go with you, who else in your market or industry, kind of depending on how your business is set up to, you know, who you serve, you know, what are the other options of other firms that they could go with that go choose over you and you know, who might be a good fit. So those are a handful of categorically the ways that you can think about. These are the types of questions that prospects are going to ask in the sales process. And so how can you answer those questions? And they go levels deep. Right. Like the cost question, for instance. Nobody's going to just put a price list on a website like that for an accounting firm, very rarely, unless you just happen to have a very productized service offering. That really is not the point. It's more that how do you educate the buyer? These are the things that drive the cost up. These are the things that drive the cost down. These are sort of the factors that go into figuring out how much your services are going to cost. So is that helpful just to think through the types of categories of content you can create? It's less about how to. And those kinds of things. It really is more about how can your content bring somebody along the buyer journey?

Yeah, and I think that's interesting because I do think most, most accounting Firms, when they approach content, they have. There's kind of three main ways that I've seen it happen. One is if they are doing their in house content, it's a lot of how to stuff. It's like how to figure out such and such tax law and how to do it. And that could drive some traffic to your site, but it's generally not what it's, it's what I would consider often like low intent traffic. Right. If you're putting together how to stuff, you're targeting people who are looking to do it themselves rather than for people who are looking for your services. So the how to content is interesting. The other thing that I think is, is important and interesting about this approach is it's not an SEO first approach. So I've seen a lot of accounting firms hire an SEO company who will go out and they'll look up a bunch of keywords and then they'll write content for those keywords. And what I see is it's often really, really like low helpfulness type content. Like it's, it's built to rank, but it's not built to build like we were talking about. And then the last one is, which I would consider probably the worst is there's a lot of like aggregators or pre written content farms out there who will like I think Thomson Reuters sends out, here's all the articles you can use and post them on your website. And so you've got the same content that everybody else does, but it's written to a level that's so like nonspecific that it doesn't really apply to anyone in particular. So all of that is, I don't know, it's interesting. But one of the questions that I think we're going to have is then, all right, so we're writing content that answers the questions our customers have. How is that actually then helping to get more customers to our website? What's that content actually doing? Where do you use it, how do you get it out into the world, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So to touch on what you said a minute ago, I mean, just how important it is that the content you create needs to be tied to the buyer journey. Right, Those sort of content aggregators and stuff who just put content out there. Sure. Will it drive a little bit of traffic? Maybe, but will that traffic be. Yeah, but yeah, probably not. Not that anyway, that's kind of the worst, like the cardinal sin of content marketing. However, thinking about it in terms of it can be easy to just create content. Create Content be like, I'm doing something, I'm doing something. But it's like running on a treadmill. The faster that you run, you still are not going to go anywhere because you're running. You're essentially running in place. And so that is what happens I think with a lot of companies that get on the content creation bandwagon with no plan. And we just, somebody said we needed to create content, we're going to go create content. It might drive some traffic, but if it's not driving the right kind of traffic, it's a total waste of time. And so to answer the question that you just asked, like, what is the point of what all this content is doing? It is to build trust. It is to set yourself up. 1. It's giving you an opportunity for people to get to know you a bit. Not in the like, hey, here's an about me. But they get to know your come from, they get to know your approach, they get to know your voice as a firm. They get to know sort of your unique perspective around particular things in the buyer process where they go, they can kind of opt in or opt out and go, yeah, they feel like a great fit. We hold similar values, we have kind of a similar approach when it comes to how we think about our finances. But all of those things can come out in the content that you're creating by answering your potential customers questions that help build trust with the client because that's ultimately it, right? We turn over our hard earned cash for goods or services when there is enough trust built that we say yeah, I think I can trust that they're going to solve the problem I need them to solve and they're going to do it well. And so at the end of the day, that's really what creating the content is all about.

So I don't know, maybe you'll agree with me, maybe not, but I'll throw something out that's that it could be. I don't know if it's controversial, but I so you know, as a marketing company, we've done some writing in the past for companies and accounting firms and over time we've actually kind of come to the conclusion that if, if like a key person from a firm isn't intimately involved in creating the content, it's a waste of money. Like I wouldn't want anyone to hire us to just write content for them. But I think that that's a real, that's a temptation for a lot of firms. Is that the owner or the key accounting, like experts are too Busy or they feel like they're too busy to actually spend time creating content that's around, you know, answering these questions. And so they want to outsource it to a copywriter, to a marketer. And like I said, I think it's often a waste of money if you, if you have asked a copywriter to go write it. They're, they're inherently limited to what they can find on Google, which is exactly what your competition has already written about the topic. It's not generating any unique perspective, it's just regurgitating whatever is already on the front page of Google. And so anyway, there's all these issues. But how would you answer that question though? Like, I don't have time to write content, I don't have time, you know, what can, what, what is needed from say a firm owner or a subject matter expert? And what can you outsource to a writer, in your opinion?

Yeah, I, we are in very close agreement on this that just hiring it out is, is not a great solution. It might be a very short term stopgap, so solution, but is not a long term approach. Best case scenario actually is you hire a content manager in house. Now they don't necessarily have to write all the content, but they own the content production process. And so that can look like them interviewing you as a subject matter expert and then going back and doing some of the writing, but they have enough close proximity with you that it can be written in your voice from your perspective and they're not just relying on Google to go do it. There's other creative ways you can think about this too. Like, you know, if I'm in the shoes of a, of a firm owner, I may, there's the time issue, there's maybe even the like I'm not a great writer issue of like, I just don't enjoy writing and makes total sense. Not everybody does. But think about other ways that you can get your expertise out of your head. It could be recording you answering some questions. Record it, have it transcribed and then have it, you know, polished up and edited by a content manager. You don't have to sit down at the keyboard and write. It could be just a, you know, having somebody interview, asking interview you ask you questions and get it on, you know, a recording of how you would say that or how you would answer the question. And then they could go take and do something with it that feels far more accurate and authentic to your perception, perspective and your expertise. Video is another great way to do it. If, you know, if you could sit down and have a kind of a talk track, if you will, of being clear on kind of the direction that you're sort of the plot points on the map of what you're trying to communicate in a video. Video's fantastic. That could then get transcribed on a writing. So there's a lot of ways that you can produce the content, and it's finding the one that both fits for your sort of style, skill set, comfort level, those sorts of things, but not sacrificing, giving up your unique perspective and expertise to just farm it out to somebody who really has no idea. So that's my take.

Yeah. I think that the key thing that I want to usually get across to a firm owner is this isn't. Well, there's a couple things. You don't want to hand this off completely to someone else. And once you start talking about being on video, creating content is hard and expensive. And so I'm a big believer in repurposing. And so you're going to create a video, create something that you can then use as video, as well as turn it into written articles and all that. But if you're a firm owner, you want to be clear on who becomes the face of your company. Because if you're going to be developing this content, and like we said, building trust is a really big part of it. If someone else in your company who doesn't have a stake in the business becomes the face of your business, and then they eventually leave, their audience often goes with them. It doesn't stick around because we like to connect with people. I'm thinking a lot, especially about LinkedIn, right? People connect with people, they don't connect with businesses. And so whoever is that face, that's where the trust is being built. And typically that should be a firm owner. And so when an owner says, I don't have time, or they want to outsource it to someone else or even push it down the ladder too far, where someone else becomes that face and voice of the firm. It's just saying this is not a priority to me. It often says, we don't actually think that this is going to work to drive business, otherwise we would actually devote time and resources to it. But like you said, I think probably the good reasons to be hesitant are like, oh, well, I'm not a good writer or I'm not great in these different areas. There are creative ways to still be the key piece in that puzzle without having to be the writer or to be that person. That's actually like creating the end product. Right. That is, that's a great time to hire people who are, you know, really skilled in those specific areas.

Yeah. One of the things that comes to mind as you're saying that is as a firm owner, whether or not you do all of the pieces, neither of us are saying you need to execute on all your marketing. That's not what we're saying. Definitely not. There is an absolute place to hire an expert and get the expert people involved. However, it's your firm and at the end of the day, you have to live with the results of your marketing. I'm in the middle of a kitchen remodel at my house right now. And so I've had people in and out, in and out. Right. All of these contractors and folks working on all the different parts and pieces. Right. I'm really clear on what I want. And they're coming in and they're doing, you know, the best job that they can do, but they get to leave when this is over. I'm the one who has to live with it as long as we live in this house. Right. I'm the one who has to live with the long term consequences. So I've got to own whether or not the results are what I want them to be right before they leave. The same is true with a firm with a, you know, the owner of a firm with their marketing. Whoever you're hiring. Yes. They're going to come in. Presumably, if you're hiring great folks like Matt, they're going to come in and they're going to do the best that they can absolutely do with whatever thing that you've hired them to do. Right. But Matt does not have to live with the long term results of that necessarily. On some level. Yes, you have your reputation at stake, all of that, but it's not your company. Same when I work with my clients. I'm going to come in and do my best to get them fantastic results, but it's not my company at the end of the day. They have to live with it and have to have take ownership of their marketing and take ownership of the process and have enough understanding and enough clarity on where they're trying to go that you don't just go, I'm just going to hire somebody and they're going to fix it for me. That's never going to work ever. So I don't know if that's a helpful, you know, kind of example. But, you know, just like there is this ownership piece that it's easy to, it feels easier in the short term to Just go, I'm just going to like push that off and it just will come back to bite you every time.

Well, I think with, especially with like accounting firms, your, your tendency, a lot of owners I think feel pressure or temptation to pick up a lot of tasks or one to one type relationships, right. You got to, you got to be the one to talk to the clients. And as your firm grows you want to be growing out of spending most of your time in one to one situations and spending more of your time in like one to many situations because you, you have a finite amount of time and marketing and content is actually one of the areas where you can start to be present for your current customers and your prospects in a one to many situation and then you can dial back more of that like one on one meetings. And that's honestly that's like an important piece of what it means to grow the company. So you're building trust and expertise but then the tasks are hand it off to you know, your, your team that you've hired to do this stuff and that your job is to set the culture and to have kind of a point of view and to be you know, present in you know, semi public forums. That's your blog, it's your social media. Those other places as the one as kind of the like, like we're saying the, the voice and the face of the company.

Yeah, yeah, I'm in total agreement with you there Matt. It is sort of the downside of scaling and growing, right Is like you work yourself out of the, the job that you started when you assuming you started the firm and started or started the practice, right. And at some point you have to decide, you know, are you going, you know, what, what business are you growing? And that's true of any business in any industry. You have to decide what, what's the business that you're growing if you want to reach a certain level, what comes with that is exactly what you described. If you want to stay a very small, very small practice with just a couple of people, well, your marketing could look very different. You might be able to live on word of mouth from you know, I, my dad and my husband actually are both CPAs and have a small practice together. They have no desire to grow it into some large firm. They're going to always keep it probably a very small five or less people there. And if you looked at their website, I do, I'm a marketer, right. Like in my husband's website look like it, you know, was created at the dawn of the Internet like don't, you know, but so you know, it is possible if you want to stay really small to do, to do pretty minimal. But if you want to grow, there just, there's no way around it. That that is the.

Yeah.

Where you got to go.

This is maybe a little bit of a sidetrack from where our conversation started, but so they ask, you answer. It's often called. TAYA is the, like the acronym. Right. That I hear around is. I find that it's a great framework for thinking through, like people in research mode. What questions do they have and how do you make sure that you provide those answers? If you're providing answers, people are going to find it, they're going to learn, they're going to trust you because they read all of these articles and all that. That's great. People in research mode, that's often a really small part of the market though, right? Like, there's a certain maybe 5% of your ideal custom at any point are in a consideration phase. They're thinking about, yeah, I'm thinking about hiring an accountant. So I'm going to go out, research and learn and all that. A big chunk of your, your target market is, is not. They're not even aware that they should have, say, like a monthly accountant instead of an annual tax preparer. And so there's an element of education. And the type of content that you write to help educate someone who's not thinking about having an accountant is going to be somewhat different than the type of content you create for someone who's in research mode. Or even if it's very similar answers, the way you frame it might be a little bit different because now you're trying to help someone understand, here's the problem that we see over and over again for people in your industry. So right now I'm thinking, I'm an accounting firm, I'm speaking to small businesses now. It gets easier the more narrow you are with who your ideal customer is, especially when it comes to that, like, education piece. Because if you're just trying to speak to all of the small business owners in the world about like, the benefits of having an accountant on their side, that's like a broad topic. And if you shoot for everyone, you kind of miss everyone. And so having a more narrow, like, customer Persona can really help you on the content side, especially on that, like, education, educating the buyer who's not in consideration mode yet.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, think about it though. In terms of how we see and consume content, it's one of two Things, right? We're either entering something into a search bar where we're looking for something. And so you go, what, what are people looking for? And it may not exactly be like, to your point that they're in research mode on the buyer's journey, but it could be some new regulation that's come out in your state and they're trying to make sense of it and figure out how in the world it applies to their business if they're a small business owner. Okay. I think back to Covid and all of the federal money and so forth. I mean, that was a mess. Bless all of you accountants who have lived through that for the last couple of years. However, like, there are people. So they're looking for answers, even though it may not be a buying decision answer. Right? And so there's that piece, and then there's the. We get interrupted. I mean, it's the inbound, outbound. You know, marketing is what we're talking about. But then there's the ads or content that sort of interrupts someone, if you will, in a feed, in an ad, that sort of content. And so thinking about the context of where someone, like, where's the content going? Something that's going on, your social media might be far more just kind of educational related to, to the point earlier, a new regulation, a new something that somebody, you know, they're just trying to figure it out. They may not really be looking for a new accountant, but they could come across it and they go, oh, yeah, they know what they're talking about. You know, you want to know that versus the. Maybe you write it. You're writing an article on your site or blog, and it's. It is more directed to, you know, hitting someone who is on the research buyer journey.

So this may not be an answerable question. I don't know. Maybe I have some. My own thoughts. But how. How much content should someone be creating? Is it like once a month? Like once a week? I don't. Yeah, well, maybe, maybe. Let me frame it this way. There's. There's this special version of wasting money in marketing, in my mind, where you spend some money so it feels expensive every month, but you don't actually spend enough. And the same could be true with time that you actually get the results or any results from it. Right? So if I spend, you know, $500 a month to get one blog article per month, that might be a waste of money because maybe it's not enough to actually make a difference, but I'm still spending $500 a month. So what are your thoughts on like how much a firm need? Is there a minimum that they should be thinking about for it to be worth it? I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, yeah, I don't know that it's a totally answerable question in. I mean there is and I have have one answer. However, going back to answering the question first, what business are you building? Like what are the goals that you have with your marketing? You've got to get clear on what the point like what, what results are you hoping to get before you go embark on any marketing activity. Otherwise you have no idea if it was a success. Right. So always start there. If you are looking for search engine optimization, organic, you know, increasing your organic search traffic. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's actually with they ask youkanswer. The research has shown that there is a kind of a hockey stick increase in traffic if going from two pieces of content per week to three pieces of content per week. And then if you think about creating three pieces of content per week, someone listening to this is either rolling their eyes or having heart palpitations going, I have no idea how in the world I'm going to make that happen. That's where it goes back to having somebody on your team that it is their job to be your content manager. It becomes evident really quickly why that would make sense. If that is the amount of content that you're creating. Now that amount of content is mostly talking about some sort of blog article, a video, something like that. Can you take that content, chop it up and repurpose it for social media? Reuse it to send to an email list? Absolutely. There's lots of repurposing opportunity there. But if the goal is a lot more inbound traffic, people just coming and landing on your website, that three pieces of content per week is what studies have shown will give you the best results on that.

And that is a lot. Right? I think that's one of the biggest things that people are surprised by when they start thinking about content. And I like to think about marketing. There's like different buckets, right. So there's the. I think about it as demand capture. Right? You're trying to. A lot of that is around like high intent SEO terms, local SEO, paid search, all of those things someone types in accountant near me, you know, you gotta capture as much of that demand and then you've got this like demand creation side of things where you're trying to help educate or get in front of people and then you've got like nurturing leads, people who you have contact with, but they're not ready to buy yet. And how do you keep showing up and keep kind of nurturing those, those along? And, and a lot of times, you know, once you get to, I think this content side of things, it's, it's kind of a step up in terms of investment, both in terms of time and effort. And, and it's, it's one of those things where if you, it's not one of those things where you can just experiment and say, hey, let's just do this at a really low level and see if we see some results. Because you, you just won't in most cases. And so it's something that there, there are real advantages. There's, there are a lot of companies that have built very successful businesses. You know, they, they, they put their resources into marketing, you know, creating content, video, blog, whatever as a way to, to grow their business instead of, you know, like a big, you know, business development team where people are cold calling and telemarketers and all that. And I've seen a lot of accounting firms put money into the telemarketing side as well. And that could work. This is sort of a different path, but it's not the sort of thing that's like, and this is a, like a super cheap, you can almost just do it on the side path instead of investing money in, you know, something like a sales team. It's something you have to choose to actually take on seriously for it to do really well, I think.

Yeah, yeah, agreed. And I think, I mean, two things. One, you just briefly mentioned it, this idea of, you know, do you hire a sales team? Well, if you do your marketing really well, content marketing really well, you are giving your sales team resource in the sales process that can really, really be helpful for them. The other thing that you mentioned was cold calling, you know, any of that outbound approach like that. Here's one of the downsides that people don't think about when they, when we think about the cold outreach and that sort of thing, that's a one and done. You've picked up the phone, right? And cold call content marketing. It's going to stay alive on your website from now until you take it off. And so it will work for you over and over and over and over again. Going back to, they ask youkanswer, the guy who developed that framework, he had a swimming pool company and he started creating content and saw the major spike and he can look at one article that he wrote about cost on his website back in 2016 maybe has accounted for $15 million in sales. One article that kept working for him and working for him and working for him. And that's the benefit of content marketing is it just, it keeps working for you when the cold calling has stopped. Right. And so don't forget about when you're thinking about where am I investing my marketing dollars? What's going to get the, where can, how can you stretch those dollars the furthest? What's going to get you the most bang for your buck? Content marketing done. Well, to your point, you can't dabble. If you're going to do it, you've got to commit and you've got to do it if you really want to see results. But I can't think of another example in terms of marketing, you know, tactics that you could, you could employ that would get the same kind of long run results that content marketing is going to get.

Well, that's probably a good spot to kind of wrap up. I mean if I had one takeaway or one thing that I was going to explain to accounting firms, actually it would be write a pricing page for your website. Like that would be the simplest takeaway. I'm, I'm amazed at how many, I mean how many marketing agencies don't address pricing on their websites. I'm amazed at how many accounting firms don't even talk about it. And it's the number one question that anyone has when they get to your site. And even if the answer is, well, it depends, you writing an article that explains what it depends upon, you know, what are the factors that go into pricing, that's going to really make a huge difference, I think in terms of getting people to click that schedule a call. But. Well, Aaron, thank you for being here. Tell us maybe as we wrap up here, tell us a little bit about yourself and what is it that you do? How, how can people find you?

Absolutely. So I have a small marketing consultancy, Acorn Studio. You can find me@theacornteam.com is my website or when I'm on social, it's usually on LinkedIn and it's just my name, Erin Folke, but I work primarily with small service based businesses, helping them develop a clear brand message, apply it to their website and then from there coaching them on how to implement the they Ask youkanswer content marketing framework.

Cool. Well, Aaron, thank you for joining us today and I think this was really good conversation and really helpful and we'll talk soon.

Sounds great. Thanks Matt.

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