The $200 Marketing Tech Stack for Accounting Firms

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of technologies out there that accounting firms could be using for their marketing. But which ones do you actually need? Today, on this solo episode of Marketing for Accounting Firms, the podcast, I'm going to be going through a $200 tech stack. And this is going to get you as an accounting firm 90, 95% of the way towards what you need. This is what I recommend. If you've got an in house person in charge of your marketing, whether that's an admin or a marketing specialist. If you're the owner and you're trying to do marketing on your own, this is the tech stack that I think is going to make your life easier and you're going to be able to be more effective in your marketing. So let's get to it. There's a bunch of different categories of things that we're going to talk about today. Now I'm a musician and so I play a little bit of guitar. You can go out there and you can buy a multi effects pedal. This is maybe a little too nerdy for some people, but you can buy one system that has all kinds of different effects together. But really the best guitarists in the world, they go out and they buy individual, individual pedals for individual sounds that they want to make. And so this is more of the individual pedals for individual sounds. In our case, it's individual softwares for individual purposes. And the reason I like to do it this way is that a, you're not locked into one system where if you stop using a bunch of the features, you still have to pay the full price. But two, I think that for accounting firms there's some specific needs that you have. And so these tools fit better for most of the cases. And again, at 200amonth for all of these tools, it's actually quite affordable. All right, so number one, you're going to need something where you can do some graphic design. My recommendation is just that you get a canva account. Canva has really been improving what they can do and how much you can do with it and it's going to hit almost everything that you need. It's not a best in class graphic design program, but it's going to get you most of what you need. Now if you did want to spend a little bit more and get a little bit more features, the next thing I would probably recommend would be the Adobe suite. But that's really just for someone who is very familiar with Adobe already. If you're used to using those tools, if you are a marketer or Graphic designer working at an accounting firm. That might make sense because that's what you're familiar with. But if you don't have a strong preference, I'm going to go with Canva. It's going to cost you $15 a month, which is pretty, pretty cheap. They've been adding new AI features and image generation in there, so there's a lot that you can do with that. The one other thing you may want to consider would be an actual image generator. New AI tools, I would say look at midjourney. If you, if you do go the Adobe suite route with Photoshop and Illustrator, you also get something called Adobe Firefly, and that's going to be pretty great for image generation as well. But my number one recommendation for graphic design is going to be Canva, so we'll start there. Number two, you're going to need to do a lot of writing when you're doing marketing. And so having a helpful AI text generation tool in your back pocket is going to be a really great resource. And this one's simple. I just recommend using ChatGPT. I would say get the Pro version of it, which I believe is $20 a month. I think you get access as of today. We're talking in October 2023. You're going to get ChatGPT 4, and if they upgrade it to 5, I'm assuming that the Pro account is going to have access to that to get access to a better system. And you're going to not have limits on how much you can generate. We're not going to go into the details of this. You can't rely on a text generator to write articles for you or to create social media posts from scratch. You're going to have to be involved in it, validating the output. And so it is a thing that you want to get better at, but it does really make your life easier and faster. So ChatGPT, that's $20. Number three, I do recommend video, at least having the ability to create video, whether that's just videos for your website, describing your sales process, or what it looks like to go through the onboarding process, or you want to use it for social media purposes. Video is really powerful and it's easier and easier for people to create and produce on their own. I love a tool called descript. Descript is what I'm using right now for this podcast. I'm recording directly into the program. And what it does is it generates a transcript of what I'm talking about here. And then I can edit the video just by Editing it like it's a word document. I feel like this really lowers the barrier of entry for someone to be able to do video editing. Editing even if you're not a video editor. Descript is a great program. It does use AI to do a lot of the work, but it works pretty seamlessly in the background. And so that's what I would recommend. Descript Pro is $25 a month. So we're going to add that to our stack. Next you're going to need and I'm going to combine these together. You need the ability to deliver email and then also possibly a CRM. Now the CRM that gets into a little bit more of the sales side of things, but having a CRM where you can track contacts when they fill out contact forms and things that can be really beneficial. Now, best in class in this space, I would say is HubSpot. And if you really do have a healthy marketing budget, it's not a mistake to go with something like HubSpot. But HubSpot, you have to get to the $800 a month level before you get access to the email automation tools that are really important for your email marketing side. And for that reason, I recommend using a program called ActiveCampaign. It's similar to HubSpot in many ways. It doesn't have as strong of analyt and it's not going to be tied into as great of a sales CRM. But ActiveCampaign does have a basic CRM built into it and it's good with email delivery. You can set up automations and if then kind of sequences. So if someone chooses one thing on your form, they get this email sequence or if they choose a different thing, they get another email sequence. If they open the emails, you can send them one or they click on a link, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a pretty powerful tool and it's at a much lower price. So HubSpot is 800amonth for the marketing level that you would need or I would recommend activecampaign is $50 a month. So I think it's a really a great option for a lot of accounting firms. All right, social media. So it's free to post on social media, but if you want to be able to schedule out your posts or automate posts, you're going to want to use a social media scheduler. Now a lot of accounting firms have really busy seasons, so especially during tax season or when a tax deadline is coming up, social media posting is so easy for it to Just drop out and use, stop doing it because you're just busy. That's why I like to recommend a product called meetedgar. What meetedgar does and allows you to do is you set up categories of posts. So it could be articles and promotional posts and maybe more just general content or announcements. You can set up things like more engaging posts, fun quizzes, and things like that. But what it does is those categories then get scheduled for a certain time each day and then you fill up the hopper for those categories and then Meet Edgar will just post something from that category. So it builds the queue. And so what I like for accounting firms is that when you have some time and space, you can write a whole bunch of social media posts and you can funnel them into Meet Edgar, fill up those buckets, and then it's going to parcel them out on the appropriate days, even when you're busy. So it automatically posts them. You don't have to think about, you know, when I need to schedule this post for this time in the future, you just add it to the right category and then it's going to go out automatically. Generally you're going to want to use Meet Edgar to fill out posts with more evergreen content, but it does allow you to be more consistent. You're going to need to do some analytics tracking, and my recommendation for most firms is just to use the free ones that Google provides. So Google Analytics, Google Search Console, you can use what they call Looker Studio to set up a dashboard. Some of this stuff is definitely a little bit more complicated and complex to get set up correctly and to use. And so it may be worth hiring someone to do the setup for you. But in terms of the actual tool that you want to use for tracking, I do think the Google Suite products, and they are free, are going to be good enough for what you need. The other one that I will call out, and this is not in your stack that I recommend, the $200 stack, but there's a product called Hotjar which allows you to install a piece of code on your website and it does screen recording so you can see how people are actually using your website, what they're clicking on, what pages they spend more time on and what pages they spend less time on. If there are things that seem confusing about your site, you can kind of guess at some of that from user behavior. So hotjart is a fun tool to be able to use. It's not a must have in most cases. Finally, what I'll mention is local SEO is actually a really important Thing for most accounting firms, especially if you are a generalist, you're going to be focusing on a local audience in that case. And so there's two types of SEO. There's local SEO and there's keyword SEO. Now, deep dive SEO experts might describe it differently, but what I think about it is local SEO is focusing on showing up when someone types in accounting firm near me or, you know, accounting firm in, you know, my city. Keyword SEO is more focused on things like accounting firm for marketing agencies or accounting firm for lawyers. And so you're after that keyword and you have a more national audience. But for most firms who are generalists, they serve lots of different types of people or small businesses is you want to really maximize your local opportunities. And so there's a software called BrightLocal that I would recommend you using. BrightLocal helps you get your Google business on the maps. When you do a search, it helps you show up there. It's going to get that profile in order. It's going to let you audit how well you're showing up in that local search. And then they also have a system in there where you can pay them to build out citations for you. Citations are basically just getting you listed on different websites. And when you get listed there and it points back to your website and your name, address and phone number, Google starts to see that you are showing up in more places on the Internet. It's going to give you a little more credibility and that's going to help you rank better in those Google maps, expand your footprint and also really make sure that you show up at the top in your immediate local area. So bright local, it's one of the more expensive ones on the list at $60 a month. And so all in all, this adds up to $200 a month. It's a great tech stack to support your marketing person or to be your marketing department. All the tools, I believe are fairly intuitive and easy to use. There's always going to be a learning curve for these tools, but it's what's going to get you started on your marketing journey. Well, that's all I have for you today. It's a short episode. I know I'm talking fast and it's like a fire hose. We're going to include all the links in the show notes. If you click on those links, a lot of them probably are affiliate links where we would get a little bit of benefit. If you decide to sign up, you can find those in the show notes or at our website marketingforaccountingfirms.com we'll have an article on the blog there for you to find those this has been the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. My name is Matt Benker. You can find me on LinkedIn and you can follow me there. Sign up for our email list@marketingforaccountingfirms.com and get in touch if there's an area where you think we could help you with your marketing needs at the same website. Thanks. Goodbye.