The Accountant Marketer

But the way marketing works, it doesn't work on the debit credits way that you're used to with the accounts. It's more like, there's debit, there's a credit, there's a unicorn, there's a triangle, there's sunshine, there's some rain.

You're listening to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Each episode, we have conversations with firm owners and marketing experts about how to attract your ideal clients, foster trust, and build a marketing engine that works for an accounting firm. I'm your host, Matt Banker. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. You can find more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now, here's the show. All right, today, this is fun. I have Karen Rayburn on the show, and Karen is a. We'll say she's a direct competitor of mine, possibly. And, and, and probably when I think of people in this space who know more about marketing for accounting firms, Karen's probably one of those people. So, Karen, tell us, tell us about yourself. And I mean, usually I was thinking about this. We were talking about it before. Usually I use this as kind of a challenge question of like, well, why should we care what you have to say? But you've, like, literally written the book on marketing for accounting firms, so tell us a little bit about yourself and what you know about this. This space.

Yeah. Thank you. And thank you so much for having me, because I absolutely believe in collaboration over competition. And the accountants that we work with have the same mindset. And one of our newer team members was just asking me recently, like, hey, aren't all these accountants that are in your coaching group, aren't they sort of competitors? And I said, well, in a way. But I sort of forget about that because as you and I both know, the audience that each company has, whether the accountant or you and I, is. Is different and the values are different. The brand is different. So, yeah, I'm excited to. To dig into this and honored that you would have me in there because I think it just shows a good attitude, good transparency and openness, which is one of our values as well.

That is so important as I found myself in different groups of accounting firm owners out there. I think the ones that are really growing the fastest and seeing the best results for them are the ones who are in community with other folks that are doing what they're doing and they're learning from each other. Even folks who are in the same cities or nearby each other, us all.

This is what I Always say, because there's different languages that we all speak. But circling back to your question about, you know, who am I, what am I doing here? The, the short version is I, I am a CPA in the States. I got the, you know, studied accounting at university. I grew up in Arizona, went to university, got the cpa, sort of just did the next thing, did the next thing, became an auditor, actually moved to Scotland. The intention was just for a couple years, you know, I was going to do it at that time, and got a job in an accountancy firm because that's what I did, that's what I knew. And then they very quickly moved me into the business development, marketing, consulting side. They're like, do you want to do this? And I'm going, well, it's got to be more interesting than auditing, so, sure, let's go. And I, I, I studied accountancy because I, I was challenged by it, but I didn't want to. With no offense whatsoever to the accountants I love, I didn't want to work as an accountant, but I, I love that. I understand that. And that's one of the things that got me to the place of, well, I understand the accounting. I've studied it, I've done it, I've worked as the marketing manager of an accountancy firm and an auditor. But I enjoy knowing that, helping accountants to understand and enjoy marketing so they get to work with clients they love. And that's why I created my agency. Because at the time, this was 12 years ago, started in 2012, and I just looked around and saw so many people helping or telling accountants, maybe not even helping, telling accountants what they ought to be doing. And the accountants going, okay, I will. Okay, now I gotta get a website designer, I guess, do I? A website developer, branding. What do I need? And then they'd have five different suppliers and they'd have to repeat their story to all of them. And it was stressful for the accountant. So that's why I created pf Kind of went, you know, boldly into, like, let's help accountants run webinars. And then went, oh, actually, you don't even have a website or an email system or, okay, let's back up. So we kept backing up, and now we have a system and approach. And as you say, the book that I wrote is called the Accountant Marketer. I wrote it because I have been, I and the team have been working with accountants for all of that time. And there's elements that just keep coming up over and over that if we're going to do anything marketing wise. Well, we've got to think about your audience. Who is this for? Why are you doing it? Why, why would they care? And I ran a full day workshop. It was actually an association with zero at a zero con in London. And it was the, they did a ton of workshops the day before the zero con and the one I was doing was on these 12 principles of marketing for accountants. And the most number of people signed up for that one. There was like 50 in my workshop and there was like five one, two in all the other ones. And I just really reflected that accountants were like, teach me, show me, I want to understand this. And the thing that accountants tend to love about the approach that we use is that there are 12 elements and they go in order. It's a structure, countenance, love structure. And rightly so. When you have a structure and you have an approach, then you can bring your personality, your audience, your brand, your values. So that's, that's the short version of how I and we got to, to where we are today. But the book flowed from teaching that, coaching that over and over and over. And I finally decided I would just drop it into a Google Doc and I had 60,000 words of blog posts and content I'd been writing and the team were like, Karen, you do realize this is not allowed to be a PDF guide. Like you must make it a book. And so that's what we did.

Yeah. Well, it's great. I've got my copy here as well. So it's called the Accountant, the Accountant Marketer. You can get it on Amazon, I believe, because I think I bought my own Amazon. Yep, all the places. Well, we're going to talk a little bit about and you kind of mentioned this. There's so many things people are telling you to do all these things as an accountant, you know, for your accounting firm. And I think that a lot of folks that I've, I've talked to and I've worked with, they're not sure where to start. They're not sure how to figure out what is the right balance of these different things. And so I think we were going to talk a little bit today about how do you balance between quick wins so that your marketing is doing stuff right now or directly, you know, going out and getting, getting work for you, getting new clients, but behind balancing that with the long term investment. Because marketing, you know, it's not, it's not just like a light switch that you can turn on when you need leads and then you turn it off when you Don't. There's a lot of this, this foundational stuff that has to happen. So maybe unpack that. How do you think about that, that balance between quick wins and the long term investment?

Absolutely. That that difference is something we've been really aware of, especially in the last year or two, because when we started PF we were focusing on that long term game. And for the record, I'm still a fan of the long term game. I believe that it delivers the best quality results organically over that long period of time. So if you're going to do marketing and do it well, which the accountants we work with, that's what they want. They want good quality marketing that brings them CL clients they love, maybe not even more clients. You know, we presume that with marketing, but you might not actually need more clients. You might need less, might need better clients. You might need to price them better and show your value better. So whatever it is that your goal is, it's about understanding, you know, who are you and who are they and getting all, as you say, those foundational aspects of marketing. I liken marketing to a steam engine because it's got to build up steam before it can go chugging along. And if you don't put the coal in and you're not building up that steam, you are not going to go from 0 to 100. And I looked this up, I think it was 130, roughly miles per hour. That's the fastest that a steam engine can go. You are not going to go 0 to 130 in a few seconds. And this is what a lot of people, not just accountants, business owners are going, okay, fine, I will spend some moneys, I will put 10 grand into my marketing and I would like 10 grand in, you know, two to three months. And you're going, how much have you put into the train? Like, do you have the train? Do you have. It's not, we're not even to the coal yet. Like, have you, have you got a train? Have you got a track? Do you know if you're going up or down? And they're like, listen, I was just. All these other people have trains and somebody offered to sell me a train for a couple thousand. I figured that was good. And you're like, okay, have you checked it out? Do you know if it's, it works? Have you put coal in it? Have you? And so there's this foundational element. Regardless of whether you're doing stuff for the long term or looking at quick wins, there's a foundational level of marketing that you must invest in. And you're either, as you and I both know, you're either going to invest your time or you're going to invest your money, or it's going to be a combo. And usually it's a lot of your time and a little money, and then over time, it's little less of your time and more of your money. And that's where the balance is tough for accountants. Because going back to that long game, you could get a client today from something you did three years ago. You know, they listen. I mean, you do a podcast. That's a perfect example. People could listen to a podcast for months, years, and then one day the right thing happens at the right time and they're ready and off they go. My book is a good example of that. People read it and go, I've been following UMPF for five years and now I'm ready. I've read it, I'm ready, I'm educated. Let's go. I've got the budget, I've got the time. I understand why it's so important.

This week's episode is sponsored by Benchmark Growth Marketing, Helping your accounting firm expand your niche with branding, positioning, websites, SEO and marketing strategy. If you're an accounting firm looking to fix your marketing, benchmark is your go to solution. Learn more at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now back to the program. Well, but one of the frustrating things, I think, for not just accounting firms, but for any business owner is this foundational stuff. It's hard to tie it directly to revenue and attribution. So even if you know they, the reason they came to you was because they've been listening to your podcast. You may not know what it was three years ago that you did that got them started on that path that you needed.

Here, they don't even know, like, one of the, I don't think it matters massively if, say, you come to me and you're like, hey, Karen, I was thinking of working with pf and we say, how, how did you hear of us originally? You might go, well, I don't know, you just seem to be everywhere. And then I bought your book.

You were around, you know, and I.

Can say, all right, I'm going to give, you know, three points to my book for, for bringing this person in. But I've got to give a point to the PF brand and the website and the socials and all of my LinkedIn posts, which I've been working on posting almost daily since the start of the year made a big impact. You know, little things that we do. And again, that's a perfect example with LinkedIn. We get accountants saying, well, I tried LinkedIn and it didn't work. Or whatever, whatever thing you're saying didn't work. But the way marketing works, it doesn't work on the debit credits way that you're used to with the accounts. It's more like, there's debit, there's a credit, there's a unicorn, there's a triangle, there's sunshine, there's some rain. And it might rain at the wrong time or it might suddenly thunder. You don't know when you get to play. And that's part of the fun, but that's part of the challenge. So circling back to the foundational elements, that is why they're so important to invest in. But you still need to decide when is the right time. How well do you know your own firm, your values, your audience, so that it's worth investing that significant amount in the foundational areas.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we have a similar thought on this. When I think of those foundational elements, there's sort of, I think of them as in three major categories. You've got positioning, which is kind of internally focused. We need to know who we are, who our clients are, like our service offering, all of that stuff. Then there's messaging. I'm a story brand guide. So we have this story brand approach, which is then how do you take your position and communicate it to your audience? And then the third one is really tangible. It usually centers around your website, like your home base. And if you, if you get those three things set as sort of your foundation, that's, that's a good start. But none of that is, is easily attributed directly to revenue. The website starts to get there, you're getting better conversions maybe, but you're still not getting new leads. Right. And so when I talk to a lot of accounting firm owners that they, they come to me and they say, well, I just need more leads. If I had more leads, I'd be able to grow my business. And, and the hard truth is that what you need often is to focus on some of this foundational stuff because you don't want to spend good money sending good leads to a bad website with bad messaging. And you don't understand your positioning. Right. I hear all the time from accounting firm owners, though. Feels like marketing is like throwing money into a black hole. I'm going to use this as a way to kind of segue into the next part, which is if all you do is kind of that foundational stuff, marketing can be quite frustrating because you're not seeing anything.

Well, you're not using your foundation. It's like building a house, right? Like, I've got an accountant I'm doing some coaching with who works with custom home builders and he's building a home himself. If all you do is build the foundation and let it sit there, you don't have a house, you don't have walls, you don't have windows, nobody can come over. You can't have wine and pasta, which we all know we want to have in the house, the candles or whatever it be. But you've got to do the foundations, but you've also got to add to them. And I hear you. I mean, we get the same thing. Like it, it does feel frustrating because this is back to marketing doesn't work the way the account's numbers do. Where I put in this and I get this, and if I don't get this, it's a fail. Instead, it's I put in this here, here, here, here, here, here, there, there, there, there. And I have no idea where this came from. And in a sense it's okay. And I don't want to minimize the priority, the importance of tracking and checking your ROI and looking at your numbers. But you do have to focus on the foundational things as a starter for the other things that you're going to. So I encourage accountants to look at what's your minimum viable foundation? So your minimum viable foundation for a firm that has two or three partners, 50 to 100 team members, you've been around for a while, you've got a name, you're not sure if it's the right name. It's kind of standard, typical. You've got the classic blue and gray colors. You know, your accounting firm name sounds like an accounting firm name. And you've got a WordPress template that looks like everybody else's. And you know, you're awesome and amazing in a particular way. And when you get the prospect in, you can convert them, but you're not getting them in. Because when they look at your website or whatever materials and they look at seven other accountants, you all look the same. So what you're doing with the foundational work is saying, well, what's my minimum viable? And for some firms, like that example one I gave, they're probably going to need to say, okay, we've been in business long enough, we need to stop here and do brand strategy. And we need to understand who we are, what are our values, what's the kind of clients we like to work with? Maybe industry, maybe not type of person, whatever. Who's our audience? What do they care about? What matters to them? What are the messages we want to get across? And once we've got all that, then we look, we sort of have set aside your name and logo and brand and colors and website, then we have that whole conversation and then we look at it and say, given that, how do you think your current name, brand, logo, website, etc. Is reaching those people? And they're going, I've just told you that we work with fast moving tech businesses and our name is ABC Accountants and Company and we look like every other. Clearly that's not matching. We probably need a new name, we need to rebrand. And then they start going, oh my gosh, but we just had the signs done last year and you know all these things. But the question is not how much did you spend in the past. We're all familiar with a sunk cost. It's not even did you work with an agency and you didn't get what you want? That happens all the time. I'm sure it does with people you work with. And that's justifiable fear that you would have. The question is, does your branding and marketing appeal to the kind of client you want? And if it does not, you are actively sending them away. Everything in your marketing right now is making it harder for you. Marketing supposed to relieve your burdens, that's its job. So if marketing is giving you burdens, then maybe you haven't invested enough, maybe you haven't been specific enough, maybe you don't know yourself well enough yet. And that's okay. That's what marketing is supposed to help you with. Like our clients refer to our foundational sessions as marketing therapy. They're like, man, that is tough, that is deep, that is intense. But oh, it's so good. And we're just downloading from your brain everything that you tell accountants, not accountants, everything that you as the accountant tell your clients or potential clients, and then we put that into a brand, a website or whatever so that your marketing can do the work for you. So once, and I know we're talking about moving from the foundation to the other wins, once you have that, then it's a question, well, what marketing campaigns will we run with our great foundation? And if your minimum viable foundation is a full rebrand with a new name and logo and a website, you're going to be spending a big chunk of money on that, and you're going to accept that and plan for it, and it's a true investment. There are other people who just need to use what they've got, update their website a little bit, create a more specific page with some better messaging, and get on social media. That's all they need to do for a while. So I just want to reassure anyone who's going, okay, you're saying I have to spend 50 grand, I've spent 100 grand. Maybe, but maybe you only need to spend three grand and do a bunch of work yourself.

Well, and I think, you know, you and I, we're a couple of marketers, we sell marketing to accounting firms. It'd be easy for us to sit here and be like, you know, and I know this is a frustration of. I think every, almost every accounting firm that I talk to, we want to be a guide, a trusted source, like our goal, my goal. And I think you share this attitude. We're not just trying to sell you services. We're trying to help figure out what is going to actually move the needle. I dread those conversations when an accounting firm comes in and says, oh, we just did a website redesign last year. And I look at what they've done and I feel terrible. But my answer might be this, this isn't going to get it. Get you where you want to go. I'm so sorry that you spent a bunch of money on this last year. But, you know, you go through some of this stuff, so that's, that is an unfortunate situation that, that happens now sometimes. You know, like you said, we, we, we talk with someone who has a great brand. They have a lot of clarity around this. They've done, they've done the work to get themselves to a point and now they really are ready to like, get some, get some leads in, in the door. And there is this balance right between this, this found you. I think you break it down into three categories. Can you talk us through.

Draw a little, little triangle at the, the bottom foundational level is the foundations. That is, you had the three, but ours are four. We do brand goals. Sorry, goals, brand, website plan, in that order. So if you don't know what your goals are, you're not going to be able to understand what marketing you need. Brand is your audience and values and messaging. Website is your client journey, the journey you want them to follow and how that's reflected. And then the marketing plan is, okay, now what stuff are we going to do? Usually marketing campaigns that you do in order to deliver on those Goals. So we circle back. So that's the foundational stuff. And if all you need to do for a year is go through the strategy, go through those things, build your marketing plan, start doing some stuff, maybe do a few small things, there's no problem that that might be your found somebody else's foundations, might be those sessions, plus a full rebrand, plus a new website, and then they're in a place to do that. So you've got your foundational content. The middle level of the triangle is your. What I call your consistent content, your blog posts, your social media, your awareness. You're just present, you're just ticking things away. And. And the top one, which is everybody's favorite, is the marketing campaign. And that's the one that says, we spend this, we expect to get this. And at the end of it, we will talk up how much we spent and how much we got, and we will check. Now, the difference is if you add it all up and say, we spent 10 grand on this campaign and we did not get any client signing up for this service or any leads yet after six weeks, we don't consider that a fail. That's the big kicker. Because you're tempted to. You're tempted to say, well, that was the stupidest campaign ever. This sucks. Why am I even doing this? And we're saying, first, marketing and creativity are all about the fails. We don't love fails, but you gotta have them to learn. So we say, all right, there's something that didn't resonate here, didn't land. Did we not have the right message? Did we go at the wrong time? Did we try and put everything out over Easter when everybody's off? Did we talk about our service more than we talked about the issues that the person faces? What did we miss here? And then we use that to learn and to either adjust the campaign or do a different campaign. So if you're hoping to have 10 new clients and you only got one, the first thing is say, well, if your campaign was six weeks long and you got one, you can keep running the things that you built for the campaign. You can keep sharing your PDF guide or your website or your video or your social posts. So it is possible that that campaign, even though you ran it for six weeks, has given you content that will deliver another one and another one over 12 months. Or like we said, three years later, somebody might go, do you know what? We had that call with you. We decided not to go ahead. We went with another accountant. That was cheaper. We've learned this the hard way that that was a very bad decision and now we're in a worse place and now we're ready to go. Let's spend the money, let's invest the money, let's learn and, and do this properly. So your campaign may have not been a fail because it it the impact takes longer to see. It may have been a fail, but a learning and you adjust your campaign and do it again. And then the second round of the campaign, you have twice as many, you know, well if you had zero, twice as many, still zero. So you go from zero to two or to five or to ten and then you just keep adjusting it so that you can learn from that. And that's what we find is the biggest kicker with the, what we call short term campaigns. But the short term campaign is built on a long term base and that is how it has the impact. So that triangle I mentioned, if you have not invested at the foundational level, if you have not invested at the consistent content level, your campaign will be harder, take longer, cost you more and deliver you less. So if you are frustrated with the lack of success in a marketing campaign where you found an agency that said let's get you on social media ads and you don't have a solid brand and your website pages are not clear and you haven't been publishing blog posts in social, it is no shocker to anyone, or it ought not to be a shocker that your campaign failed, but it feels like a shock to you and that I understand that, you know, you're sitting there as the accountant going, well, that marketing agency is rubbish. And I don't ever want to speak against another agency because I don't know them and it's not fair. But it is your job as the accountant. You're the responsible for your own firm's marketing. So it is your job to say, how do I make sure that I'm investing at the foundational level, the consistent level and the campaigns level in a way that fits with my firm. And if you need to invest in all three and that whole triangle looks like a ton of money in year one, then that's what you do. And if you're not ready do that. You do a little bit on the foundations and then year two you do that. But what a lot of our clients do is they invest at the foundational level and then they take what they were putting there and put it into campaigns because they've already done that. And then their campaigns succeed and they're like, hey, look at this, marketing's working. So it is a balance. And I understand that principle of wanting to get quick wins and all that being said, there are very tiny things that you can try. I'm not going to make guarantees because every firm is different, but it might be that if all your clients are on Instagram, it doesn't matter. You don't like Instagram. That's where they are. Maybe you just need to hang out there.

Yeah.

Or LinkedIn or TikTok or whatever it be like. It's all about the audience.

Yeah. Well, one thing I'll say too, though, you know, with marketing, there is a lot of trial and failure, but I think that there is also an advantage to working with a firm that understands your business and your industry. I know because we work with a lot of accounting firms, we have more insight into what types of campaigns and what types of tactics work and what I've seen. One of the big mistakes is for marketing firms that are more generalist in their approach, they assume that what works for, you know, a brick and mortar retail shop is going to work for an accounting firm. And a lot of times those, the relationship is different. And the types of campaigns that tend to work really well in one space don't translate to another one. And so when you're thinking about how are we, what, what kind of tests are we running? You want to be running the tests, the campaigns that have a higher chance of success. And I do think that there's, there's really a lot of insights. Now, you know this as an accountant too. If you have, if you have a niche or you have, you know, types of clients that you work with a lot, over time you get insights into their business, you're able to offer better advice because you've seen it before or you have similar clients and you can do that. The same thing happens in this marketing space. There's so many things you could do in, in marketing that you want to be as best you can, choosing wisely. But even, even you and I, who have worked with a ton of accounting firms, see campaigns fail occasionally. And yes, absolutely, have to be adjusted and reworked. Right.

That's it. And I think just accepting that. So I'm working on my second book, which is about the mindset of creativity and that accountants being humans. So unless you are listening and you're an AI bot accountant for everybody else, all the accountant humans, because you're a human, you are creative. And it is tempting to think, well, I'm not a creative person, I'm not an artist, I'm not a photographer, I'M not a writer. But instead of putting it up in this like, oh, this, this unachievable place. Creativity comes down to problem solving and curiosity and taking. I stole that from Inc. The book from the Pixar owner. And but those two things, I see that in accountants all the time. And it, that's what you do with your clients. You problem solve and then you're curious about it. So a big part of creativity is curiosity and a big part of creativity is fails. So if you accept that going in. We don't accept that we like fails. You know, we don't want the campaign to result in apparently nothing. But what we do is we look beyond and say, was it nothing though? Actually, because it seems like it was. But we learned a lot. We've got a couple inquiries and we don't know what's going to happen in three months or six months time. So opening your mindset to let's try something, there's a, there's a play element to marketing that I know can be hard. As an accountant, you're like, I don't want to play. I want you to tell me how to do it, what to do it, step one through five. And I want to guarantee a result. What's encouraging me is most of the accountants that we work with anyway are the ones who are like, you know what? Yeah, let's try it. Like, I, I'm doing a hundred day video challenge right now, just personally for myself, but I've got a, a bunch of accountants who decide to start doing it with me. And if you're listening to this podcast and you want to do it, you can do it yourself. You just pick today as your day one. And for a hundred days, you record a video every single day so that you can get better and more natural, more comfortable at video. And I picked this because video is my, I avoid it. I want to get it perfect, I want to plan it, script it. So I do a 90 second video on Instagram every day for a hundred days. And that the point is not to be like, oh, I got X number of clients. It's to say, I'm going to see what happens. Austin Kleon, one of my favorite authors, talks about showing your work and keeping going. And he says, just show up every day for a hundred days and see what happens. And that's what creativity is about. Now the marketing campaigns that we run with you, we'll run the numbers, we'll plan it out, we'll budget it, we'll look for ROI and numbers. But there is still an element of just seeing what happens. And there's a firm, a firm owner who decided to join me for the 100 day challenge and she is already going, you know what? I'm five days in, I'm going to try TikTok as well. Just because. To see and I thought what a lovely approach. She's not going well, I've been doing it for five days and I haven't got a new lead. This is a rubbish challenge she's leaning into. I just want to see, just want to see what I can learn and what I can grasp well.

And just zooming out a little bit from that. I think one of the things that's really, it's going to really benefit an accounting firm is if you, if you start thinking about marketing, not just in that project mindset like we're going to do, we're going to do some marketing every once in a while. You know, there's two things about marketing. You know, it, it feels expensive. Right. And it is expensive. And when we say expensive, you mentioned it already. Yeah, and it's expensive either in time or money or both. But the reason it feels expensive, I think, is that firms haven't really built it into their business model as, as an ongoing budgeted thing that they're, they're consistently investing in and, and how you invest those dollars. And that time is going to change as, as you build a better foundation, as you find campaigns that work, as you decide what kind of consistent stuff needs to happen every week or month and then what kind of campaigns do you want to run. But if you don't have a plan and a budget and an ability to do this over time, it's always going to feel expensive because you're going to go and say, you know, one day you're going to wake up and realize, you know, your, your website looks terrible on mobile and you need to do a redesign and you're going to go and find out how much it's going to cost and that's going to be, you know, a stake in the heart. It's, it's going to feel bad. But if you're budgeting, if you're setting aside money on a consistent basis, it doesn't feel so bad and it really should be a part of your, your business in, in general. Unless the only way you want to grow your firm is by buying other firms, you're going to need to do something though.

Even then, like I always say, even if you don't want to get more leads, you just want to have better clients that your team enjoy working with and you enjoy working with that are profitable for you. You need marketing for that, too. Because if you. What is the. If you're just standing still while everybody is moving forward, you're not going to get what you've always gotten. You're going to get less because you're going to start sliding backwards. So, and I do understand, as you said, that if you're looking at it merely as I spend this dollars, did I get this dollars, that there is a little turn to the approach that you need to take. And again, with the minimum viable, whatever that is, Start small, start safe is one of the things I encourage you to. Doesn't mean you have to stay small and safe, but it means that you start somewhere and you try something and you see if it works. And then if it does, you do more. And then recognizing this is circling back to you as the owner of the firm, that marketing is your responsibility. It is not something you abdicate. It is not something you hand off to someone else. We work collaboratively with our, our accountants and we meet with them every month or sometimes four times a month or as often as we need to. We're talking, we're sharing. They're sending us a message in Slack going, I had a great idea today. I thought about this. Or is this a great idea? Maybe this is stupid, but they've got that, that balance of saying, what are we going to do with this? But they recognize it comes from your conversations with clients, your conversations with prospects, the questions they are asking. And then we just help you turn that into a format and a tangible and intangible that appeals to people. So when you recognize that marketing is your job as the owner, like you are, the, you know, buck stops with you. It isn't that you don't get help, of course you do. That's why, you know, people like us exist. But yeah, what you're doing is saying, I'm not going to just tack on a little marketing to see if it works. I'm going to consider that a base level of expense that I have to put into my firm for what it will deliver. And we recommend 3 to 10% of your revenue. And that percent per year. That percent will change. If you need to do more foundational stuff, you might be at the 10%. We've had firms who have invested 20 or 30% in one year, and then in the next year they're like, right, okay, now we're at 5. And actually we're going to go down to 1% for a few months and then we're going to go up to three. That's fine. But if you're spending zero percent, you know, that's just, that's not, at some point it's going to bite you.

Yeah. And it has, it has a lot to do with how, how aggressive you want to be or how quickly you want to move, because a lot of this foundation, you, you could spread it out over time and that would be fine, but you're probably going to spend the same amount. So if you've got the, if you got the money, you know, maybe it makes sense to, to take a, take a leap and, and do it all at once rather than, you know, wait for three years to get it done, at which point that's when you start really getting the benefits from it. Well, this is a good place.

I think firm has already changed. No, I was just going to say.

Like, that's a huge deal.

You have a new firm, you have different people, you have different clients. So. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I just want to recap. So we were talking about. There's really three. There's your, your triangle. There's these three levels, right? You've got your, you've got your foundation that you need to get, get set. Then you need to have consistency in, you know, it might be email marketing and social media, this, this blog post, this stuff that you're, you're producing on a consistent basis. And then finally, you've got these campaigns where it's, it's kind of a targeted. We want to go out and, and make an impact. And those are the ones where you're probably most closely judging, like, attribution and roi. And as you're talking about it, I, Yeah, just, you've got your train metaphor. The metaphor that came into mind is like, you got to eat. And, and we're going to do three things you got to do. You're going to trap food, you're going to farm food, and you're going to hunt food. And so like, the foundation is like, we're setting the trap so that as people come in, they land on our website, they understand who we are, and they say, yeah, I want to work with you. Then you farm, you're working with your network, you're putting out consistent content. And then in some cases, you're going to go out and you're going to hunt the buffalo and you're going to bring back, you know, a big, a big prize. At the end of the day, those are, those are your campaigns.

Well, Karen, tell us about hunter gatherer marketing.

Right. Well, Karen, tell, tell, tell our listeners. Where, where can they find you? What, what did, what would it look like to get started working with you? You know what, what would you want them if they're, if they're interested in, in seeing what you have to offer? How would they do that?

Yeah. Thanks. So the, the very first place I would recommend is, is just get a copy of my book, if you haven't already. Yep. Thank you. So you go to karenlrayburn.com, and that has all the links. It's on audio, I've narrated it, it's on ebook, it's on print and you can get it from wherever you need. So that's the place to go for the book. Or you can just Google accountant marketer book. And then if you considering looking at working with PF or you just want some free resources, we're big on giving resources and templates and checklists and stuff that can help you. That is werpf.com that's my agency. We have about 20 creatives working all over the world with accountants all over the world. So it doesn't matter where in the world you're working. We work with us, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, uk, anywhere. And you know, everything that we do is custom fully to who you are as a firm because that's what the best marketing is.

Yeah, well, I agree. We're also a custom shop. I know there's a lot of templated things that a lot of folks get started with, but I think that when you're ready to jump into that next level of your marketing, one of the things I love that you say is, you know, the, the owner, you have to take ownership of it. You know, you can't, you can't outsource this completely to a marketing agency and expect good results. I know as we've developed over time, we've, we've realized it doesn't make sense for us to write on behalf of firms. We have to collaborate with them because the real insight, the value of that content so often has to be situated really with the person who knows what they're talking about, which is you as a firm owner. And so you need to also be involved in the marketing strategy and developing your firm. It's not something that you can, you can't 100% just throw money at it and hope that it's going to grow. I think that may be in terms of a piece of advice that's the best way to waste money is just to throw money and say it's somebody else's problem.

If anyone is listening and wants to flush their money down the toilet, the best way to do is just throw it at somebody, have no involvement, no conversations, and expect to get a return. And you know that that is exactly. It is. When you understand it's your job and when you understand that marketing's job is to represent you, don't you want it to represent you well? And honestly, of course you do. I hope you do. So in order to do that, you get to put it in. And if one of your fears is, oh, it's going to take so much time, think about how much time it takes to try to figure it all out yourself and get frustrated and say, that was a waste of money. And also it can be, it can actually be really fun. Like a lot of our accountants we work with, after some time, some people it's a few months, some people it's a few years, they're like, do you know what? I actually really love blog writing or videos or whatever thing. Everybody's different and they find they love it because they made that connection. I am getting to share with people who I and we as a firm truly are. And that's a beautiful thing.

Yeah. Well, we could, we could talk about this all day, but there's, there's probably a hard limit at which point people are going to stop listening. So I think we'll wrap it up there, but Karen will have to have you come back again and, you know, whatever that next kind of big topic of marketing that's on your mind. Let's, let's set. We'll set up another conversation sometime in a couple months. So thanks, Karen, for being on the show. And again, you can find the, you can get the book in all the places, but karenlrayburn.com is where you're going to. You find all those links and we are pf.com for the agency. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you liked this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting firms newsletter@marketingforaccountingfirms.com and you can connect with me, Matt Banker, on LinkedIn or Twitter. We hope you tune in next time for another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firms.