What's Wrong With Accounting Marketing

Foreign.

Hello. Hello. Another episode of marketing for accounting firms. My name is Matt Benker. I run a firm called benchmark growth, and we do marketing for accounting firms. That's kind of the point of this show. I bet you can guess what we're going to talk about today. But specifically, we're going to talk. I've got Laurelin Wilson on the show today. We're going to talk about what is wrong with marketing for accounting firms. You know, what, what mistakes are being made and what are. Where are people wasting money and all of that. And so, Laurel, thanks for being on the show.

Oh, thank you, Matt. And thank you so much for having me. Now, before we even get started, what camera are you using? Because that's a really nice camera.

So I. I'm using an old iPhone, actually. So here's. Here's a little. Yeah, a little trick. So iPhone, if you. If you're on a Mac, I think you're on a Mac, there's a direct connection now where you just put an iPhone next. So it's just on a tripod, but you put it next to your thing and you can select your iPhone as your camera. And so we've all got old iPhones laying around in the camera in an iPhone is a lot better than in those MacBooks.

Yeah.

Just because it's. The MacBook. Screen is really thin. You can't put a lens in there. The iPhone is thicker.

Okay. When you say, quote, old iPhone, like, what. What are we talking about? Because I feel like I have an. I think it's.

I think this is. It might be like an iPhone 8 or like an SE or something.

Okay. I have access, so. Okay, good. I'd be good.

All good to go.

Oh, my gosh. Look, coming out. Firing. Look at that. Great tip to start it off.

We're going to talk about content today. And I think video content is actually, is. Is a big deal these days. I think a lot of folks could benefit from recording videos, and it's a simple way to improve the quality. You don't have to go buy an expensive SLR or try to hook up a webcam or whatever. You can just use an old iPhone.

Yeah. And this is like. Yes, yes. And I would even. I would go so far to say that video is the most important content creation piece that accountants can get involved in because that's what everyone's consuming.

Now we're going to talk about, you know, what's wrong with marketing for accounting firms. But why. What do you have to say, like, why should we listen to you what's, what's your experience in authority?

Yeah. So honestly, I'm surprised anyone listens to me. I'm, I'm. I'm the type of person where whenever I do something like, and it's semi successful, I'm like, I'm more surprised than anyone. I'm like, oh my gosh, that actually worked because a lot of times I just experiment with things and I just try things out and I just don't have an expectation to succeed. So when I do, I'm like, oh my gosh, that worked. But I mean, on the flip side of that, that means I'm just not, I'm not afraid to try anything. And so that's kind of how I got involved in posting on social media. And kind of like, I don't even want to call myself an expert. I'm just out here trial and erring and seeing what works and sharing that. And if something doesn't work, pivoting and trying something new. So I just kind of have like my own little sandbox I'm playing in.

Yeah, well, and you're, but you're, you're doing it. I think that's the, that's the key.

Doing it. Yeah. And so kind of what my little springboard was getting Covid. So it all started with COVID where It was late 2021. It was literally that last week of December, which is like the purgatory week, where it's just weird, everyone feels weird. And I got Covid and it was, I call it good Covid where I didn't have any symptoms. I was just, you know, positive and I was being a good citizen. So I wasn't out running around town. I was like, well, quarantine in my room. Cuz I had my kids with me, so I even had to like quarantine away from them. And I felt fine. So I had all this energy and I was like, well, maybe I'll start posting tax and accounting stuff on TikTok. And I had an ebook at the time and see if I can sell this ebook on there. Just kind of, kind of as an experiment to see could I sell accounting and tax things on TikTok. And prior to that I'd had a couple videos go viral. Some were not tax and accounting related, one or two were and they were like response to this. What is her name? Something Valentine or something. She's some type of like business entrepreneur. But she'll post tax stuff. That's not always accurate. So I did like one or two response videos to her that had Gotten a decent amount of engagement. So I thought, okay, let's, let's try this. And so I started doing that in January and I had a couple videos hit really or really early on that were around influencer taxes. So like the taxability of things like receiving PR packages and things like that. And so in that first month I gained like 30,000 followers just. And I wasn't even posting every day. I was posting every couple days. So it wasn't even very consistent. And so, you know, sold maybe overall like a thousand dollars worth of this 19 eBook. Again, I was just doing as an experiment. I wasn't like, this is going to supplement my income. It was. But I learned from that. Oh, you can sell tax and accounting services on social media if you do it in this kind of engaging way.

Yeah. What two things I'm hearing here. One, and I think we'll get into this. Spiky opinions are helpful and good when you're on social media. Like, no one needs to hear the, the bland. What everybody else like what you'd find in a typical SEO article on a Google search, they're often looking for something a little more specific. And we know with social media, you know, a little bit of tension, controversy is one of the things that really drives engagement. And just related to that is that you had, you had a specific and a strong point of view. And that I think this is, you know, if I'm going to make a point one about what's wrong with a lot of accounting firm content is that there's, there's just literally no point of view. It's just like bland information that goes out there. Here's the rules about such and such. Right?

Yeah. And it's not as we know, tax advice is a very personal thing because if someone asks us, can I do X, Y, Z? Our answer always is. The joke is, it depends because it is so personal. And so when you are delivering tax and accounting advice, you do, you have to make it personal for them. And that's why this bland, you know, these bland articles and stuff like this is how to take the meal deduction. No one's. Everyone's eyes will glaze over and they won't, you know, they won't read it. And so then what you have to do is make it entertaining. So if I were to do that, like, here's a perfect example. I think I did this. I followed a day of me going out and creating some content for a vendor. I was doing like a sponsored post or something. And so I like kind of vlogged you know, it was like a one minute TikTok video of the different things I was doing throughout the day. Like I was buying lunch, I was doing this. Was it deductible and why or why. Why not was this deductible? So I was, you know, creating a very specific instance and situation and kind of talking through why or why not something was deductible in that situation.

All right, well, let's, let's just like open it up here. What are the biggest problems with marketing when it comes to accountants and accounting firms right now? What are you seeing?

The main problem I see from smaller shops. And by smaller shops, I mean, you know, not big regional firms. I mean, you know, firms with one or two partners, maybe 5 million sub or whatever, is there's no personality behind their, their content and what they're putting out. People are not going to respond to, you know, lo tax associates like there's not a face. So you really need a personality and a face behind the business because accounting can already come across as impersonal. Like, you know, no one's like, all jazzed to go see their accountant, unless I'm their accountant. Then they're super jazzed. But it's like, okay, so how do you take this thing that's been cold and impersonable and turn it on its head and make it personable and make it relatable and that to me, that to clients. Because the number one thing, when new clients come to me and I say, why are you leaving your last accountant? They'll say, I never hear from them. So they're, they're wanting the relationship piece. That's the value add at this point. And so that's what you can start providing through social media. They get to know you.

Yeah, there's. It, it's kind of ironic because I, I think everybody knows if you're in, if you're in accounting, it's a trust business, right? Like, people, you know a lot about them, their personal lives, their businesses, because you're seeing their books, you're talking about their taxes, like these conversations. It requires a lot of, you know, vulnerability on, on the part of the client. And yet a lot of firms come across as, like you said, kind of cold and impersonal. It's hard for me to know, like, do I want to move forward with this kind of company if I don't have any idea what kind of company you actually are? I mean, I know you probably have blue and silver, you know, logo and design. You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of, like, professionalism, I think, in accounting firms and in the way that accountants present themselves, but without that other piece of. We often talk about, like, you have to have both empathy and authority. Like, you have to show that you understand who you're, who you're serving, and then you also have to have the actual knowledge. So, you know, a TikTok influencer might have a lot of empathy or like, relatability, but if they don't know what they're talking about, that's a problem. And I think a lot of accountants know what they're talking about, but they have a real. They really struggle to, to present it in a way that people can actually relate to. Right?

Yeah. And I think that's a really good way to put it. And I think part of the problem is, and I run into this a lot is we kind of have the curse of knowledge where we are so deep in our level of knowledge, we forget what the average person knows and doesn't know. And the average person is on layer one while we're on layer 20. So I think part of the struggle is just they're like, what content would I even put out that would be valuable? Because they're thinking they need to go 20 layers deep. You only go 20 layers deep, you stay at layer one. How do you take a meal deduction? What's auto mileage? Do I need an llc? What's the taxability? Like, these things that we consider, quote, unquote, basic are incredibly complex to the average person. And so just taking a step back and realizing, you know, all the things I know I don't have to educate them on, like, that's what they'll hire me for. So it's kind of this like, top skim level baseline knowledge is what, you know, you can give out to the public and they will, they will eat it up.

So no personality. I think that that's a huge challenge. No personality, no face of the business. I would venture to say most firms and a lot of firm owners are like, yeah, I don't, I don't want to be the face of my business. I want to disappear. I want to. I want to do my work and I want to make money, but I don't want to have to be. I don't want to have to be on social media. I don't want to have to be publishing. What, what do you say? How, how would you, what kind of advice would you give?

Well, here's the thing. You don't have to do anything. You don't want to do. But just know by making that decision, you are reducing your opportunities to drive a new client. That's just the bottom line. So you can keep doing what you've always done. And guess what, you're going to keep getting the same results you've always gotten. But if you want to kind of reach a way broader base of clients, which you can do at a pretty low cost with social media, that's like kind of the cool thing about it. You don't have to buy Facebook ads or Google Ads and spend thousands of dollars a month. You can just put yourself on video for free, you know, a couple times a week and drive in clients that way. So you don't do it. Fine, but you're not going to get as many clients. Cool. More for me. Thank you.

You're trying to find more opportunity for you as the firm owner, as, as maybe the subject matter expert to be in a one to many space. Right. You're speaking to a larger audience and doing less of the like one to one client facing work because you're, you're always going to be a bottleneck. If you're the, if you're the strongest, let's say voice opinion expert in your firm, your skills are, are valuable obviously in those one to one situations. But if you want to grow your firm, they're more valuable in this, you know, one to many space. And so it might just be about a mindset shift of saying, well, you don't have time for social media. It might be because you're spending so much time, you know, in production or in these other places that might not be at least long term the best value for, for the limited time that you've got.

Yeah. And I think that's a huge mindset shift that's very hard for accountants in general because we start off as very technical workers. And then we, you know, either we're done working for someone else or, you know, we start off on our own and we keep growing and growing and then we are forced into this position of being a business owner. Being a good business owner is a very different skill set than being a good accountant. And that's why another thing we joke about in our industry is accountants are terrible business owners because they have so much trouble removing themselves from the work because they think I'm the only person, I'm the only person who truly understands the client. I'm the only person who can do this. When in reality it's like, okay, if you're serious about growing, you have to learn to delegate like you, you have to bring on a team if you're serious about growing. Like, those are just the steps you need to do or don't and keep doing all the work and never grow and never making more money. Those are your options.

Well, speaking of spiky opinions, Laurel, and why don't. I don't. I don't need to create content on social media because I, I have a company that is sending me blog articles every week for SEO that I'm posting to my website. And they, they, or maybe they even post on social media for me a couple times a week. Like, isn't. Isn't that going to be enough?

It depends. Is that, is that strategy driving new business for you? Because if it is, cool, just keep doing that. But more often than not, what I see is that is not driving new business. All it is is it's cool I'm putting out content. But the first thing I tell accountants, before you put out content, like, you need to, number one, have a strategy behind it. Like, what's your end goal? Content. And if you don't have a strategy to start, you're just going to be blasting out content and not tracking whether anything's converting or not. So it's like, okay, if you're, if you're using this service and you're putting out kind of this impersonal, because it is kind of impersonal boilerplate content that's, you know, there's not a lot of personality, there's not a lot of tone behind it. Is that driving you new leads? And my, my bet is it's probably not driving you new leads. That's probably not getting a lot of engagement. Like, how many followers are liking it? Are people commenting on it? So those are the kind of things you need to look with. There is one of those services who I like to poke fun at. But if you search the hashtag on Twitter, small business stat, I think it's on Saturdays, is you will literally see thousands of the exact same tweet coming from accountants and accounting firms with zero to little engagement. Like, I, I literally mean, like, I see one heart, no hearts, you know, and these are also Twitter accounts that have been, you can tell, like, set up by this third party that have, like two followers. So it's, you're, you're, you're getting what you pay for. Actually, I would say you're not even getting what you're paid for because you're literally getting nothing at that point. It would be better to have no social media if that's what you're putting out.

Save, save a hundred bucks a month. You get the same results but you have a little cash in your pocket. One of the things that I, that frustrates me about people selling marketing in the accounting space is they, a lot of these places will really sell high on the value of SEO and this content that they're putting together. But they're, they're creating, they're giving the same content to every single firm that's out there. And what Google does is, is it, it recognizes that as duplicate content. So if you're not heavily editing the stuff that you're getting and you're putting it on your website, Google looks at that and it's like, eh, we already see this article over there. There's no point in ranking it, you know, for your website. And so a lot of, I think they over promise, you know what this is actually doing. The value, if there is any value is just, you know, it shows activity. Right? So if someone checks out your social media and you haven't posted in three years, well, okay, if you have boring articles that were from last week, okay, maybe that's better than nothing. But that's, that's sort of the, the limited value that I see in it. I don't think it has much SEO value in most cases, you know, aside from the quality of the content. And then on top of that, a lot of times they actually set you up on like blog.xyfirm.com, which means the SEO juice isn't even for your domain. It's for a, it's for a separate domain. But the sales pitch is often really like, hey, this is going to help your SEO. I'd be real, I'd be real skeptical about that if you're thinking about one of those firms.

Well, here's the thing too. Like I think of, and this is not every tax preparer, but I also work with small businesses in an advisory component. So if I'm looking at their financials and I'm seeing how much they're spending on marketing, I'm asking them, what are you getting for what you're spending? Can we measure this? Is this hitting revenue? If it's not? I literally had this conversation with a client yesterday where we're having to drastically cut costs and we're looking at his marketing budget. He's spending $20,000 a month on marketing for months, for years. I was, I was like, have you gotten one client from this? Well, no. Okay, guess what's being cut for the next several Months, you know, but it's like, why are we not asking ourselves that exact same question? Like, what's our actual ROI on this?

Yeah, I, I mean, I, my, my opinion or like the perspective I usually bring is, you know, marketing, Marketing is expensive, but you can spend time or you can spend money. And, and I would say this is. As a person who sells marketing services, I love it when a firm has decided that they're going to throw some people time, hour, resources at their marketing as well as try. And, you know, there can be an advantage to working with an outside partner, but if you're not putting, if no one on your team is putting in any time, that's, that's a real easy way to waste money because no one's really paying attention to what that marketing company is doing in most cases. And that that agency probably doesn't have the knowledge and the insight that they actually need to do good work for you because there's no one on their team that can provide that level of insight. Now, some agencies also aren't built to actually want any of that feedback either, but, but it does require a little bit of both, I would say.

Yeah. And I think too, when you are a business owner and you're deciding what do I keep in house versus what do I outsource, you have to take a really hard look at what are the things that you can deliver that would be very, very hard for a marketing firm to deliver. You know, and so, and then being able to kind of splice up, okay, this is what I'm going to keep, and then this is what I'm going to hand off to them. And so kind of figuring out more of a collaborative engagement because again, if you are working with someone, they do need to understand your personality and tone to put that into the materials they're creating for you. So I just think it's very unrealistic to think you can just hand this off a hundred percent and they will take it and do a really good job with it, you know, unless you're paying them like tens of thousands of dollars a month and even then. So you just have to be ready to accept there will be some component of involvement for you in that if you want good marketing that actually converts.

You mentioned, you mentioned roi. You know, what is this getting you? What are, what are some of the things that you're tracking in terms of how you, I know you're doing a lot of. It's organic, right. You're doing a lot of posting and creating your own content. What are the Numbers or metrics that you're looking at and how do you tell if it's working?

I've almost actually stopped doing any marketing for my firm because I was, I was. Well, I mean I was at capacity and so pretty much what I was doing though when I did have that funnel open and I'll, I'll respond to this in two ways. I'll respond with it. With my newsletter I send out and actually get subscribers for verse like when I'm getting business clients. So when I was getting business clients, basically what I was, my goal was to get to convert two to three engagements a month and these were like monthly 500 plus engagements. So if I was doing that, my marketing was successful. If I was not getting enough inbound calls to do that, I need to create more content and put more content out there. And so it's a very easy basic metric. So what I do with my newsletter I have cause I have a newsletter called the Mad Woman Media newsletter and it's 30 bucks a month subscription that accountants can subscribe to and then they can use the content within that white label it and redistribute it however they want. The only way I'm advertising for that right now for the most part is every week. And I haven't done this the past couple weeks I'm like do as I say, not as I do is I would, every time after I'd send out a newsletter to the list, I would do a tweet, a small tweet thread summarizing my newsletter just went out. Here's the topics I covered. You know, this is what people get when they subscribe. Da da da. And so what I was tracking on that, when I do send that out, I'm like, if I can get three people to sign up for that every week, you know what, that's 12 signups a month. Then I'm like, I'm doing the advertising is doing good and if I'm not getting three signups with that, okay, then I actually need to start posting more in between those posts to try and you know, get in people's feeds more.

So and you could probably say right, your, the, the focus is like on an outcome. I, this is, I think actually another mistake is that a lot of, a lot of firms, they see reports and it says your, your traffic has gone up this much or like this is the, the cost per click for your Google Ads is way down. And you've, you've got all marketing companies often we're very good at making good looking reports. To prove our value. But it, but it might be based on metrics that aren't related to sales. And it's not to say marketing is, it's art and science. You don't always know what exactly is going to work or if it's going to work. So, you know, no marketing company is going to be able to say, like, if you hire us, it will, you know, get this exact result for this cost. There's always some risk, you know, involved. But at the end of the day, your marketing should be contributing to revenue. And so if there's no connection between sales and marketing activity, if you can't draw a line between those two things, or you're not in any way trying to correlate that. I mean, for Coca Cola, like, brand impressions might make sense, right, as a metric to, to track, but for a small accounting firm, like, brand impressions are basically worthless. You need actual like lead to sale type metrics that you're thinking about.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I just, yeah. I think it's really funny that accountants, like, we're numbers people. Like, we should be able to see, we should be able to see the numbers. And if you're not seeing the numbers, something needs to be adjusted. And one thing I tell people too, what's kind of cool about accounting and whether you hire a marketing person or you're doing it yourself, the first thing I say is you need to develop a strategy and you need to give it six months. So you have to give it time to work, you have to give it time to get content out there. But then so much of the content we put out is evergreen. So guess what? Something we put out six months ago when we only had three followers, and now six months later, we have 400 followers, we can start reusing content that's already been made. So even if you do partner with a marketing firm for six months and you're still getting content made that you can then reuse in the future, you have not lost this content. So it's like even if you don't drive one sale, you at least have content now that you can reuse in the future.

Yeah, well, on that point, a tool that I think can be really helpful. We, we use a, a social media scheduler called Meet Edgar. And the way it works is you, you set up categories of types of posts. So we recommend like, you have some promotional posts, like articles that you share, sort of general advice and then more engagement, you know, polls or other like, I don't want to say clickbaity, but it's, you Know, it's the fun content, even birthdays and you know that kind of stuff. But you, you set up your buckets of types of content and then you fill your buckets with, you try to do, like you said, more or less evergreen content. And then what Meet Edgar does is it puts out, you set, say like promotional posts go out on Mondays at 11am and engagement posts go out on Thursday at 2pm it goes through those. It'll, it'll pick one and it'll put it out in your social media. And then if it runs through all of the posts that you've created, it will refill the hopper and it'll start going through them again, which for accounting firms like Philip, your hopper in, you know, November. And then when you're in the middle of tax season, you know that there's content that's still going to go out regularly. Now it's not, it's not the best. Right. Timely new content that would be great to be creating all the time. But the reality is, you know, the ability to like do social media in the middle of March. Right?

Yeah.

May not, may not be feasible for a lot of folks, but at least you know that there's something that you've already created in the past that's, that's going out there. So yeah, it's one that we like.

Well, Annie, as you talk about this, like, that's kind of one of my passions is how do I help con accountants create content easier? And so as you're saying this, I'm trying in my head, I'm like, okay, how do we solve for this? Like, how do we make it easier? And then two, obviously like, I'm an accountant. I'm, I'm can be price sensitive. I'm trying to think of where can I save dollars. So it's not only how can we do this in a time efficient way, but is there a way to automate and do a certain amount of things that then you can also save money as well?

Yeah. You know, most this is even a direction that we're going with our business is that we see you kind of go through multiple phases. Usually when you're, when you're really small or starting out, like you probably have to own the strategy and you got to do a lot of the production.

Yeah.

You grow, you grow bigger. Maybe it makes sense to hire an agency to do some of that stuff for you. But if you grow big enough, you probably are going to hire and develop a team internally that's going to be in charge of your marketing. Again and so it depends on where, what resources you have and what phase you're in in terms of your business growth and all that. And so like we've been moving in a direction of trying to do a better job of supporting and equipping people who are doing marketing for their firm rather than primarily just selling, you know, marketing services to firms. Because you're right, the, the cost just makes a lot more sense if you can develop your own capacity to do that in a lot of cases.

Well and I think what's cool is there is with all the new tools coming out, like I think I need to figure out how this works. Do you know how this works? How you can like basically plug in content to. I don't know if it's chat GPT but you can train it to use your voice and so it will rework content in your invoice in your own voice. Like that. To me I'm like oh my gosh, that's a game changer, you know. So it's one like that's a good example if you are working with one of these cheap services who's giving you bland content, being able to plug that content into, into a way that it reworks it into your voice. So it's like things like that. I think there's a lot of opportunity on the horizon for accountants to be able to maybe manage more of this stuff as they're smaller and they don't have a budget for it, but in a very time efficient way.

So we've talked about personality, we've talked about boilerplate content, talked about this like curse of knowledge challenge. Is there anything else on your list that you see like what's, what's the stuff that you see occasionally that just kind of, you know, drives you a little bit nuts?

Oh it's, it's always non tax professionals giving tax advice that is too blanket or too vague that people are going to take that and think it applies to them and you know, execute it very wrongly. Tax fraud. But on the flip side that's an opportunity for content. For tax professionals like that is one of the easiest ways to create content is just to do a response video. I could do response, I could do multiple response videos every day on TikTok if I wanted to to bad tax advice. So there's never, there's, there's no, we're never lacking for it. And then what's also cool is like for me, my problem is, is not that like oh, I can't think of content to create. My problem is I have too much content I could create. But it's like, you know, you go to those videos, it's bad tax advice to begin with, then you go to the comment section and then that's even more content. You can see what people are asking to like. Yeah, it's, it's literally an endless flow of content. Ideas would just be responding to bad tax advice and people too. I find people love response videos. So those are my videos that honestly probably get the most engagement is when I'm responding to bad advice. So it's like not only are you debunking, you know, bad information, two, you're establishing yourself as an actual authority on the subject and people will trust and follow you for that.

Yeah, you know, for, for folks who are more tech, technical technician types, you know, you don't feel like you're super comfortable on social media yet if you can find a community. So if you have, you know, a market that you serve really well, or I mean, it can be any type of community, but you find yourself in a space where people are hanging out and you just start answering questions and correcting assumptions and things like that. It could be Facebook groups for contractors, it could be Reddit threads for influencers, or there's all these places that these conversations are happening but the people who have the real knowledge are not there and participating. And you build that goodwill on the front end, you know it's going to turn into. Now you might not get a client, right? So you're talking to someone on, on TikTok. You might not get a client from that, you know, 22 year old influencer who saw your video. But there's a whole bunch of people who are business owners who are also scrolling on TikTok that are seeing that kind of stuff.

Yeah. And I always say whenever you, you meet someone or you get in front of someone, you're not just getting in front of them, you're getting in front of their whole network. So even if you're not a good fit for them, they're going to remember that and then refer you out accordingly. So it's never, it's never for loss getting in front of new people because you just never know when I say when one person can change your life because you don't.

Yeah, really, when, when someone has a problem. At least today, 2023, I don't think it's quite shifted yet to include ChatGPT in this, but maybe it will. But right now people look for solutions in two places. They either go to Google and they, they do A Google search or they go to their network and that could be a Slack channel, a Reddit thread, an in person network. But those are, those are really the only two places. And so, so much of your marketing is often focused on like, how do we show up in Google when you know, the really valuable stuff might be, how do we get our name to show up in these communities when someone is looking for a solution that we could provide.

Yeah, and those are just communities like that just going to where your ideal client hangs out are just such low cost ways to market yourself. Now I will say this. My plan was to try and get a hundred in the next month on the ground route marketing because I won't be able to get in, in front of enough people. So I think the grassroots approach is better if you're kind of doing a long term, you know, I'm not looking to gain a crazy number of clients a month, but I'm just trying to, you know, get a good marketing strategy going and start getting clients to filter in. So I actually though am doing the other one. I. In the next two months, my goal is to bring on 100 new tax clients because now I have a, a new tax person helping me do return. So I was like, okay, let's go. I have capacity. And so for that it's, my strategy is not going to be going to Facebook groups. It's not going to be. My strategy is to, number one, I'm going to rework my Instagram for my business. I actually just, you know, changed the handle. So it's Lake Oswego tax. So it's very specific to my community. And when people, where I live, when people see Lake Oswego, there's certain imagery and you know, things that come up. So people will immediately like form an image and a, a vibe in their head. So it's like, okay, I want to make sure my handles really aligned and then I'm going to pre populate the grid probably with 9 to 12, you know, different, different tiles. So I have some history there. And then, you know, give enough information about my company and stuff. And then I'm going to do a targeted Instagram ad campaign for my area. So that's like, that's, I'm, I'm going to spend some money on it, but that's like, I'm, I'm kind of niching down to my area. I have a clear plan for what I want to do, so I feel okay throwing some marketing dollars at it.

Yeah, well, that's, I mean that's where it goes back to you can you can spend time or you can spend money and you really just got to ask yourself like based on your goals and your capacity and resources right now, what's the one that is going to make more sense? The thing that I, the advice I would generally give though is if you're looking for a cheap way to do marketing, either not much time I'm going to buy content from this guy over here and repost it, or not much money I'm going to Pay, you know, a 10 an hour freelancer to write blog articles. You're going to get what you pay for. Like you're better off putting in either putting in the time. Now one thing I'll say I think that is really interesting about what you're doing is there's a few folks out there who are experts in the space and also like helping with content. Do you want to talk a little bit about the, your newsletter? Like what do you, how do you see that as different than you know, these, these content farms that are providing content for, for CPA firms or accountants?

Yeah. So I would say the main difference for me right now that I can come to the forefront and say is I'm actively a practicing cpa. I have an active tax base, I have an active accounting base. So I'm in the weeds just like they are. Every single day I'm getting asked the same questions they're getting asked by their clients. So just on a relate relatability level, I can relate to them a lot easier. And then I think the other thing is too now I have a couple years history of actually creating content, engaging content that connects with small business owners online. So it's not only am I coming from it from the technical side that I'm in this, I know I'm doing exactly what you're doing. But then also look, look what I've been able to do with it and I'm going to show you how to do it and I'm going to give you the same type of content that I put out that gets good responses and it's I need to like this is again do as I say, not as I do. I get so much good feedback from my newsletter. I get emails every week from accountants who are subscribed to it and they're like this is incredible. Thank you so much. Like I should be screenshotting those and putting those all over my website. But it's they like that honestly to me is also affirmation that this is, this is good stuff. I'm doing. And so, and then too, like just this, this past week, there was another CPA who reached out to me who wants me to do some kind of copywriting services because they're, they're a subscriber on my newsletter and they're, they're like, we love the content you put out and how you, how you phrase it, you know, it's entertaining, but it's simple enough that the average person can understand it. And that was the problem. They said our marketers can't do this because they're not accountants. And you know, they don't, they don't understand the information enough to even deliver it in a good way. So, like, can you help me do this? And I said, absolutely, I can help you do that. I'm very good at doing that.

Yeah. If you have a person on your team who understands accounting, but they're good at marketing or they're good at writing and you see a future like, where they could be assisting your firm in creating content, like, find a way to develop that on your team. Because I think the thing that, that you, you bring up that's so important is that, that you know, that intersection of subject matter knowledge and you know, interesting writing, content creation, you know, that voice, the tone, all of that, that's, that's a fairly rare combination, I think, in this industry. There's a lot of knowledge with, you know, most people don't go into marketing or into accounting because they, you know, love to write and are kind of entertaining in their personalities. We don't write content for our clients anymore. We said, we, we just eliminated that as one of our deliverables. We only do if we can work with a subject matter expert to create content for them. Because, you know, I think we do a good job of writing. But we just found without that level, like you're saying, of knowing, what are people asking right now? What, what advice do they need? The, the content we could create would be SEO optimized, but it just wasn't, it just wasn't helpful or good in, you know, for a human. Yeah, it was good for robots, not for people was the problem.

Yeah, well, and two, it's a little hard for me to just be like, account. You just start writing your own copy. Cause the reality is I first started dabbling in creating content for self employed individuals in 2017. I've been writing for seven years. I've been writing content and explaining these types. So I've gotten like, I've put in the hours, I've put, I have the word, the Number of words to support me. So it's not a skill. I just one day woke up and have like, I, I had to work at it. But again, the cool thing with accounting content is it's evergreen. So a lot of the content I created back in 2017, I'll revisit it and then I'll rework it, you know, with better writing techniques or maybe tax laws changed. And so again, it's like the stuff you create, you can keep reusing over and over and over again. That's an asset that's there forever. And so that's why I think it's worth investing your time in.

Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation. Laurelin, when are you going to sell your practice and become the next like, Jason Stats, full time content creator?

Oh my gosh. I, I don't think I'll sell my practice anytime soon. Part of it be is because, so I've always said, like, I want to be a millionaire, not because I want a million dollars. I want to figure out if I can do it. So it's kind of the puzzle that's really interesting to me. So that's where I'm kind of at my firm right now is I'm entering like, I'm in a growth phase right now, you know, just staffed up and I want to see, okay with what I've done, where can we get to? And then at that point, step back, reassess. But I'm kind of like picking up the puzzle pieces and seeing what fits together and just experimenting. But then part of that too is I do that and I make money doing that. This is how I pay my bills. This is like the main way I pay my bills. But then, cool. What am I learning? Okay, can I take now what I've learned and teach other people, Monetize it. So I'm always trying to think of the lessons I learn is how I can in the future kind of spin off new businesses. So the accounting firm, I'll probably have minimum if I sell it. It'd probably be when I'm like 50, once my kids are, you know, out of school and doing that. But then on the flip side, I am kind of freeing up space this next year to going more into the content marketing of helping other accountants create content. So that's kind of where I want to expand and figure out, okay, how can I do this a little more at scale? Cause I don't want anything that's taking up all my time. I don't want my accounting firm to take up all My time. I don't want my marketing endeavors to take up all my time, but I still want to be able to express myself creatively that way and experiment and see, you know, how can I make money off doing these different things?

Where can people find you and if they're interested in getting your newsletter, where are they going to get that?

Yeah. So where I like to connect with my accounting peeps is on Twitter. So my handle is just. My name is at Laurelin Wilson, and then my website is matt is madwomanmedia co not.com because I couldn't buy it. It was owned by someone in China and they would not respond to the request to buy the domain. So madwomanmedia co. So there's a link to sign up there, but then there's also, if you scroll down a little bit on a page, there's a freebie download. So it's literally just like a Getting started creating Content 101 guide, which is like eight or nine pages long. It has some good insight. Actually has some good insight too. If you know at all who Duke loves taxes is. He's enrolled agent, has a tax firm and has over 3 million followers on TikTok. He's a content machine. But, like, he also is in his 20s and has energy and doesn't have kids, so of course he can be a content machine. I am in my late 30s. I have two kids. Like, I cannot be. And so there's ways to create content and be successful online with both. He's done it. He's successful. He does it, obviously at a much greater scale than I do, but I've done it too, and it's got me clients and it works.

So, yeah, that's awesome. Well, thank you again for being on the show. Love it. Love the conversation. Yeah. Connect with Laurelin on Twitter. X whatever we're calling it these days.

It's Twitter.

Yeah, it's. It's. That's. That's my opinion too. As long as Twitter exists, you can find. Find her there. So I think we'll leave it there. And yeah, this has been another episode of Marketing for Accounting firms. Thanks. This podcast, marketing for Accounting Firm 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 @benchmark growth marketing.com Connect with me, Matt Banker on LinkedIn.