Your 3 Storytelling Pillars

So usually then with B2B brands that have brought me in, they're like, we are really boring. We have like a not very sexy product. Like, help us figure out how we talk about this, you know, and so that's the beauty of like kind of figuring out you and your voice and how you can connect.

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 Marketing for Accounting Firms dot com. Now, here's the show. All right, today I have Sarah Panis with me. Exciting random connection. We're both here in Minnesota and Sarah knows my mom. We're both story brand guides. It's a weird small world thing. We've both, we're both kind of in this marketing world but in pretty different places. But Sarah, give us you know why this is the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. You do marketing and have you worked with accounting firm owners before? And tell me.

I haven't.

Yeah, go ahead.

I, yeah, I haven't worked with an accounting firm yet, but I've worked with so many different brands of all different sizes. So my life was the last 20 years, over 20 years, worked in corporate for really big brands. I used to lead content marketing strategy for Sleep number. They're a billion dollar sleep retailer. And I worked with lots of other clients like Starbucks and Nestle Waters, et cetera. So lots of folks in the B2C space. But then I've been getting more into the B2B space, which I love as well. And so really helping all the way from these big brands down to small business owners. So the beauty with content strategy and as we're thinking about how do we connect with our audiences is it doesn't matter what size you are. We all need to ultimately connect with our customers. And so that's where I come in. I help companies check those storytelling projects off their to do list, help think through the content strategy elements to better connect with their audiences and drive better business results through their content.

Yeah. So we're going to dig into content strategy and I know it's a challenge for a lot of accounting firm owners. They have multiple challenges. There's the blank page syndrome, like, I don't know what to write. There's this question about like, should I repeat myself? Do I have to constantly come up with new things. But before I get into that, I want to ask. Go. Going from that B2C to B2B, one of the things that I realized. So we do. There are some firms that are really in kind of the B2C space. They do, they do tax planning and preparation for individuals. But a lot of our audience and a lot of the clients I work with are more in that B2B, you know, accounting firm, working with businesses, doing their outsourced bookkeeping and more advisory services and all that. In your experience, moving between those two spaces, though, what. What do you. What do you think of as some of the bigger differences from a marketing perspective that you need to. What. What's the same and what's different? B2C. B2B in your experience?

Yeah, good question. I've never thought of this, like, in comparison. So let's think it through. So I would say the, the biggest. What I tend to notice is B2C brands are always thinking about storytelling and how they want to connect with their audiences. B2B brands, I think, aren't always there yet. They feel like, oh, well, that's for all these B2C brands. Like, we're B2B. Like, we're really serious. We just need to, like, talk to each other. So I think that's the biggest difference is just mindset around, demystifying the fact that ultimately we all, we all are people and we all like to be engaged. And storytelling content, no matter if you're B2B or B2C is a great way to do that. I think that's the biggest difference that I see right away. And so usually then with B2B brands that have brought me in, they're like, we are really boring. We have like a not very sexy product. Like, help us figure out how we talk about this, you know, and so that's the beauty of like, kind of figuring out you and your voice and how you can connect. And I know we're going to be talking about storytelling pillars. It's, it's. It can be done for any single industry. And I always say, no matter how boring you think your brand is, it's still interesting to your target customer for some reason. So it gives you the platform right there of how do you think then about. How do you talk about it in an interesting way?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if this is a fully formed thought in my own mind either. But the thing that that occurs to me is B2C brands tend to have a Bit of a broader audience in some ways, or they know, they recognize we're talking to a lot of different types of people. And so what's the common thing that we can use? Let's use storytelling. Whereas a lot of B2B brands have a really, a really clear target individual. Like their buyer has like one job title and is in one particular role in a lot of cases. And so their idea is like, well, we can just, we can just talk about like the solution to their specific problem. And, and you mentioned the boring problem. There is still that challenge, though. How do we actually connect with our customers in a way that resonates with them, not just in a sort of like, technical fit sort of way. And so maybe this, this over again. I don't know if this is, this is a little bit of my own, like, thought experiment here, but we in B2B, we have this idea that we could just create the perfect puzzle piece, like my puzzle piece and your puzzle piece fit together and then that's going to be the solution. And we skip over the human element of there's a person on the other side of this. And so storytelling and this idea of connecting through something that's a little bit more empathetic and humanizing can be a real. Let's just say it's like it's an amplifier. Maybe it's for a B2B to brand. This is the next evolution to layer on top of your technically correct but boring content. Now you got to start thinking about how to talk to humans. So maybe can we use that as an intro? You've got a really interesting kind of method and approach to content. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, definitely. And so, you know, I host my own podcast called Marketing with Empathy as well, where we get into all these aspects of empathy before I talk about the Fed method, because empathy is one key aspect of that. But empathy is all about connecting heart to heart, mind to mind. If we can drive a better connection with our customers, they're going to buy more, they're going to refer more, they're going to be more engaged, they're going to have life or long, longer lifetime value. Right? So at the end of the day, it's not, it's something that relates to every single brand. Because I've had some very serious conversation. Like I say serious, like very stoic serious, like on the B2B side, where they're like, there's like someone who's really for it and someone who's maybe skeptical. And the skeptical usually revolves around well, is this just kind of fluff and it's not going to be important for the brand. So I just want to start. There is like, when I'm talking about empathy, we need to connect with our customers or they're not going to want to buy from us.

And for accounting firms, obviously an accountant relationship with the client, it's a trust based relationship. And I think one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of firms make is that they hide behind kind of a businessy and corporate Persona. Like, I'm amazed at how many sites I land on. I can't see a single picture of a person. I don't even see names of who I'm going to be working with. And I think as a, as a trust indicator, a lot of firms could benefit a lot from actually humanizing themselves more instead of just trying to be just a technical or financial solution to a problem. There are people behind each of these businesses and if I'm looking for an accountant, I want to know who's on the other side of that screen or in that meeting and can I trust them as, as a person, not just as a company?

Yeah, definitely. And so that's a good transition then into my Fed method. So Fed, it's an acronym and the F stands for focus, E stands for empathy, and D stands for data. And so I like to think of like your content plan. Like, you know, our bodies, everyone's body needs like three things to survive and thrive, right? We need sleep, we need food, and we need exercise of some kind. Your content plans and your storytelling plans need three things too. They need focus, they need empathy, and they need data to be successful and to survive and thrive as well. So focus is really about, from a, from a business perspective, this comes to where you're going to boil it down to. What are your three storytelling pillars? And we can get in more later if you want. Like how do we pick what those three story dealing pillars are? But this is your focus area. What I see in so many brands is that they may be all over the place or they, they may have way too many things they're trying to talk about or not enough things that maybe they're talking about. And they're just hitting that on one thing, but they're not doing that one thing maybe as creatively as they could in a few different ways. So my recommendation is three storytelling pillars. It, it's a, it's a good amount where it's not too many, it's not too few, but it gives you kind of this nice, sweet Spot. And when you think about your storytelling pillars, what you want to do is you want to think about, you know, what are the most obvious things about your company.

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So as an accounting firm, right, what are the things that you're an expert in that you can talk about? You know, and so those generally tend to be like your first two of your, your pillars. As you're thinking about it, you're like, okay, well we can this and this. But then the third pillar, I always recommend being a little bit of a wild card. So what do I mean by that? This is something that differentiates you. So there's probably thousands of accounting firms, right? Maybe even more than thousands and thousands of accounting firms in the world. And how do you differentiate yourself from each other? Well, it's going to boil down to your areas of specialty, you know, your people. Like, what else is it about you that makes you different? That maybe it's a belief, maybe it's a cause that you believe in. Like for my own business, myself, my consulting business, I do content marketing strategy for brands, right? So my, my first pillar is about content marketing. It's stuff that I talk about. My second pillar is about consumer behavior because that goes hand in hand with, as we're thinking of storytelling. Like, we need to understand how people are thinking and why they're doing things that they're doing. It helps us be better marketers. But my third my wild card has nothing to do with either of those. It has to do with me personally. It has to do with my business. And so my third wild card that I talk about is child trafficking because I donate a portion of all of my proceeds to this great child trafficking rescue organization called International Justice Mission to help fund these rescue missions to help rescue these kids. So it's not that wild card isn't the bulk of all of my content, right? But it's an accent and it's something that's different for me. And I'm also personally a faith based person. So I do talk about my faith as well. So as people are out there and they're looking for a content marketing person, you know, they may click with me, they might click with someone else, but that's the goal, right? We want to like Say, well, this is. This is who I am. And you're going to attract your people better that way. So.

So let's dig it into that just a little bit. I think for an accounting firm, the first two sound pretty easy, right? We're going to talk. We might be talking about taxes or, or if you have like a niche or a real specialty, you might talk about that. You could talk about even, even things like technology or, you know, I know folks who are into. Into crypto or into. It could be just business development in general, mergers and acquisitions. There's a lot. I think there's lots of accountants who feel pretty comfortable in some of those spaces. So that makes a lot of sense. What is your advice to a company versus an individual? Because I feel like that. That sounds like the hardest thing. If I'm thinking about what's my wild card? How do I choose a wild card for me as a company if it's not like, purely like a personal brand or, you know, the firm owner isn't upfront? I know you have a lot of experience with, you know, big businesses. Obviously the CEO of Starbucks is not, you know, it's not their, you know, personal, you know, they might have their own, you know, wildcard in their own personal brand.

But for a company, yeah, definitely. Well, you want to have the conversation of, you know, what are, what is your expertise? What do people tend to come to you for? What are we known for? As you ask, what do we care about? Those are ways to kind of help you get into, like, what is that third thing? So a great example. I used to lead the content marketing strategy at Sleep Number. Like I mentioned when we were there early on, it's a mattress company at the end of the day, right? So someone could say, well, what's sexy about a mattress, right? Like, anyone can say their brands not sexy. Same number of beds are amazing, though. They're smart beds now. When I started there, they weren't. And now they're all smart beds that, you know, do all sorts of cool things. But like, when we were developing our content strategy, you know, our wild card for us as a company was sleep science. It was digging into the scientific aspect behind the sleep and all the sleep data and the insights and the collaborations that they were doing and how they could talk about those, all the numbers and the techie stuff versus it just being a mattress that just is laying there, not doing anything right. So that was like an aspect of a wild card. Another company client of mine that I worked with, they're. They were a clothing company and we didn't get as wild like, but that's okay. Like, but it still was like for them it was thinking about how their products worked, what was different for them. For the women who wore them, it was a sports bra company and their sports brass had all this adjustability and different innovations tied into them. So it was like, okay, well we know for sure we want to kind of talk about. But they, they took a position where they wanted to continue to advance the industry and advance sports brass even further. So they actually created like there was a whole messaging around. Let's like create this community where we can talk with our customers and even people who don't own us yet about what would like the ideal bra look like, giving us honest feedback and like kind of like having like this innovation hub, right? Like, of like this feed real time feedback and connecting with like the owner and the designers and getting feedback that way. And so that was different, you know, because it's creating that. It's like opening the doors to their customers to truly have moments where they can get that feedback. But you can even just look at like your expertise too of like maybe there is something that you're really passionate about and that pillar could be around how you deliver it. So maybe there are specific experts within the company. And then it becomes like this format of well under this pillar we are going to do behind the scenes videos on X, you know, as an example. I mean, but it has to be broad enough that it fits into a pillar. So what I say for folks when they're thinking of their pillars is pretend that your brand, that your company is a magazine and you're telling someone, oh well, our magazine is about X, Y and Z. That's what your storytelling pillars need to do. So that they're a nice umbrella that then a bunch of different things can fall under throughout the year. And once you have alignment on those three pillars, it is incredible because you know then what to say yes to, you know what to say no to. And it just gets those creatives uses flowing. Like oh cool. Yeah, we, we said we wanted to talk about this related to taxes. Well then perfect. We need to create like some different pieces of content throughout the year that relate to this. This is our niche. We need to make sure we have enough different types of content related to this, you know, so it just helps you focus. That's the whole beauty of this is it takes upfront thinking time but once you've thought it through, it actually makes your life so much easier because you can just say yes or no to, to what's right. And then it helps your audience know what the heck they should listen to you for as well.

Yeah, I love this. I feel like one of the problems that you might see in an accounting firm with their marketing department is creating content but not getting any engagement. And if, if the, if the reality is you're not getting good engagement, people are not paying attention to you're really good accounting tax businessy content. What might be missing from your three pillars is something that gives people a little bit of an entry point and isn't totally related to your expertise. And so, you know, off the top of my head I could think, you know, if you run on EOs, maybe talking about EOS and like business organization is your third pillar or if you're, you know, really focused on a local area, maybe your third pillar is about just celebrating local businesses or something that has to do with your city in, in particular so that you can, you can find ways to connect with your ideal audience that aren't directly about accounting and taxes and all of that. So that's the, so focus. This is the first pillar or the first of the three things. You get three pillars which helps you figure out how to, how to create content about enough things, but also limit it so that you're not trying to, you know, shoot in the dark, create content about everything. It helps give you some, some guidelines for what you should create. The next of the of the Fed method is empathy. Is this, is this a different type of content or is this a concept to layer on top of how you approach content?

Yeah, unpack that for us. Yeah, this definitely all three of these work together. So for some companies your three storytelling pillars may come to you really quickly. Then what's going to happen is you're going to look at your empathy and your data insights to validate and make sure that that's accurate. For other people, they're not really sure what their three should be. So they're going to start and they're going to go through their empathy and data insights instead first and then back their way into what their focus pillars are. So it all works together. It doesn't matter what order you do them in, but they're going to support each other. So with empathy. So when I talk about empathy, I talk about cognitive empathy, which is helping you connect heart to heart, mind to mind with your audience. And I've observed like four, I would say different types of empathy filters I call them, that you can use in your storytelling to help it better connect and to try to and start to just understand what the heck your audience is thinking or feeling. You're not a mind reader. You're not going to know exactly what they're thinking or feeling. Right. But so we have to look at certain things to, to get that. So the first empathy filter is data informed. So this is like an example of where you're looking. You're like, oh, okay, 46% of our audience has high school aged kids living at home. That's a data insights, a fact. Oh, that's a big chunk of our audience. You know, maybe we should think about some content related to their kids. And the second empathy insight is or is called SEO informed. So search engine optimization. Okay, well this then tells us we can look and say, oh gosh, there's a large volume of people who are searching for ways to better communicate with their teenagers. So it's different. The first one was data. It was like just a fact in a stat. But now we're starting to get insights on, okay, the whole like home life and actually trying to communicate with each other or maybe what are tough questions that they may ask. As those teens are going to be leaving to go off to college, they need to know about their taxes. Like as an example, right? So you're starting to get like your wheels start going like, okay, that's interesting. Like, how could we as a company help answer that? How can we help create content around that? The, the third empathy filter is human informed. And this is like shared human feelings that we can relate to with, I think about like there's so many key moments in our human life. Like our kids are growing up too fast. If we stay with the kid theme, you know, or maybe in taxes, a shared feeling could be like, nobody, you know, maybe your customers don't like paying taxes. Like, who wants to pay taxes? Right. Like you don't get excited to have to hand over your money. But that could be a human inform. But like you take that obviously and then you can create useful content to help answer that feeling. Or I always joke, like when I'm getting groceries, I inevitably seem to pick up the slowest checkout line at the grocery store. Like that's a pain moment that a lot of people relate to. Or Spotify did a great whole content series on this where how many people will just keep waiting in their car to listen to a great song before it finishes? You know, like these are like human feelings or shared moments that we can relate to. You know, and so those are great to look at with your target audience as well, to say, like, where are those like moments in their life stages and things that are going on that we could tap into that they would relate to? I've seen, you know, some companies have done a really great job with this because there is that relatability. And then the, the last empathy filter is nostalgia informed. So nostalgia is really a very powerful empathy filter when, you know, when the insights are used. Well, these are like key life moments and experiences that people go through. So like human informed, I'm saying that's like shared feelings, nostalgia, shared experience experiences or moments that we go through. So maybe you grew up in the same decade, have the same favorite toy growing up or the same movies you used to watch or we all went through a crisis together with the pandemic. Like that's a big old moment, right? Of different, of things that we've gone through together and experiences we've gone through together or people remembering when they went to their first, you know, Billy Joel concert. Like, whatever it may be, that's a moment in nostalgia. So what I do with empathy, my recommendation is think about these, like, don't only look at data informed empathy of like those 46% of our, you know, our audience has high schoolers living at home because you need to give it more, more, you need to dig a little deeper to the human aspect of that. And you can find that in a lot of different ways. Which leads into then the D, which is data in the Fed method before. But before I go into that, do you have any questions?

Yeah, before we jump off empathy, I think, you know, this idea of cognitive empathy and even as the way you approach with insights, I think a lot of people think of empathy as just like I just gotta add more fuzzy feelings to my content and make me more personable or try to be more soft I guess is the right word. But I think what you're saying is really empathy isn't, isn't just, you know, fuzzier and warmer and cozier. It's about how do we put ourselves into the shoes of what our ideal clients, targets, prospects, need and want from us. And so when you're using these, you know, data or SEO or human informed, you're trying to step back away from saying, what do I want to communicate to them? And instead step into the shoes of like, well, what is, what is it that they want from us or me or. And, and people interact with brands and with the world through different ways. You know, I think of SEO, you know, that's curiosity data again, you know, very factual. You can you can get demographic or other information about them. And then these human and nostalgia, I think those are super interesting for an accounting firm to step back and say, like, what's my nostalgic connection point with my customers? And how can we think about content from that perspective? I think is very, very different way than probably. They're used to thinking about it. They're used to thinking about content as the. Like. I found out this important thing about a tax law change, and I must communicate that out to my audience instead of from the perspective of, you know, what was it like the first time that I had to do my taxes? Was that a. Was that a fun experience? Was it intimidating? Was it? Or like, was. What about when you sit down the first time your kid has to file their taxes? Like, what is that experience about? Now you're starting to get into something a little more interesting as far as how the content could connect with your audience, not simply inform your audience.

Yeah, spot up your spot up.

It's really interesting.

Yeah. And then, like, it feeds in, into the data. Because obviously we're looking for these empathy filters, but then we. Where, you know, we. Where else can we keep looking? There's so many places that are available to companies of all sizes. You know, if you don't, if you have big budgets to invest and like, tap into paid resources and insights, great. But if you don't, it's okay because there are so many free insights that are available to you, it just takes the time to go through them. So when empathy and data connect, when they're paired together, I think that's really where the magic happens. And that's where I've seen the best ROI on the content that has been created for brands of all sizes, because it's that sweet spot. It's that overlap. And so when you're looking for data insights, my recommendation is always to look at at least three sources. You don't want to just go to one place and say, oh, well, our internal customer insights team or our marketing group gave us these insights on our customers. Great. But find two other places that you can get some additional insights, because what happens, and I've seen this because I've done lots of different content audits for companies over the years, is it's skewed. There can be some. Some. It can be skewed based on the platform, you know, so if you're only listening to social insights as an example, and let's say your brand is really active on LinkedIn and you're only looking at LinkedIn insights and nothing else. That's great. That gives you great insights on what's happening in that environment. But maybe in some other places you're going to find some additional, maybe contradictory or supplemental that's going to just deepen that insight even more. So it's going to help you with your content to be like, oh wow, ok, well we thought, we thought they were stressed about this one thing, but according to like all this other, it's actually like these two little subparts of that that seem to be giving people the most angst. So let's start there first. You know, so with data then, so that's my hope. That's my whole thing is please, please, please look at least at three different sources and there's a, and more if you can. Obviously one of my favorite places to look for insights is SEO search engine optimization. Just because it really is like this huge focus group of people typing in all their deepest questions and desires into a search engine. You don't get the specificity of knowing how old they are and those kind of demographic details, but you do get really rich, holistic kind of consumer insights. And so I love looking at SEO. My favorite tool for that is answerthepublic.com it's a great tool, really low cost, you can do tons of searches and they give you all sorts of different content ideas based on all the most popular things that people are searching for. As a company, you want to solve your customer's problem, right? And so if you know what their problem are and then you can see all the questions they're searching for related around that sphere, start answering, start answering those questions. Start going through that list. That's such an easy low hanging opportunity for, for data insights and then pairing that with your empathy insights, you know, and then in your lane, right in your pillars. So this is how they all work together.

Yeah, that, that's a great resource. I know we, we talk a lot about the, the they ask you answer framework, which, you know, simply put, your customers have questions and if they can find the answer from you, that's great. But if they can't find the answer from you, they're probably going to go elsewhere to find the answer. So how can you, how can you figure out more? What are they, what are they wondering about? How do you answer that? So answer the public dot com. That sounds like a great, a great resource. Can you help me differentiate again a little bit between you kind of mentioned the data and SEO insight in the empathy piece and then in the data piece is, are these just Sort of different ways to think about it or how do we know. How do we know if we're leaning too far into one or the other or where that hole in our content or insights are, are right now?

Yeah, I would just think of it like, it's like a great recipe. Like we're, we're mixing stuff in, we're putting in ingredients and the SEO informed empathy is like when you see the data and the, and the facts of like what people are searching for. It's, it's gleaning and asking yourself what is happening in the hearts and minds of your customer base. So that'd be the difference. They go hand in hand. But I have a lot of other data sources in addition to SEO. SEO is where I usually love to start. But that, that, that's the difference. So don't, don't worry. I wouldn't worry about. I, I know I do include them in both, but it's like SEO, like you're doing all the research from a data perspective and then from an empathy perspective, you're looking at like themes and trends and really trying to get into the hearts and minds of your customer base.

Got it. Yeah. So the data is nice to have in front of. You have those numbers to draw from, but now you have to like infer or like think through. Like what does, what does this mean at more of kind of a heart level for our, our customers and, and clients.

Yep, you got it. Can I go through, I just have a quick list of other databases because it just, just, it just again, so if you're listening, like if any, you have access to any of these, pick at least three and start there. I would say social listening. So what are insights of your community or competitor communities telling you based on what people are posting, paid media results? What if you're investing in ads, what are the insights from that? Like, what's working, what's not working from your own internal. Like any existing customer insights you have, obviously use those. I love customer loyalty programs. If you have some type of a loyalty program or community, those are great places to look for insights around what your customer is thinking and feeling and what types of questions they have and how you can create content to help them. Your employees are fantastic. They're in the front lines, they're talking to your customers all the time. Right. And so how do you get feedback from them about, about ideas or hey, what do you guys hear a lot? Like, what are questions you're getting? What do you think would be useful for you to be able to share Stuff like that. Customer and customer service. Like if you have a separate customer service department where calls are coming into, those are great because you can see how can we create content to reduce the amount of call volume coming into our call center if we could create it? So that's a cost savings for the company. That's actually how content. And another way that content can save you money actually is preempting like the. All the people that need to be on the phones or in the chats to answer those questions. Website traffic analytics is really great too. Where are they going on your site? What are they looking at? What are they spending time on? There's a lot of different third party, you know, companies that will sell you data and insights and information on your specific target, you know, audience as well. If you, and then if you work with any agency partners, tap into them. Like, what are you guys seeing? What are you guys hearing? Give us those insights. So these are all beautiful places to look for these insights. And then what you do, like I said, is you're gonna like. When I actually do this with brands, I actually try to print out as much as I can and I get a big table and I just lay it all out and I go through and I'm highlighting, I'm looking for repeats, I'm looking for things that keep showing up in multiple places. Because then, you know, like, okay, this is really something. It's not just isolated to this one channel. Like, I keep seeing this across the board. People have a lot of questions about this thing. Like, we can help them with that. Let's make sure we're talking about that in our context.

This, this sounds like a lot of work. It sounds like someone who was a professional at. It might be helpful to be part of this. What are the advantages of bringing in a content strategist to help you figure this stuff out versus just trying to do this?

Yeah, right. And that's always the problem. Every brand has a problem where they usually don't have enough time or budget or people to like, do all of the work. So that's where I come in and I help companies kind of check those storytelling projects off their to do list so they can actually just, you know, get more time back while driving more customers. So my process, how I, what I do generally is, you know, you and I are both certified story brand guides. So like part one generally with a company is I'll help them figure out their foundational messaging strategy. Like the foundations and the pillars of. And just like not pillars to be confused with what I just talked about, but just foundationally, like, who's your customer? What are their problems? How are you going to help them right then from there though? Like, you have that foundation and then you have to think about what we're talking about now, which is, okay, well, how do I keep them engaged all year long? They are not going to want you to talk about like tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, and every single post and email and call. Right. We're human beings. We tune stuff out after a while if it just kind of gets boring. Right. I mean, that's just us. Like, no matter how you get the most incredible company, most interesting topic, your audience still isn't going to hear about the thing all the time if it's boring. So this is then when this, these storytelling pillars, I call it a brand storytelling blueprint is when you work together to identify, well, what are your storytelling pillars? Let's take a look at like by and I, and I can help do that for companies by doing this backend research and coming back with recommendations on their sweet spot, like what those three are. I also have a mini online course as well for folks who are interested in knowing how to DIY it themselves by the same name. It's called Brand Storytelling Blueprint. So I can share that link with you for the show notes. But. But yeah, I mean it does take time and I'm kind of giving you all the options. So like that's what I would, I would just say if you're gonna do this yourself, please don't be overwhelmed. Look at this as it's gonna give you so much sanity and focus long term. Like usually when I come up with storytelling clothes for a company, they last for at least two years generally as long as there's no big changes in the business and you know, they, you know that that's going to change things completely. But generally you do it, it doesn't need updating for two years. Like, you have your focused area, this is what you're talking about. Then, then the rest is just brainstorming what are we going to talk about within this subset.

Right.

Pillar, you know, so that's, that's kind of how the flow works. And it's pretty, it's really pretty quick to, to do. I mean I can help like figure out these content strategies with brands like the foundation and then the next steps. It's really within like two to three weeks, it's done. So then they have the whole rest of the year to execute against it.

Well, just to tease this out, one of the things That I often talk about with our clients is that when it comes to marketing, you have to pay for marketing in three ways or three times. You have to pay for strategy, which is someone to help you figure out what to do, often kind of how to do it or what level of investment in these things you need to put then there. And then there's the next step, which is production. Someone. Someone actually writes and creates and designs and does the stuff. And then finally you have to do promotion. You have to get it published, scheduled, put out there in the world. And in. In all of these areas, you can usually spend time or you can spend money. And so what I found, though, for a lot of firms, when it comes to marketing, the best investment in your dollars is to make sure that you get that strategy piece right. There's a lot of. There are a lot of talented people out there. If you're a business owner, you know, writing for yourself can be a really great exercise and a really valuable use of your time. But figuring out all of this content strategy stuff might not be the best use of your time because you have to learn, like, how to do it, what it is. And you got to put all this time into, like, researching and putting together calendars, you know, for you to sit down at a computer and have, you know, a good understanding of this is what I need to write. And at different times of year can be so valuable working with an outside expert to help you with that strategy piece. And then those other things you can kind of fill in for yourself. But don't skip over. Don't ever skip over the strategy piece and just jump right into production. Like, you can sit down and write every day, but if you don't know what you're doing or why, it can be. It can be really discouraging, I guess, is one of the big things is you can. It's still a lot of work, but if you're not getting the results or the engagement or. Or if you feel like what you're writing is boring to yourself all the time, it can be a really hard way to. To go about content.

So, yeah, there's this great quote, Matt, that I love, and it says, if you think it's expensive to hire an expert, hire an amateur.

Right?

Hire an amateur. And it's so true. And I think we've all probably been in some situation like that. I know I have earned my career at different points where you're like, what is the point? What are we doing? Like, you're wasting so much time and money.

Money.

When People don't have an endless amount of time and money to spend on these things. Like, we have to be focused.

Exactly.

And we deserve the sanity in our life to actually just, like, have a game plan that we need to execute against.

And not to, not to call out my audience too directly, but I think accounting firm owners know this better than most. But a thing that often happens, I think, with professional services is, you know, we're smart people, and so we, we really see the value of our expertise for our customers. But then when we look at another area, we think, you know, bookkeeping can't be that hard. I could just do it myself. Or, you know, for. So for an accountant, you know, you recognize the value of having a third party outside expert when it comes to your financials and that role that you play in their lives. But it's also true in some of these other areas, you know, of marketing or, you know, business leadership or, you know, there's so many different areas where having that, that expert guide is such a huge value. We recognize it in ourselves, and sometimes we don't take our own advice when it comes to some of these other areas.

Yes. Great, Great. Call out to everyone listening. If that's you, like, be like, guilty, raise your hand because it's so true. It's so true. It's why your clients hire you to do. Help them do all the great work that you do for them. Like, it's the same thing. Like, if we want to succeed faster, we need to, like, tap into experts to help us together faster. It's just life.

Well, I, I feel like we could probably keep talking about this in part because it's a huge topic, content and all these things. There's. There's so much to dig into, but I think we better wrap things up. Sarah, where can people find you? And I know that you've got some resources that you can share here.

Yeah, definitely. Well, if you guys enjoyed this and, and I would love to have you listen over on Marketing with Empathy, my podcast. I. You can connect with me on my website@kindredspeak.com I'm very active on LinkedIn under Sarah Panouse, so you can find me there. And then I do have two freebies, so if you're interested, one is a PDF and the other is a quiz, and they're both available on my website@kindredspeak.com favorites and the PDF is a. It's a one pager of the content marketing hourglass funnel. So this is really thinking through examples of what types of content can live at each stage of, of your customer touch points. And what I find is it's a great way to look for gaps. You need to have some type of great content at every single touch point. If you don't, you're missing out on an opportunity for the engagement with your customers. So use that PDF to kind of just look at your own funnel and think about it and see where you might have gaps. And then the other one is a new quiz that I just created and I'm really excited about. And it is if you're ready to improve your content Strategy. It's a 40 second quiz, so don't take too much time and go through it and I will give you action steps of like, what you can do to make over your content strategy. And it has a fun little twist because it identifies and labels you with like if you're, if your company was a home makeover show, what would the name of your home makeover show be? So it's kind of we lean into that makeover idea, but as it relates to content for your company, very cool.

So if you are your firm and you're not happy with your content, you're hitting frustration points. You, you feel like it could be better, but you don't know how. You should definitely connect with Sarah, you know, get those freebies from her site. So kindredspeak.com backslash favorites to get those things and sorry, you probably already said this. Are you active on particular social media platforms?

Yeah, LinkedIn. LinkedIn would be the place to find me. That's. I would love to connect with anybody.

That's a good spot for accounting firm owners. So we'll see you on LinkedIn. Sarah, thank you so much for being here on the show talking about the this Fed method. And do you have any last points of wisdom that you want to leave anyone with?

I would just say don't be, don't be intimidated by this. Just you. If you start somewhere and if, if at the end of the day you just start asking yourselves what's the empathy filter? You'll already be way better than you are now. So you can literally just say, what? Why will our audience care about this piece of content? How does it tap into whatever they're thinking or feeling at this moment? Boom, you'll already be leaps and bounds ahead of your a lot of your competitors.

Very good. I think we'll leave it there. Thanks again, Sarah. We'll see you next time. 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.