How to Build a Marketing Plan That Actually Makes Sense

Most accounting firms start their marketing plan backwards, and it's the reason they've never had a campaign really take off. So whether you've tried some ads and some social content before and it didn't really work, or maybe you're trying this marketing thing out for the first time, I want to show you how to build a marketing plan that actually works. And it's clear and simple enough for you to understand. As a founder. This is the same process I've used to build marketing plans for over 25 accounting firms at this point. And it's how my client Brock added $8,000 a month to his bookkeeping firm and in his first three weeks running ads. So here's how most firms come up with a marketing plan, right? They start by talking to a bunch of different agencies. If you're smart and you're going into this and you don't really know anything about marketing or what you're doing, then you go talk to a bunch of people who do, right? So you schedule calls with a bunch of agencies, you talk to five or ten of them, and you hire the one that seems like they know what they're talking about. The problem here is that most agencies follow a very specific business model, and it's something I call like a productized service business model. So if you go to an agency, typically there's one or two services that they really excel at, and that's kind of the main thing they offer, right? It might be Facebook ads, or it might be email marketing, or it might be social media content, but they're really good at that one service, and that's what they do. And so if you, as a founder, go to a Facebook ad agency, and you're like, I know as a business owner, Facebook ads are the missing link in my business. Like, this is the thing. I've got all the other stuff figured out, and. And Facebook ads is the only reason why I'm not as successful as I want right now. I'm not getting as many clients as I want. Then you go to that Facebook ad agency, and 75% of the time, it's gonna work out great. The problem comes when you, as an agency owner, don't have that overarching strategy masterminded out yet, and you're still trying to figure out what marketing strategy is even the right path to follow. And so if you go to the Facebook ad agency, they're gonna say, oh, yeah, Facebook ads, we can get you there. You go to an email marketing agency, they're gonna say, oh, email marketing, absolutely. We can get you leads, you go to the social media content guy. It's the same thing. It's like asking a barber if you need a haircut. Like, of course the answer is always going to be yes. But if you've ever tried this, then you know that it doesn't actually work the majority of the time. And that's because you, as the business owner need to come up with your marketing strategy before you go and start hiring people to implement the tactics for you. You might remember this from business school, tactics versus strategy. Right? Strategy is high level. Tactics are boots on the ground. So if you were a lemonade stand, right, your strategy would be, we're going to be known as the fun friendly lemonade stand and we're going to have the best customer experience. Right? That's the high level. That's the goal. But that doesn't really tell you what are the actions we're going to take to make that a reality. And that's where tactics come into play. Right? So your tactics might be that you play fun music, you offer lemonade with fun names like Sunshine Splash, or, I don't know, something like that. You put a sprinkler in the yard for kids to run around in. Right? That's the tactics. But if you just come at this from the point of I want my lemonade stand to be better, then sure, you can put these tactics in place and your customers are going to have more fun. But who's to say that your customers having more fun is the main constraint of your business right now? Right? Maybe your customers love the experience, you're just not getting enough of them. And so you actually need to not put attention into making it more fun. You need to put your attention into getting more customers. And this is why you rarely get that outsized ROI from hiring a marketing agency that you're looking for. Right? You want to see 5 or 7x on the money you're investing into your marketing, but you're getting 1 or 2x at best, which, by the way, at about 30% margin, which I think most accounting firms hover over around, you're still losing money at that point. And so what I want to walk you through here is a more sophisticated approach that's going to get you a simpler marketing plan. Yes. By taking a step back, taking a deep breath, you are actually able to get a marketing plan that's simpler and easier to understand, it's easier to implement, and it also happens to be far more effective. So we need to start with high level strategy. Okay? And there's three core things we need to identify here. Okay? Number one is who are we targeting? What type of customers are we trying to get more of? Because if you're just trying to get more customers who are anybody and everybody, or small business owners in the US or real estate investors, that's so incredibly broad. And you're going to be competing with giants like Grant Cardone and Tony Robbins and Alex Hormozi, the people who spend millions and millions and millions of dollars every year to market to these broad audiences. And so you're never going to be able to come up with something that's specific enough. You're never going to be able to come up with something that's relevant enough to, to such a broad audience of people. And frankly, you're never going to be able to outspend those competitors unless you have also millions and millions of dollars to be able to compete in that bucket. And so what is your competitive advantage against people like that and against providers like that? Frankly, what's your competitive advantage against these big four accounting firms who have millions and millions of dollars and, you know, thousands of CPAs and accountants working for them? Your competitive advantage is how relevant you can make your solution to your ideal client. Okay, so let me put it this way, right? Imagine you've got two firms, right? And one of them does real estate tax strategy. We do tax strategy for real estate investors and they work with developers, they work with multifamily investors, they work with short term rental investors, they work with people who own a business and do real estate on the side. They work with people who are full time in real estate all over the spectrum. Obviously these are very different situations. Every one of those that I listed off, there's a completely different thing going on inside of their head every single day. And so if we're going to market to such a broad audience, we have to keep our message relatively broad. And so we're limited in how specific we can get in speaking to what they're thinking about every day. Because we have to go, okay, what is a short term rental investor thinking about that also. A multifamily investor is thinking about that also. A developer is thinking about that also. And we have to find like the center of the Venn diagram here. And that just doesn't work real well because you're going to find that by speaking to everybody, you're going to resonate with basically nobody. And so it's going to be super expensive to advertise this way. It's going to be less effective and your overall return on marketing spend is going to be significantly less. Now, on the other hand, you've got a second firm who also does real estate tax strategy, but they market specifically to high income W2 earners who invest in short term rentals. Okay, think a tech employee who's making 600 grand a year and invest into Airbnbs as basically their retirement strategy. That is a very specific person that we're trying to advertise to and we can get really detailed and really nitty gritty on what's going through their head every single day. Maybe it's related to I don't want to be in this grind of, you know, working this high earning corporate job all the time. Like it kind of feels like golden handcuffs. But I also don't want to sacrifice the lifestyle and the wealth building potential I've got with this massive income. So how do I replace this income over time and also pay less in taxes while doing so? That might be the compelling message to that person. And you see how that's hyper specific. And so if I'm a W2 earner who invests in short term rentals and there's one firm advertising to me with that specific message, and there's another firm advertising to me with, hey, do you invest in real estate and think you pay too much in taxes? Obviously, I'm going to go with the one that's highly specific to my situation because by being so specific, they're demonstrating that they understand what I'm going through. And if they understand what I'm going through, then it's not a crazy assumption to think that, oh, they've probably got a good solution to my problem. Now the second thing we need to get clear on here is what service are we selling to this person? Okay. And these go hand in hand. Right. So when I work with an accounting firm, probably about half the time they know exactly what the service is that they want to be offering to the new clients they want to bring in. They just don't know exactly who they're trying to offer the service to the other 50% of the time. It's like we don't exactly know who our ideal client is, and we also don't know what service we want to primarily sell. And this is where it's really important to understand the difference between an intro offer and an upsell, cross sell, downsell offer. Okay, so every firm usually has one or two core services that are really easy to sell to somebody who's never worked with you before. Right. A brand new customer Then you might have 8 to 10 to 12 to 20 other services on the back end that are really, really difficult to sell to somebody who's brand new, but they're fairly easy and straightforward to sell as an add on to somebody who's already working with you. Right. So for example, I work with a tax strategy firm who specializes in short term rental investors right now. And their core offer, the main way they get people in the door is through tax strategy. Right? Because they can create a tangible ROI for you. You pay us thousands of dollars, we're going to help you save tens of thousands of dollars on your taxes. Right. That's basically the value prop. It's very easy to understand, it's very ROI driven and it's very easy to gauge success on that. And was the service worth it? Because it's like, did I save more money on taxes than I paid this CPA firm? Yes. Okay, great. Now this firm also offers tax preparation and they also offer bookkeeping and they also offer cost segregation studies. But these are services that are much more difficult for their specific audience for much more difficult to sell to somebody who hasn't worked with you before. Right. Take tax preparation for example. This is a much more transactional service. People have this idea in their heads that they're going to get the same value and the same quality of work if they go use their local CPA down the street who charges $500 versus this high end tax strategy firm that charges $5,000. But if I've worked with you for tax strategy, I've been like, hey, here are all the things we did this year to make sure that you're going to save the maximum amount on taxes. You're gonna save 50 grand compared to what you paid in taxes last year. Here's the thing, most local CPAs, your typical CPA doesn't really understand how to record all this stuff correctly and make sure that the IRS sees this as legitimate. And so you should probably consider signing up for our tax preparation service. So we can just handle that for you and make sure that there's no issues there and everything gets properly executed. That's a really easy ascension. And you could have the same conversation for bookkeeping and for cost segregation studies and for, you know, whatever other upsell cross sell downsell services you offer once they've already worked with you. But the main thing you need to figure out right now as we're building out this high level strategy is what is my core offer versus my upsell cross sell down sells. Right. So I'll Talk with firms sometimes where they're like, oh, we do bookkeeping and we do cfo, we do tax planning and we do tax preparation and we do payroll and we do like all these different things, right? And so there's two questions we need to ask to determine which one needs to be our core offer that we sell to new customers. Okay? So number one is what's going to provide the most immediate, obvious value to our ideal client? Okay. So in other words, it's very simple and very easy to understand how this particular service is going to make my life and my business better, right? It's going to make me more money, it's going to save me time, something along those lines. Now the other question and the flip side of this is what's going to set me up properly to upsell, cross sell downsell this person to another service down the road. So like, if you've ever played pool, then you know that it's not just about the immediate shot right here at hand, but it's also about setting yourself up for the next shot, right? So like if you've got two shots where you could, you know, reasonably expect, I'm going to make the ball in the hole, then you pick the one where it's going to set you up afterwards to also have a really good shot. So we also need to think about our offers that way, right? So once you've determined which service is the core offer versus your upsell down, sell, cross, sell offers, then we come to the third part, and in my opinion, the most fun part of all of this, like high level strategy building, which is what transformation does this core service create for this ideal client? So we've got the client, we've got the service, we're selling them. What transformation is this going to create? Right? And this isn't they're going to have a tax strategy or they're going to have clear financials. It's to use the real estate example again, you're going to be able to escape the golden handcuffs faster because you have more money each year to reinvest back into your real estate portfolio. Like, that's a pretty compelling transformation. I'll give you an example from another client of ours, a guy named Brock. He runs a bookkeeping firm for residential moving companies. And his transformation is we'll help you scale your business more effectively because you'll know when you can actually invest into that next step. Buying another truck or hiring an admin person or opening up another location. You're going to have confidence in your numbers. So you're not just guessing at when you can make those big moves. And so by understanding who we're targeting, by understanding what service we're selling this person, and by understanding the transformation that this service is going to create for them, now we have a marketing strategy because we can answer questions like where is it going to be effective to get in front of this person? What is this person going to want to know about us before they book a call and before they buy? What is this person going to value in our service versus what's maybe some fluff that we don't even need to offer and include in this service? These are tactical questions that are asking, what are we going to do? What are the actions we're going to take? But you can't ask the right tactical questions until you have this high level strategy in place first. By the way, if you want someone who's done this all before for firms just like yours to come step into your business and help you build this all out. So that's exactly what my team and I do. So we step into your firm as your chief marketing officer and we'll tell you exactly what strategies you need to implement and we'll help you build those systems. So if that's something you're interested in, click the first link in the description below and you can get more info. Anyways, let's move into tactics. All right, so now that we've got that high level strategy in place, we can look at tactics. What are the daily, weekly, monthly actions we need to be taking? There's a lot that goes into this. It's going to become clear once you have your strategy in place, it's going to become clear what questions you need to ask. But a few of the common ones that are really important, kind of regardless of what your overarching strategy looks like, is how do we need to be getting in front of customers, how do we need to be building trust with customers, and then how do we need to be converting customers? Okay, and these actually correspond if you're familiar with a marketing funnel, with top, middle and bottom of funnel. Okay, so I'm going to walk you through each right now. All right, first off, top of funnel, how are we getting in front of new prospective customers? And there's only three ways actually to do this. Every possible way you can get in front of new people falls into one of these three buckets. Okay. It's either going to be outreach content or ads. Okay, so Facebook ads obviously falls into the ads category. YouTube content like this or podcast like this falls into the content category, email outreach falls into the outreach category. And whatever method you choose obviously is going to have its pros and cons and you're going to be able to make the determination based on who we're trying to reach. It'll be pretty easy to kind of like look at the pros and cons of each method and figure out, okay, this is probably the best one for us to pursue, but you need to have one of these in place. Now, once you have a top of funnel figured out, and let's say for the sake of example here, you're going to use Facebook ads, right? You don't need to then get other top of funnel strategies in place. We really only need one way to get in front of new customers, at least for now. Eventually you'll get to a point where you're doing this at massive scale. You're spending like hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Facebook ads. And it's like, okay, at point we probably need to diversify and we need to do YouTube ads or we need to do email outreach or something else to diversify just because we're getting diminishing results as we scale. Or I guess that would be more like that. I don't know, I'm just drawing in the air for you guys. But a lot of people will get hung up on, oh, we're not getting enough customers from Facebook ads, so we need to go do Google Ads or we need to go do SEO blogs. No, you only need one method to get in front of people. You just need to get that method to a point where it's profitable and you can scale it up. Now the first factor in whether you're going to actually make money from these Facebook ads again in this example here is how are you building trust with your customers? And that's the second thing we need to establish here. So different types of people are going to have different preferred ways of consuming information, right? And one of the things that's helpful to understand is which of the four buyer types does my customer most fall into? Typically when we're, if we're building out like an ideal customer profile for one of our firms, there's four buyer types and just a high level overview. You've got analytical buyers which they're motivated by like logic and information. You've got amiable buyers who are motivated by stability and cooperation. So like, these are the people who want to make everyone else around them happy. You've got driver buyers who are motivated by power and respect. So they're Very concerned with how others view them and how they follow their directions. And then you've got expressive buyers who are motivated by recognition and approval. Okay, so understanding which buyer type your ideal customer falls into is really important here. And typically, like, if I'm building out an ideal customer profile for one of my firms, typically you're going to see there's kind of a primary and a secondary. So it's like most of our customers fit in, are analytical buyers, but some of them are driver buyers. And then it's very rare we run into an amiable or an expressive buyer. And so you're going to know, okay, here's kind of the primary way that we need to communicate with them and build trust with them and make them feel good about the relationship with us. And here's the secondary way that we also need to take into consideration. So as an example, how are we building trust with these people? If your buyer type is mostly analytical, then you're going to want to provide them with statistics, with case studies, detailed breakdowns of your process. Like, they're going to really enjoy that. If I can show them, you know, this is how we helped Joe save $50,463 on taxes last year. Here's the three steps we did and how much each of them saved him, then this analytical buyer is going to really, really respect that and appreciate that. If your buyer type is more amiable, let's say these people tend to take longer making their decision. And if they feel pressured by you or if they feel like they're being sold to, oftentimes they'll kind of fade into the bushes like the Homer Simpson meme. Right. So we want to make them feel like they have a relationship with us. This is where it's really important that they feel like they like us. So you can look up the buyer types. I'm not going to break down how to sell to each one in this video, because that's not really the point here. But understand the big picture here is making sure people can basically feel like they're vetting you, even while you're kind of subtly indoctrinating them into your way of thinking and understanding that your method and your strategies are the best. If you've ever seen Inception, the main kind of plot of the movie is there's this guy that they're trying to influence to make this decision, and they have to implant this idea in his mind to shut down his family's company, and they have to plan it in his mind in a way where he thinks he Came up with it himself. That's like the whole plot of the movie. Sorry if I spoiled it for you, but you need to be doing essentially the same thing for your prospects. But regardless of what buyer type they are, we need to understand what is going to push them to make the right decision and how do we create as much material like that as humanly possible. And this is where lead magnets are really valuable. Like genuinely valuable lead magnets. Not like, here's five tax deductions you can take as a small business owner. Like, that's bullshit. Nobody cares about that. This is where content is going to come really, really handy. Especially long form content like this, a YouTube video, a podcast, even an email newsletter or LinkedIn articles could also be considered middle of funnel content. I always lean towards video because I've got this beautiful, sexy studio. No, I'm kidding. Video is genuinely better for building that like parasocial relationship with people where they feel like they know you even though they've never met you. But you can obviously do this through written content like emails or LinkedIn articles. It just maybe it takes longer. It might not be quite as effective. You need to play to your strengths, right? So once we know how we're going to build trust with our customers, then the last thing we need to identify is how are we converting customers. And this basically comes down to your sales process. Okay, so what are these steps in your sales process that are required to get a deal across the line? Now, I'm not a sales expert by any means, so I'll leave this conversation mostly to the sales experts. But with most accounting firm kind of services that you might offer, especially to other businesses versus like to individuals, it's a trust offer. Okay. It's not something where they're going to necessarily look at. What are the strategies this firm is proposing and are these going to be effective strategies? Like they're not looking to become an expert and kind of judge your worth or your value based on that. They want to judge your worth or your value based on how much they trust you. So I was talking with a friend of mine, he runs a sales agency for accounting firms. They do really great work over there and they've actually started moving towards a two call close with many of their accounting firms that they do sales for, where basically the first call is kind of like discovery and like building that relationship. A short overview of what we can do for you and then, hey, let me put together a more detailed proposal and we'll go through that more in depth on a second call. Like two days from now. Now, I don't personally prefer to call closes like that for my company, but also I don't run an accounting firm, so I guess that doesn't really even matter. And I don't know why I'm talking about that here. But the tactical things that you're going to be doing here are what are the resources we need to be sending them between when they schedule the call and when they actually show up to the call? Do we need to do a one call close or a two call close? What do we send them between the first call and the second call? If we're doing a two call close, how are we framing our value on the sales call when we're live face to face with a prospect? These are the questions that are going to be really important here. Now at this point we've got a high level strategy, right, where we can say, here's the direction we need to go, here's the high level outcomes we need to pursue. We've got the tactics which tell us, here's what we need to do daily, weekly, monthly in order to achieve these strategic objectives. The last thing we need though is we need a way to measure our success. And so this is where your KPIs and your data is going to come really, really, really valuable. Okay, so the first thing here is just understanding what metrics do we need to track within our marketing campaign here to be able to determine success. Right, but that's not necessarily isolating for external variables that might have complemented your growth. Right? So it's very important that you're measuring how much do we spend on this versus how much are we making specifically from this marketing strategy? Taking referrals and word of mouth out of the picture, taking unexpected growth that came just because the industry we serve is booming this year compared to last year. Right. That could be another like unexpected external factor. Has nothing to do with the actual marketing. This like, you know, this Facebook ad strategy that we put together. And so you need to be able to separate that out first. Now, within that individual campaign, you've kind of got this customer journey mapped out, right? So like with Facebook ads, you might have an ad and then they click the ad and then they watch the video sales letter and then they book a call and then they show up to the call and then they close on the call, right? And that's your customer journey. There is a KPI we can track for every one of those steps. Some of them actually have multiple KPIs that we can track and so let's say you're spending $10,000 a month on marketing, and from that marketing, you're only making $20,000 back. That's not a very good return on investment, right? That's only two to one. And so every step of that customer journey has at least one KPI that you for that, okay, These are things like click through rate or opt in rate or booked call rate or show rate. It's going to sound like a bunch of jargon. Maybe I'll do a video one day going through each of those terms, just defining them. But the important thing is to understand each of those has a metric that goes along with it. And so just like if you come into a business and the business is, isn't profitable, it's not making any money, you're going to look at the books, right? You're going to say, where the hell is all this money going? Like they're making revenue, but none of it's coming out in profit. Where's it all going? What are we spending it on? Your marketing. KPIs are going to tell you the same story for your marketing, right? So you're going to say, okay, we're spending a bunch of money on marketing. We're generating a bunch of traffic and a bunch of leads from these ads. Where is all that traffic going? Where are all these leads going? And we can look at our KPIs and we can see, okay, this one's good, this one's good, this one's good, this one's good, this one's not good. This one's good, this one's good, this one's good. So this one right here is our problem. And we can isolate that and we can put all our attention and effort and money into fixing that versus what most people end up doing when they don't have proper KPIs in order is they just kind of look at everything they're doing and they're like, well, this seems like it's, you know, probably not optimal. And this seems like maybe it could be better, but they're not working on the one thing that's actually the main constraint, right? Because they're guessing. And so if I'm running ads and the ads are getting a ton of people to click, but the video on the next page doesn't do a good job explaining what I do. And so I'm not getting any booked calls, I might look at that and I might say, if I don't know my KPIs, I might look at that and Say, oh, these ads suck. I need to work on my ads. And I could spend six months working on my ads testing hundreds of different videos, different targeting options, different text copy on the actual ad itself. And I'm never going to get better results because that one video that explains what I do is really poor quality. And so people are just getting confused and they're leaving. They're not booking a call to learn more because it doesn't seem relevant to them. But if I look at my KPIs, I can see, oh, the ads are actually doing a really good job here. It's this video that explains what I do that's sucking. Because, you know, people are getting to this page and then they're just leaving, they're not booking a call. And so I can look at that and I can say, okay, I need to make a better video sales letter. And I can test a few different video sales letters. I can work on scripting that better and explaining my value and what I do better. And eventually I'm going to actually start booking more calls because the people coming from ads are still coming, but they're coming to a better video that does a better job explaining what I do and making it relevant to them. That's just an example here. But big picture, we just need to be applying the theory of constraints, right? So I find it helpful to build a dashboard for this where maybe you've got like an assistant on your team who can go in every single week, you know, maybe go in every Friday and find the data points for each step and then just drop that on an Excel spreadsheet for you. And by doing that, you can not only see when something is up or when something is down, you can not only see every step of your funnel broken out in what's working and what's not working, but you can also see trends over time because you might have one week where booked calls are down, but last week it was great. And you're not doing anything different this week. And it's just that natural, like, fluctuation that happens sometimes. And so you can actually see like, okay, is there natural fluctuation to this or is this actually a consistent downward trend that I'm seeing? So you have your high level strategic objectives. We know where we're going and what outcomes we're trying to create. We have our tactics so we know what to do every single day, week and month to actually make that strategy a reality. And we have our KPIs so that we can actually measure the success and how close to this big strategic objective did we get? That's your marketing plan. That's it. So this might sound complicated to you, but I promise you, this is something you go through one time and then you make small updates every year, every couple of years. This is not something where you have to reinvent the wheel every six months. And so by going through and, you know, spending a week or spending a month with your main focus being this marketing strategy, this is going to yield insane dividends for you down the road. Because every agency you hire, every person you hire into your marketing department, every hour you spend personally working on sales and marketing is going to be properly directed. You know that it's actually putting you in the right direction towards where you're trying to go. So that's gonna be it for this video. I hope this was helpful for you guys. If you liked this video, then you should definitely check out this video, because YouTube says you'll also like this one. So I'll see you over there.