How To Get Bookkeeping Clients In 2025 (full guide)

If I was a bookkeeper looking to get clients in 2025, this is the marketing strategy that I would use. It's four steps, and that's what I'm going to be walking you through in this video. Now, if you don't know who I am, my name is Peter vanderwaal. I'm the accountants marketing guy, and the owner of Social Club Studios, where we're working with about 16 accounting firms in various niches all around the US and I want to show you one particular client of ours because he's got a bookkeeping firm. And we plugged this marketing strategy into his company, and it worked amazingly well for him. So this is a slack message I got from him a little while back. He says next Thursday is one month of running ads, and with a little bit of organic in there we are. Plus $130,000 in annual sales between tax and bookkeeping. That's about 20% growth in a little over 20 days for his business. So all that to say, the stuff I'm about to show you here works really well. And step one here is what a lot of people will call market research. But essentially it's just answering the question, who am I trying to attract as a client? And if your answer to that when I initially asked that is something along the lines of small businesses making over $500,000 a year, then you are going to have a massive flop on your hands. Okay? Your niche is your competitive edge in today's marketplace. It's how you stand out. I'm an agency owner, and if I have the option between a bookkeeping firm that works with accountants and lawyers and agencies and home service companies and a bunch of different types of businesses versus a bookkeeping firm that only specifically works with agencies, then I'm going to choose the bookkeeping firm that works only with agenc, even if their service is a little bit more expensive. So let's talk about how do you find your niche and the way I like to go about this. This is an exercise we do with every one of our private clients. We go through their client list and we ask these questions. Okay? So number one, who do I like working with? Number two, who's operationally easiest to serve? And then number three, who gets the best results from my service? And depending on what type of business you're ultimately trying to grow, you might weight a different priority or a different level of importance to what you One or another of these three questions, like, for example, if you're trying to build a lifestyle business where you don't want to build this huge team. You just want to make, you know, 10, 20k a month super easily without working a ton, you know, spend a lot of time on the beach, whatever. Then you're probably going to weight this question, who do I like working with a little bit higher than the others. If you're trying to build, like, the most efficient business that you can scale to, like, to the moon, you're trying to build an empire, right? You're probably going to optimize for who's operationally easiest to serve, right? And so that's completely up to you how you weight these questions. But these are the three most important questions you need to ask when you look through your client list to identify, okay, what type of clients do I want to get moving forward into the future? And you're going to end up building a Venn diagram that looks something like this, right? And so just imagine all of these are just different attributes of your clients, different answers to these questions. And you'll find somewhere in the center, these are going to align with each other. And so at this point of alignment here in the center, that's your ideal client. Now, your ideal client might be a specific industry like Brock, right? He only works with residential moving companies. That's like, incredibly specific. It might be a phase of business. So, like, we've got a client, he's actually more on the CFO side of things, a little bit higher ticket pricing model. But we look through his client list, and every one of his best clients, they had this big move kind of on the horizon when they first started working with him. And that was their big reason for signing up with him. They have this big move like opening another location or buying the building they're in instead of renting it, and they want to have a proper financial strategy behind that. Right? Your ideal client might be characterized by a highly specific set of problems. And that's the key. It needs to be very specific. Okay? If it's just vague problems, like they don't know their numbers or they're losing money and they don't even know it, like, that's super vague, that's super basic, that's not a problem, that's unique to the type of clients that you work with. And so once we've identified who your ideal client is, we, we need to figure out what is the message that we need to put out into the world to be able to attract people like this. Right. Dan Kennedy puts this really well. He describes it as, you want to join the conversation that's already taking place in their mind. Okay, so imagine like if you're at a party or networking event and there's a group of people that you're trying to get into and like, introduce yourself and like, join the conversation. You're not going to just like, walk right up, interrupt their conversation, start shaking hands and going around and like, introducing yourself. Like, that's not a good first impression. What you might do Instead is stand 5 or 10ft away. You kind of listen like, you know, what are they talking about? You know, how could I jump in with something relevant that they might find interesting? Then I can introduce myself and get to know everybody there. And you need to take that same approach with your marketing. And so the number one thing I like to do to figure out what this conversation is is just to ask them, right? So if we go back here, you've got a couple of clients who you've identified as, okay, these are my ideal clients that I'm trying to get more people just like them. Well, go ask those clients that you already have. Hey, what was the main problem you were facing when you first signed up to work with us? What were you trying to get done that you couldn't before you were working with us? And those two questions will help you understand really well what was going on in their head before they started working with you. Now, you may only have a couple clients like this. You might not even have any clients that you would say are the ideal fit. And so what you can also do is I like to listen to podcasts that your ideal client would listen to. Right? So if there's like industry specific podcasts even outside of your niche, Right? So let's take Brock for example here, right? Like he works with residential moving companies and he does a bookkeeping service for them. And so he might go listen to a marketing podcast for residential moving companies, and he might go listen to a podcast from like some coaching program or mentorship in the space. And then the other thing I like to do is I like to find forums and social media content in the space. And I like to go through this content and the posts in these forums, But I also like to go through the comment section and see what people are saying there, because you might find gaps in the space, things that not a lot of content creators are talking about, but people want to know. And so from this research, you should be able to come up with like 10 or 12 talking points. You can use that kind of join into this conversation. And I always like to frame them as questions. Okay, so if we take Brock's company as another example here, Right. A residential moving company owner is probably asking questions like, how do I take home more money from my business? How can I invest into new trucks and equipment, how can I hire office staff to take over my admin work for me? And these are all directly related to Brock's bookkeeping service. Right. Because he's going to give them the financial clarity to know, okay, here's some expenses I could cut so I can take home more money. Here's how much cash I'm actually going to have left at the end of the year so I can buy a new truck. Here's how much margin I have if I need to hire an office person for, you know, 40 grand a year. And so once you've done all this, you've got a really good idea of who you need to attract and how to reel them in. And so now you're ready for step two, which is to actually build the funnel, by the way, real quick. If you own an accounting firm and you're looking to scale past the seven figure ceiling, this is exactly what my team and I do. So we will come up with the messaging and figure out exactly what it is that's going to activate your ideal client. What we will script all of the sales videos you need, we'll build the landing pages, the automations, the email sequences, all of that, and we'll even launch the campaigns for you. And all you have to do is spend two hours with us up front. We're going to get all the information about your business that we need so that we can act as an extension of your brain. We can talk, we can act, we can write even better than you can to be able to attract the right clients to your business. So if that's something you're interested in, click the first link in the description or if you're watching on your tv, here's a QR code, there's a little bit more info on the next page and you can book a call if that's something you're interested in. So let's just take it for granted at this moment that we can actually get in front of people. We need somewhere for these people to go if we've piqued their interest. So most of you watching this, you probably have a website with like a contact page and there's like a contact form people can fill out, or maybe if you're really advanced, there's like a calendly call booking form, which is a great first step, but it's not the end all be all. And so there's a process I'm going to walk you through here. I like to call it an application funnel, but it's really just a fancy word for a better contact page. Okay. And in order to make this work, there's just four elements that you're going to need. Okay. And so the first element is something we call a video sales letter. Okay. This is a 5 to 10 minute video that the prospect can watch to basically understand if this is for them or not for them. Right. So we've kind of identified, like what are the talking points that are going to make this resonate with your ideal client. And so the video sales letter should really be based around one or two of those main talking points that are going to be important for them. Now the next step of this is going to be some case studies and testimonials, which, by the way, I'm going to show you examples for all of these in just a moment here. But the case studies and testimonials, we just want to show them like, you've done this for other people in the past. You've done this for people just like them. The next thing we're going to need is an application form because we don't want just anybody and everybody to be able to book a call with you. We want to actually vet them ourselves and make sure that you're not getting on the phone with like completely broke people or people who don't even have a business yet, or they're just way too small of a business for you to be able to work with them. And then the last thing we need is a call booking form, like a calendly or some app like that. And so this right here is Brock's application funnel. And so you can see here we've got this video sales letter which is titled the three questions every moving company owner can ask to know their numbers. And if you watch any of his ads, then what he's doing in there is he's taking these pain points, these things that moving company owners want, like more owner take home payments, like hiring an admin person or buying another truck. And he's saying, look, all you need to do these things is just knowing your numbers. And so by the time somebody gets to this video sales letter, they want to know how to know their numbers. So he covers all of this in the video sales letter. The call to action, of course, is to book a call. That's the first thing we need, right, the video sales letter. The next thing we need though is customer Testimonials or case studies. And so what we've got is a few testimonial interviews he did with some of his best customers who got the best results from working with him. Right. And so you can see we've got a little written thing so people can kind of like preview this. But honestly, the video does most of the work for us. Because you can't fake a testimonial video. Right? It's literally the guy Chris or, you know, Kyler or one of these guys in real life on video talking about how awesome it is working with Brock. And by the way, Brock has an incredible business because the things that his clients are saying about his service, just absolutely phenomenal. So really proud of him for that. So we've got four testimonial videos here on this page and then these call to Actions to book a call. So if you remember, that's elements one and two taken care of. Let's take a look at this application form. So if you click the book a call button, it doesn't actually take you straight to book a call. It takes you to this application form first. And so if you fill this out, obviously, name, email, phone. But the next questions it asks are how we actually vet people. So first off, Brock only works with companies based in the US Then we have them put their website in here because you can tell immediately whether they're a moving company or not, then their annual revenue and then their company name. And so based on these questions, we can tell are they a client that we can actually work with. And so once you submit this, then that'll actually take you to a call booking page where you can schedule a time to speak to Brock or somebody on his team. And so that right there is the four elements you need. Okay? It does not have to be complicated. It's one video sales letter. It's a couple of case studies or testimonial interviews you do with clients. And then it's just an application form and a call booking form. Literally any one of you could set this up, especially if you're using my VSL template. And so that brings us to step three. Now that we've got somewhere to send people, we just need to get in front of them. And so one of the basic rules about marketing that I think everybody needs to understand is there's really only three ways to get in front of people. You can reach out to them, you can post content, or you can run ads. Okay? And any of these three options are fine. And so the question then is just which One is right for me. And so I've got kind of a decision making matrix that I'll walk you through for this. So, number one, I almost never recommend outreach. I think it can work, but it's just such a massive time suck that there's only very highly specific circumstances where I would recommend it. It's super sweaty, it takes a lot of work. So if you're under 500k to maybe a million dollars a year, then I would probably focus most of my marketing time and attention on creating content. If you're over a million dollars a year, I would actually start out by running ads and then I would start creating content once the ads are going along nicely. And I'm going to walk you through my process for each of these. Just on a basic level, I've got other videos diving super deep into content specifically or ads specifically, so you could check those out. But this is just going to be a high level just so you can understand which one is probably the best path for you at this current stage. So from a content perspective, in order to make this work, I would pick a platform where your ideal client likely spends time. Okay, it doesn't really work anymore to just like cross post the exact same stuff to every platform. So you really need to pick which platform you're going to start with first. And this should be based on where your ideal client lives and where they spend time. So if you work with CPG startup founders, right, then you should definitely be on LinkedIn because that's where they're probably spending time. They're trying to get wholesale deals, they're trying to get connected with vendors. All that stuff is super beneficial for them. So they're going to be on the platform. If you're working with home services companies like Brock works with residential movers, I would definitely be on Facebook and Instagram. That's where these guys are likely to spend time. Crypto and tech, you're almost certainly going to need to be on X or Twitter, whatever you call it. But the interesting thing here is that YouTube can work for almost any industry actually, because everybody spends time here. So Pew Research did a study recently comparing going over a ton of stuff related to social media platforms. But one of the things they measured was the percentage of households in the United States at different income levels who use each platform on a regular basis. And believe it or not, the highest income level they tracked was over $100,000 a year, which I think is a good proxy for business owners, basically because if you make over 100k a year, the chances you're a business owner are much higher than if you make under 100k a year. And what they found is something like 80 or 90% of households over $100,000 a year in annual income spend time on YouTube on a regular basis. That's higher than any other platform. And so you can pick LinkedIn or Facebook, Instagram or X or whatever you want, but YouTube is almost a guaranteed win. It's just a little bit slower to like get it up and running and start getting traction there. And so whatever platform you pick, you need to create content that feels native to the platform. And what I mean by that is you need to create content that is essentially in the format that the platform wants you to be creating content. So like on LinkedIn, the main format that you see people succeeding with on LinkedIn is kind of this like written post with an image on it. Maybe you can sprinkle in some video content because they're kind of like trying to push video on the platform, but it's not like it's not a big thing there yet. I would still devote most of my time to written posts with, maybe with an image, maybe without. On Facebook, I would go 50, 50 between like written posts with an image which still work, especially to get in front of your existing follow. But I would also use video content on there basically like in the reels format. Instagram, I would go much heavier on video and I would make sure to do like higher quality reels. So you know, high quality camera, high quality editing style, all that stuff. Like the bar is really high on Instagram right now in terms of the type of content you need to create. So that's going to be really important here. I would also do a little bit, I would sprinkle in some long form carousels where you can do like the, like the swipe posts where it's images and you swipe through them again, those do really well for getting you in front of your existing, existing followers. And so it's a good kind of mix where you can get in front of new people with reels. You can nurture your existing audience with carousels. And you know, all of this traffic gets directed towards your funnel that we created in step two. Now if I was on YouTube, I would be focusing 100% of my attention on long form how to content. Okay. So we're trying to create videos that are over 20 minutes long. And it's highly educational, highly how to and the how to is always one of those things that we identified that our ideal customer Wants. Okay, so if we go back to the example of what Brock's ideal clients probably want, we would create how to content around these questions. And you know, maybe there's other questions that we find that they want answered. You'll notice actually if you go to my YouTube channel, the majority of my videos are how to videos. So that's content. If you're under half a million dollars a year, I would 100% recommend starting with content because you really don't have the budget to invest into ads at any real level. If you're in between 500k and a million a year, then it's of either. Or if you're over a million dollars a year, I would 100% just go straight into paid advertising. And the way I like to think about paid advertising, a lot of people like to come up with these really complex funnels where it's like we got to send people to this low ticket product and then we've got an email sequence to bump them up to our to book a call with us and then we sell them an intro offer and then we ascend them into a high ticket offer on the back end of that. I want to just go straight for the conversion. And so they're going to click an ad, they're going to watch our vsl, they're going to apply and they're going to book a call and then we've got like maybe a little pre call nurture sequence, a couple emails that get sent to them. I do have a full video going over ad strategy on my channel here. It's too complex to cover everything in this video, but I would just look up Peter Vanderwaal how to run Facebook ads here on YouTube. You'll be able to find that video. It teaches you everything you need to know on the ad side of things. Okay, let's recap where we're at. So by now we know who our ideal client is. We know how to speak to them. We've got a funnel to send them to and now we're creating content or running ads to that funnel to start getting leads through there, start getting calls, booking. The last thing we need to do here. Step four, we need to track our roi. Okay, we need to know how much are we making back from this investment of time and money into our marketing. And so there's two main metrics that I track with all my clients and this is really all that you probably need to be paying attention to to as well. So that's R O Ms. and LTGP to CAC. I'm going to walk you through each of them here. Right. So number one, R O M S. This just stands for return on marketing spend. And so the question that this answers is how much do we immediately make back from our marketing spend? Let's say you spent $5,000 this month on ads and you made $10,000 a month in new sales. You brought on, you know, let's say 10 new clients at $1,000 a month. So that's a 2x roas, right? Because you spent 5k and you made back 10k this month. Now, yes, you'll make 10k again next month. But we don't want to count that in this return on marketing spend because we want to know how much we're making back right away. Another example, if you spent 3k a month on content and you made $9000 a month in new sales, then that would be a 3x return on marketing spend. Right? And so hopefully this metric makes sense by now. It's really just going to help us understand cash flow as we invest into our marketing. Right? Because some businesses, they could afford to, let's say, spend 10k a month on ads and only make 5k a month in new sales because they know that long term the client's going to stay around long enough to where they're still profitable on it, even though they're technically losing money the first month and they're only break even the second month. But that needs to be a conscious decision you make that can't be done out of necessity or out of ignorance. And that has to be a conscious decision of this is the right way for us to get clients. We're super confident these clients are going to stay with us long term. And it would actually be a poor use of resources to try to improve our marketing funnel to the point where we break even or we make a profit on month one. Now, the second metric that we want to track here is something called LTGP to cac. And this is, this is actually a ratio of two metrics. So lifetime gross profit and cost to acquire a customer. So lifetime gross profit, you can figure this out. Basically, this is your customer lifetime value minus the cost of goods sold. So let's say you charge $1,000 a month for your bookkeeping service. Right. And your average client sticks around for 24 months. I think this is a fairly reasonable expectation if you've got a good service and you've got a good market that you're providing the service to. Right. And let's say it costs you $300 a month to deliver on this service. So you're paying your bookkeeper, you know, $30 an hour, and they spend 10 hours per client. Right? So that's 24 months. So that basically means that over the entire time this client is with us, we're going to make $16,800 in profit. All right, so hold that here. Let's talk about cac. Right, so cac, again, cost to acquire a customer. You can calculate this based on all of your marketing and sales spend. And then we're going to divide that by the number of new customers that you take on. So let's say you spend $4,000 on ads, spent $3,000 on an agency service, and let's say you pay your sales reps $2,000 in commissions. So that means that you spent $9,000 this month on marketing. And then let's say you made 10 new sales from that. So we divide that $9,000 by 10, and that gets us a $900 cost to acquire a customer. And so if you're charging $1,000 a month, then that means you make just a little bit of profit month one and you start being super profitable months two through 24. And so if we bring these two metrics together, our LTGP to CAC is 18.67 to one, which this is an insanely good benchmark. Okay? Like, if I was hitting this, I would 10x my marketing spend tomorrow. Okay? This is essentially a big daddy long term metric of how scalable is my business and how good of an opportunity is this business. If I had a stock that I could put in a dollar and make back almost $19, basically guaranteed, I would just keep hitting that button as many times as I could. Right? And that's the way you need to think of it. That's the way the best business owners think about their business. They think about it as an investment, because once you've got your lifestyle covered, it's like any other money that you make. You can either invest back into the business or you can invest into something else. You can go buy real estate, you can go buy stocks and bonds, you can go buy crypto. And so the game just becomes, where do I get the best return on my money? And if you've built a good business, then you should always be able to get the best return on your money by putting it back into the business. In this case, this is absolutely the case. There's nothing else that you could invest into that is going to get you a 19x return over the next 24 months. Hey, if you like this video, you're definitely going to like this one. Check it out and I'll see you over there.