I Built a $3M/yr Content Strategy For a CPA Firm

I'm the marketing guy behind a tax firm that scaled to $3 million a year in three years. And one of the absolute biggest keys to this growth was building the owner's personal brand. And so this is Ryan. He's got over 50,000 followers across platforms right now and he makes millions of dollars every year from customers that find him online. And the number one problem that we ran into for probably the first year of producing content together was simply just running out of ideas. Like without just reading the tax code on camera, there's only so many topics you can talk about related to taxes. And so when you run out of ideas, it's like what the hell do you even talk about? And have enough ideas to post multiple times a day. Well, safe to say we've got it figured out today because we've been posting twice a day now for months across all platforms that he's on and we've got 30 to 60 days worth of content just in the bank stacked up ready to go at any given time. And so today I'm going to show you the process we use to never run out of ideas and to make sure we're producing content that's giving getting in front of ideal clients over and over and over. By the way, if you don't know who I am, my name is Peter Vanderwaal and I own Social Club Studios where we scale seven figure service based companies to multiple seven and soon eight figures per year. So first I want to show you this account on Instagram. This guy is no code Alex or Alex Haydn. But if we go ahead and just sort his last hundred reels by most viewed, there's something interesting here that I want to show you. Okay, so I've got the two videos right side by side. This one here got like 1.4 million views. This one here got like I think just under a million. And I want you to watch these and tell me, tell me if you can figure out the difference.

You want to start a software company but you don't have an idea. I got you. Go to acquire.com and filter to software companies that are making over $100,000 a year. This shows their product market fit. Next, find one that you like and go to nichepower.com and get a competitor report. Next, search their competitors G2 reviews and make a list of recurring feature requests that people want as well as complaints about the current competitors. Then solve those complaints and build those new features quickly by building on a no code tool. Get to market in six weeks or less and start getting customers by utilizing outbound strategies that are super affordable like cold email and cold calling.

And if you want the full okay, so that's number one, his most viewed video of his last hundred posts. Here's number two.

You could literally own a software company before 2025. All you have to do is go on acquire.com to find an idea. After that, take your idea and run it through validate my SaaS.com this is going to give you a full competitor report. It's going to give you their pricing and it's going to give you a bunch of other information to help you validate your idea and make sure that it's something worth going through with before you spend any time, money or energy on it. And then once you need to know how to build it, you have a few options. You can use a no code builder like Bubble Dio or you use conversational AI as text to app to build it, like create X, Y, Z to build it. And then it's going to take you a little bit of time to build it. You could pay someone. Again, you have options. And then once it's built to your first customers, you can utilize cold email and cold calling. They're the two most affordable, affordable channels. To be our first customers, you can go to ListKit IO.

So he's basically got just a couple steps right. So it's find an idea from this one website, acquire.com find their reviews and see what people don't like about it. Go build something that solves those pain points for all their customers and then try to take their customers through cold outreach. I could go through a bunch more of Alex's videos because it's actually he's had a ton of videos the past like three to four months that have used this exact same structure. But here's the point. People need to be reminded more than they need to be told. We don't take action on new information the first time we ever hear it. And different ways of communicating something are going to resonate with different types of people. So you really just need one core message and maybe five to ten core topics to talk about. And you're good kind of infinitely with your content. The hard part is just going to be figuring out what those topics are that really resonate with your audience. And so I want to give you a framework here for how I might do this for a brand new company that we've never worked with. And I actually, I picked a niche here that we actually have never worked with because I wanted to kind of come up with this from scratch. And I didn't want to like, pull this from one of the clients that we've already been doing this for. So here's, here's an example, right? So let's say you are a legal firm and you specialize in entity structuring and asset protection. Okay? And so the first thing I always like to do is come up with what are the benefits of this service and what are the pain points that you're solving with the service? Okay, so some benefits of like an asset protection strategy would be you're protecting your other assets from lawsuits. You're eliminating unnecessarily tax filing or legal fees for, you know, multiple LLCs that are all over the place that you don't need your assets go to your proper heirs when you die. Tenants don't know who you are, so they can't sue you. Right? These are some of the benefits, these are some of the outcomes people are looking for when they hire an asset protection strategist. Some pain points here are your assets are kind of a sitting duck to lawsuits, right? Somebody trips and falls in one of your properties, they could go and sue you and they could get all your properties. Theoretically, you're paying unnecessarily tax filing fees or legal fees. Maybe you have too many LLCs set up, something like that. The government decides what happens to your assets when you die because you don't have a plan in place for the succession and passing them down to the next generation. Your tenants know who you are, what other stuff you own, and so it puts a massive target on your back for them to maybe even fake an injury in one of your properties or to really like over inflate the injury that they get in one of your properties. Now, the reason we just listed all of these out is that we're going to use these for our hooks. You can come up with as many benefits or pain points as you want, but this is how you're going to figure out what specific messaging is really going to resonate with your ideal client. And so step one is basically create a hook based around one of these. Step two is deliver the steps or the strategy or just the idea that you're trying to convey. And by the way, starting out, I would literally just come up with a step by step super basic strategy. We'll cover how to script this out in a moment here, but I wouldn't get fancy with it. And then step three is just repeat this every one or two weeks. And so you literally refilm the same exact video Concept, just with a slightly different hook in the first three to five seconds. And you'll notice too if we're repeating this only every one or two weeks, then that means you only actually need like five, five to maybe ten good video ideas. Let's talk about hooks for a moment because I think this is something where there's a lot of information out there on like different tactics to create hooks, but nobody talks about the actual foundational strategy. Kind of the baseline you have to understand to really be able to come up with your own creative hooks. Okay, so there's a really helpful framework that I like to use called broad, narrow, niche. Okay, so it's literally three lines in a row. And so your first line is broad, right? Literally anyone could be interested in this, right? And so these are things like money, sports, health, very broad concepts anybody could resonate with or understand. Then in your second line you go narrow, right? You start to zero in on your ideal client. And so, and then third line and beyond, you go full niche. And now we're talking asset protection strategy for real estate investors. It's very specific. Here's an example I wrote up just for this video. Okay, so this is still following the asset protection strategist type of service offering. And so here's the script, right? You could lose everything in the blink of an eye if you do this one thing wrong. And 99% of investors I speak to are making this mistake. So let's say you own three different rental properties in different areas and somebody trips and falls in property A, well, for most of you, they could find a smart injury attorney, they could sue you, and they could take all three of your properties from you in that lawsuit. But with the strategy I'm about to show you, you'll be protected from even the craftiest ambulance chasing injury attorney. And from there you would just get into the actual of the video. Super straightforward. So you've come up with your hook. But how do we actually come up with those steps, the bullet points, the strategy that you're going to be delivering? And how do we deliver it in a way that's simple enough for somebody on social media to understand, but also giving enough of the complexity that they can kind of see how you're different from any other asset protection strategist. So when I was thinking about this to prepare for this video, there were really three main tips that I was able to come up with based on all of the scripts that we've built out over the past few years. And so tip number one is just to define A single objective. Okay. I think a lot of people try to overcomplicate it and they try to give as much value as humanly possible with 17 bullet points and eight different tips at the end and addressing FAQs, and you're just over complicating it for social media. Okay, if we're real, this is a 30 second video, maybe a 60 second video. And so the person watching doesn't need to feel like they came away with a whole wealth of knowledge. If anything, that's just going to cause them to feel overwhelmed and go, nope, sounds hard. And so before you script the video out, you just need to know in your mind what the objective is. Okay. And so for a video like this, the objective would be for them to have a general idea of what an asset protection strategy even is. Right. For those videos from no Code Alex, I showed you a minute ago, his objective is probably something like give somebody a general idea of what it looks like to start a no code SaaS tool. Right. One of his steps was literally go build the SaaS. There's no detail in there, right? He's not telling you how to do it. He's telling you two different tools you might look into and you can go figure out the rest. And so tip number two is to assume the viewer has zero context for what you're talking about. All right? They don't know who you are. They don't know what an asset protection strategy is. They probably don't own any real estate. Assume a baseline knowledge of like a third grader. Because when most people are scrolling on social media, they might be 120 IQ person out in the real world, but on social media they're like an IQ of like 7. Lizard brain is in full control. They're not thinking. So there's a really great tool you can use for this. You don't have to use it forever. But it's great to kind of train yourself in a new way of writing. It's called Hemingway App. And if you type something out in here, let's say you script a video out, it'll actually tell you the grade level of the video script. You can also just throw it into ChatGPT and you can get an approximate estimation for what grade level you're speaking in. And the cool thing with ChatGPT too is it'll give you suggestions on how to trim it down or how to simplify it down. And that can be really, really great. But I would not use it to script the video to begin with. If anything, feel free to Put more complicated steps into chat GPT and then ask it to simplify it down to a third grade reading level. Okay. And third tip kind of related to these other two is just keep it to bullet points. Okay? Don't linger on any one specific thing. So back to that example video I showed you with Alex. He's got four main bullet points, four main steps to create your own. No code. Sassy. And so for you, if you can boil it down to three, four or maybe up to five steps, maybe that might be a little bit too long, but maybe five steps and each step it's like tell what the step is and then maybe give like one sentence of context. And if you can't make a step make sense with just two lines, you probably need to zoom out a little bit. You're probably getting too specific with that step. So that would be the difference between like, we're going to do an audit of your current properties and entity structure versus we're going to look at everything you own and figure out how to organize it properly. See the difference? A third grader could understand the second one. They'd have no idea what an entity is. They have no idea what an asset is. None of that. Now here's the thing. The reason this works so well for expert driven businesses is as experts in our given field of work, we have this tendency to assume other people understand more about our field than they actually do. Accountants will use terms like profit and revenue and EBITDA and just words that the average business owner doesn't actually understand. And then they get confused on why nobody cares about their content or is paying attention to them online. You need to simplify it down, right? That's what it comes down to at the end of the day. Now there is a place for educating people on those higher level ideas, but you have to get them in the door. And that's where if this YouTube video I'm filming right now was an Instagram reel, I'd basically be saying, stop using jargon in your videos. That's all I would say. I would keep it as simple as that. That's a very simple, single actionable tip that an expert or a professional can apply to their social media content. If I tried to take every framework and tip and idea that I've given in this YouTube video so far and fit that into a 30 to 60 second social media video, that wouldn't work. People just don't have the foundation of knowledge to be able to consume that in just 30 or 60 seconds. And so if you have one takeaway from this video, it's that you're probably over complicating your social media content and you need somebody to help you simplify it down.