Practice Development Articles
Welcome to Marketing Camp
What if Your Marketing Was a System Too?
By: Guest Camp Counselor, John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing
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With thanks to Intuit for their invitation to be your Guest Camp Counselor, I want to welcome you to the Intuit 2006 Marketing Camp. Each summer Intuit puts together a virtual marketing camp for practitioners like you, so you can move your marketing efforts to the next level.
Intuit knows me from Duct Tape Marketing, where I work with both small businesses and accounting professionals. I think’s that why they asked me to share my thoughts – because I know both your challenges and the needs of your prospective clients.
From what I see, accountants and others in a similar practice may deal with cultural constraints that keep from marketing their services effectively. In a nutshell, my advice is to treat marketing as one more system in place to help you succeed.
Practitioners and Professional Services
Accounting professionals and others in professional services seem to have a difficult time viewing marketing the same way they do other elements of their business.
Yet I bet you have little problem envisioning systems to run the financial or operational aspects of your practice. But marketing? You may think that’s some fuzzy, left-brain, creative thing better left at the bottom of the list of things to do.
Use a System
What if you began to look at marketing your business, the same way you might look at preparing a balance sheet? What if you developed and documented a way to create a predictable flow of leads, clients and revenue – a marketing system.
Such an animal can exist in your practice if you simply follow a set of strategic steps to create an effective marketing system. After that, operating the system only involves executing planned activity, knowing that it will produce consistent results, no matter who is operating the system.
Sound intriguing?
So, let’s break it down into the steps required to create a marketing system.
Seven Steps to a Marketing System
- Narrow Your Focus. Create a description of your ideal client. Describe them as though they are sitting across the desk from your at this moment. Define the market by way of your ideal client, and use this focus to make sure that the market needs the services you provide, and values what you have to offer.
It is just as important to understand who you don’t want as a client. If a certain size business is the best fit for your accounting services, then think in terms of narrowing your focus to serve the unique needs of that size business. An ideal client isn’t always your biggest client. In fact, the ideal client may be the type of client you personally enjoy working with the most. Take a good hard look at your current client list to discover common characteristics among your best clients. You may also discover that doing tax returns of a certain size or type no longer make sense for your firm too.
- Find and Communicate Your Core Difference. Even if your make it up, you’ve got to find something that makes your business stand out from the pack. Once you do, you’ve got to build your entire marketing program around communicating this difference. Everyone says they provide high quality work and great service, so it’s not enough for you to do the same. Is your difference contained in an unheard of guarantee, is it a very specific market niche or is it in your ability to offer complete financial advice from a CPA? You can’t stand out trying to be all things to all people.
- Package Your Business. Look for every way to build your unique difference into the experience your client or prospect has with your firm. Everything about your firm should communicate and deliver your unique promise. Package your services as products, communicate your unique process, name your service offerings. Don’t call your tax organizer a tax organizer – call it a “Fool-Proof Tax Strategy Planning Tool.”
- Create Marketing Materials That Educate. Instead of printing glossy sales brochures, create marketing materials and Web site content that clearly speaks to your ideal client and offers proof that you’re indeed uniquely qualified to solve their problems. Create case studies, testimonial sheets, client lists, process descriptions and checklists, service descriptions, and the compelling story of why you started your business. Look for ways to document how you help clients minimize their tax burden, take money out of their businesses the smart way, and avoid common problems in fiscal management. Show your understanding of how big corporate requirements, like Sarbanes-Oxley, still create potential traps for small business – and how you help clients avoid them, Write articles for local publications, round-up expert content from other professionals and look for ways to create content around the most misunderstood and frequently asked about issues in your target client’s world.
- Install the Lead Generation Trio. There is no one perfect way to generate leads for your practice. In fact, to generate the momentum needed to create a consistent, predictable flow of high quality leads, you must work on many fronts, including especially the lead generation trio of smart advertising, public relations and referral marketing. (Smart advertising will interest and creates demand for the educational materials described above; public relations will provide proof of your core marketing difference; and referral marketing provides a level of trust unmatched by any other form of lead generation.) Each of these lead-generation strategies must be employed in concert to get the greatest impact.
- Automate and Dominate. Once you start to create a flow of leads, let technology do the heavy qualifying and selling for you. Ezines, email, blogs, Web sites, white paper delivery, and even prospect lists – all should be automated in order to most effectively communicate as consistently as is necessary in today’s advertising message onslaught.
- Live by a Calendar. Create the system and then work the system. Do whatever you must to make sure that you do at least one marketing activity every single day. Create a monthly calendar and give each month a marketing system theme. Get everyone in your organization involved – put the calendar in a very public place.
If you begin to approach your marketing from a systematic point of view and use the steps above to create the foundation for your entire marketing system, you will no longer need to look at marketing as sort of chore left best to those creative types. Who knows, marketing may just add up after all.
Elsewhere in Intuit’s Marketing Camp
Don’t forget to check out the other Resources for Intuit 2006 Marketing Camp so you can find the support Intuit has supplied for your marketing efforts.
Have fun at marketing camp, and then take what you’ve learned to apply to your own practice when you get back home.
John Jantsch is a marketing coach and creator of Duct Tape Marketing. Find out more about the Duct Tape Marketing system here.Last Updated: 08/22/2006
