7 Hats CPA Firm Marketers Need to Wear to Get Partners and SMEs Blogging

The secret sauce to blogging: maximize commitment + minimize partners’ responsibilities

Your Job is Getting a Whole Lot Harder

We see a lot of energy and enthusiasm by marketers because of all of the new marketing opportunities presented by inbound marketing and content marketing. At the same time we know how frustrating your job can be given the twin challenges of moving your firm’s marketing efforts in the right direction and the snail’s pace of adoption by firm management and partners.
 
When it comes to blogging, one of the ways to resolve that frustration is to take a lot of responsibilities off of your partners’ plate, particularly in terms of writing. At the same time, that means putting more responsibilities on your plate, and the need to wear more hats, like these:
 
(1)    Educator

Unless you can show the professionals in your firm the value of blogging the chances that they’ll rush to put fingers to keyboard will be zero. Nada. Zilch. There’s an abundance of research on the relationship between blogging and new client acquisition, and it makes a lot of sense to use this to stimulate interest and participation.
 
(2) Facilitator

You’ll most likely find that the number of partners in the firm that are willing to regularly blog is going to be quite small, but at the same time, the number who are interested will be pretty high. That’s the time to get professional resources to serve as ghost writers and to facilitate a process of hiring and using them to grab and package a partner or SME’s thought leadership into blog posts. Another key part of wearing your facilitator hat is to manage all of the critical behind the curtain activities that are necessary to publish, post and promote the blog.
 
(3) Ideator

Most of you may be too young to remember Tom Terrific, a cartoon character who used to tie on a special thinking cap to solve problems. You’ll need to do the same as you’ll likely get a deafening silence when you ask the question, “well, what do you want to blog about?” Instead, do some research, ask questions about prospect pains, be literate with new laws or regs, and then come to the table with a year’s worth of blog post titles and let your partners and SME’s chose which ones they wish to see published.
 
(4)    Scheduler
 
One of the behind the curtain hats you’ll wear is to develop and manage a publication schedule for your blog post and for the promotional activities you’ll be executing to get eyeballs on that post. HubSpot (of course) has an outstanding free template you can use to this end, and you can get it here. While there’s a high likelihood that the concept behind the schedule and the realities of adhering to the schedule won’t quite jive, you may find that publishing the schedule – and highlighting posts beyond their due date - may catalyze partners and SMEs into action ... one hopes.

 
(5)    Promoter 

You’ll want to keep most if not all of the promotional activities related to the firm’s blog off of the partner and SME’s “to do “list. You and your team should be promoting the post on and off site using every digital asset you have at your disposal from social media accounts to eNewsletters to email. Work with your professionals to identify LinkedIn groups where their prospects are, and then take responsibility for getting their post visibility in those groups.

(6)    Reporter

If you’re blogging you should have access to analytics that show the reach and number of visits to any given blog post. Use this data to report on results and to showcase blog posts that were successful. Two words of caution here – manage expectations. At this point in the evolution of digital marketing for CPA and other professional services firms, blogs that accrue 30 to 60 visits can be considered very successful, but if your partners or SME expect to see numbers in the thousands, just remind them that those are rock star numbers, and pretty difficult to achieve if they’re blogging about changes to tax code!

(7)    Awarder

One increasingly popular tactic we’re seeing is companies that reward staff for great blogs that have great results. There’s nothing like tying incentives into your blogging program that can range from recognition to a more valued prize, like a new car for the most visits in a given quarter. The additional bonus: you can use the fact that you give away cars for blogging as a great story to tell for your recruiting and retention efforts.

“OK, I’ll Sit for an Interview Once Every Two Weeks!”

... said the partner to the marketer.
 
BINGO!!
 
At this point in the evolution of professional services marketing towards digital, getting a partner or SME to agree to this process is a hugely positive step. Once these efforts begin to bear fruit, two amazing things happen: (1) other partners want to hop on the blogging bus, and (2) partners want to blog even more.
 
At that point, you might just need to buy another hat because your hat size just grew a whole lot bigger.