How 10 Top 200 CPA Firms Marketed for New Biz from American Taxpayer Relief Act

An Analysis of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Lost Inbound Marketing Opportunities

CPA firm marketing Marketers love chaos because chaos breeds opportunity.

And nothing breeds opportunity better for CPA firm marketing opportunities than complicated, dramatic, cliff hanging changes to tax structures, right? Put yourself into your client or prospects’ shoes for a moment and here’s a few descriptive ways to capture their mindset: confused, angry, upset, concerned, miffed, anxiety ridden, etc.

The upshot – they’re hungry for information, and looking online for solutions to questions and issues they have. This is the perfect recipe for inbound marketing: get found; convert site visitors to leads; convert leads to new business; and continually measure results…. in other words (and please forgive me for being so mercenary about it), take an individual or business owner’s angst and turn it into new business.

I have a list of 10 CPA firms ranging in size from about $22 million to over $80 million in revenue that I continually monitor for best inbound marketing practices. Relative to ATRA, here’s what they accomplished from an inbound marketing perspective:

7 out of 10 posted an article or news story about ATRA onsite
4 out of 10 provided a detailed, downloadable pdf on a free access basis
4 out of 10 wrote and published a blog post
5 out of 10 published a Tweet driving the follower back to their article or blog post

The good news here is that 70% of these firms used some form of content marketing, and of these, all gave their thought leadership away for free. For the most part, the content was hard to find (buried several clicks deep), and there were very few internal linkages from the site’s industry, services or bio pages to the ATRA content.

Here’s the bad and ugly of what we found: no one, zero, squat, nada, zip – used the opportunity to present an offer and generate a lead. Essentially, for those firms that did something, it was 100% about branding and showcasing thought leadership, and 0% about lead generation!

In fact, there was one firm (someone ranked by Inside Public Accounting between 100 and 110) who did what I consider to be an outstanding job in publishing and promoting their thought leadership, only to fall short by not having a way to convert the visitor to a lead. What a shame!

So, what could these firms have done differently to capitalize upon ATRA and generate some leads in addition to publishing thought leadership?

Start with developing the idea or concept for a compelling, juicy, hard to refuse offer. Maybe something like “Free 30 Minute Checkup on How (You / Your Business) Can Take Advantage of The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012”
Create a landing page on your website to capture the lead
Create a place call to action buttons around the website promoting the offer, linked to the landing page
Promote the offer offsite using social media
Assign a rainmaker to follow up on all leads and book appointments

CPA firm marketers and partners need to be always thinking about how to take their investment in content marketing one more step up the ladder to lead generation. Knowing the number of visits to a particular page on your website is nice, but wouldn’t it be even nicer to turn that visit into a lead?

For those firms that did not do even one shred of marketing work around the Act, it’s time for you to do some serious thinking about re-engineering your online marketing program. Right now, you’ve got some room and flexibility to catch up, but in a year from now when inbound marketing is de rigueur for CPA firms, you’ll find yourself losing the online battle for new clients.