How CPA Firm Marketers Can Handle the Explosion of New Marketing Technologies

So Many New Marketing Technologies, So Little Time – It’s Like Trying to Drink Out of a Fire Hose

The other day, we were huddled around the conference table here at VLLC World Headquarters talking about new marketing technologies. As you’re probably aware, it’s an unwritten Law of the Universe that a brand new piece of marketing technology must be launched every fourteen minutes or so, and each must have some kind of “gee whiz” feature that marketers can’t live without.

One key part of our mission as a professional services marketing agency is to keep abreast of these new developments, and I gotta tell you, it’s like drinking out of a fire hose! There always seems to be something newer and better and different on our radar screen, and if we see something that’s cool or interesting, we try it out on ourselves first before bringing it out to a client.

(Buy us a beer sometimes and oh, the stories we could tell!)

For example, right now we’re playing around with Vine from Twitter. This allows you to publish a 6 second video (yep – you read that right …. 6 seconds!!) that takes the place of a 140 character Tweet. Makes you wonder what’s next  – maybe back to hieroglyphics? Eliminating vowels?

We’ll let you know if we come up with a way to do a 6 second video that helps you market a regulatory compliance service. Stay tuned. Keep the faith.

But it’s not just Vine that makes life for accounting, consulting and legal marketers interesting these days. It’s about all kinds of new technology and software that drives marketing automation, email, social media, project management, customer relationship management, analytics, and more.

I’m concerned about marketers in professional services firms falling further and further behind when it comes to online marketing. So much of your time and resources needs to be devoted to day to day marketing activities like writing proposals that your time for strategic thinking and investigating new technologies is limited. Add to the fact that even if you find an amazing new marketing approach and technology (like inbound marketing), you‘re still challenged by getting your partners to agree to try (and fund) something new and different.

Not so easy a task, eh?

I read a really interesting blog post about the stress of adopting new marketing technologies on the HubSpot blog that I thought had some terrific guidance for marketers in CPA, consulting and law firms (“A Stress Free Approach to Adopting New Marketing Technologies”). The question that was posed in the post was “how do you stay on top of what’s available and possible, and whether platforms will help achieve key performance indicators?”

I encourage you to read this post for more details, but here’s a summary of its key points for avoiding stress:

1. Encourage agility and experimentation
2. Always be listening to stay on top of new advancements
3. Carve out time to learn & research
4. Connect to strategy - remember your goals, and focus efforts on achieving them
5. Be an advocate for the right technologies
6. Enable others to easily adopt new technologies
7. Establish benchmarks for success, and then monitor performance over time to assess the investment

Of course, another way to deal with the stress of change and adoption is to ignore it completely, and wait until your competitors are getting more site visitors, generating more leads and getting more ROI out of their marketing budget … in other words, kicking your butt.