How Partners Can Make – or Break - a CPA Firm Inbound Marketing Program

What Comes After Referral and Word of Mouth Marketing?

Everybody who doesn’t like to take the easiest path to growing their CPA or professional service firm raise their hands.

Ok, so that was a trick question because everybody raised their hands.

Next, everyone that believes that the only way to grow their accounting or professional service firm is by referrals and word of mouth marketing raise their hand.

Oooh. There’s still a lot of hands raised, but that was a trick question too. I would expect and I could agree that if I asked if referrals and word of mouth was the best way to grow a firm, then everyone’s hand – including mine – should have been raised. But the truth of the matter is that 1:1 marketing simply isn’t enough because of the dramatic and fundamental shift in the way that prospects and clients engage with accounting and consulting firms using online resources.

With the firm retreat season here, it’s a great time to talk about how to complement your firm’s  1:1 marketing with an inbound marketing program. The fundamentals are pretty easy to grasp, but designing and executing an inbound marketing program takes resolve, commitment, investment and patience.

7 Ways That Partners Can Make or Break an Inbound Marketing Program

Just in case it’s not obvious, if partners and other subject matter experts don’t step up to the plate and contribute to inbound marketing, it’s not going to work. Period.

Inbound marketing is not a set it and forget it tactic. It’s not something you can dump off to your marketing department with a wave of your hand, a blast of a trumpet and hearty, “go forth and inbound!”  battle cry.

Nope. You’ve got to pull your weight, but the payoff can be tremendous in terms of more visibility, more leads and more new business. So here’s seven ways you can step up to the plate to make inbound marketing successful:

1. Learn and pay attention to what’s going in in the world of professional services digital marketing. Read and subscribe to blogs like this one or others like HubSpot, MarketingProfs, and the Content Marketing Institute. Download whitepapers. Attend webinars and get CPE to boot!
2. Be willing to invest money for inbound marketing infrastructure, including a new website built on best inbound marketing practices. The availability of marketing tools and technologies (like HubSpot) is simply staggering, and every day you ignore their potential is another day that you’re falling further and further behind in availing yourself of their power and potential.
3. Set quantifiable goals for your niche practice and for the firm overall as to what you want and expect to get out of a digital marketing program. increases in website visits, leads generated, new clients, new revenues, etc. Inbound marketing is quantitative marketing, and depends upon smart, measureable, actionable and results oriented goal setting in order to maximize its utility as a marketing approach.
4. Contribute content in the form of blog posts, articles, whitepapers, slide shows, videos, and so on for posting to the website. Inbound marketing is built upon a foundation of great content. Publishing content increases the chances that you’ll be found, is key for converting site visitors to leads, and serves to build personal brands.
5. Be an active participant in social media, with an emphasis on LinkedIn. In addition to having a complete LinkedIn profile, partners need to be involved in conversations in relevant LinkedIn groups – that’s where you can fish where the fish are. Next, I would recommend Google+, followed by Twitter and then last, Facebook. Start with committing 15 minutes a week and see what happens before investing more of your time, but be consistent and patient!
6. Always be building your email marketing database, because you’ll be doing a lot of emailing under an inbound marketing strategy. Hopefully, you’ll be emailing to the right target at the right time with the right message, but that blog topic is for another day.
7. Measure everything and hold yourself accountable for making changes because the days of “I think it worked” marketing are over. When you go digital, there’s nothing that can’t be measured, and measurement is the key to getting a return on your investment.

Thank You Alistair Marshall!

I recently read a post on one of the LinkedIn groups for professional services marketing from Alistair Marshall, a consultant from a strategic and business development planning firm in Australia called Julian Midwinter & Associates. Alistair wrote,

“If you rely on referrals alone you can only grow your business at the rate that others are prepared to talk about you.”

Wow. What a great way to position the disadvantages of solely relying on 1:1 marketing. In effect, if you’re living by referrals alone, you’re putting the growth of your firm in somebody else’s hands.

But with inbound marketing, you’re putting firm growth into the hands of prospects searching for solutions who will find you if – and that’s a mighty big if – you have the right inbound marketing strategies and  tactics in place, and if you  have the tools, technologies and infrastructure necessary for getting found and converting prospects that have found you into leads.