The Absolutely Most Amazing, Best Ever Post Tax Season Niche Marketing Meeting

Only a mere 90 minutes to more visibility, leads and new business

It’s getting close to the time when CPA firm marketing teams will reappear on the radar screens of firm partners. Even though you may have committed to a budget in the Fall, the real work will start up in May after your partners come back from a well-deserved break.
 
It’s probably been a few months since you put together your 2015 budget together, and in the midst of doing a gazillion tax returns, partners you worked with may have forgotten the details. Perhaps it’s time (and a terrific opportunity) to reinvigorate niche marketing plans and you can kick things off with a 90 minute marketing meeting. 

Put These 5 Items on Your Niche Marketing Meeting Agenda

Here’s an agenda for that marketing meeting to make it as productive as possible, concluding with a solid action plan that can carry the niche forward to the 2016 budget planning cycle.

Cell phones off and put away?
 
Great! Let’s start:
 
1:30 – 1:50 pm
Set specific, measureable goals for the niche
 
Niche goals should be developed around specific, measurable objectives, like “increase the number of online leads we receive by 40%” or “increase revenue per client by 66%”. There are elements of both specificity and measurability in these goal statement. A goal statement IS NOT something like “do four case studies” or “put together a video” .. those are tactics, and tactics are used to support goals, not frame them.
 
1:50 – 2:00 pm
Strategies and tactics for improving the digital profile of partners and subject matter experts
 
Your agenda needs to include a plan for how, what, when and where the online profile of the niche team will either be developed or improved. This can range from improving the bio on the firm site to a executing LinkedIn strategies.
 
2:00 – 2:05 pm
Discussion: how we’re going to fix the email database
 
Yuck. Nobody likes or wants to do this, but it’s one of those “gotta do” chores where everyone in the niche needs to participate. This just needs time and muscle, but the payoff is well worth it as having a clean, segmented email list is worth 275 times its weight in gold.(Note – I made that stat up, but you get the point, right?)
 
2:05 – 2:30
What’s Hot?
 
This is the point in the agenda where partners and subject matter experts hold court and teach the marketing team what they see as the hot buttons issues for the year. Defining these early on gives the marketing team the ability to craft lead generation programs.
 
2:30 – 2:40
Return phone calls and take a bio break
 
When you see the beads of sweat on partners’ faces because they’re going through cell phone withdrawal, then its time to give everyone a break. Make sure they know about the $5/minute fine for not being back in their seats when the next part of the agenda comes up.
 
2:40 – 3:00 pm
Who is going to be blogging and other content marketing issues?
 
You’re going to want to save the best and most difficult agenda item for last. Before you go into the meeting, however, it’s a wise idea for you to be prepared to make cogent arguments about why the practice needs to ramp up its content marketing initiatives, and in particular, to be blogging on a regular basis. Ultimately, the goal of the marketing team should be to develop a content marketing strategy and schedule, along with a solid idea of the time commitments required of partners and subject matter experts. 

Strategy Before Tactics 

For those partners reading this blog, you do realize that this is just the beginning of the commitment to marketing your niche practice that you’ll need to make, right?
 
I also encourage you to read between the lines for what’s at the heart of this agenda: a message of “strategy first, tactics later (much later)”.
 
CPA and other professional services firms tend to think about marketing as a series of tactical executions, like “redo the website” or “put together a sales sheet”. At the point in time when you stop thinking this way and realize that tactics need to be positioned as means to reach goals, you’ll find that marketing isn’t overhead – it’s fundamental to firm growth.
 
At the end of the day, 90 minutes represents about .06% of the total number of hours you’ll be putting on your time sheet this year. That’s not a bad investment for paving the way to more visibility, leads and new business.