8 Best Practices for Capitalizing on a New Opportunity Coming from Regulatory Change

Surf's up!!

That’s what my mentor used to say whenever the Federal Government started the process of bringing a new regulation to life.

He implanted the vision of all of us in the marketing department sitting on a surfboard, looking out to sea, and waiting for a swell indicating that it was time to start paddling like crazy to catch the wave. Of course, catching the wave and riding it to shore meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in new consulting fees for the firm.

As a Managing Partner or niche practice leader, you should love new law, regulations, codes or standards as it means that you’ve been given the opportunity to put together a program that will serve to both retain current clients and attract new ones.

Part 4 of our series on ways that marketing a CPA firm becomes more effective using an online sales funnel.

We’ve reached that point in our series where it’s time to talk a little BOFU - “bottom of the funnel” marketing. After all of the hard work you’ve done to capture a lead and nurture them with a combination of thought leadership and advertorial marketing, you’ve hopefully reached the point where they’re marketing and sales qualified, and moving towards making a decision about how to hire your firm to help them with their accounting or business advisory needs.

Earlier in this series we talked about aligning your firm’ marketing strategy with TOFU and MOFU content and offers. These stages are stepping stones to securing a new client or getting more business from an existing client. At the TOFU stage, the responsibility of the marketing team is to answer the prospect’s question, “HOW do I solve a problem?” This is where our content needs to be 90% non-advertorial and 10% advertorial.

Moving to MOFU, we need to answer this question from prospects: “WHO can solve my problem?” It’s at this point that we need to establish ourselves as a vendor of choice, and it’s likely that the prospect is considering several choices at this stage.

The Death Knell for Branded Pizza Cutters

I want you to notice something right up front.
 
I didn’t title this blog post “how much does inbound marketing cost” because if I did, I’d be drummed out of the inbound marketing industry and stripped of my inbound marketing epaulets, all recorded for posterity on YouTube.
 
Inbound marketing is all about return on investment, built on a foundation of quantifiable goals and objectives, and strategies and tactics for solving marketing problems like getting more website traffic, converting website visitors to leads and nurturing leads to sales.
 
It’s a lot more than just a line item on the firm’s budget and P&L. 

4 Questions to put on your next marketing/management committee agenda

I read a story in our local paper about a teacher that was embarking on a bike journey from the State of Washington to Maine this summer to help raise his student’s awareness of environmental issues.
   
It seems that the longest bike ride he had attempted to date was a round trip of about 80 miles.

Do they have a viable and active online lead generation program?

In my last blog post, I made the point that the inbound marketing methodology (attract-connect-engage-delight) can be used as part of the merger or acquisition diligence process for assessing what a buyer or seller brings to the table in the way of marketing.

A quick review: (1) this idea is not designed to replace “traditional” due diligence investigations regarding marketing, but to complement those investigations in a deeper and more meaningful way; and (2) the value of using this methodology lies in the fact that it can be used as a harbinger of what can be rather than what is now.

The Difference Between a Snapshot and a Crystal Ball

It looks like the flurry of deal making in 2016 is going to be on pace with what we saw in 2015. That means deal values well over $2 trillion, but yet, it’s likely that more than two out of every three deals are going to fail.

There’s been volumes written about the reasons why mergers and acquisitions fail, but I tend to look at top line effects unrealized or unfulfilled as a key trigger of failure. All of the M&A transactions I’ve been involved in were built around an expectation that the merged companies would be able to create a greater volume of sales together than could have been accomplished alone.

Forecasting More Post-Merger New Customers Using an Inbound Marketing-Based Assessment

I wonder if there are any of my blog readers out there who could have correctly made the following forecasts:

• Gas for about $1.75/gallon.
• Both the Duquesne men’s basketball and the Temple women’s gymnastics team getting stuck for 24 hours at the same time on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the Great Blizzard of ’16. (Wonder if there were any fisticuffs over the last Cheez Doodle...)
• Bernie Sanders.
• The continuing saga of my heartbreaking Buffalo Bills missing the playoffs for the 16th year in a row.

A Little Bit of Discomfort Might Be Exactly What Your Marketing Needs to be Great

Before you dive into this week’s blog, I want you to stop and take a minute or so to view—from start to finish—this marketing communications gem from attorney Bryan Wilson, the Texas Law Hawk.

Once you’re done viewing, if you feel it necessary to run to the facilities and wash your eyes, by all means feel free to do so.

Is Contextual Marketing a Part of Your CPA Firm Marketing Program?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a website that played a key role in generating leads for your firm?

I think that it’s fair to say that most CPA and other professional services firms’ websites aren’t as effective as they could be when it comes to lead generation. It may be that firms just don’t think of their website as anything more than an online brochure and a branding tool, but today, the goal of a website needs to be focused on converting visitors to leads.

At its most fundamental level, converting a website visitor to a lead involves publishing some type of offer or call to action that requires completion of a form with the prospect’s contact information. For most CPA firms, that means: (1) using a “contact us” form, (2) bemoaning the fact that the website isn’t generating leads because nobody is requesting a contact, and (3) expending little to no effort to figure out why visitors aren’t clicking away to contact the firm.