As a team, we talk to a lot of tax professionals … and as we’ve done so, I’ve noticed something:
Tax professionals, accountants and bookkeepers are frustrated with their existing marketing.
We have had many more new advisory firm clients join the AdvisorProMarketer family last year than any previous year, and many of them are looking for something new.
There’s plenty of reasons why people might be frustrated with their advisory firm marketing, but much of it boils down to one serious (and very common) mistake made when marketing your firm:
Failure to communicate a unique message.
It’s not just in our industry either — take a look at just about any industry with many competitors: colleges, hotels, sedans, law firms … the websites and marketing messages bend over backwards to be just like all the others. You can’t identify one hotel website from another if you delete the name of the hotel (unless there’s a beach or a snow-capped mountain in the background).
Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not buy what’s cheap and close?
This is a HUGE problem for firm websites — and it’s not solved by “picking a different template”, as certain companies would have you believe.
No, what you need is a Unique Selling Proposition. But that term is thrown around so much, that too many business owners just sort of nod to themselves, and say yeah, we got that.
Really?
If that’s the case, then why do so many advisory firm marketing materials (perhaps yours?) talk about the same bland services:
- Small Business Accounting
- QuickBooks Services
- Payroll
- Part-Time CFO Services
- Personal Financial Planning
- Tax Preparation and Planning
Yada, yada, yada, ad infinitum, ad barf-um.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but that just don’t cut it. What you NEED, is a conversational, *direct* reason why your prospects (and yes, your clients too — they need continual “re-selling”) should choose to engage your services.
Something that is of direct benefit to them, and not a standard descriptor for a particular service you like to provide.
And this ethos (communicating direct benefits and unique reasons) needs to be a part of everything you communicate, from your website, to your oubound emails, to your brochures, to your client-intake forms — EVERYTHING is marketing, my friend.
“Copying” what every other accountant or tax firm in the country is doing is a surefire recipe for getting frustrated, or for becoming seen as a commodity. Which, if you haven’t yet noticed, is the worst kind of position to be in (hello, newspaper industry).
And if this describes you or your advisory firm marketing, well, we look forward to the opportunity to help you fix that.