Accounting Marketing Conference Recap: Association for Accounting Marketing and AICPA Practitioners

By Lee Frederiksen

This year I’m doing both a video recap as well as a traditional blog post. Let me know which format you prefer.

Read Full Text

Accounting Marketing: 3 Trends that Are Re-shaping the Industry

By Lee Frederiksen

Every once in a while I like to step back and consider the factors that are impacting the industries we serve.  One of the best times to do that is after attending the Association of Accounting Marketing Summit held in conjunction with the AICPA Practitioners Conference in Las Vegas.

The Challenge

I’ll admit that it is always somewhat of a challenge to distill all of the presentations, discussions and new perspectives down to a small number of major trends.  But distill I did, and in the end I was able to identify three major trends that are impacting accounting marketing.

1. The Rise of Content Marketing
Using content as part of professional services marketing is, of course, not new.  It has been around in many incarnations, such as thought leadership, custom publishing and educational newsletters.

As a matter of fact, accounting marketing professionals are perhaps the biggest consumers of syndicated content.  Many firms use this content to offer client updates and newsletters.

But that is not what is new.  The new trend is to adopt the use of original content, content often produced in-house, to attract new clients.  This content is optimized for search engines (SEO) and serves to both generate leads and increase visibility in your target audiences (brand building).

While the benefits of content marketing are many, it is not easy to do correctly.  Many accounting marketers have talked about the difficulty of getting key subject matter experts to write the content and to keep it SEO optimized. As a result, I expect that there will be a big increase in outsourcing parts of the content generation process.

Read Full Text

How to Get More Business for Your Accounting and Financial Services Firm

By Lee Frederiksen

As marketers and executives, we struggle to provide a better answer to this question: how do you get more business in a more efficient and predictable way?

I think some of the answers come from better understanding how clients think about and use accounting and financial services. Hinge's large-scale study of buyers and sellers of accounting and financial services provided data that tells at least part of the story. In recent webinar we discussed what this study means for accounting and financial services firms.

Today I’d like to share some of my key take-aways from the webinar.

How to Get More Business for Your Firm

1. The strength of your brand is the most important way you are found. In professional services, your brand is the product of your reputation and your visibility. The better and more specific your reputation and the greater your visibility, the stronger your brand. This is critical because the research shows that when people are looking for a new firm they ask friends and colleagues for a recommendation 87% of the time. If these friends and colleagues have never heard of your firm or don’t know what you do well you, will not be referred.

Read Full Text

How to Reach Professional Services Buyers

By Lee Frederiksen

How do you reach professional services buyers? This should be one of the first questions that any professional services marketer should ask themselves. Hinge Research Institute (our research arm) has just released a new study that tackles that issue head on. 

One of the questions we asked the over 800 buyers in the study was how they would go about finding a new professional services firm. The results are shown in the figure below (buyers often use multiple strategies, so the numbers add up to over 100%).

Read Full Text

Buying Behavior and Professional Services: A New Research Study

By Lee Frederiksen

Wouldn’t it be nice to peer inside the brain of your potential clients and see how they select a firm? Or to see what really matters to your clients? Or what about discovering your competitors’ blind spots? Yeah, that would be useful, alright.

Well here is your chance.

Hinge Research Institute (that’s Hinge’s advanced research arm) conducted a study of 822 buyers of professional services (Buyers) and 533 professional services providers (Sellers).

In this study, Buyers were clients of Sellers. This allowed us to look at buying behavior from both perspectives. There are some real Venus vs. Mars moments to be sure.

Detailed free reports are available for each professional services industry we studied:

Read Full Text

7 Strategies to Generate Better Accounting Leads

By Lee Frederiksen

Why is it so challenging to generate good accounting leads? There are a couple of good reasons.

First, accounting is a service that every business needs, so there is a lot of competition. And since many of the same accounting principles and skills apply across industries, many firms are competing for every company out there.

Second, there are compliance requirements that force businesses to use certain services (audit and taxes, for starters), so there is a sense that if I must do it, at least I should try to minimize cost.

The result is as inevitable as death and … exactly! Accounting services become commodities. It’s difficult to differentiate between firms, and fee pressure becomes intense.

Not all accounting leads are equal

There are ways to free your firm from this dilemma. Here are some of my favorite strategies for tipping the scale in your favor:

Read Full Text