Jassen: All right, great. Now the next thing that we got here on the outline is how to work on the effectiveness of your marketing? So you’ve got three ways to improve that marketing effectiveness by generating new prospects for you CPA business.
James Orr: Absolutely. Here’s and interesting point about this and one of the ways you get better with marketing is you decide and commit to always be measuring and testing and trying to improve your marketing in general. So you need to know if I put out an ad how much traffic is that generating? How many people are signing-up from that? How many people are requesting my special reports? That way you can go back through and can change one little thing for instance, I’m going to suggest that you first start with headlines.
So you want to go and change you headline in your ad and maybe it’ll be – the headline will be your special report title in the lower – the four things you need to know before you file your next tax return or how to save yourself hundreds of dollars on your next tax return for electricians, plumbers or real estate agents or whatever you’re going to focus on, on that particular niche. Then you can go give them that special report but you want to find out if you place an ad in one spot on Craigslist, do AdWords on a social media type website – how many people do you normally get coming through from that ad and how many people of those sign-up. Then you can measure those numbers to improve on them and you’re constantly running horse races in order to see which horse is going to win. Your control, the one you ran last time and that was the winner versus the new one you’re running this time and you want to see if you can have the new horse beat your old control horse in order to do better this time than you did last time.
It becomes a really fun game at least for me when you start doing this marketing cast and you keep doing better and better and better and see if you beat yourself. So I think that’s step number one in those three ways. Does that make sense?
Jassen: Totally, I love that.
James Orr: Okay. So the one thing I said first always be measuring, testing and trying to improve your marketing headlines. That’s the first thing to test. Once you kind of had a decent headline the next thing you want to be testing is your call to action. What you’re actually saying to get people contact you, order your special report, download the free report, call-up the 24-hour recorded message line. Whatever your call to action is to get them to join your mailing list or contact you, request information, you want to be testing different ones to see if you can improve the response rate. So your marketing headline may test how many people you’re actually getting to read your article. Then the next call to action is to see how many people that have been to your page actually take the action you want to give them, call in or click the form or fill-out something and so you want to be testing that in the second way. So that’s the second way to do it.
Jassen: Okay.
James Orr: The last one to be testing is the specific thing you’re offering. Are you offering a special report like what we’ve been talking about? Are you offering a free consultation? I know that’s extremely popular with CPA’s. It’s the free consultation. You could be doing that. You could be doing an audio interview or you take one of your clients in that particular niche and you talk to them. Maybe it’s not even a client. Maybe you say, “Hey look I know you’re a real estate investor in this field, I’d like to pay you $50, $25,” – or maybe they’ll do it for free – “I’d like to interview you and find out what your biggest tax problems are or your biggest tax challenges are? What do you worry about in your business and I want to address those in a frequently asked question and answer session.” Then you can have that CD being a CD that you give away as a lead generation tool in order to get name, address, telephone number, e-mail address from potential other real estate investors who want to get that information from you and then you can market to them over and over and convert them to clients.
So those are the three things to test. Headlines first, call to action and then the widget or the thing that you’re giving away in order to attract people.
Jassen: Now let’s talk about some not so face-to-face methods for building your CPA business. Here you got seven ways to build your CPA business online but doing it without spending a fortune.
James Orr: Yes, absolutely. This is really where I think a lot of my expertise comes together. This is not every single way to do it. These are seven highly effective ways to do it.
Of course number one again is focus on building that internal list. So all the strategies that I’m about to talk about – the other six are going to be ways to build your list so you could continue to market to your list over and over again. When online – I mean, you definitely can do an e-mail type list but – I would actually go for both an e-mail and also U.S. Postal mailing address so that you could follow-up with their physical newsletter, physical postcards or a Christmas card or thanksgiving card or other holiday card if that you’re nature. Whatever you need to do in order to do both the physical mailing ones and also the e-mail ones, I think it’s very important. So let’s talk about some of the other ways to do that.
Jassen: Okay.
James Orr: Jassen, you know this. What’s one of the best ways in order to get traffic to your website?
Jassen: Articles by far. Hands down.
James Orr: Content is going to be what generates people coming to your website. So you need to writing tons of articles and you need to have them on your website. Now what we’re talking about is writing articles to get traffic to your blog or your website. By the way, for those CPA’s that don’t know what blog is – website is kind of like the old term for something that’s static. A blog is more a platform for a constantly changing, constantly updated website that has relative content to people coming to visit the site. It could be articles, it could be information about what your business is doing, how you’ve been involved in the community, things of that nature. So you definitely want to have a constantly growing, evolving type of content website which is what we call web blog.
Jassen: Okay.
James Orr: So let’s talk about the articles. You can do articles on your website. So you write new contents and that was going to primarily attract new visitors that are finding your website through search engines but it also encourages people to subscribe to your site so that they receive content on a regular basis. It’s going to also encourage them to share those articles and resources with other people and link to those directly.
Now the other type of thing you can do with articles is you can actually do what’s called article marketing. An article marketing is taking articles and publishing them out or making them available so that other people can grab them if they think they are good quality and put them either on their website or in their newsletters or e-zines or anything like that and then they can then market out your article as contents to the people that they’re helping or following or being part of their everyday business. What’s great about this is when you use articles that you wrote and you allow other people to use them, you get direct traffic from the articles because at the bottom of the article you’re going to have what’s called a resource box. It’s going to talk about the free gift that people get for subscribing to your newsletter or request this special report that’s got the seven ways to save money on taxes for certain business types.
So you’ll have all these different things in your resource box which will have traffic coming from wherever the article was published back to your own website. But another interesting thing happens when you have those links in that resource box. What happens is that search engines give you credit whenever another website links back to your website. It’s kind of like a popularity contest and so the more links you have coming in to your website, the more likely your website is to grow in popularity and become more important which in turn were going to show your website more likely higher on the search results than other websites. So the more article you have that with links coming back to your site the more popular you are and the more likely your site is to come up in search engines for articles that are already on your site.
Jassen: That great. That is because that’s free traffic. That’s incredibly powerful.
James Orr: It is. It’s free traffic both from the search engine because you get that link popularity but it’s also direct traffic from people when the articles are on their website. So you really get a nice double benefit from doing article marketing. So I highly recommend writing articles and having them on your site and also using product marketing.
Jassen: Well, then I contrast that being free because the next one on your list is not free.
James Orr: Absolutely. So article marketing invests a little bit of time but it’s free. The other way to do it you can actually pay the major search engines like Google or Yahoo in order to send traffic to your website based on keywords. So let’s say you really did want to do a CPA accounting services for a very specific niche. Let’s say you wanted to focus on real estate agents. So you want to be more real estate agent clients. Well, you could go and take out an ad on Google or take out an ad on Yahoo or Facebook or any place like that and you can have your ad say, “Accounting for real estate agents. Let us do your accounting and save you money on your next accounting thing.” So basically you can have an ad there that when someone clicks on it, you pay the advertiser a fee then that traffic comes directly to your site. So you might be paying $0.50, $1.00 or $1.50 for every person that clicks through to your site. So you can see that comparing that to article writing where you’re getting free traffic to your site – the taking the time to write some articles much more attractive.
Jassen: I like that.
James Orr: So that’s number three on the list. Here’s the fourth way in order to build traffic to your website without spending a fortune. That is creating informative and how to type videos and market them on You Tube. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Jassen but the You Tube search engine is the second most popular, second most used search engine on the Internet.
Jassen: Really?
James Orr: Yes. The first is Google. The second place that people search the most on is actually You Tube. So if you have an informative video – let’s say you have a video that says, “Four ways for real estate agents to save money on their taxes,” and it’s basically you on there, maybe its got a picture of your screen, your computer screen instead of a picture of you or maybe it’s just you on the camera, you get someone in your office to take a picture of it and then you over four bullet points of ways that they can actually save money on their taxes. Maybe it’s deducting certain expenses, maybe it’s hiring a professional to review their tax return. Whatever it is those four reports and then you can put that video up on You Tube. It’s free to put the video on You Tube and then once people go on there and their searching for saving money with taxes or real estate agents stuff, they can find your video and then at a certain percentage of those guys will come from the video. They will contact you, your website or they may join up to your mailing list or something like that. So using videos is highly effective as well.
Jassen: Well, a tip for You Tube. In addition to putting your URL in the video itself people need to keep in mind that the description box to the right in upper right of the video, you can put a clickable link in there as well. So people that are filling up their descriptions on their You Tube videos when they’re uploading them be sure to put your website, your domain name up in that description box as well.
James Orr: Absolutely. Yes, definitely a good idea. So let’s go on to number five which is advertise special reports and your service to specific niches on classified ads websites like Craiglist, Backpage, Kijiji and things like that. So the basic idea here is you have a special report again – I’m really big on using widget because you don’t want to just say, “John Smith, accountant,” or “John Smith, CPA,” and “All accounting services for your business.” Really bad idea, it’s not nearly as effective. By the way, I want to encourage you to test me on this, okay? Go ahead and run an ad that says, “John Smith, CPA accounting services for your business.” Run that ad versus running an ad that says, “Five ways to save money on your taxes for real estate investors,” or “Seven tips your bookkeeper doesn’t want you to know from an accountant for another specific [inaudible][00:26:28].” Some other specialized report – people request that. Test these two ads head to head and tell me which one does better. I already know the answer but you should do it for yourself, proof that I’m right about this marketing of widgets and special reports and everything.
Jassen: Can I say something out there really quick?
James Orr: Sure, absolutely.
Jassen: For folks that are thinking, “I have to write these special report, I’ve got to this, I’ve got to do that,” I will say this, that you are better off putting out there, “Hey, do you need accounting services for your real estate brokerage?” You are better off doing that rather than doing nothing simply because you don’t think that you have the time or talent or whatever to write a report or put together a package of information to send people. So folks who are listening, it’s better to do something even if it’s not a 100% perfect than to do nothing at all.
James Orr: I would agree except it’s so easy to pay somebody $30 bucks to write a two page report and outsource the process than it is to do and it’ll be much more valuable to you to have that done for you if you’re not willing to write it yourself.
Jassen: I totally agree. But just for people who don’t want to do that or don’t think they can or what not, it’s better to do something than nothing.
James Orr: True although it’s much easier to write a check and do it the right way.
Jassen: [laughter]
James Orr: I think you should outsource it if you’re not willing to do it yourself. So getting back to the thing ads, so Craigslist highly effective and definitely be creative with where you’re marketing your service. You could definitely contact people on Craigslist who already have in the business that you want to target, just offer them the report. Make sure follow Craigslist rule or Backpage rules or Kijiji rules to make sure you’re in compliance but you can definitely can post ads or contact people via those resources in order to find new people coming to your website and building your online business.
And these last two I’m going to cover really quickly. Number one is become active in discussion forums supporting your niches. So if you know you’re going to target a niche of electricians, you can go to electrician type discussion forums where they are talking about marketing their business, to running their business and you could become active in that forum answering questions about taxes and offering your special report for electricians or an audio interview with one of your best electrician clients where he talks about how you save them all sorts of money and kept them out of trouble and all those types of things. Then offer that as a free resource for them on there but if you become active in two, three, four or five different discussion forums, you’re going to have lots of new people coming in to your internal list and then you can market and convert those guys over a period time.
Then the last one is social media websites. So there’s tons of groups out there, Twitter type related content group type things and Facebook and all these other social media type websites. You could tap into those existing groups or make your own and I kind of encourage that in a similar way to what we talked about what meet-up except you’re doing it online.
Jassen: Right. Just to meet people in their – going back to the big fish in a small pond thing, you know introducing yourself to other ponds.
James Orr: Absolutely.
Jassen: Okay. Let’s change gears a little bit and talk about some specific methods for branching out there and getting your name known. Let’s start with some offline stuff. You’ve got here four ways to build your CPA business offline through networking opportunities. Could you go through those real quick?
James Orr: Absolutely. In my mind there really are four major ways to go out there and network in the community. You know some people will say, “I’ve got this other obscure one and of course you can definitely come up with those too.” But here are the four ones that I think of when I think about networking.
The first one is you need to be building and marketing your client and prospect database. So basically the strategies that we’re going to talk about when were talking about offline networking really are ways to build that list inside your business so you could continue to market them. It’s not enough to be able to have one-impact marketing. You don’t want to have message go out there once they see once and that’s it. You really want to be able to hit them over and over again so that they know, like and trust you and then they want to become clients of yours. So you need to have that internal list. So that strategies that we’re going to talk about are going to grow that list.
Number one –hands down, join your local Chamber Commerce. It is a great way to meet other business owners which a lot of accounting CPA guys are focusing on, working with business owners. Isn’t that primarily what the market is working with?
Jassen: Exactly, I guess.
James Orr: Yes. So you want to go meet other business owners. You want to go to four-hour parties. You want to go to after-hour parties. You want to go and do the actual lead generation group type things. In my opinion a lot of people go there and say, “How many business cards can I collect? How many people can I add to my list?”
I have a slightly different take on it and that is I think you should go and make one or two or three better quality contacts. Have some face time, develop a little bit of relationship, of course exchange business cards, you want to give them your card. You want to collect their cards from them and the only reason to give your business card really is so that you could get their name, address, telephone number and so you could put them on your newsletter list and make sure that they get contact from you on a regular basis from now on. That way when either they need an accountant or when they have a referral who could use an accountant, they think of you first. So that’s really the number two, putting on the list was joining your Chamber of Commerce and that’s a really important one. In your business do you use Chamber of Commerce at all?
Jassen: You know we actually don’t. For those that are listening and don’t know, I’m an enrolled agent and we do tax representation. We operate nationwide and we don’t need this kind of networking type functions. We finally put together a plan however which is very, very recently like literally is a course of week to start doing some of the stuff within our association what not. But now we’ve never taken advantage of the chamber and leads groups and things like that.
James Orr: Okay. They’re very effective especially regarding local business. So if you’re trying to grow your own local business, you’re focusing on that you know, chamber of commerce is another great one. The other one that I found to be highly effective is meetup.com. Meetup.com for those people that don’t know is a website that has local meetings where you go to on very specific topics. So somebody who wants to start a meet up group about bash fishing or writing books or playing video games or playing board games or anything like that, you can find very specific meet-up groups for a variety of topics.
The ones you probably want to focus on or ones that are more business oriented. So once that you have business owners go into and you could do very similar things you do with the chamber you go to the meetings. You become part of the group. You network with them. Establish good relationships. Get their contact information. Make sure that they’re on your mailing list to get your newsletter and then you grow that relationship over time. Then the great thing about meet-up groups is there so many different ones and you can go out there and join a variety of them and just really connect in at a great level with these guys. So that would be the third one on my list.
Have you used meet-up much?
Jassen: Yes, I love meet-up. Maybe two weeks ago I was looking at a bunch of different of meet-up groups just here in the local, the greater Denver area and it really kind of surprise me that the number of individuals that were members of business related meet-up groups was second only to membership for local singles meet-ups. I was really surprised. I thought that it would have been much lower thing behind singles would have been I don’t know maybe hiking and outdoors type groups and maybe parenting and things like that. Business was number two. I was really surprised by that.
James Orr: Yes. A CPA trying to really focus on growing their business, there are plenty of business related meet-up groups that they can join. I realized too that some of your referrals are not necessarily going to be coming from other business owners but they’ll be coming from individuals who happen to know business owners and that they’ll be able to refer business to you as well. So you’re not just going – I wouldn’t exclude somebody from your newsletter, your list just because they don’t own a business right now.
Jassen: Right. People that … I’m sorry go ahead.
James Orr: I was going to cover the last point but if you want to add something go ahead.
Jassen: Well, I was going to say individuals know other individuals that own businesses even if they don’t own a business themselves.
James Orr: That’s correct, absolutely. Now that ties right into this last point which is volunteer your time and meet other charitable minded individuals. So if you’ve got a great charity or volunteer group, definitely get out there and volunteer. Make new contacts. People tend to give much more credit to people that are willing to go and volunteer their time and be charitable than a business that is not. So if you go out there and you really do it because you want to volunteer because you want to be charitable and you’re meeting these great new contacts that way – they really see you in a great light and they’re much more likely to do business with you by meeting you in that capacity.
Jassen: Great. Those were great ideas. Thanks for sharing those.
James Orr: You’re welcome.
There are a ton of figure skating camps throughout the year for kids. For us adult skaters, we have a few fun options, too. Here is what I could find regarding adult summer camps. I fully intend to attend at least one of these this year.
Lake Placid Adult Skating Weeks
Dorothy Hamill Figure Skating Fantasy Camp
Whether you are an independent CPA in private practice, or a partner in a large firm, you can boost your business by specializing in niche markets. This transcript from our recent webinar goes into depth on this topic.
Jassen: Okay, great. That’s a pretty good overview of how to use those lists. Now the next thing I want to talk about is the world of niches. Using niches to market your CPA business more effectively, can you go into that a little bit?
James Orr: Absolutely. One of the problems that I see with a lot of businesses and specifically with CPA’s and accountants, is they tend to be too general in nature. They say, “We offer accounting services. It doesn’t matter the business that you’re in we offer accounting services for just about every business.” I think that’s a mistake and it maybe 100% true that you will take on just about any business, that you can do accounting for just about any business, however I think it’s a mistake from a marketing perspective because people want to work with companies that specialize in helping them in their specific situations.
So as an example, I’m a real estate investor so I own rental property and I would like to have a CPA that says, “I focus and I work with real estate investor clients.” So the accountant has a specialty and they know how to deal with certain things that I have in my business. It doesn’t take too much extra to know how to deal with that. The majority of the accountants out there isn’t CPA’s can definitely work with people at rental property but you want to actually advertise to the world that you do focus on that specialty. There are lots of advantages in doing that as well. So that what I’m talking about when I’m talking about focusing on specific niches.
Jassen: What are some of the advantages?
James Orr: One of the advantage is you can become a big fish in a small pond. So if you go out there and you start offering accounting services to – let’s use real estate investors as an example – so you go find real estate investors, you find out where they hang out, things they like to do, where they’ve read the information and then you kind of market yourself as a specialist. An accountant that work exclusively or primarily with real estate investors and you can offer special reports or bonuses or training materials or any information that’s going to be attractive to real estate investors. You can become someone who is really catering to that market. You could become the only accountant that that’s really focusing on serving that community in your local market or maybe much smaller numbers. So you become a bigger fish in that small pond of real estate investors.
One thing I want to point out is that you can have more that one niche. So don’t think that I’m suggesting that you specialize and only deal with one type of clientele rather I would say go pick two, three, four or five even more niches and just start marketing directly to those guys that you each have a specialty maybe you do a special report on each one of those and then you can use those to market and get clients to raise their hands and say, “I’m interested in hearing more about what you have to say.”
Jassen: Okay. Now when you’re becoming this big fish in a small pond that you’re talking about, what do you think about the effectiveness of some of the marketing results that you can get when you’re doing that? I mean is there a difference in the effectiveness of your marketing in what you can get out of your marketing?
James Orr: Absolutely. If you’re going to go – and we’ll continue on with this real estate investing as an example – if you’re going to go and you’re going to focus marketing as an accountant or as a CPA and you’re going to focus on working with real estate investors. If you put out an ad in a real estate investor newsletter or you go to real estate investor groups then you network specifically with real estate investors and you have a special report or an audio interview or some other type of widget – what I call marketing widget – in order to attract attention. If you go out there and you used those particular products you’re going to have a much better, more effective response than if you go out and you to say, “I offer accounting services.” If you go and you say, “Here are the eight ways to save taxes on your rental properties,” and you have a special report maybe one or two pages long that talk about some of the different ways as an accountant you can help real estate investors save taxes on their rental properties then you have a much more effective marketing message, a much more effective widget in order to get prospects to raise their hands and give you their name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, get on your mailing list so that you can market to them over time. Then when they do have an accounting need, the first guy on their mind who they know, like and trust and they’re willing to go and spend money and become a client of yours.
Jassen: That sounds great. These widgets that you’re talking about, they have a lot of different uses, right?
James Orr: Absolutely. I think we’re going to be talking about that here at another question but I can definitely talk about them all day long. So I’m a huge believer in creating widgets and the more widgets you have out there – they are like having new fishing lines in the water where you’re having clients respond to those things and coming in to your funnel that you can use and then market to your internal list.