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.