Jassen: Okay. Now we’ve already talked about a little bit about Meetup.com. You mentioned that in an earlier segment but could go on to some more detail about using meet-up to meet new people and grow your CPA clientele?
James: Yes I definitely can. There are basically three ways that I can think of to use meet-up and they sort of overlap in some ways. The first one is you can use it find niches that you are interested in serving as a CPA or accountant. Then you can join those meet-up groups, become involve in the group. Share information, be helpful, and learn about their challenges. Learn about their problems, see if you can help. Offer them access to your network and try to get access to their network and just overall become part of that community. So that’s number one is focus on specific niches your interested in.
The number two one is you can actually create your own meet-up group and cater to those niches. Seven or eight years ago I forget what it was now, there was not a local real estate investor group in Fort Collins nor in Colorado where we are and so I ended having to form a local real estate investor group. I started holding meetings and then I started networking with everybody. It turned out really great so I recommend people start groups if there isn’t one in niches that you want to cater to. Then grow your contact base from there. People will flock to you. People interested in that will want to join your group and provided you’re giving them good value and good information and great opportunities there, they’re going to want to keep coming back. They’re going to see you as an expert and be more likely to do business with you in the future. So you can definitely grow your own meet-up groups if you need to do it that way.
The last one is you can go outside of your local market and contact group owners outside of your area who you may want to cater to. One of the great things about being a CPA business is you really can do it remotely, right?
Jassen: Yes.
James: So if you wanted to go and start saying, “I’m going to really focus in on this one niche.” You could go find other meet-up groups outside of your local area and cater to them and give them access to your special reports or your lead generation tools and then let them offer them to their group as a free resource that they can download as long as they get their contact information. Then you can start marketing to them over time to.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Ohhhhh…. you have to read The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book… it is AWESOME!
Jassen: Exactly. Okay. Now the next one – people are going to scratch their heads when they first hear this but just because you have a service business like a CPA firm that doesn’t mean that you cannot use eBay to sell your services.
James: I want to correct what you said because part of the challenge is that people do look at CPA or accounting business as a service business. One of the great things about using widgets is you can convert a service business to a physical product business. By going out there and creating products whether that’s a special report, a little mini booklet, a audio CD, maybe it’s a three hour seminar you do, whatever it is that you can do in order to create a physical product then you can start marketing things like physical products that will have an upsell or back end of your actual service. So you want to actually take that into account when you’re thinking about other ways to market your business. You’re right. Most people would be scratching their heads, “How do I market my CPA business on eBay?”
Jassen: So explain real quick, how do they do that?
James: Well it’s easy. What you do is you go create a very specialized report for a very niche industry and you sell that report as a product on eBay. So for instance you might make a two hour audio CD talking about how to setup your bookkeeping system for electricians or for retail shop owners or get more specific than that in mind but you can go and do all the variety of these things.
It might be really simple things that you have – a normal conversation about with all of your clients and it seems so second nature to you but every time they hear it they’re like, “That makes perfect sense. So now I know how to setup my file system,” or “Now I know how to setup quick books,” or “Here is the software I need.” Whatever those questions are you could make an information product, a physical product. Maybe it’s a booklet, maybe it’s a special report and you could sell it even at a loss – I don’t recommend it – but you could sell it at a loss and consider it cost of doing business for your lead generation. So maybe you have a CD that cost you a dollar to make, you’re going to sell it for $0.99 on eBay and with the marketing fees you have to pay eBay maybe you’re at a $0.30 loss. But now you’ve got someone’s name, address, telephone number and e-mail address who is interested enough to pay a dollar for that product. Now you’ve got an opportunity to put them on your mailing list. There is a much higher probability that they would become a client than just someone on the street.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: Does that answer your question about how to market a service on eBay?
Jassen: Definitely I’m sure some of our listeners are surprised in what they’ve never thought about being able to market a service on something like eBay with it’s geared toward physical products. But they’re very, very doable.
James: Yes. I would generate a hundred plus new prospects a month from selling information products on eBay for a business.
Jassen: Okay. I think most of our listeners would be thrilled if they were able to generate a hundred new inquiries in a month into their CPA firm.
James: I agree. I was doing a lot of products and this is not just one product doing this. I mean would create lots of very niche focus products and I’ll be able to sell those over a period of time. You know as in aside, if you hook up with someone else that has a product or service that they’re selling, couldn’t you do like a joint venture like let’s say somebody was creating websites. You can go and joint venture with somebody who’s selling websites to electricians or contractors and network with them and bundle the two together in a special report on how to setup your business from the tax side plus this website. Now you just share the names and addresses and contact information.
Jassen: That’s a great way to go. It’s part of that whole clichés which is thinking out of the box things.
James: Absolutely.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Don’t just read The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book… implement it and profit.
Jassen: Exactly. The next two things I want to talk about are two very specific and kind of out there marketing tactics. These are very specific strategies that CPA’s can use to market their business. The first one I’d like you to talk about is using business cards to market your CPA firm. How do you do that?
James: Well I’m going to tell you that this is one of the more aggressive ideas I have. So it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. I don’t recommend people use traditional business card. You can definitely have a traditional business card. What I’m more talking about here is like a mini flyer. You can have mini flyers printed up online or you could use business cards for it but the business card is really an offer for one of your widgets – special reports, something that they can download, free consultation, whatever it is that you’re trying to market. The idea is to get these out as aggressively as possible. It sort of inline with a lot of multilevel or network marketing companies might do in order to just blast the word out in a gorilla marketing style. Just get it out there as much as possible.
So I’ll just name off a couple of different ways to do this and you can decide whether or not you want to do any or all of them but realize that some of them are a little bit more aggressive. You may get some slack for doing some of them but just make sure you’re complying within the law and don’t do anything crazy. So here’s some really basic ideas.
Whenever you go out to a restaurant you can definitely leave a business card with your tip. The bigger the tip the better it’s going to be at being impactful, I can tell you that. If you’re going to a restaurant you can leave your card with free information about that. You’re probably not going to get a huge amount of business from it but you’ll never know. You could have the right person to pick it up and you kind of get one and these things are cheap. The more you get out the better it is.
Another one is ATM machines. Anytime you go to an ATM machine to make a deposit or withdraw money, you can leave a business card near the ATM machine. Where I got this idea from is a lot of these networking companies will stick like half cut open envelopes with business cards right inside of the machine and people find that effective. They made it work. I know people that are marketing their network marketing company business with that. So just adopt it and use it that way.
Here’s one of my favorites and that is if you go to a library and you’re taking out books and reading on things, a great bookmark to use would be a business card and if you happen to forget that when you return the book then so be it. If you happen to be in the library reading the book and you happen to bookmark it and put it back in the shelf accidentally so be it that way to. The same thing goes for books in bookstores. You’d be surprised how many books I see in the bookstore where they somehow have a magical business card stuck in the middle of it.
Jassen: Yes. [laughter]
James: So it is a way in order for you to get your word out about your business. Leaving them as bookmarks in bookstores but you can also use bulletin boards. Anytime you’re out in the supermarket or the mailbox place or anything like that that has a bulletin board and you’re allowed to post things on, the university library, any place like that you could put little things on the bulletin board. Just make sure you put it out there and replace it frequently every time you go there go ahead and replace it.
Jassen: You just carry these things around with you and so when see the opportunity to leave one then do so.
James: Yes. My first real estate broker told me that if you leave in the morning with 10 business cards in your pocket, you should do whatever you need to in order to get those out during the day. Whether that’s posting them on bulletin boards or handing them to strangers or whatever you need to do and if you do that everyday you’re doing a good amount of marketing just to get your name out in the business world.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Have you read the appropriately named The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book?
Jassen: That is awesome. Next thing I want to talk about is how to take your – this list that you’ve been talking about building this whole time. You’ve got this list and so what are some ways that you can cultivate new business specifically from that list?
James: Yes. I think most people are under the false illusion that they’re going to convert a very large number of people directly from their website or other direct marketing into clients. While it does happen, it is much easier to get someone to come on your website, order a free special report or a free download and join your mailing list and over a period of several contacts, begin to know, like and trust you and then when they’re ready they’ll actually contact you about your service and actually become a client. So what you want to do is you want to have regular contacts with your internal list, people who have requested information from you, people that are existing clients and reaffirm that they’ve made a good decision being with you, reestablish yourself as an expert. Do all those things and there are four ways that you could use that to cultivate new and repeat business and referrals actually from your internal list.
Number one is the monthly newsletter. I personally would prefer if you’d physically mailed it – I’m not getting a kickback from the post office. I’ll tell you why you should actually mail it. It’s because people discount e-mail. So if you actually take the time to go print out 8 ½ x 11 two-sided newsletter once a month, you can upload your newsletter to the U.S. postal service, you can upload your mailing list to the postal service. They’ll do all the printing and mailing for you and it’s dirt cheap so you can definitely go and do that. But you should mail it out because it’s going to give more value. People are going to notice it. Even if they throw it away, you’ve now gotten the hits on your name and your information where someone else the next day or two days later says, “Hey, I need an accountant.” Guess what? They just saw your name and they’ve been seeing it every month for the last six months and they’re going to think of you. More so than someone else who’s just sending them an e-mail once in a while. You definitely want to have some type of physical mailing and get it in their hand. So that’s number one.
Number two is occasional e-mails with updates, promotional offers and special reports and important announcements. I think you should e-mail your client base regularly and just let them know what’s going on. Maybe you’ll tell them, “Look, I’m about to take vacation here in the next two weeks. So I just want to make sure that if you have any needs that I’m available for you over the next two weeks or if you’re going to miss that then I’ll be back in a month, a month from today in order to handle anything you need. So let me know if you need that and by the way, we have a new client discounts where it’s free hour consultation and 10% off your first tax return,” whatever it is you’re going to offer. So you could go ahead and do that. Put out any special reports you put out there so you could get occasional e-mails where you do that. I think that’s really important too.
The third thing out here is to give them access to you via social networking sites. I told you before that social networking is really about getting to know the person. These are things you like outside of business. They want to feel like they know you more so than you’re just an accountant. So give them access to you. I mean, create a Twitter account and share with them when you do certain fun things or vacations you take or restaurants you go to or sporting event, share whatever your hobbies are. Then people will know, like and trust you and be more likely to do business with you by becoming involved in those things. You can use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all those different social media type websites in order to do that.
The final way that you can actually use your internal list to cultivate and get new business and repeat business and referrals is there are definitely applications out there on the web where you can take all the new blog articles and contacts you’ve added to your blog over the last week. It is called RSS to email. You can have it automatically sent out once a week to your entire client base where it says, “Here are the new articles I wrote with like a one sense description of what’s included,” and they can click on the link in order to read those. You can set that up so that it automatically happens. If you’re adding contents to your blog there’s going to be an e-mail sent out that lists all the different content that that was added and you don’t need to do anything extra. It just gets taken care for you. So I think that’s a good way to do e-mails more so than the newsletter you know. The one I recommend is MailChimp.
Jassen: Okay. The purpose of the RSS e-mail feed is to get people coming back to your website, right?
James: Right. They just keep your name up there so that when they finally do need you, you’ve established yourself as an expert. They know you. They trust you because you’re constantly there, you’re reliable. They’re willing to do business with you. So they’ll do referrals to you especially if you ask. If you put down there, “By the way, I love your referrals,” or if you highlight people that have given you referrals – yes, you want to go and do that type of e-mails so it’s consistent and top of mind awareness.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. You gotta see this: The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book
Jassen: Now, one of the things that some CPA’s may not think about doing what their business is taking advantage of joint venture opportunities. This is another area where you can essentially outsource some or a good chunk of the work of marketing by partnering with other people in businesses. Can you explain some methods that CPA’s may be able to take advantage of joint venture opportunities?
James: Yes. I’d like to explain that joint venture concept for CPA’s with an example using a client. Let’s say you have a client, you’re a CPA and you have a client who is… let’s say they own a tile store. So they own a business where they sell floor tiles. You could go to that store owner and say, “Look, I’d like to create a special report for people.” People that are doing tile in their houses are probably homeowners. So I want to do a special report on how homeowners can save money, certain things that they need to take advantage of on their taxes and as an accountant, as CPA I can help them with that. I want to do a special report and offer as a free thing for all of your clients. I want you to send out either your normal newsletter or want to do a special newsletter with you offering them this free special report on ways they save money as a homeowner and I want you to write a little testimonial saying that, “John’s been an accountant of mine for 17 years and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else as an accountant. You should definitely go and order this report if you like to learn how to save money.”
John has now endorsed you to his list of clients with a special report something of value to them. Maybe it’s an audio report, maybe it’s a printed special report. Whatever it happens to be and when they request that report from you, they get added to your internal mailing list. So what you’re doing is that you’re tapping into John, the tile company owner’s client list in order to do marketing for yourself. Maybe in return, you also send out a special coupon or something else… like something of value for the tile owner company in your newsletter.
Maybe this becomes a monthly thing for you. You take one client that you spotlight and they do a mailing to their list for you and you actually put their information in your newsletter. Then everybody benefits by doing this joint venture. They get new clients, you get new clients. You can expand your business. You can keep growing your list in giving people things of value and reasons to open up your newsletter when they get it. So all the way around, it’s win-win-win for everybody. You could do that over and over again and a lot of people just overlook that opportunity.
Jassen: Okay. This is something you can do with a fair amount of frequency, right?
James: Sure. You could take four guys a month that you actually you go into joint ventures with and then in your newsletter, you have four spots for those guys to be in there. If it’s the whole back page and they get a quarter of the back page each and it’s just a coupon. So you absolutely could do this with a lot of frequency. In fact, you could outsource somebody else to go and contact your guys. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could go and outsource the process of someone else seeking out those contacts for you in doing joint ventures.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want more meaty marketing strategies? Read The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book.
Jassen: You had talked earlier about – when I mentioned not having your special report or what not – you mentioned outsourcing. So could you discuss some ways that a CPA could outsource some of the marketing duties of their business?
James: Sure. I would love to because I’m a huge advocate of outsourcing. I will outsource as much as I possibly can. I’ll talk about five different ways that I think that a CPA or an accountant can definitely outsource some or all of their marketing. The first one is – we talked before about the importance of articles. You need articles to post on your website. You need articles to share and have syndicated out there so that they’ll link back to you and you get direct traffic from them.
So one great thing to hire out and outsource right from the very beginning is hire someone else to write articles for you. You could go to a lot of these outsourcing websites like guru.com, elance.com, odesk.com. There’s a whole bunch of them out there. You could put up a project that says, “I want someone to write me 20 articles. I’m willing to pay $100 in order to have someone write this,” or whatever price you set on it. Then people will come in, they’ll bid. You can find people bidding it down or if you didn’t set your budget high enough, people will bid it up a little bit. Then they come in and they’ll write the articles for you. You go proof read them kind of tweak them a little bit if you need to and then you could publish them on your website. They give you permission as when you’re paying them to do it. It’s a work-for-hire and so you have the right to publish them with your name on it. You’re the contact with information in your resource box. That’s the first one I would recommend people outsource.
Another one to outsource and I’ve done a lot of this is that you could hire someone that keeps your particular marketing up in a lot of these classified ad websites. We talked before about different classified ad websites but if you’re posting up and offer for a free special report, you can hire someone to every three days to take down the old ad and put up the new ad with that special report and do that for you. It’s really inexpensive to hire someone to do this. In an hour every three days you can have someone post up four or five different ads easily. So if you’re paying somebody minimum wage to do that unlike one of these sites like guru.com or odesk.com or whatever else it is, you could hire someone for an hour every three days to do that job for you and just pay them to do that then just fire and forget, they’ll take care of it.
Jassen: Exactly, great strategy.
James: I would definitely recommend doing that. You’re not worrying about it and you know it’s getting done and then you spot-check it every once in a while to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.
Jassen: Right.
James: Number three, you can hire someone to coordinate placing your articles or your ads in other people’s online newsletters or e-zines. There’s lots of people out there with these groups of 100, 200, 500, 5,000 people in either particular niches or particular geographical areas and they are looking for great content to share with their group or they’re looking for someone to pay a nominal fee in order to have an ad show up in their newsletter, e-zine. Some of these guys are willing just to have $10 to cover the cost of their e-mail provider, their web posting accounts. They’re more than happy to have you have your ad in there as a sponsor for a very nominal fee that kind of get your name out there and offer your special report to those guys. So you could hire someone to go out there and coordinate all those relationships for you. Again I would use those same outsourcing websites in order to do that. You just expand out your network that way.
Jassen: I like it.
James: Here’s number four. You could hire someone to contact the owners of other blogs and see if you could actually post your article or do a guest blog on their websites. You could then tap into all the people that are coming to their blog and reading their content. You can now get exposure to all of those guys. It’s the equivalent of going and guest speaking at someone else’s Meetup.com group. Wouldn’t it be great if you went to a meet-up group and there were 20, 30, 50, 100 people in the room and they heard you speak for 15 minutes about a particular topic that is of interest to them? Well, you could go and contact other blog owners and say, “Look, I realize it’s hard to write content for your blog. It takes time and I’d be willing write one for you absolutely free, I won’t charge you anything. May I just ask if I could put my little resource box at the bottom when I’m done? I’d be happy to write an article specific for your audience about tax issues,” if that’s what they’re interested in. So go ahead and volunteer for that or better yet hire someone to contact those guys and do that for you. You could combine someone else writing the articles with that one and have the whole process automated where they made the contact then someone else who you really trust to write the articles can write them for you. You outsource both sides of that.
Then the last one, we were talking about this one the other day. You can hire someone to focus on social media of your business. You don’t want to go and update Twitter and update Facebook and find friends that are in related industries, make contacts and do all that stuff. Sure, it’s kind of cheating a little bit because the idea behind social media really is making those personal connections and building those relationships. But if you want to hire someone else to do that for you, it definitely can be outsourced and there are lots of people that are outsourcing it. Do you really think that President Obama or Britney Spears are doing all of their own posts on Twitter and Facebook? No, of course not. No, not at all. Those guys are having someone else handle their social media. You could do the same thing.
Jassen: Okay. Those are some great tips. Thanks James.
James: You’re very welcome.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Take your CPA business to the next level with The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book.
