Your Mission Statement

Even if you have already created a mission statement, revisiting it can help clarify what your team can offer and why a client should be interested. Your team's mission statement should be one to two sentences in length and clearly state your business and brand's purpose. It doesn't need to be too specific or measurable, but it needs to explain your purpose for existing that can be clearly communicated and understood.

The statement should make reference to your long-term goals, take into consideration your brand's features and benefits, and target the right audiences. Successful mission statements share the following four elements:

• Value

  Why does your brand exist?

• Inspiration

  How do your goals inspire both employees and clients?

• Plausibility

  Is your goal reasonable, attainable, and realistic?

• Specificity

  Are you clear, not general, in describing your goal and purpose?

Don't mention your process and speak specifically about the company. Instead, focus solely on the benefits that your client, including its stakeholders and employees, will get from working with your practice.

Your mission statement should be a group effort. Meet with your team and ask questions to brainstorm key words. On a whiteboard, write all the words and phrases that come to everyone's mind. The more insight you have, the better. From this list, you can begin to build your mission statement around the key words your team comes up with. It may take time, and you will no doubt write multiple statements and several drafts of each before you narrow it down.

Here are some questions for you and your team to ask in order to help create your mission statement:

• Why do we exist?
• Whom do we serve?
• How do we do what we do?
• What are we really good at?
• What is unique about us?
• What is our driving force?
• What services do we offer?
• What needs do we satisfy?
• What market and region do we serve?
• Who are our ideal clients?

A sample mission statement might look like this:

We are a locally owned CPA firm that provides accounting, tax, and cloud advisory services to small businesses. We believe in a hands-on approach, being a strategic partner in your business and deploying best-in-class technology to serve you.

Here are few other examples from some top accounting firms:²

• KPMG LLP

  “KPMG's mission is to turn knowledge and understanding of information, industries and business trends into value for our firms' clients, our people and the capital markets.”

• RSM McGladrey

  “We will deliver global capabilities with the ‘local’ touch that brings world class assurance, tax and consulting expertise to our clients through enduring relationships built on genuine understanding and trust.”

• Kaufman Rossin

  “Our philosophy is to provide knowledge and expertise—with unsurpassed dedication and sensitivity. We provide professional services to businesses and their leaders, offering experienced guidance at every stage of business growth.”

• EY

  “To drive progress and make a difference by building a better working world—for our people, for our clients and for our communities.”

• CBIZ/Mayer Hoffman McCan

  “Our mission is to help our clients prosper by providing them with a wide array of professional business and individual services, products, and solutions to help them better manage their finances and employees. We endeavor to provide superior client service and build long-term client relationships.”

Your Brand Promise

Your brand promise (also referred to as brand essence) is what a potential client will get from your brand. In many ways, it is also a slogan for what your brand represents and the immediate image people have of your company or product. Keep your brand promise short, simple, credible, memorable, inspiring, and different.

Here are some examples of brand promises from various companies:

• KLA-Tencor

  “The yield company”

• BMW

  “The ultimate driving machine”

• Xerox

  “The digital document company”

• Geico

  “15 minutes or less can you save you 15% or more on car insurance.”

• Nike

  “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world”

• Apple

  “Think different.”

Customer Experience

What do you want your client to feel during your interactions with your team and services? It is not about what they think of your work, but about the end result. For example, a restaurant wants customers to feel satisfied by food they otherwise would never make for themselves. An accountant's services are no different. Do you want your clients to feel relaxed from not having to deal with the stress of money management, or feel inspired to try new ways to expand their business?

Breaking Down Your Services into Segments

Most brands plan for the overall business, but often this can leave many loopholes. Instead, break down your business so your different services can be discrete units, such as budget planning, cash flow management, inventory oversight, and the like. Note anything that your team offers in terms of a service, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. The goal is to identify each of the different services your team delivers to clients and what a client will experience as a result.

Creating Customer Segmentation

Every customer has a different set of expectations about your firm's brand. For instance, some may value convenience over price. Compare each segment of your services with the profiles of different customers, and define the needs of each of those personas—including the key drivers of their purchase decisions and their brand perceptions. The goal here is to match a potential client's needs to your services. What do you offer that lines up with those needs?

Brainstorm with your team to identify each segment's specific needs and how you can meet those needs, either by improving your existing processes and/or strategies based on your new findings or by developing brand new ones. While designing your experience, make sure it encompasses all the crucial factors, such as product and/or service, defined channels, content offerings, pricing and packaging, and client touch points.

Assessment and Deployment

Once you have put together the final draft of your customer-experience architecture, you should ensure that it is coherent and conveys integrity before you start publicizing it. Have some outside family members, friends, consultants, and/or clients provide feedback. As part of your final evaluation of this vitally important document, ask yourself these questions:

• Is the brand experience is expressed evenly across all platforms?
• Have all the discrete customer experiences been included in the overall architecture planning?
• Are the strategies enhancing or complementing other experiences?

Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy is one that combines all of your business's marketing goals into one comprehensive plan. It is based on the following three elements:

• Market research
• Business goals
• Service offering

Your fundamental goal with your marketing strategy is to increase revenues by attracting potential clients, retaining your existing customers, and providing upsell opportunities to other service lines. This approach can also help you sustain your competitive advantage.

Marketing Methods

Marketing today can take many forms, but while the Internet and social media have opened up new pathways for marketing, some of the tried-and-true methods still work. The main marketing methods you should explore with your team include the following:

• Thought/Industry Leadership

  This is an individual or group of people who are go-to authorities within your industry and the client's, who can help recognize trends and then implement strategies to achieve actual business results. You may reach out to these individuals or recruit them from within your team. For instance, team members may have more insight into social media trends or changes within a client's industry since they may interact with it on a regular basis.

• Strategic Partnership

  This is an arrangement between two companies or organizations to help each other, or work together, for a common purpose.

• Referral Sources

  You can promote your products or services to new clients by asking for referrals from companies in the same industry as your vertical niche.

• Networking

  You can (and should) reach out to individuals and associations in your vertical industry niche market. It's important to create personal connections to demonstrate that you are more than a business—you build a relationship. Taking time to invest in those relationships is important so that when prospects or leads come up in either of your networking circles, you are the first to think of each other and trust that the client will be handled well.

• Event Hosting

  Consider hosting organized get-togethers with local businesses in your vertical niche. For example, you might host casual lunches or after-work socials during which you offer some kind of “teaching” seminar for potential clients to learn more about you and your services.

You don't have to do all these, but this list gives you an idea of the types of marketing available. Which one (or ones) you choose depends on various factors, such as the budget you have put aside for marketing, your return on investment (ROI), and the ability to track engagement and success.

Internal Marketing

If your firm has several staff members or multiple departments, mining available opportunities internally can be just as important as external marketing. The benefit of networking internally is that you don't have to convince them you are the right accountant or bookkeeper for them. By meeting with tax professionals in other departments and educating them on the advisory services you offer, you can uncover needs within your own client base that may be good prospects for your service line.

Here are some ways that you can market internally:

• Lunch-and-Learns

  Schedule training sessions with associates and managers from around the firm to show them what you offer to clients. Visually providing examples of dashboards and different types of analysis your team can provide will give them a good feel for which of their clients are right for your services.

• One-to-One Lunches

  Schedule lunches with different associates and managers in your firm to educate each other on what you both do and how you can collaborate to uncover opportunities for each other in each of your books of business.

• Weekly Team Meetings

  Within your own team, there are opportunities to mine. Each team member is working on different clients and having his or her own conversations. By scheduling weekly meetings in which all team members go over the status of the clients they are working on and any opportunities they foresee within their client base, you can collaborate on proposing additional services. For instance, you may be providing bookkeeping services to a restaurant client. Through discussions with that client, you learn that the bookkeeper is being asked questions that are more complex and geared toward the opportunity of opening another restaurant location. In a team meeting, this can be surfaced so that a strategy can be put together to offer this client virtual controllership or CFO services as well to prepare the analysis they need.

• Staff Incentives

  Build in incentive pay for staff members who either bring in new clients or upsell a current client into additional services. These rewards can help to drive the behavior of looking for new opportunities since your team is closest to the clients they are working with.

Marketing Budget

You can organize a solid marketing budget by following these three simple steps:

1. Find your reliable revenue.

   This is the minimum amount of money your company currently makes each month. For example, if your company has revenue that ranges from $5,000 to $10,000 per month, the reliable revenue is the lowest figure of $5,000. Any amount over that minimum is revenue that isn't recurring and can fluctuate from month to month. Next, subtract all monthly expenses from your reliable revenue, such as rent, payroll, and the like. Whatever is left over is the disposable income that is available for your marketing budget. Of course, you want to put aside money for unexpected costs and future growth initiatives, but this approach gives you an estimate of how much you have to work with.

   Depending on your stage of business, you may not have clients or enough revenue to give you extra funding for marketing. Marketing is just as important, if not more, at this stage as well. You should consider your marketing investment as necessary as buying office furniture and equipment. In the beginning stages, your budget may be lower and you may have to draw from personal funds, make a personal loan to your business, or take out a loan from your bank. As long as you are aware of how these additional funds are going to be utilized, and your marketing decisions are not haphazard, it is worth the investment for the future growth of your practice.

2. Determine where you want to invest your marketing funds.

   After you know the total amount available to spend on marketing, the next part is to organize how you intend to spend that investment. There are four factors that often influence how funds are spent: budget size, your past experiences, advice from outside marketing experts and consultants, and where you can reach your target clientele. Keep in mind that marketing efforts such as social media activities require that you invest your time. Others can be purchased for a minimal amount of money, such as small print advertisements in industry and trade publications in your chosen target market, website ads, and e-mail advertising.

3. Make changes when needed.

   Budgets are never set in stone. You should evaluate and make adjustments in your marketing budget as you move forward and discover what works for promoting your cherished advisor services and what doesn't. You might need to invest more money into fewer marketing opportunities, or cut back spending in other ones.

Return on Investment

ROI is often tough to measure, because there is not always a direct correlation between the money you invest in your business and the revenue you receive. Your marketing efforts could come back in the form of new talent, an opportunity to interact with vertical industry niche prospects and clients in new ways, or an introduction into new software or other infrastructure that could help your business down the road. However, to the best of your ability, you should gauge your marketing efforts and have an idea of the intended outcomes you want from that investment. Here are some key concepts to keep in mind when figuring out your ROI:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

  This is the total price needed to acquire a customer. You can estimate this cost by dividing the total costs associated with acquisition by the total number of new customers within a specific period.

• Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR)

  This is the recurring revenue from your client. If you charge them the same amount each month for your services, that is your subscription revenue that you can use to evaluate the growth of your business.

• Acquisition Cost Payback

  This means the number of months of contribution margin to pay back the cost of acquiring a customer. It is calculated as shown here:

  
• Value of Customer

  There are two types of customer value: desired and perceived. Desired value is what customers want from your product or service. Perceived value is the benefit customers believe they get from a product or service after being purchased.

• Acquisition versus Retention

  As a general rule, getting regular clients to return and winning back lost customers is less expensive than acquiring new ones again and again.

Here is a simple formula that can help you calculate the ROI for marketing investment:

For example, if you invest $4,000 into marketing materials and $800 in paid staff time and attract $18,000 in new client business, your ROI would look like this:

Marketing is also about networking. This can include things like going to networking events in your area, getting involved on boards and committees of associations, traveling to industry conferences, building your website, blogging, writing for industry publications, and engaging in all forms of social media.

Website

Your company website is the most essential part of your marketing architecture. All your other marketing efforts, no matter how successful, will be in vain if potential clients are driven to your website only to leave once they arrive.

In general, accountants can face several obstacles when it comes to public perception—fair or unfair. First off, many people are often afraid to contact an accountant because they feel intimidated. Many clients are experts at what they do but may not be very knowledgeable about accounting and finance, which can make them feel inadequate. They don't want to feel exposed when telling an accountant that they lack this knowledge. Your website is a way to break down that barrier and brush off the stereotypes of accountants wearing suits and ties and working on adding machines. Instead, create an approachable image so that prospects will be encouraged to contact you.

A website is a living, breathing thing—it's not something you set up once and never come back to. Your website should tell a story about the mission of your practice, the verticals you target, what your client experience is like, and who your team is. People do not look up companies in the Yellow Pages any more. They do their research on you before they make their first contact, including checking out your website in many cases.

Nowadays, basic website design has become a do-it-yourself endeavor. There are many free website templates available, as well as services that show you how to design your own website, but remember that your team members are accountants—not designers. Just as your clients need an accountant to do their finances, you should hire an expert to design your website. It is worth the investment; this is your “storefront,” so don't skimp on costs for quality.

The big problem with free templates is that it's too easy to use the same template as another accounting firm and/or display the same stock images. If you look like everyone else, it's impossible to stand out or communicate a differentiated message.

A website is a reflection of who you are as an accounting or bookkeeping practice. It is also an opportunity to introduce yourself and your team in a more personal and appealing way. Use your website to feature stories of the individuals who make up the business. For instance, you could showcase your own and your team members' interests besides accounting. Does anyone surf or hike? Show pictures of them enjoying one of their favorite beaches or trails, so you can connect with clients and prospects who have the same interests.

Your website should be kept up-to-date, preferably every day if possible, with new content and valuable resources for your clients to always refer back to. Your website designer will work with you to outline your website's look, feel, and content to make sure that it meets your business goals and attracts the vertical industry niche clients you want. For instance, if you are targeting restaurants, allow the design to reflect key elements of that industry. Rather than just listing prices, you can design it like a restaurant menu and show your packages in a format that resonates with the clients you are trying to attract.

Here is a summary of certain characteristics your website needs to have to garnish sufficient attention from visitors:

• Headline or Tagline

  A headline is derived from your mission statement and becomes the tagline for your practice. It is often the first information visitors see, so it needs to grab their attention and communicate who you are and what you do in a brief, concise manner. Otherwise, the visitor will just move on.

• Lead Capture

  You can acquire e-mail addresses from potential clients by offering content in exchange for giving an e-mail address. With these e-mail addresses, you can then use an autoresponder to reach visitors and explain more about your services.

• Testimonials

  As with LinkedIn, adding testimonials can offer instant credibility. Place a testimonial on each page, if possible, and make sure to identify who it came from and his or her company. Don't make the testimonials sound the same; try to have each one highlight a different aspect of your services, if possible, such as customer service or an improved business outcome. Your clients are often more than happy to offer testimonials so reach out them.

• Client Portal

  Create an exclusive, secure area on your website for clients to upload documents and communicate with you. You can also get personalized content for your clients or have exclusive resources that the general public wouldn't receive—an added value for being a client of your practice.

• Navigation

  Having a simple table of content can further help keep someone on your website. A confusing layout or hard-to-read fonts will frustrate visitors and push them away. Keep the navigation simple and easy to follow—no more than four to seven tabs at the top or on the side.

• Call to Action

  Highlight a call to action on the page, such as downloading a PDF that summarizes your services, viewing a video, or requesting a consult.

• Social Shares

  While obsessively posting on social media can be a waste of time, when you do write an article, update your blog, or want to promote an industry-related news item, make sure to post the link from your website and share it across all your social media platforms so people come back to your site to view it. Other people who then share your content also can help contribute to a high search engine ranking.

• Content

  People want go to websites for information—this can be information that is standalone and never changes as well as new content that is posted on a regular basis. If people know you offer new content, they are more likely to revisit. If you or no one on your team is a skilled writer, you can hire someone to help you pen articles and blogs. Begin with posting new content at least weekly, and make sure that the information is relevant to your business, services, and objectives.

Social Media

Social media outlets like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are ideal platforms to implement your marketing strategy, as they can reach thousands if not millions of people and businesses and can help you engage with many other people and companies within your vertical niche.

Social media is always changing and evolving. It's a fast-paced approach to marketing and communication, so it needs regular attention and engagement. Your commitment to social media can be quite valuable, but you need to make sure that you are properly set up to take advantage of what it can offer and that you enlist the right people and personnel to manage it on a daily basis.

The social media outlets mentioned above are the primary ones that companies can best utilize and they are still the most popular. As you go along, you may discover that certain social media works better than others and you may want to adjust your strategy to devote more time to them and less to others.

Also, keep in mind that you don't have to be involved with every type of social media out there. For instance, Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest are oriented toward more visual posts. These work well for business that have a “visual” product (food, manufacturing, etc.), but may not be ideal for you, depending on who you are trying to attract.

Here is a closer look at the big four—LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—and how they may benefit your marketing efforts to promote your services and find potential clients.

Blogging

Blogging is an effective way to reach out and communicate with clients and potential customers. It can also further enhance your business's brand awareness, and market your services to a larger audience.

A blog can improve your firm's image as well as help drive more traffic to your website. Specifically, blogging can help your firm to:

• Stay connected with your current clients
• Educate potential customers about your services
• Showcase your team's expertise and knowledge
• Enhance your website's search engine rankings
• Create another platform for all your social media
• Reach out to prospects with whom you cannot connect through traditional sales and marketing

There are many free blogging services you can use, including Squarespace, Blogger, and WordPress. However, it's best to add your blog to your website, as it can help bring in more traffic.

Many web-hosting companies offer free blogging tools, but some charge a small fee. Your blog will become a part of your website with its own address, for example: www.websitename.com/blog.

For the best results, you do need to invest time into making your blog current and relevant to visitors. You might need to hire a writer to help you pen your blog posts if your team does not have the writing skills, or an editor to help edit their writing. You can also reach out to other related industry blogs to “share” stories: posting their stories on your blog with links back to the original articles. This can help you build content and address different topic areas.

No matter who writes your blog posts, there are certain areas that always need to be addressed. Here are some tips:

• Stick to what you know. You're an accountant, so stick to your areas of expertise. Don't write about what you don't know or about personal topics.
• Add value. Give readers helpful, useful, and timely accounting or bookkeeping information.
• Involve your team. Encourage your members to contribute as much as possible. This will make your business appear more personal as well as more knowledgeable.
• Write for a regular audience. Avoid technical writing and unnecessary accounting jargon that readers may not understand. Keep the language simple, conversational, and most of all interesting. Give them some kind of takeaway value with every blog post.
• Understand your audience—and empathize. Explain how your expertise can directly benefit your potential client. Talk to them in their business language, not yours.
• Keep it short, but not too short. Most blog posts are between 400 and 800 words. Posts that are shorter than that will be ignored by search engines. If the posts are too long, however, you may lose a reader's attention. One option: divide a post into two parts that you post on different days.
• Make blogs appealing. Make blogs visually appealing with subheads and easier to read with bullet points. Add charts and graphics when possible. “How to” videos are also helpful.
• Maintain momentum. Update, update, update. Nothing will kill a reader's interest more quickly than blogs that are not updated on a regular basis. If they like what you write, they will want to read more, so give them what they want. This doesn't mean you must write a new post every day, but set up a schedule and stick with it, like once a week at first and then twice a week after that. Post on the same day(s) too, so readers won't have to guess when the next post will be out.

Once you have written a blog post, you need to distribute it through your e-mail list of clients and website visitors who have shared their e-mail addresses, as well as across all social media platforms. Consider adding social media buttons to your posts, too; that way, people will be able to share your content easily, bringing in more readers.

E-mail Newsletters

As with your website content and blog, a weekly e-mail newsletter can help both you and you clients. However, many newsletters fail because they are not sent out on a regular basis and/or the content is bland and misguided.

Your newsletter should offer something for the reader/subscriber. Make the content informative and personal. For example, you can highlight a news story that is related to their industry, or changes in tax laws or other financial information that could affect their business. You can send a condensed version of your most recent blog, or profile one of your team members. The more valuable content you can provide to small businesses owners, the more you can seed a relationship of trust with them that may allow you to ultimately serve them as a client.

Distributing your newsletter through e-mail marketing services such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign can help you track how many people actually open the newsletter attachment so you can gauge interest.

E-mail Signatures

Creating a unique e-mail signature can be a simple way to promote new social media and website content, or new services. For example, a signature might include a phrase or question that links to your blog or other website content, like “Do you make these five cash flow mistakes?” It's another way to promote and market your services and expertise to both existing and potential clients.