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what's up ladies and gentlemen welcome to another edition of dream firm spotlight my name is tyler s clark co-founder of dream firms where we create generational wealth and impact for entrepreneurial accountants by systemizing how they attract win and retain the business of their dream clients and what i would love to help you with today to make sure that you can do that 100 for free through this content is to help you to create a marketing plan so i'm going to share with you the five steps to create a marketing plan for your accounting firm and we're going to jump right on in so step number one is to understand first and foremost what marketing is and what marketing is not the biggest thing that holds entrepreneurial accountants back from creating a high performing marketing plan is they all of a sudden feel that it needs to now include their sales strategy their fulfillment strategy and wait a minute now we're creating a business plan and a marketing plan is not a business plan so the very first step to creating a marketing plan is to narrow your scope and to understand what marketing is and marketing is about generating leads it's about generating opportunities and the way that you should remember this is that marketing is about getting people to raise their hand and say oh you're speaking to me i would like to learn more so think of marketing as getting people to raise their hand or talk to a big audience of people and only a small fraction of that audience is really going to be the type of person you want to work with that you want to raise get them to raise their hand and say you're speaking to me so again marketing is getting hand raises but sales is about getting hand shakes and fulfillment or delivery is about giving them what they just purchased okay so again step number one make sure that you understand that what marketing is and what it is not and limit your scope to specifically focus how are we getting more leads and if you are unsure of what i mean when i say a lead yes email addresses are great yes social media metrics are wonderful number of new likes and comments and posts all of that matters but a lead is a book call ladies and gentlemen so that is the metric that we want to make sure we keep front and center when you are getting ready to create your marketing plan not your business plan step number two here you do not create your marketing plan in a vacuum and what i mean by that is step number two is you must analyze your current marketing investments and understand what they bring back to you and what is the gap okay so start with analyzing your current investments what software tools are you spending on right now that maybe you don't have implemented don't like the way they run don't really bring anything back to you or maybe you love them and you say hey that tool we've got it's rocking it does exactly what we want it's implemented perfectly cool or we might say what's our website doing did it generate us any appointments in the last 30 days do we even get a report from our website provider on how many appointments were generated how do people even schedule appointments with us is there a way for them to do that or are we just waiting for the phone to ring or or how do people get in contact with us digitally or what are the different ways in which people can get in contact with us digitally and a lot of firms they're not even sure right they go well we have a facebook page and i go cool when was the last time somebody sent you on something on your facebook business page through messenger they go they send things through messenger on our facebook business page how do we even how do we even check that so my point here is again you got to take a look at where you've currently invested money and time right it's free to set up a facebook business page you spent time on doing it but you may not necessarily even have the systems or the protocols that allow you to take that investment of time and make sure that when not if when something comes through from it how do you know that it even how do you how do you see it how do you know that it's going to get responded to who's responsible for it and it can't be you the firm owner for every little thing related to your marketing plan so again analyze your current investments what are they bringing back to you or what are they not bringing back to you and what is the gap start to analyze the differences in what you would like to see versus what you're currently seeing okay all right so the third one here is going to be a little bit different okay so the third step here is we really need to define the destination okay now i'm going to blend this a tiny bit with sales because you really have a hard time talking exclusively about marketing and not having sales come into play at least a little bit okay and so what i mean by that is in total in order to truly understand what the end goal of success looks like for your marketing plan you've got to define the end goal and the end goal is going to be the number of leads you need to generate but in order to understand the number of leads you need to generate what do you need to tie that to your sales goal okay so you want to have a crystal clear understanding of a few key metrics and i'm going to walk you through them so number one is what is your sales goal for the next 12 months try and keep it within a limited scope don't go like what's our 10-year sales goal what's your what is your goal for sales in the next 12 months okay now when you know that the next question you go is well let's say our our goal is a 100 000 new business which is approximately about what 85 to 90 percent of accounting firms are looking for when they come to work with us so let's go ahead and pick the one that's most common let's say you want to add six figures in the next 12 months okay well what is the average value of our client okay what's the average client value from someone that we're going to be end up working with and for the sake of keeping things simple here i'm going to go ahead and say hey that client when they sign up and they work with us they're going to be worth about ten thousand dollars a year to us maybe about 850 a month somewhere in that general time general range that's generally speaking the type of client we're working with okay cool now the next metric you need to know from your sales percentage again to work backwards to what your marketing objective needs to be the total number of leads is okay well okay that means i need 10 clients to reach my sales goal right average value of 10 000 100 000 sales goal 10 clients very straightforward but the real question we need to ask ourselves is what is your closing rate on these opportunities now there's a caveat to this because when i ask you what your closing rate is the problem most entrepreneurial accountants have when they try and factor this in and understand it they go well my closing rate tyler it's 80 and i go well that's fantastic under your current marketing plan which is exclusively referrals when you start to grow in a different way you want to accelerate faster you're going to open up new marketing channels and i promise you you're not closing 80 unless for some reason you are way under quoting what you need to there's no reason that would be like no there's no shame in having a close rate that's 25 to 30 percent that's exactly where it should be if anything that's excellent so again the key here is you go okay well knowing that i'm going to have new marketing opportunities because i have to open up new channels in order to reach this new ambitious growth goal that is not exclusively referrals i can realistically set my close rate at fill in the blank for the sake of argument here i'm gonna go ahead and just pick what i think is a safe ground safe one that i see pretty commonly with just moderate sales ability not something crazy no silver tongue just you can stream a couple sentences together you know what i mean you could say a quote so it's usually about 20 okay so we go okay if i know that i need to get 10 clients and my close rate is 20 simple math that means i need 50 opportunities over the next 12 months i need 50 booked calls between now and 12 months from now and now we have a objective we have a goal we have exactly what we need to be able to do in order for our marketing plan to be more than a plan it's so that it's something that actually works and we go cool we know if this plan is successful if or when we hit 50 qualified leads and this is just one little extra piece of information on number three is you want to be very careful about simply counting a lead as a lead and a lead versus a qualified lead okay so qualified lead right you get a pure startup no funding has no never heard of the sba before right can't even get their grandmom to lend them a hundred dollars and say hey i i'd love to work with you and you go but our average client value needs to be 850 a month and you're you couldn't even afford our installation price to just get qbo set up for you in your chart accounts not a qualified lead now will we count that to the 50 no we wouldn't count that towards the 50. that wouldn't make any sense we want to make sure that the leads that we count ultimately align with point number four which is how do we know what makes up a quality lead okay so the way i want you to think about step number four here okay in creating your marketing plan is this who not quite where are my dream clients so it's both of these things simultaneously for point number four i think one of the major reasons that people struggle with dream clients is they can imagine who but what they really need to be thinking of is where are these dream clients now you can't get to where until you understand who so you do want to start and say okay well who is the type of person that's going to routinely be willing to invest and fifty dollars a month to be that average ten thousand dollar per month client again you can pick the numbers you might say you wanna be a hundred thousand dollars a year it's up to you just basic math here okay so again you say who is my dream client and let me just give you the best possible way to approach this when you narrow your focus when you become more relevant to someone's situation it makes finding out where they spend their time a lot easier okay so again who but more importantly where is the highest likelihood that this congregation of this dream client profile will be investing their most precious resource their time to be able to get information hang out online go to a local networking event whatever it is you just go that's the dream client cool but where do they invest their most precious resource and that will inform the vast majority of your marketing strategy it will tell you the vast majority of your marketing plan now the final step here is similar to point four here step four in the sense that in order to move even if you know where someone is even if you have a really well defined dream profile the quite literal million dollar question you have to ask yourself to make this marketing plan worthwhile is why should they work with you why should they take you up on that offer to book a call what is the crowning unique value proposition that's going to help separate you from everybody else and i don't want to go on a rant on commoditization but i'm going to rant on commoditization very quickly because it gets brought up in the accounting space a lot commodities only exist when the market cannot fundamentally tell the difference between one service provider and another or the market cannot tell the difference between one product and another i think everybody here would agree with me when i say clothing is a commodity okay right clothing you can get clothing everywhere at any price but there's a huge difference between the the the brand of nike and the the random brands you've never heard of and the best example i can give you i hold up two white t-shirts okay two no-name brands one of them is tina's white t-shirts the other one's timmy's white t-shirts they look the same they feel the same they fit the same they are fundamentally the same [Music] what will be your driving decision and what t-shirt you purchase the price and this is really why price compression happens in the market is that we all say and look exactly the same as accounting professionals we go i deliver great service i work with small businesses you should trust me i have credentials and i have integrity but that's just what the other firm down the street just said so why are you different again and so you must be able to define why someone should want to take you up on the offer to invest their most precious resource their time to speak with you one-on-one to further understand how that value proposition is going to benefit them and why investing in it at a premium level is something they should be really excited about okay so the last very last part of point five here is your why is important right you've got to define that but once you define that that's when you get into the last aspect of this and this is what i find most people try and start with they try and go how are we going to get leads and they go well there's all these different tactics and they go oh maybe we should try facebook ads or maybe we should try linkedin or maybe we should try posting more here maybe we should try cold calling or maybe right there's a million tactics out there you can go through all of them but that's the last thing you should be thinking about it's literally the last thing that will matter at all because unless you take the time to understand the first four things 4.5 right like everything i just discussed discussed up until this point the tactics themselves will not make a difference and this is why most accounting firms are just bouncing back and forth between different tactics and they spend two months three months trying something doesn't really work then they don't try anything for a few months and they try something because then they get fired up and then they don't it doesn't really work at all because they're not approaching it in the right order and you have that order right now so again let me do a high level summary here of the five steps to creating a marketing plan for your accounting firm step number one you have to understand what marketing is and what marketing is not do not treat this as a business plan marketing is about hand raises not about handshakes or delivering on the promise stay focused on lead generation and a lead gen in my my world is a booked appointment okay so that's step number one understand what it is and what it is not step number two here analyze your current marketing investments how are you getting people attracted to you and what investments are you making to get that to happen and what investments have you made that maybe aren't bringing anything back to you can you tweak them a little bit what's the gap in terms of what you've done and what you were expecting and how can you just fill that gap a little bit to hopefully get a little bit more from your current investments before you add anything on top of it right do that analysis of your current status as it relates to lead generation step number three define the destination and in order for you to understand how many leads you need to develop for your marketing plan to make sense and have that target for you to go and hit you have to go okay what's our sales metric what's our growth goal in the next 12 months 100 000 whatever the number is you pick 100 000. okay average value of client 10 000 a year okay great so we need 10 clients our average closing rate is 30 that means we need 30 leads or if our average closing rate is 20 that means we need 50 leads and again be careful of the referral trap where it's like i close eighty percent because you've only done one type of marketing before and it's the easiest type of sales environment you'll ever have new marketing different sales environment lower closing rate just prepare yourself mentally for that and it's part of the game so don't beat yourself up over it okay fourth thing here okay the question that we always have to ask is who is our dream client but once you have a meaningful answer for that step four is not only who is your dream client step four is where is your dream client as well where are you the most likely to be able to get in front of them invest time invest energy invest money to increase the chances that they see you right this is the analysis of the market effectively that you want to work with and then finally the fifth and final step which is two parts why should they work with you and then how can you get that message in front of them so what's that unique value proposition what sets you apart from the other accounting firms why are you not a commodity and again the reason you are not a commodity is the market can readily identify that there is something different about you you don't want to be timmy or tammy's t-shirts you want to be nike right you want to be that billion dollar brand where someone looks at it and goes that's what i've been looking for that speaks to me i want to wear that on my chest i want to be proud of that the same principles for branding in the in the clothing space in any space for that matter will apply to your accounting firm because you've got to be special you've got to want to target someone and then let them know why extra money out of their pocket is a great idea for them how do you speak to them how do you make sure their pains and their concerns are accounted for how do you make them feel special how do you make sure that they understand that you are fundamentally different because you are and then once you've got that defined guess what you're doing now now comes the tactics and this is easy at this point problem is most people start with tactics tactics come last they are dead last and then you go okay now that we have all of this defined well it's pretty obvious because of what we did in step four oh the best bang for our buck is going to be on this platform at this networking group at with direct mail maybe i don't know depends on what your dream client is so listen creating a marketing plan can be very very simple and i believe that you will make it a lot simpler by following these simple steps that allow you to understand exactly what you're looking to achieve and how to make sure that you do not over complicate it by blending too many things in or doing them in the wrong order and if you would like to be able to create a marketing plan that attracts your dream clients to you that makes them want to invest in a premium price in your accounting bookkeeping more tax firm services and you don't want to reinvent the wheel explore the create your dream firm program honestly just hop on to a call see what it's all about see if it's a good fit for you i believe that you will think that is the case not because i say it but because your peers have proven it so again if you are serious about reaching whatever the growth goal it is that you have set explore our create your dream firm program we'll help you get the perfect marketing plan in place on behalf of your firm and i sincerely appreciate you investing your most precious resource with me during today's dream firm spotlight and always what am i don't forget what is it only you can create your dream firm but we help you every single step of the way have a fantastic rest of your work week everyone and i will look forward to seeing you on the inside of our create your dream firm program in the non-citizen future