six rules of professionalism that accountants need in their marketers.
by bruce w. marcus
professional services marketing 3.0
there’s a wonderful cartoon in which a guy in a business suit is looking over the shoulder of an artist at his canvas. the caption, spoken by the artist, is “i used to dabble a bit in accounting, too.”
then there’s the guy who said to me, “if you’re smart enough to be a cpa, then you’re smart enough to do your own advertising.” to which i replied, “yes that’s true. you’re also smart enough to be a nuclear physicist — but it doesn’t make you one.”
there’s the guy who read a book about tightrope walking. he knew everything about tightrope walking — except how to do it.
more professional services marketing 3.0: all great strategy starts with “why” • can you hear me now? • managing knowledge as a growth and management tool • the secret formula for getting new clients • what we’ve learned since accounting marketing was legalized • do accounting firms really want an ‘image’? • what accounting firms need to learn from personal financial planning specialists • the delicate art of positioning your firm in the mind of the prospect • even a random disaster can be controlled with risk management •
the point is that while marketing may not be nuclear physics, it does have its craft, its artistry, its techniques, its experiences, and its history. and if you’re not within the realm of all those things and more, you don’t know much about marketing. marketing mythology doesn’t count for much.
and it’s not just accountants and cpas who fall prey to the egocentric nonsense that they can do it because, after all, they have graduate degrees. a large number of people in business feel the same way.
every marketing professional can tell you a story about a client or employer who retained the marketer for the marketer’s expertise, and then drowned him or her with useless second guessing. a favorite starts with the words, “my wife says…”
but perhaps the real problem is not the presumption of knowledge where none really exists, it’s in the drive to an unwarranted expectation that leaps over a large mound of reality. every marketer has a story about being hired by a professional who says, “we’ve been a small firm for 15 years, and now it’s time for us to be a big firm. help us.” followed by a large fee or salary, which, unfortunately, always makes it harder for even the wisest of us to say no.
too bad, because what usually happens is not only acute second-guessing, but entrenched ideas steeped in marketing mythology. your marketer says, from the depths of experience, “this is what we have to do,” to which the reply is, “but we’ve never done it that way. let’s do it the way we always have.” the tenure of the marketer in that situation is rarely longer than three months, at which point the client goes out to find another marketer, and the cycle is repeated.
the client, truth told, may think he or she wants to be big – but doesn’t want to go through the rigors of getting big. don’t dislodge the status quo.
what, then, should clients or employers know about what they don’t know – in order to really benefit from the knowledgeable, experienced, and thoughtful marketer?
a lot, but let’s start with six:
- marketing has specific skills that improve with experience. how to understand the client’s market. how to write a program that achieves a marketing objective. how to use the tools of marketing, and how to manage those tools.
- marketers understand what works and what doesn’t. many years ago i developed an ad campaign for a client who had some ideas of his own that he wanted to try out. ok, i said, let’s run your ad, which seemed to be a good one, against my ad, which he didn’t like as much as his ad. my ad out-pulled his by 50%. why? because he didn’t understand the psychology of advertising, which is learned only after long experience. remember exxon’s “we put a tiger in your tank”? it beat the stuffing out of everybody else in the field. why? because the guy who wrote it understood that what sold gas was not just the words, or even the picture. it was the feeling that the strength and power of a tiger became yours when you got behind the wheel. the guy who wrote it didn’t learn how to do that in accounting school.
- there is no greater artistry in marketing than in direct response. knowing how to capture the reader in the first line. knowing how to time a mailing. knowing how to get the reader to think that the bright idea to buy was the reader’s, not the writer’s. and that’s just a sample of what the professional marketer knows. “why are we paying this guy so much for direct response?” an accounting firm partner once asked. “i’ve been writing letters all my life. i can do it.”
- marketers understand that trying to tell people how to think about the firm doesn’t work. that’s why you can’t say things like, “we put clients first,” or “we do high quality work.” it may be what you want the reader to think about you, but they’re not going to just because you ask them to. more brochures are expensive and useless garbage because they attempt to get readers to believe things that just aren’t credible by simply expounding them. professional marketers know better.
- good marketers understand the difference between firm objectives and marketing objectives. they’re not the same, although you can’t have one without the other, as the song goes.
- ultimately, marketing is an art form that uses skills, techniques and experience to achieve its ends. as we’ve said, if you want a good marketing program, don’t hire a mechanic, hire an artist.
as a professional, you should have some inkling about how expensive it is to hire marketers whose work you don’t understand or appreciate, only to have a frustrating parting of the ways. it’s even worse when you have a strong feeling that marketing is something you have to do in this competitive environment, but aren’t quite sure about how to hire, much less understand and live with, that peculiar breed of professional services marketers.
bruce w. marcus is a pioneer in professional services marketing and coauthor of “client at the core.” this is adapted from his new book, “professional services marketing 3.0,” available for purchase here.
related: managing risk in client relations • your clients love you? what if you’re wrong? • the three degrees of risk • four essential habits for building client trust • the nine hallmarks of a marketing culture • the four cornerstones to building a marketing culture • getting the client is only half the battle • practice development: it’s not rocket science • nine fundamentals for a healthy marketing culture in an accounting firm •
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