and why it sometimes doesn’t.
with:
- five generic reasons to advertise
- the 15 basics of accounting advertising
- the 18 benefits advertising can provide an accounting firm
by bruce w. marcus
professional services marketing 3.0
advertising in cpa firms services has a strange history. more words and more dollars have been wasted on it, and less seems to have been learned from its mistakes than from any other marketing tool we currently use.
unfortunately, advertising is much more complex than it looks. it is the most subtle of all marketing tools, and the most frustrating. it can even succeed by breaking traditional advertising rules, if that’s done properly, by experienced copy writers, and with great skill and courage.
but judging from the full body of professional services advertising, even most ad agencies don’t seem to understand the differences between selling an accounting firm and selling toothpaste. and therein lies the core of the problem in most professional services marketing as its too often done today.
why advertise
advertising has four major generic purposes:
- to inform, and to reinforce that information
- to create an umbrella of favorable attitude toward you and your firm (or product) to pre-sell
- to open a prospective client’s door to allow a personal presentation
- to either generate action (such as selling a product), or, in most professional services advertising, to allow for a more favorable context in which other action may comfortably take place, such as setting the stage for sell
- to focus internal priorities and appropriate actions
as more firms now advertise, it becomes increasingly important that the advertiser — the accountant — as well as the advertising agency, understand the process as it pertains to professional services. to be passive in the process, and to allow a clueless agency to guide the decision, is as dangerous as eating unidentified mushrooms, simply because advertising is so different for professionals than it is for products. your agency may be a good one, but if they don’t understand that difference, then your ad may be clever, and attractive, but irrelevant.
it should not be forgotten that professional services are probably the only enterprises that depend upon the full participation of the professionals themselves for their marketing efforts. product marketing doesn’t often involve the people who make the product. but who hires a an accountant without actually meeting the practitioner? how can an ad be written without input from the accountant? in other words, ads alone don’t do the job. a total marketing program that actively includes the professional does.
what, then, is the specific purpose of accounting firm advertising? to build a reputation and name recognition that reinforces other marketing efforts that attracts and sells to prospective clients. this seems hard for product advertising people to understand, which is why most professional services advertising is so bad.
few people read an ad by an accounting firm and call up to say,” i saw your ad – let’s start monday.” advertising builds an impression of the firm (which is why attempts to be funny are silly), name recognition, and reputation – so that somebody who eventually needs a firm will tend to choose that of the better known advertiser rather than to choose the competitors. if the ads address a specific problem or specialization, they are likely to get inquiries. ultimately, it can be a significant element of a total marketing program – but without the full program, the ads are doing only a fraction of the marketing job.
in fact, there is an unpleasant little secret. if you ran a series of ads that simply said, “smith & dale is an accounting firm”, and ran it often enough, people would know your name. but you would be competing against firms with ads like the “jones & jones” ad, which goes beyond name recognition to project a capability and a quality sufficient to bring the firm to mind when people are choosing a firm for their specific needs, for your skills, and experience.
the basics of accounting advertising
some things to consider, then. not rules, really – advertising is an art form, and frequently, the best advertising (and art) comes from breaking rules. but artists know that to effectively break the rules, you have to know what the rules are. just some basics, then, to clear the way for originality, relevance, and effective advertising to function. (a paradox – fairness dictates noting that, through some anomaly or another, bad ads sometimes seem to pull or impress readers better than good ads. but that’s part of the mystery of advertising.)
- understand that with great advertising you can sell a product to somebody who hadn’t known that product existed, but you can’t persuade somebody to write a contract or have an audit unless the need for these services already exists. this is a major point. it dictates that the purpose of professional services advertising is primarily to get somebody who needs an accountant to choose your firm rather than another one. are there exceptions? sure. if you’re advertising to people who might not know that their financial statements can be used to help them plan for their business. but these exceptions are the smallest part of the marketing for accounting firms.
- an advertising campaign is not a marketing program, and advertising rarely works except as part of a larger program that culminates in getting through the prospect’s front door, and to the opportunity to sell.
- remember that the nature of professional services marketing makes it difficult to judge the effectiveness of an ad or ad campaign in the near term. if i advertise toothpaste for sale, i know how effective the ad is by the number of tubes of toothpaste i sell. i can persuade you to buy my brand of toothpaste with sound advertising, but with the best of advertising, i can’t persuade a happily married couple to get a divorce unless they are actually considering divorce
- in product marketing, company counts, as well as the product. there may be a thousand people behind the manufacture of a tube of toothpaste, but the interface between that thousand people and the consumer is the tube of toothpaste. the interface between an accounting firm and the client is the individual accountant serving the client. thus, the expertise you’re selling resides in individuals, not firms.
- you can say, “my toothpaste is better than their toothpaste,” but you can’t say “we write better briefs,” or “we do better audits.” not just because of any bar association rules, but because it isn’t credible you can’t prove it. and in any firm of more than two accountants, some will be better than others. this is the “sez you” factor. absolute parallel consistency in accounting skills is not likely – if not impossible. you can have consistency and quality control in a toothpaste factory, but not in an accounting firm.
- it’s pointless to announce that you do the very things you’re supposed to do. “quality is important here.” “client service is paramount to us.” “the client comes first.” these are gratuitous statements and a waste of literary breath. they lack credibility, and do nothing to distinguish you from your competitors. besides, they are the kind of factors that are presumably inherent in the cpa practice.
- a cardinal mistake is trying to tell the reader what to think, or how the reader should think about you. give them the facts that lead them to the conclusion you want them to reach, and if they can easily draw the conclusion you want them to reach, you’ve won.
- don’t misrepresent. the acoustics of the marketplace call catch you.
- and lose the concept of image, because, as the old saying goes, what you are speaks so loud i can’t hear what you say you are. you don’t change the way you are perceived by manipulating symbols. the symbols will be overwhelmed by truth.
- differentiation isn’t easy. but unlike product advertising, in which you can delineate points of a product’s uniqueness or superiority, the best way to do it in professional services advertising and still be credible is to focus on the experience and expertise of individuals. there are exceptions, but that’s a good starting point. there are no easy ways to credibly differentiate one professional firm from another. the best you can credibly do is to demonstrate the realm of a firm’s experience and expertise. not differentiation in the same degree as in product advertising, this approach does something better – it distinguishes a firm, and that’s better than tortured attempts at differentiation.
- in professional services advertising, or in any collateral publications, illustration is particularly difficult. you can’t show a product, nor a factory. what seems to be left is an irrelevant stock photo of people at desks (yawn), or characters walking up or down courtroom steps. but then, there’s ingenuity. real people from your firm or metaphorical illustration. it’s not just that the illustration should draw you into the ad, but that there should be relevance to the message and thrust of the ad.
- corporate-style advertising rarely works in professional services. generally, corporate advertising is when ibm says “computing is good for you, and ibm is in the computing business.” the difficulty with corporate advertising in cpa firms is that firms don’t serve clients – individual accountants or specialized teams do. but if smith and dale advertises that accounting is important for your business and they’re in the accounting business, it helps with name recognition. it doesn’t say much about why smith and dale is a firm that does accounting better than the firm you’re now using, or even well enough to serve you. this kind of advertising is called branding, an unfortunate concept that confuses name recognition for branding’s promise of consistent, high-value service. in accounting, branding like coca-cola or ibm is a myth. a major consideration here is the role of the firm in serving clients and the role of the individual accountant.
- name recognition is important and it may be the most valid reason to advertise. you should get at least name recognition from your advertising, and the rest is context for it. but if that’s your objective, know it at the start, so that it’s still sound advertising – intriguing, informative, enticing, and not just gussied up with rampant cleverness for its own sake.
- positioning, in all advertising, is important. (but so is understanding what positioning really is.) positioning says we understand your needs, and we know how to serve those needs successfully. positioning is not saying this is who we are and what we can do, regardless of your needs. it stems not from the point you want to make, but from those of your market’s needs that you can serve. proper positioning is crucial to successful and effective marketing, and especially advertising. without a clear position as a foundation for any ad campaign, the only beneficiary is the ad agency – not the advertiser.
- the danger in all advertising is agency ego – the tendency of an agency to write ads that are clever and pretty, but that ignore some deeply ingrained experience of what works and doesn’t work. this is the kind of advertising that ignores the crucial question, “what do you want the reader to know, think, or feel after reading the ad?” it’s the kind of advertising that thinks that there’s no difference between selling a product and selling a professional service.
but if it’s all that difficult to do well, and expensive (never mind the return on investment), why do it? many good reasons.
advertising tax and accounting services can:
- help to establish a professional presence.
- establish and support name recognition.
- spread word of your existence, and to broadcast the name of your firm and the nature of the services you perform.
- convey a favorable impression of your services, and the way in which you perform those services.
- engender and support prestige.
- help increase market penetration.
- enhance and support a position in the market.
- clearly delineate a firm’s attitude toward the way its services are delivered.
- help define and project specific marketing objectives, based on a realistic perception of your firm and its services.
- develop a need for your firm’s services in addressing specific problems, by appealing to either the intellect or the emotions.
- build a favorable context in which you can use other marketing devices and methods to urge and inspire people to take action in retaining your services.
- help sell some services.
- help to define a new service, in the context of the problems it solves.
- afford the opportunity to be persuasive, even within the limited context of professional advertising.
- focus on a client problem or opportunity, and define how your service can help to resolve that problem, or seize that opportunity, for a prospective client.
- reinforce, and be reinforced, by sound public relations – as well as other marketing tools – that are designed to build and enhance reputation, to inform, and to focus an accurate perception of your firm and its services.
- build a foundation that can enhance the more active marketing functions.
- strengthen internal pride and morale, by demonstrating to staff a visible, concerted effort to project the firm and its strengths to the public.
and in the cold call, it helps take the chill off of ignorance about who you are and what you can do.
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.
copyright. used by permission.