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How to market your advisory service & drive endless organic leads

How to market your advisory service & drive endless organic leads

Learn how easily you can start targeted and consistent marketing.

March 04, 2023

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,004 growth-minded accountants.

This is post #2 in my five-post series on creating and delivering advisory services.

Here's what you can expect:

Feb 18th: What is Advisory & Why Offer It?
Feb 25th: Crafting Your Advisory Service (What Does the Market Want?)
Mar 4th (today): Marketing Advisory Service
Mar 11th: Pricing and Selling Your Advisory Service
Mar 18th: Fulfilling Projects and Building a High Caliber Team

Quick note: as I was writing this piece I realized it was way too long for a newsletter, so I'm breaking up Marketing, Pricing, and Selling into two separate pieces.

Let's go.

Today I'm going to tell you how to market your advisory services.

You've done the work to identify customer pains and built a solution. Now it's time to tell your niche about it.

Welcome to the hard part.

If you can succeed here, the end result is 100s of organic leads contacting you every month to buy your services. You'll have full control over how fast or slow you want to grow because your sales pipeline is so strong.

You'll also have margins to hire people and elevate yourself out of client work so that you can focus on building the business.

But you have to nail this part of the process.

Unfortunately, many accountants give up too soon and just before they start seeing results.

Good Marketing = Targeted Consistency

My marketing methodology can best be described as "targeted consistency."

There are two rules to make it work:

Rule 1: Pick a marketing channel to distribute content to your niche and make sure 100% of your posts are related to your niche.

Have you ever followed someone because they put out great content relevant to you, only to find they are talking about a completely different topic later?

Successfully creating brands around multiple topics is very hard to do.

Instead, I want you to talk about one thing (tax or accounting) over and over and over. Learn how to say the same thing 1000 different ways. Don't go off script.

You will build a stronger brand.

Rule 2: Post consistently for 12 months.

The hardest part about great marketing is simply showing up.

Imagine spending hours on a piece of content only to see it gets 50 views and no engagement. Disappointing results will wear down your confidence.

So remove all expectations.

Commit to 12 months of consistency regardless of results.

Content vs. Ads

In my world, marketing closely equates to content creation.

Creating great content, consistently, builds an enormous amount of trust with your following. They will feel like they know you simply because they consume everything you put out in the world.

This will also make your selling process easier because people will be ready to buy before they ever get on a meeting with you.

Paid ads can help to drive sales quickly.

But be warned, paid ad funnels are difficult to get right and can be expensive. Additionally, your sales process must cater to people who don't know you.

Organic lead gen is the apex of marketing. Eventually, businesses built on paid ads look to transition into organic lead gen.

So my recommendation is to skip ads and start creating content.

Picking a Channel

If you are new to marketing, I recommend starting with the following channels as they have produced outsized results for our firm:

Podcast
Online Forums
YouTube channel
Facebook Groups

If you can find where your niche hangs out online (forums, Facebook groups) then marketing becomes easy.

All you need to do is answer tax and accounting questions when they are posted in those groups. And then you create a flywheel effect by using those questions as prompts for a podcast episode and YouTube videos.

Think of it as building an external knowledge base.

And one that you can leverage the next time a tax/accounting question pops up in the online groups you're a part of. "I made a video explaining this" is a great way to build brand.

The goal is to become known as the "go-to person for tax/accounting questions" in your target niche.

Back when I started my firm, I posted 1300 answers to tax questions on an online real estate forum over the span of two years.

This springboarded my firm's growth and I still get leads from those posts today.

No Blog or Social Media?!

If you don't have a way to drive eyeballs to your blog, it's a waste of time (for now).

And though social media can be an amazing channel, it's hard to start with because it requires daily posting which puts you in a state of constantly brainstorming the next piece of content.

My bet is you're too busy for that.

I want your content creation to require absolutely 0 brainstorming. A low barrier to entry will ensure you (1) stay on topic, and (2) post consistently.

So ignore the shiny object and go back to your niche's online forums and Facebook groups.

My niche doesn't have an online forum or Facebook group

Every community is online these days so if you're not finding your niche's online forum or group, either (1) you're not looking hard enough; or (2) you've niched down too far.

A more realistic scenario is your niche has an online community but rarely asks tax/accounting questions.

In this case, I want you to do two things:

Offer to do a live tax or accounting Q&A with the community admins. The admins will drive people to the event (which is the hard part). Better yet, do this 1x per month.
Create your own Facebook group specifically for people in your niche to ask tax and accounting questions.

We did #2 and now have a Facebook group of 15,000+ real estate investors.

Every day, we answer tax questions posted by the community. It's super easy because it requires zero content planning, and we can point members to our other channels at will.

In a future email, I'll explain why I think Facebook groups are amazing and underutilized.

But you didn't tell me how to market my advisory services!

Here's the thing...

Marketing is about building a brand of trust. You want to become know as "THE go-to person" for tax or accounting issues in your niche.

Building a brand of trust is your number one focus.

Focus on writing high-quality answers in those niche online communities and producing quality podcasts and YouTube videos.

On your podcasts and YouTube videos, plug your service and show how it can help your followers.

It's the jab, jab, jab, right hook method Gary Vee developed.

Give value, give more value, give even more value, and then tell people how you can help them.

If there are already accountants in your niche doing this...

I am known as "The Real Estate CPA" which is great for me because pretty much all landlords will give us a chance in the sales process.

But here's how you can beat me:

Niche down further.

For example, you could become known as the CPA for Realtors. You'll have a much better chance of closing realtors than I will because your positioning becomes superior to that sub-niche.

"Sure, you can work with Brandon, but I am THE accountant for realtors."

Upcoming Posts in this Series

Over the coming weeks, here's what you can expect each Saturday:

Mar 11th: Pricing and Selling Your Advisory Service
- How to price your service and consistently test new prices
- We'll walk through my sales framework (and get you out of sales!)
Mar 18th: Fulfilling Projects and Building a High Caliber Team
- How to manage relationships and projects
- How to build a high caliber team to deliver these services

That’s all for this Saturday.

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