Truth be told, you don’t have to be an award winning copywriter to make effectual marketing materials for your CPA practice. I found out a number of years back that even the “pros” use templates to make ads and sales letters that get results.
Previous to I share my template, it is vital to first know some of the objections that may be going on in the mind of the prospect when they see your advertising. You will want to make sure the marketing piece you make overcomes these objections.
These objections could include:
? You don’t know my problem.
? How do I know you are qualified?
? I don’t believe you.
? I don’t need it right now.
? It won’t work for me.
? What happens if I don’t like it?
? I can’t meet the expense of it.
Here is my 12-point template to follow to make effectual material pieces:
1) Get attention
If the headline doesn’t catch the prospect’s attention, the rest of the letter will not be read. Here’s an example of a excellent headline: “Some Small Business Owners Pay A Lot More Tax Than Others; Will You Pay Too Much In 2009?”
2) Identify the problem
After you have gotten the reader’s attention, you need to gain their interest by spelling out their problem. The reader should say to themselves “yeah, that’s exactly how I feel” when he or she reads your sales letter. This practice in the marketing world is called “problem – agitate.”
3) Provide the solution
In this section, you will introduce yourself and your air force. You spot yourself as the solution to their problem.
4) Present your credentials
This is the time and opportunity to toot your own horn. A few things you may consider to place here are the part of time you have been in this area of expertise, as well as vital awards or recognition.
For myself, I talk about my credentials, including the fact that I am author of a book and a list of magazines I have appeared in.
5) Show the benefits
Help your prospects know what they will gain from your air force.
6) Give social proof
Provide testimonials from real clients as evidence that your claims are right.
7) Make your place forward
Have a specific place forward-more specific than your general air force. 
Give a guarantee
Guarantees help overcome the objection “What if it doesn’t work?”
9) Inject scarcity
Make sure the reader understands this place forward isn’t going to be available forever. This helps to encourage them to take action now.
10) Call to action
Tell prospects clearly and specifically what to do in order to take you up on your place forward.
11) Give a warning
What will the prospects miss out on if they don’t take action now?
12) Close with a reminder
Sure, twelve steps are a small more work than slapping down your name, address, and phone number in an image ad. But if you are serious about growing your CPA practice, it is vital to implement effectual CPA marketing techniques.
From hereon, when you want to make effectual CPA firm marketing materials, follow the 12-point template that I have just mutual with you.
Posts Tagged ‘Killer’
Grow Your CPA Firm Using Killer Marketing Materials
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010Killer Closing Kungfu For CPAs
Monday, May 31st, 2010If you’re a CPA who’s working on improving your marketing, and you’ve by now made the time for marketing, positioned yourself as the expert, and packaged your air force…and you have a steady stream of leads flowing in–the next step is “meeting with the prospect” and “selling” them on your service, right?
The excellent news is that closing the sale is really very simple, when you know how to do it, without feeling pushy and without the prospective client feeling like you’re pushing them to sign on the dotted line.
I’ve been experimenting with the soft close over the last 7 years now on many hundreds of different prospects, and I’ve made every mistake in the book, most of which cost me potential clients. But along the way, I kept getting better and better at it, and started crafting a process that I now consider pretty reliable.
Here’s the process I have in place when a business prospect calls my office wanting to meet with me:
1) When the prospect calls, the admin person in the front office collects all their information on a preliminary interview sheet, including their contact information, how they heard about my firm, questions about their existing CPA relationship and the reason they want to meet with me.
2) Then the meeting is scheduled with me after 5-7 business days.
3) A packet of information is mailed to them previous to they meet with me. They receive the packet from me that contains several things: a sheet on the team members, special report or my book, testimonials, past newsletters…it’s a thick “shock and awe” packet of information. We also include a “confidential application” in the packet that they must complete.
4) The prospect comes to my office to meet with me. Keep in mind that no one likes to be sold, but everyone likes to buy. With that in mind, I question the prospect how they heard of my firm. I question to take a look at their completed application so I can get a better overview of their revenues, their goals, books they have read, etc.
I probe into their needs, what has lacked in their existing relationship with their CPA and why they are looking for a exchange in their CPAs, what are their major challenges, what are their long and fleeting term growth plans?
All the while I am making notes. I take a brief look at their business and personal tax returns.
I am listening ninety percent of the time and only interjecting to encourage the prospect to dig deeper into their issues. This is vital; most CPAs go astray here, because they are not asking excellent questions and they are not attentively listening.
By engaging the prospect with excellent probing questions, you have differentiated yourself from the rest of the practitioners in your area. I use my notes to recap the list of things they need help on.
5) I briefly talk about what differentiates my firm from the rest and the service packages we place forward and then I go into fees.
And differentiating my firm and me is vital because when I come to the part of my meeting when I talk about my fees, I don’t want the prospect to say “but this other CPA quoted me this.” I have changed the playing field such that the air force they will receive are perceived to be very different than what my competitors would place forward.
6) I get the appropriate signatures and payment and my firm has now got a new business client.
7) After the client is signed up, I will briefly meet with my Senior Manager to hand off to her the client paperwork. She takes it from there. She will call the client two days later to officially welcome them to our CPA practice and schedule their orientation meeting two weeks later. In the meantime, the admin person will send them a fruit basket and a “welcome aboard” card. I am looking at this as a lifetime relationship and a strong referral source so I am prepared to invest in it from the get-go.
Excellent closing techniques are very vital as the final step in converting a prospect into a client. The excellent news is that closing the sale is really very simple when you follow the process I have identified in this article.
Why RSS May be the Email Killer – Part 1
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010According to online statistics from eMarketer, less than 20% of internet users intentionally read content with the aid of an RSS reader.
Indeed, even frequent internet users have no thought what that small orange RSS square represents and certainly don’t realize that there is a huge shift brewing in the bowels of online publishing and marketing.
But, that may exchange more quickly than we all used to reckon for 3 very potent reasons.
There are advantages to RSS that will compel most, if not all, internet users and content consumers to “learn” to use an RSS reader and start managing RSS subscriptions.
In the same way email eclipsed snail mail for content delivery, RSS will eclipse email as the consumer’s choice for opt-in messaging.
If you are an email peddler, the time for you to get engaged to RSS has come, because, whether you like it or not, the wedding bells will be ringing soon.
Here’s why…
RSS = EMBEDDED VIDEO(and audio)
I recently was questioned to help a small business embed video into emails they wanted to send to established clients.
Their vision was clear:
1. Make a quick video email with a webcam, stick it right into their corporate Outlook email with a Youtube style preview.
2. The customer gets the email, clicks the Youtube-looking video preview and the video start playing.
3. No landing page, they wanted everthing to happen right there inside the email client, whether it was Outlook, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo or otherwise.
Simple right? Nope…
This is simply not possible with email.
Many brilliant companies have tried various tactics to embed video into email in a way that doesn’t consistently get blocked or stripped by the various email providers.
With email, the best that can be done is mimic the embedded video look by putting a video preview image in the email which opens up the web browser and plays the video there when clicked.
Ironically, even this comes at a significant cost because of the technical knowledge needed to make it happen.
So why is this a less than perfect solution?
Primarily because none of us like to be bounced around, we want to view video instantly, seamlessly.
After all, we have been trained to expect this amount of immediacy by seeing it everyday on Google’s “universal search” and countless blogs.
The excellent news is, embedded video and audio are part and parcel (fundamental elements) of RSS.
Count video (and audio) that can be instantly viewed by a name receiving an RSS feed is as simple as count text.
Readers get what they have come to expect and corporations, as well as small businesses, can provide dynamic, highly personal content without paying a coder or webmaster thousands of bucks.
RSS = 100% DELIVERABILITY
I was shocked to see the stats on email deliverability rates for the typical business. The fact is, even if you have come by a person’s email honestly (that is – you did not buy a bootleg list of emails from some guy in a dark virtual alley) the likelihood of them really receiving that message from you is 60% or less.
So, let’s say you have a list of 1000 customer emails – which you have worked hard and paid real cash to buy. When you send a message, 400 of them (on average) don’t get it. It either involuntarily lands in their Spam Folder or gets deleted even previous to it reaches them.
Even companies like Aweber who make a living sending emails for other people and have intimate agreements with email providers like Gmail, AOL and Yahoo, only get a 90% deliverabilty rate – on a excellent day (they claim %99.4 but I use Aweber and when I factor in the total opt-in and email management process, at least 10% of my emails are undelivered).
RSS is reasonably different. If a name has opted-in to your RSS “feed”, they will get 100% of your messages. No doubt about it.
This is obviously excellent for the company but how is this also an advantage for the customer?
Well, have you ever had the frustration of opting-in to a touch that you were interested in only to find (after searching for a few minutes) that it was buried in your spam box.
Have you ever had to “whitelist” an email address so that each email that was sent wasn’t immediately deleted?
Doing this takes TIME… the most expensive commodity any one of us owns.
Once consumers realize there is a simpler way to get 100% of what they want, 100% of the time, and 0% of what they don’t want, RSS will start to look like a (pardon the ancient expression) “no brainer”.
RSS = SPAM-FREE
This may be the “tipping point” that triggers the general masses toward RSS.
Yes, spam is annoying… it takes time to delete… it contains inappropriate messages which make parents steaming mad… and it is the constant burden of corporations and email providers.
Especially due to the last reason, email will not be free forever. You may not have to pay if you send just a few emails to your acquaintances and family each month but if your sending out a significant number of messages… you will pay.
This will be the email manager’s final attempt at curbing the clever spammer.
In fact, email providers are by now debating and tweaking a platform similar to cell phone companies where you will have a sending quota.
This will only push spamming into a “higher” art form and challenge the suprisingly intelligent geeks behind this modern phenomenon to new technical heights.
All of this will only serve to highlight the value of RSS even more and compel the average folks into opening up a Google Reader account or using the one they goofed around with more evenly.
But, previous to RSS eliminates email as we know it, a few things have to happen…
We will cover this in Part 2 of “Why RSS May Be The Email Killer”.