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Generating press coverage for your accountancy practice. By Tim Prizeman
While many accountancy practices will look at the widespread media coverage achieved by the Big Four and other large firms and wonder how they can compete for press attention, in fact there are huge opportunities for smaller practitioners. In dealing with the press it is the fast that beat the slow, not the big that beat the small - sole practitioners and high street firms can use their nimbleness and entrepreneurialism to secure the sort of valuable press coverage that attract business leads, new recruits or to generally enhances their kudos.Whenever there are changes journalists need financial and business experts to interpret these developments and explain the effects on their readers (particularly who will be the winners and losers and how much will it cost them). There is no-one better placed than an accountant to do this, and small local practices should not be in awe of larger firms: they are often slow-moving bureaucracies whose public pronouncements are compromised by their need to avoid upsetting big clients and to suck-up to the Government in order not to jeopardise public sector work.
My advice for accountants doing PR, particularly those doing it on a shoestring, includes:
- Decide on your area of expertise (are you an expert on businesses in a location, industry, tax specialist, etc). You must be a specialist – journalists are not interested in speaking to generalists... you can, however, be an expert in lots of things!
- Think in terms of winners, losers and quantities, not in terms of academic principles.
- Subscribe to (and read) the publications you want to be in so you know what issues they are following and who is writing what stories (obvious….but it's amazing how many people don't read publications they profess are important to their clients).
- The next time a development arises that effects its readers (eg tax change, VAT tribunal, or you just generally think that people in that industry are missing a particular trick) immediately ring up the journalist and say something along the following lines: "Hello, I’m Mark Tomarket from accountants Tick & Bash. The change in yesterday’s Budget increasing employers’ national insurance could have a dramatic adverse effect on employment in this town because of the large number of retail and other labour intensive industries – is this a story you are interested in covering?".
- Be persistent, and look on your dealings with journalists in the same way you would seek to win a new client – you need to build up a relationship with certain key journalists, and the more you can help them to do their job, the more valuable a contact you become.
- Do involve your clients (with their permission). Journalists love real businesspeople who will act as case studies or give a view from the shop floor, and find it hard to track down such people. The coverage will earn you undying gratitude from your clients and secure great coverage for your firm into the bargain.
- Having gone to all the effort of getting lots of press coverage, don’t rely on people reading the magazine! Use cuttings as powerful marketing collateral – perhaps have copies in your reception, links on your website, get prints of the article and mail them to contacts or use them as leave behinds after meetings with prospects.
No doubt the same could be accomplished by a press release, but you won't build up a relationship with a journalist by sending them press releases. In any case, by the time you have drafted and sent it someone else will have called and beaten you to the punch.
Accountants can take heart that at times like these when clients are being assailed by economic problems, excessive taxation and over-regulation... it's an excellent time for getting your name in lights as someone who can help!
You may be thinking about starting a blog to attract business, after all there is lots of coverage about them and you no doubt know someone who is doing one. Don’t ! Following this advice will save you thousands of pounds in saved time and costs – please take this money and give it to charity, or if you don’t fancy that simply throw it down a drain: at least that way you will still have saved the time you would otherwise waste. Why? Here is one of many points to consider...
Last year blog search engine Technorati was already tracking over 72m blogs, with over 175,000 new ones being created per day. While a modest number of these have large and growing followings, most have quickly become moribund after attracting negligible interest. If you generously guesstimate that one hundred successful blogs are launched everyday, that also means 149,900 unsuccessful ones each day, on top of at least 71.75m existing little visited ones – not great odds!
Tim Prizeman is director of PR advisors Kelso Consulting, who specialise in advising professional partnerships. You can email Tim at timp@kelsopr.com
Number of comments: 5
AccountingWEB.co.uk 15-May-2008
Categories: Practice Features
Times read: 1840
Mark, you have a major point and let's not make it easy for the technicians to drag the profession back.
It's actually not that difficult to find content for the blog/magazine because there are letters, reports, telephone and meeting notes being produced every day littered with key words. Just cut and paste, remove the clients name and you have the basis of an interesting article.
Go for it and you'll be different and being different is half the battle.
Good luck
Bob Harper
www.moresoftware.biz
If you integrate a blog into your website and if it is regularly updated and if it is rich with the words and phrases that your target audience use when searching for accountants on the web and if ...(various related points), then YES you're right.. Your website will then be more attractive to the search engines than one that doesn't have a blog. But that's a lot of IFs for a typical accountancy practice to satisfy. Hence the reason I tend to agree with Tim's advice above about blogging.
Mark Lee
Tax Advice Network
Mark Lee
As I understand it, and I am not an expert so maybe someone who is can clarify, but a blog 'attached' to your website helps with getting you up the Google rankings. This in itself may be worth the time and effort to keep you on the 'first page' of the search engines.
Both as regards PR and blogging - although Bob's idea below is also worth considering.
It's strange but the idea of gaining free publicity on TV, radio and In print seems not to be attractive to accountants. Together with Chantal Cooke, media guru and owner of the Passion for the Planet radio station, I have been promoting a dedicated workshop on this subject for accountants and tax advisers. The level of interest has been surprisingly low.
Maybe accountants are just not really interested in this subject?
Mark Lee
Tax Advice Network
Mark Lee
A blog or "online business magazine" (as I prefer to call it) is something professional service firms can use to great advantage as part of their marketing and communication strategy.
Think about it. For literally no money a firm can set-up and update their own online magazine every day. The entire team can be involved which is great for developing team culture and demonstrates the firm lives in the “real-time”.
There can be articles about tax and general business advice as well as commentary on topical issues of the day like the credit crunch crisis. A firm can even announce and publish the results of its annual client survey!
While local key influencers, like bank managers, receive template newsletters from other firms which look and read the same you’ll be sending them regular emails with a link to your unique Website to keep them informed. You could even build relationships with key influencers by recording interviews with them and uploading to your online magazine.
Using technology like this is low cost and high impact. If, like me, you believe in education as the basis of the marketing strategy then a blog is a great platform. Inform and impress clients and prospects about important changes and developments and this dovetails with your positioning for value pricing.
Now, if you do some PR and someone reads the article and visits your Website, the promise of a proactive firm is enhanced by great content. This means the chance of an enquiry is significantly improved. Bearing in mind marketing is a two stage process (and getting people to check you out online is step one) having great content is vital whatever marketing you are doing.
There are many other tactics and strategies combining online and offline marketing. Linking the blog/magazine to PR could be done by writing a brief article about a Press Release. The article could refer to an online briefing for the journalists (which you host using Website and video using Camtasia) with a Q&A session at the end. The video could have a link to a Press Release for them to download.
I’ve only seen a handful of firms use a blog and now use the full potential because they haven’t rolled it into the wider marketing mix. There’s a huge opportunity for firms and keep in mind this type marketing is going to attract and develop technology friendly sophisticated clients that are drawn towards consulting and willing to pay a premium
Bob Harper
www.moresoftware.biz
