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Why I'm not attending a bookkeeping conference

27th Jun 2018
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I surprised myself recently by signing up for Media Influence Live which is an event next week in London organised by PR and marketing expert Janet Murray. As an attendee I will spend the day with journalists from big-name newspapers, magazines and media.

As a start-up I have a fairly small budget for events, and I promised myself I'd try to attend at least, but probably just one big event every year. Last year I attended for a day of the ICB's Bookkeeper's Summit in London, it was an expensive day out but the conference gave me the opportunity to get up to date, to meet some fellow bookkeepers and to find out about some service providers who I've since started working with. I attended some interesting sessions, but I can't say that I couldn't have found similar content available online if I sought it out - there's heaps of stuff available at the moment from the likes of FreeAgent, QuickBooks and my accounting body the ACCA. 

I usually attend several local networking events every quarter, a lot of my clients attend a group called Freelance Mum in Bristol so it makes sense for me to be there regularly, and there are some brilliant Enterprise Nation events here in Bristol which have added a lot of value for me. This year being confident that I am up to date with topical issues in the bookkeeping world, I've decided to invest my events budget somewhere entirely different from the traditional bookkeeping conference. What's important to me in my business now is scaling, building my reputation and establishing myself as an expert in what I do. And to do that I need to get my business in front of a lot of people, and I don't need those people to be fellow bookkeepers and accountants, those people need to be potential clients, hence Media Influence Live. 

Over the course of this year, I've spent a lot of time building up content on my website, particularly in the blog (sorry AccountingWeb, this has meant a lot less articles from me) and using that content I've been able to target my clients through social media which as it happens is where they spend a lot of time.

Last year I asked a social media expert how on earth a bookkeeper would use Instagram. There are one of two doing it, there are some bookkeepers using the generic stock photos sharing bookeeping tips, maybe the odd motivational quote. Then of course there's Claire Owen-Jones who puts me to shame with her award winning instagram account full of hilarious anecdotes of her life in stick-man form. So it took me a while to get my head around what exactly I should be doing until I realised that through the blog I actually had this great content I could share with the world. And it's paying off. Last week I signed up a client who told me she came to me because I was visible to her on the platform she was using to engage with her own clients, and that made me current. So that investment of time in building the content, building the blog, spending time on social media is a return on investment I can really measure. That got me thinking about the return on investment of the events I'm choosing to attend. Getting my name in front of lots of fellow bookkeepers and accountants is brilliant for building knowledge of my practice within the industry but actually if I want to get myself in front of clients, then I need to do something else.  

The world's changing, networking's important, but it's also important to remember that we need to be where our clients are. This might mean starting to challenge the events we choose to attend, whether they're really helping us meet the targets we're setting for ourselves or whether we need to change the ways we think about networking and how we find our clients entirely. My clients are creatives and they spend time on Instagram so it makes sense for me to be there, it's how they find me and how they communicate with me, however unlikely I thought that might be. 

So, which networking event are you attending this year? 

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FT
By FirstTab
29th Jun 2018 12:24

Interesting blog. Thank you.

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