CHAPTER 1

A Long and
Winding Road

Accounting marketing has an interesting, albeit fairly short, history. Many firm partners still remember the days when it was against AICPA rules to advertise, market, directly solicit, or even participate in competitive bidding. Virtually non-existent for most of the 20th century, the practice has evolved at a rather slow pace even since the rules were changed. In some cases, any increase in firm marketing has been despite the objection of firm leadership because longer-standing partners recall the earlier proscription. Although the reluctance is slowly dissipating, some baby boomers who cut their teeth in the 1970s still have a bit of an aversion toward the whole idea of marketing their services.

Like kids who could suddenly pick out their own school clothes after years of wearing a uniform, most firms found the change a bit overwhelming when the ban was lifted. Suddenly adding marketing to the mix of firm operations created an atmosphere where thinking creatively was an asset, and the shift cast most accounting professionals into a sea of uncertainty. What should we do? Who will be responsible for it? Isn’t it just tacky to advertise? Who will pay for it, and how much should we set aside for it? Can’t we just wait for referrals to come our way like we always did? The questions were endless and drove more than a few firms and practitioners to simply put off the decision and stick with the status quo.

It’s strange to think that there was a time when there was no such thing as accounting marketing, nor were there any accounting marketers. Hard as it is to imagine, the profession many of us take for granted simply didn’t exist 35 years ago! But it did develop over time, and, not surprisingly, it was the Big 8 (or Big 5 or Big 4, take your pick) that led the charge. Armed with budgets that were the envy of smaller firms, these industry giants found it easy to test out the fresh opportunities. By the mid-90s, the big dogs were spending millions of dollars on advertising.

The small to mid-sized firms that opted to follow the lead of the larger, international firms began to see the benefits of investing in marketing as well, though still very conservatively. By the mid-90s, many of them had firm brochures that they could hand to clients when needed; they might have spruced up their stationery and business cards a bit to look more distinctive. Some were probably even wondering quietly whether there was any advantage to creating a website, although few made that leap until several years later.

THE SLOW CLIMB

Accounting marketing got a very late start, which was followed by reluctance and confusion on how to use this newfound power. But by the mid-90s, things started changing, and at a pretty rapid pace too. The Association for Accounting Marketing, which began in 1988, had more than 200 participants at its annual summit by 1995. The fledging concept of professional firm marketing was off to the races, and firms that were taking advantage of their marketing freedom were seeing the results of their efforts. Over time, nearly every firm started implementing some form of marketing. Whether it was developing brochures and other print materials, mailing a newsletter each month, actively seeking out press coverage, or inviting local bankers in for a lunch and learn, firms were moving forward. By the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, quite a few firms had created and launched very simple websites, most by simply taking their brochure content and tossing it online. These early websites were rarely revised or even reviewed once they were up; they represented a significant development but remained a far cry from the carefully crafted, interactive sites of today.

Well into the 2000s (and sometimes even today), accounting marketers would hear partners grumble about the dollars spent on marketing and field questions about the lack of immediate return on investment. That difficulty in demonstrating an instant payoff remains a challenge for many accounting marketers. Unlike most industries where marketing is considered an investment, many in the accounting profession see it as an expense, and one that is hard to measure and account for. Much of the benefit is virtually unquantifiable: how do you put a value on strong branding, goodwill, or respect? For that matter, how do you measure such accomplishments?

A Brief History of Accounting Advertising

In the early 1900s, accounting firms would alert potential clients to their services by purchasing advertisements in city directories or creating and handing out flyers. It sounds pretty reasonable, but the American Institute of Accountants, which eventually became the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), was not fond of this self-promotion. To put an end to the practice, in 1922 they banned nearly all forms of promotion for public accounting firms. This was not unique to CPAs either; similar restrictions were put in place by the associations representing lawyers, doctors, and other professional services providers.

Not long afterward, the rule was expanded to include a prohibition against “direct solicitation,” which covered any uninvited in-person visits, conversations, or telephone calls to a potential client. Taken to the nth degree, a CPA could be sanctioned for simply striking up a conversation with someone on the subway about her profession. Decades later, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) posited that the prohibitions against advertising were illegally restricting trade among the professions and began pressuring the associations to get rid of these rules.

Despite how over-the-top it all sounds to those of us who didn’t work under these rules, this provision wasn’t overturned by the AICPA until 1978, after AICPA members adjusted Rule 502 of the Code of Professional Conduct to allow advertising that was not “false, misleading or deceptive,” commonly referred to as the “Bates Decision” in reference to the U.S. Supreme Court case Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. Even then, a handful of state societies kept the rule in place for their members. In fact, it wasn’t until 1985, when a CPA named Scott Fane sued the Florida State Board of Accountancy for violation of free speech, that it was overturned for good. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally struck down the restriction on direct solicitation by a vote of 8 to 1.

These original restrictions led to a lasting feeling that it was unseemly for professional services firms to advertise in any way, regardless of whether the content was informational or accurate. Falling somewhere between wearing white before Easter and stealing your neighbor’s lawn furniture, self-promotion and direct solicitation was something you just didn’t do for many years. Even after the legality of marketing accounting services had been clearly established, most firms were very slow to take advantage of their newly secured marketing freedom.1

CONSISTENCY AND COMMITMENT ARE KEY

Unlike a single purchase, such as a car or a computer, where the cost is upfront and the benefits are tangible and immediate, marketing is a process. Successful marketing delivers incremental results by starting slowly and building on earlier progress. The reality is that marketing is more akin to going to the gym than many firm leaders recognize. No matter how enthusiastically and diligently you begin your workout program, you’re not going to be able to flaunt washboard abs and a svelte new shape in only a few weeks. Instead, you show up at the gym at six each morning and sweat, only to be rewarded with sore muscles and a stubbornly unmoving scale needle. Likewise with marketing, the payoff takes consistent effort and a prolonged commitment to your plan. But even with the best planning and most diligent work, it takes time to see the fruits of your labors.

If you lose interest within a month or two, trying out different fitness machines and classes and showing up less often before eventually giving up, you’ll end up with no demonstrable progress. That doesn’t imply that your workouts had no value, only that you weren’t measuring their value accurately. Conversely, you can’t use every machine or show up at every spin class, or spend all day, every day in the gym. You need a plan that works for you. Ideally, you’ll consult with a trainer to assess your current fitness level and help you design an effective improvement plan tailored for your specific needs and abilities. You’ll select a few machines or classes, or a combination of both, and establish a workout routine that matches your goals while working within the time and energy you have available to devote to your new fitness initiative. You’ll be wary of over-committing time or energy (which could result in a quick burnout) or spending too much money on equipment you don’t really need. You’ll definitely select a variety of exercises to keep from getting so bored you can’t make yourself do one more rep.

This exercise analogy highlights another lingering challenge posed by the veteran guard of marketing-averse partners. Even if they grudgingly agree to approve a bit of marketing, few of them want to take chances with creativity. Instead of starting from scratch and crafting messages that are unique to their firms, they tend to prefer messaging that is nearly identical to that of their competitors down the road. They’ll often go so far as to ask those responsible for marketing to copy the tactics of competing firms. In fact, we have found it all too common that if you were to remove the names from five random CPA firm websites, it would become nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other based on their language and branding.

Which brings us to today’s standards of accounting marketing. Though many firm marketers still fight uphill battles to get the recognition and budget they need and deserve, the situation overall is much better than it was even 10 years ago. It’s rare that anyone asks if a firm needs a website; more commonly the discussion centers on what the website should contain. More and more, partners are discussing what differentiates them from their competition, allowing their firms to compete more easily and effectively and not fall into the trap of commoditization in the eyes of their audiences. Social media is gaining greater acceptance because its benefits are more understood and its low cost embraced by budget-conscious firms. In essence, firms are making the shift from one-way (also known as “push” or “outbound”) marketing to two-way (or “pull” or “inbound”) marketing.

PUSH VERSUS PULL MARKETING

At the risk of getting too deep into marketing minutia, I do want to take a moment to explain one of the biggest shifts that marketing has ever seen: push versus pull marketing.

Push Marketing

Also referred to as “outbound” or “one-way marketing,” push marketing describes what most businesses have been doing for ages. Basically, it’s when a company “pushes” a message to an audience in the hopes that the audience will see it and respond. No two-way interaction is expected in most cases. The ultimate goal is to get someone to call your firm, buy your car, order your alarm service, and so on. Push marketing, when done well, delivers your firm into the laps of those who might need your services. It gives people information they weren’t actively looking for but might be willing to act on once they have been presented with your message. Direct mail campaigns such as clothing catalogs or election mailers are perfect examples of push marketing.

Pull Marketing

Pull marketing, of course, takes the opposite approach. These efforts are meant to “pull” a client to your firm or business. Today’s Internet-savvy consumer would never consider making a major purchase without conducting research, much of which is done online. Firms that are adept at pull marketing have information in place that these research-happy prospects can find, immediately giving the firms a leg up on competitors that don’t market this way. Pull marketing is the messaging you create to be found by those who are actively seeking information on a topic or who are looking for a provider. Blogging, social media participation, and search engine optimization are all good examples of pull efforts. By employing these strategies, accounting firms help to ensure that they will be found by potential clients who are taking an active role in exploring some aspect of the firms’ services.

Think about it this way: you’ve just moved to a new neighborhood and need to find a dentist. In most cases, your efforts will be assisted by a combination of push and pull marketing tactics. You may receive a postcard from the local dentist that hits at just the right time (push). You may see a billboard or bus bench ad on your way to work about a local dental practice (push). You may ask for recommendations from your Facebook friends, who then direct you to their dentist’s social media pages (pull). Or you’ll conduct a web search for dental offices within 10 miles of your new home and click through to their websites (pull). You may even get a telemarketing call from a local provider (push). In the end, you will weigh the pros and cons of your options and make a decision about who gets to take care of your missing filling based on the cumulative information you have at hand.

Pull marketing is certainly seeing a surge in popularity—much of this book will discuss how to take advantage of these inbound tactics—but it’s a fool’s errand to toss out all push marketing. Many people are turned off by push marketing and will automatically discard or tune out the messages they receive this way. Sometimes, though, push marketing delivers the right message at the opportune moment, and there are audiences that pull marketing will never reach. Ultimately, it is the firm that can find the right balance of both methods that will get the best results.

No two firms are alike, either. This is why you won’t find a standardized checklist in these pages, where you just insert your firm name into a template and then sit back and watch the calls and emails come rolling in. Marketing is much more of an art than a science. Finding what makes your firm unique and communicating that in the most effective way possible isn’t always easy, but those who make the effort to identify and properly share their message will definitely see powerful results. And just as with fitness, marketing progress starts slowly. With a consistent, well-planned effort, marketing’s benefits can extend beyond the original expectations.

Interview: Suzanne Verity, Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM) Founder and Life-Long Accounting Marketing Champion

Suzanne saw the future of accounting marketing long before most people had any idea what to do with it. In addition to founding the Association for Accounting Marketing, she is an award-winning communications professional and expert marketer who has held a variety of roles in the industry.

Tell me about how and when you got into accounting marketing and what role you played.

In 1984, my first year out of college, I interviewed for a job with Professional Publications, an Atlanta-based newsletter company. Owner and president Robert Palmer, a CPA, started Public Accounting Report from his kitchen table. To my knowledge, it was the first independent publication—meaning no advertising—devoted to coverage of the accounting profession. Bob had the inspiration and foresight to branch out from there to offer a full family of newsletters covering multiple aspects of the business of running a public accounting firm. My assignment (because I did land the job!) was CPA Marketing Report.

How did you see the Bates decision affecting the industry and how CPAs went about “marketing” themselves and their firms?

Bates encouraged accountants to dip their toes in the water in terms of how they went about getting new business. I came in five years post-Bates, and it was about that time when the first marketing positions were being created. Even so, we were a long way from acceptance of marketing as a respected in-house function or marketers as strategic contributors. Arthur Andersen was probably the first of the then-12 global firms to have a full complement of high-level marketing professionals. At most firms below that level, however, often it was the managing partner’s secretary (and that’s what they were called back then) or, if the firm was big enough, the office manager or firm administrator who would “draw the short straw” to add marketing, whatever-the-heck that was, to her duties. As for the duties... database and contact management (without the technology to manage the function), direct marketing (of the snail-mail variety), collecting information about Yellow Pages advertising (and how to secure better placement than AAA Accounting Services in the alphabetical arrangement)! So, at that time, Bates was primarily a boon to the Yellow Pages, creating new listing categories for accountants and attorneys!

You hear the same kind of conversation about websites now: “i guess we’ll do one, but no one will find us on the web.” And...

And they do. That’s exactly right. Yesterday’s Yellow Pages ads were the precursors and counterparts of today’s social media. In the beginning of accounting marketing, would-be clients leafed through the Yellow Pages; now they turn to Google. Search engine optimization is today’s equivalent of making a decision about the placement of your ad, how much space to buy, and all that. So it’s old school and new. The principle is still there.

So in 1984 were firms excited to have the opportunity to market themselves or were they unsure of what marketing was?

Excited? Not! Unsure, for sure. Most firms referred to what we call marketing and business development today as practice development then, or, even one step removed, practice management. I think that says something. I think most firms embraced marketing begrudgingly at first. The partners saw it as a necessary evil, a far-from-proven support function that added to overhead and subtracted from their draw.

So was it just considered unseemly to admit that you want to grow?

At that time I don’t think they associated marketing with growth.

What events did the most to shift the perception towards recognizing marketing as useful and acceptable rather than horribly gauche?

I think the AICPA did a good job of jumping in early on to create conferences, programs, and resources related to marketing. The annual Practice Management Conference was the main attraction. Marketing was added to the topical mix, and that’s also when non-accountants who had been hired to handle marketing duties began intermingling with partners.

Do you remember certain early accounting marketing campaigns that may have been particularly effective?

I remember an out-of-the-box advertising campaign that won kudos and awards for a regional firm based in Minneapolis. The marketing director there used her allotted time at the firm management retreat for arts and crafts.

Luckily, the partners played along. They grabbed crayons, finger paints, construction paper, and paste to create self-portraits. The idea was to portray them outside of their accounting persona, to reflect their hobbies and special interests. The final masterpieces were featured in a series of advertisements in the city business journal. The firm and the partners received many calls and comments because their self-portraits and the campaign theme broke stereotypes. The relaxed creativity left clients with the impression that the same creativity would be applied to their business matters and the firm’s solutions.

How long did it take for most firms to designate funds and create a real marketing budget? I ask that with the knowledge that quite a few firms still don’t have a marketing budget today.

I would say that the mid-90s was about the time when firms, in number, started to consider marketing as a legitimate business function and organize as such. Around this time, marketing at big firms was finally broken out as a dedicated cost/revenue center, with defined goals and expectations. For a large number of firms, for instance most of those within Public Accounting Firm’s Top 100, marketing stopped being a sideline of the firm administrator or an after-hours commitment begrudgingly taken on by an assigned partner-in-charge.

What do you find most surprising or even shocking about accounting marketing?

I think marketing is finally coming into its own as a business discipline within the profession of public accounting, across the board. It was always baffling to me that CPAs took so long to acknowledge marketing and sales as a necessary investment to grow their firms because they wouldn’t advise their clients to go without such. I think it all goes back to the essence of the accounting profession itself. What we are selling is intangible for the most part: relationships, brainpower, expertise, rapport. The most successful accounting marketers are experts at personification, and there must be a symbiotic relationship with the public accounting professionals they are working for. This is a business in which marketers cannot be disembodied from the firms they serve; they must be fully integrated with mutual dependency.

What do you have to say to today’s accounting marketers?

Hats off to those who stuck it out and paved the way as pioneers in what was basically a hostile environment. Their successors still need a pioneering spirit because marketing itself changes along with the business of accounting. Social media has changed everything when it comes to reaching out, getting attention, closing deals, making money. Whether it’s the firm itself or even its clients, it’s just all different.

And I think working in that environment as a marketer is fun and challenging. When I tell people that I have worked with accountants for the majority of my career, they kind of want to console me. I tell them they are dead wrong, that it’s an exciting beat for me. CPAs are entrepreneurs at heart, and public accounting is at the heart of the business world and our economy. Partners are a lot like doctors in a way. They go into their field because they love to help their clients, just like doctors want to diagnose and heal their clients and prevent problems in the future. CPAs have that same drive to help and heal. And the ones who are good at it make a good living along the way. CPAs are business people for sure, but I also think there is a lot of altruism there, I really do. I think they are good people to work for.

And good marketing will let everyone know that fact.

1 Clikeman, Paul M. Called to Account: Financial Frauds that Shaped the Accounting Profession. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013.

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