Episode 205: The Only Marketing Plan Your Accounting Firm Actually Needs

You have tried the ads. You have posted on social media. You have handed it to an agency. And yet here you are, still wondering why the leads aren't coming.

In this session, the Wize team breaks down exactly what it takes to build a marketing plan for your accounting firm that doesn't just look good on paper but actually gets executed week after week.

✅ Why 5% of your revenue should be dedicated to marketing and what that looks like at every firm size 

✅ How to identify who you are actually attracting before you spend a single dollar reaching them 

✅ Why consistency beats strategy every time and how to pick the marketing channel you will actually stick to 

✅ The SEO approach that generated 58,000 monthly website views and still holds without being touched for two years 

✅ Why outsourcing your marketing without a strategy first is one of the most common and costly mistakes firm owners make 

✅ How to study your own client base to build a data-driven marketing plan that actually converts

If you have been spending money on marketing and wondering why it isn't moving the needle, this session is your reminder that the right plan, the right channel, and the discipline to execute consistently can change the trajectory of your firm faster than you think.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 4 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:  

 1. Download our famous Wize Freedom Map for FREE - Find out the 96 projects every firm owner must implement to build a $5M+ firm that can run without them - Download here 

2. Need to Hire right now? Book a 1:1 FREE discovery call with our WizeTalent hiring coaches to help find your next team member the Wize Way – Click Here 

3. Work with Jamie and our mentors for 8 weeks - Build a custom business plan for your firm - Apply here

Transcript

Welcome And The Promise

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit and freedom and a business that can run without them. I'm Bren Ward, your host, and each week we deep dive into the real stories, proven strategies, and battle-tested tools from successful firm owners just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and systemized their way to freedom so you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode.

What Makes A Plan Executable

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Alright, so today we are going to be discussing the marketing plan and how to build one that executes. And we're going to be covering on the being clear on who you're attracting, how you're going to reach them. And this is the most important one. You'll consistently execute. We're going to also be uh sharing the discussing the benchmark that we have here at WISE about what percentage of your revenue should be dedicated to marketing in

The 5% Marketing Budget Benchmark

SPEAKER_01 1:04

your firm. Before we begin, what percentage of revenue do you think should be dedicated to marketing per year? It is 5%. To put it into perspective, on a million-dollar firm, that's $50,000. And then at $500,000, it's $25,000 and uh 12 and a half, even half that. So if you have this budget set aside, are you currently consistently spending that? Is there a plan for how that money is spent? Okay, or is it just given to a marketing agency to handle? It could be paid ads, it could be uh investing in SEO or articles or with strategists. Randy, you mentioned when we first did our GPSs that you were on Instagram.

SPEAKER_04 1:51

I I'm on YouTube and I'm on Transistor that goes to all the different podcast platforms, from like on Apple and Spotify, and I don't know what's big in Australia, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Oh, it just goes out there. And with this, right? Of course, in terms of like commitment, you will have to be able to commit your time. In some cases, some might argue that, yeah, that's an even bigger commitment than even 5% revenue because you're getting involved. How has that played out for you so far? Like what do you have how what have you been measuring to track how that has been produced?

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Well, well, unfortunately, uh, haven't even done it quite a year yet. It's been about 10 months, and we just put together a really, really good lead magnet that now connects to YouTube, and now it's going to my platform, and you know, so people can download the free uh lead magnet. So we just did that in the last couple weeks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Is that something that you made once before? And all like do you uh come back to refresh

Lead Magnets And Tracking Results

SPEAKER_01 2:50

it? This lead magnet?

SPEAKER_04 2:51

Yes. Um I it's way more professional. It looks like a top tier. I mean, it looks like a professionally made deal. So everything all fits together, same font, same understated style for more sophisticated folks.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Excellent. So, you know, it it's something that requires constant maintenance, basically, right? So from a financial resourcing point of view, it's really easy to see how, like, okay, so out of that 5%, that's a commitment we're going to make. And it improves on our conversions, right? It makes our marketing worth it. It attracts leads towards the firm. That's awesome, Randy. The hardest part about executing or even making a marketing plan is figuring out that thing that you're going to consistently execute on. Okay. There's the who of your attracting and how you reach them. Sure, that's important. But they're just decisions to be made. It's what you consistently execute and then resource that will weigh on you every single day. And you will feel it. It's workload or it's spend every single day, because that's what's happening now.

Define Your Ideal Client Using Data

SPEAKER_01 4:01

To begin with, we need to be able to figure out and have a target on who we're going to attract. And if you're a firm that has been in business at least three years, you would already know that there is a type of client that tends to like be drawn to your firm. Okay? Or ones that you tend to feel like are your bread and butter. They might not be the most exciting, but they tend to be your bread and butter. You want to look at your own existing client base with existing data of clients that you've already served as the place to be able to assess who should you be attracting. And by focusing on assessing client track record with your firm, you are working off actual data and you are doing a data-driven decision. In all of marketing, especially digital, it is the analytics that play an absolute key role in telling you what you're actually going to return. And it applies everywhere from the views that you might get monthly to the keyword difficulty or competition that a Google keyword on SEO might have. Who you're attracting, you want to start with those clients that you understand very well and you have confirmed are a good category. Once you've identified these clients, okay, and we'll call that phase one. Phase two, you want to kind of just take a, I don't know what the term is, it's that one where they study like other things like anthropological view on that set of clients and sort of try and think of what is the life cycle of this species? And then in what various paths do they diverge? Like maybe like a dentist, get out of dentist school, they work for someone else, they're P A Y G, they become a contractor, make a bit more money, they start finding some assistance, and then they start having a business. They start purchasing property, they start building centers. Okay. And then maybe that by that point they're in their 50s, 60s, or whatever it is. They're looking at these set of clients, you're trying to draw these patterns and you're trying to study on their life cycle. The who in part of what you're attracting here, it's I want to emphasize the like, how much do you understand this? I'll give you the inverse to illustrate why I'm going on about this. If you ask the typical firm what their persona is, they'll go, yep, it's a small business and they've got properties. That's fine if it can be elaborated on, but it usually can't. It's fine if this person genuinely like give me an example of a narrative, but typically no. So

Pick A Channel You Can Sustain

SPEAKER_01 6:35

this is an insufficient level of understanding on the who you're attracting here. My best advice that can apply to every firm is you look at your own existing client base. Now, how you'll reach them. The how is very important because if you pick a difficult how, you'll find it very hard to do the third one, which is do it consistently. So if the way you're going to reach them is through like highly produced videos, that might be a bit difficult. Okay. But sometimes people pick the too easy, um, like the default option. Oh, I'll just start writing articles on my website now, right? And writing to them. That's still not enough. It's just like doing and copying what you're hearing on the internet. The how is the strategy. This is like, so what game are we going to play here in order to reach them? To give an example, this is a very, very old tool. I know it's got AI plastered everywhere now, but not too long ago, and it still is today, but the number one SEO keyword research tool out there, going back to first to these slides here, the how you reach them. If by understanding who you're attracting, documenting this, discussing it with your team, like really going to your ends to answer questions and get the whole firm aligned on it. If past this and you're at the how you reach them, I can only just share of my things I've tried because I'm not a marketing expert. I can just tell you the things I've I've tried, but the how can vary wildly. Okay, some people might say video is better, some people might say cold outreach is better. I think I put more weighting into like something that I wanted to do and that I would do consistently, because that's knowing who I am, rather than going for something absolutely wild and like difficult, like creating playbooks

SEO Keyword Research Using Ahrefs

SPEAKER_01 8:25

once a week or something. So I use this tool called Arefs, and my strategy back then was this. And to this day, our Google, our website gets about 58,000 views per month or every 30 days. And that was when I last checked, maybe like two months ago. And I have not updated it in like two years, and it's extremely out of date, but it's still holding its own in this SEO game being played out here. And my strategy was really simple. I went on the AFR, that's the Australian Financial Review's top 100 accounting firms. So in every country, I'm sure we have our own list of top 100 accounting something. Okay, it could be Hong Kong, Florida, Miami, New York, whatever it is. Wherever you are, you will have a top 100 accounting firms. And you want to use a tool like Arefs, it does cost a lot of money. I was paying $700 a month for it at one point, but I needed it for like a few months in order to conduct research and get a process going. But what you would do is you would put the domain of each of those top 100 firms into Arefs here is a great image of an example of this. So I would put the firm's URL in here, and then on the left nav, I would go and research their organic keywords and top pages. And I want to know what pages do these firms have as their top keywords and pages. And what I found by going through every single firm, every single top 100 firm, plus a few more over multiple years list worth, going over these, I would go and collect all these keywords. I think I collected around like 2,000 of them. And I've realized that every accounting firm top 100, they all had a one thing or a few things, a few small subset of things they were known for. Sometimes it was a partner. Sometimes they'll get there because people just like simply search a name. I would say all the way until about the top 30 accounting firms, do the SEO results have any value to us? Because at the PWC level, they're talking about like some scandal in a different country. But like everyone from the top 31 to 100 is really worth paying attention to. My strategy, my how was okay, well, I'm just gonna get all the best things that these firms are good for, ranking for. If they're relevant to my business, I'll put them all together. And then I filtered out of this 2,000 keyword list the ones with the lowest keyword difficulty, but the highest volume. And then the strategy was okay, I had a whole bunch of lists and I kind of was stuck there. But Tim Corsbrook, the other mentor, helped me actually put it into an article schedule. Like he actually saw order in it. When he put it finally into a schedule, you cannot do like it whittled the list down to about 500 keywords. But if you do one article a week, how long will it take you to write 500 articles? Like 10 years, 500, how are you gonna write 500 articles if you write one a week, if you're gonna stick to one a week? The beauty, and I'm starting to see this more and more nowadays, is the how you reach them in the how of anything. You want to do your research to the point where it's presented in front of you like a whole backlog of work that is impossible to do in a human lifetime. And then you'll solve, you'll see if you can solve it. And we solved it. We solved it by hiring marketing people, training them, employing tools like Arefs. There are more. But we stuck to it consistently. I had a partner working together with me in marketing, and honestly, his website's doing way better than mine. If I had to go back, I would have just done 500 articles on bucket companies, trusts, company structures. Nowadays, company structures is really important. I've just had tons of that, knowing the leads that have come out the other end. That long experiment and the value I want to provide to us today on that front is just pick a small subset of topics and completely dominate it. Your case studies of your best clients, uh, because you can be totally led astray with analytics, but it did serve as a good experiment. Okay, so that's the how we did SEO. Nowadays, the firm would focus more so on working with partners, like say other JVs or brokers, and sort of trying to, we find that's a bit more long-term. The digital is just going to be there. Out of all the mediums that I've seen

Turning A Backlog Into Output

SPEAKER_01 12:45

a firm can choose, YouTube has been by far the most unchallenged area that accounting firms have in terms of marketing. And I've had multiple strategists that I've paid basically give me the same conclusion that it's just YouTube. Davey Mac, I'm not sure who here has heard of Davey Mac. Maybe if you're in Australia, you've heard of Davey Mac. He has this one video on about companies, trust first company structures. It's old, it's going to be old now, but he had about 155,000 views. And you think about it. How many inquiries did 155,000 views get from a 15 or something minute video comparing trust first company structures? Maybe a thousand? You know what? The scale is enormous. Scale to an accounting firm is the the internet completely blows out the scale of um of an accounting firm. Like, how many do you need? And a thousand come through, and what 200 of them to a discovery meeting? And a hundred would then ask for a proposal. The old school way might have been like that, you know, trustee company, family trust sort of thing to two entities. They'll come and set up. They might get charged three grand, four grand. So, what is four grand on what that hundred proposals they sent out and they convert 20% of it? 20 converted proposals for about four grand each. It's like 80 grand. That video, that one video, how much money did it cost to make that video? If it's a great video, I think they could have spent 10 grand on it. I don't think so. He was there, he's doing a video from his office, and it's well edited though. Okay, and he has built up a reputation, but he does know the YouTube game, and the people watching it don't know that he knows how to play that game really well. They just see helpful information. I've personally seen his calendar as well, and it is his charge out rate is double I would usually see here, and it's full. Okay, it's more business a firm can handle. So how you reach them, I think digital is a non-negotiable unless your non-digital strategy is compelling. I'll give you one example. There's a firm owner here who relocated her office into an area in Australia in Sydney that was high in manufacturing

YouTube Scale And Real ROI Maths

SPEAKER_01 15:10

and research and development, right in the center of it. Like these are industrial districts, uh, business districts, really. Put their office there, and that's a great move. Imagine capturing that whole geographical location. If you have a geographical advantage, sure. You will be able to have a non-digital strategy. When you are able to find something that can click for you digitally, the scale is enormous. You just have to find something that clicks. The reason to create to research to the point where you end up with a gigantic list that feels like it would take years based off conventional advice. Like, you know, conventional advice is write one article a week. Okay, then it would take 10 years. We have to write four or five articles a week in order to like get it in any reasonable time frame, maybe get it down to like one year. And really, it took two, it really took three years. At least we stuck by it. And to be honest, if it wasn't for Tim Corsbrook, I don't know how we would have just gone. He's a great writer. My job was I'll figure out, I'll do the research on the SEO. He was a great writer and he knew how to put the SEO structure into place. Okay, so yeah, the how it would include people to expand on that. Joy, can you tell us what are you trying to solve? What do you mean by specialized or a marketing agency? What are you trying to solve?

SPEAKER_02 16:27

I'm just not quite sure where I should start, to be honest. I did twice, short of video post regularly on a LinkedIn, but doesn't seem to uh works well. Kind of a wanting, should I get someone to guide me how to do it, how to do more effective, or should be outsourcing to someone else? I'm just not quite sure where to start.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Outsourcing is like never always a wrong answer. There's there's a role that outsourcing has and working with an agency has in a marketing roadmap for sure. And that's a great question, actually, and which will give us more structure to like today, which is defining this executable roadmap. I would work with an expert to first establish the strategy, and that defines the who, how, and the what. It's really up to you to experiment with. But the first person I would meet would be a specialist or an expert in a strategy on helping you define your who and your how, like to challenge you on how deeply you can think about your who and your how. That's what a marketing strategist would do. I've paid for them. There have been like some, there's a guy called his name is MC Carter. I went through his persona thing. It just opened my eyes to right, you gotta basically gotta know everything about this person, their demographic psychology, where do they get the news? What pain. The most important thing is what pains do they have that you can solve? Are you you're solving whose pains are you solving? Okay, if you take that and you start researching, like coming in with a bit a bit of background in it too at first, you might find that, oh, I'm gonna start answering these questions, and then you might need to go see an expert. You might see someone like an MC Carter. So that's the how. So the way to start would be a strategist. It took investment, it took knowing who are regular members, who are new members,

Agencies Conferences And Where To Start

SPEAKER_01 18:20

what everyone's about, and sharing what like brings value to them. To be honest, that's the most purest form of what like any form of digital is. It's attempting to do that at scale, but it's always going to be a sample. Any firm who has that opportunity should take that over writing articles. If it's going to take anyone's time, let's go to these conferences 100%. If anyone's got time, go meet people 100%.

SPEAKER_04 18:44

So my niche, this is how I developed it, but I did it before COVID when there were a lot more attendees in my niche. But after COVID, way more people are doing this. Uh they're not going to conferences. I'm not finding it uh cost effective. Now, it may be cost-effective in Australia. I don't know. So I have gone to a bunch of different conferences in my very narrow niche. And that's how I got started, but I don't find it cost effective now. Just because the cost is just getting uh too much.

SPEAKER_03 19:21

Yeah, there is a there is that factor that you know yes, it costs money, you know, but you know, so does the marketing. The marketing, the digital marketing costs money and time, and you know, and also you've got to go, you're in the room with all the same, the same the people you need to talk to. It is direct, yeah. It's like, yeah, you're just going straight to the source. You're not, you know, these people have got a good chance to be interested in what you do. It's very difficult to calculate the ROI because like I said, like I can go to one of these things and no one even talks to me, and no one asks me for a card, then people email you later. Yeah, it's a very gray area. Mark marketing in general is very gray. You just don't know.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

I think what I'm seeing is quite interesting, David and Randy. It's because Randy, it was due to COVID that you saw conferences drop off. Whereas that may be a different case in Sydney, in which case uh I guess it goes back to the thing I mentioned where if you have a non-uh digital strategy, it's because you're exploiting a geographical advantage. Okay, so if you're exploiting a geographical advantage, great. Okay, and it's giving ROI, Randy. And in terms of David, everything's cost something. The 5% or 5%, I like Sean, your five to eight percent revenue. Because eight percent might be an aggressive spend, ten percent might even be an aggressive spend. But as long as we budget for it, of course, right? Looking inwardly at your own person, if you pick the thing that you're willing to do consistently, that's the right first move. If you pick writing though, it's just gonna take a long time. If you pick making a splash at a conference, everyone might know you straight away. Right? If you go on YouTube, you might go viral. Every platform has its own way of rewarding success. You know, they're all good. You can point to many, many millionaires in every platform. You just need to pick one and then just willingly do it consistently.

Wrap Up And Listener Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get that to your inbox every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you, the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.