2024 Reflections: Proven Strategies to Elevate Your Business in 2025

In this solo episode, we’re diving into the strategies that worked wonders in 2024 to help our business—and our clients—achieve growth.
From high-intent Local Service Ads and Google Business Profile optimization to leveraging LinkedIn newsletters and starting Skool communities, this episode is packed with actionable tips to amplify your brand presence and streamline your marketing efforts.
Learn how to:

• Generate quality leads with Local Service Ads.
• Maximize your Google Business Profile for SEO and reviews.
• Use LinkedIn newsletters to stay top-of-mind.
• Build low-touch Skool communities to nurture prospects.
• Launch or guest on podcasts for unparalleled exposure.

We’ll also explore how to repurpose content effectively, set up tools to increase engagement, and position yourself for success in the year ahead. Whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or professional looking to level up, this episode has something for you.

Want access to the resources we discussed in this episode? Join our Skool community here: Accounting Leads Now.

Interested in starting your own Skool community? Use our affiliate link to get started: Skool Affiliate Link.

Tune in and let’s make 2025 your best year yet!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success the go-to podcast for fractional CFOs and accounting firm owners who want to attract more high-paying clients and increase their revenue. Hosted by James Donovan from Nine Two Media, this podcast dives into marketing strategies specifically designed for lead generation and client acquisition. In each episode, you'll hear from industry leaders sharing their success stories and Thank you, boost your bottom line. Today, I want to do something a little bit different.

Speaker 2: 1:01

To kickstart the new year, I want to start this season with an individual podcast. We're not going to jump in and have an interview today, but I wanted to recap what's worked really well over the last year for us as a business and what's worked really well for our clients through different marketing channels, mindset etc. And just share with those listening what's going well and what's not. So I would say kind of getting into the marketing side of things so that there's some actionable takeaways from this is one of the big shifts in the business over the last year was when we launched local service ads for our clients back in the summer. Local service ads has been huge because our clients are getting very high intent leads from people who are problem aware, looking for a solution, and they're going to Google with their search. So it's all search intent and they're looking for those opportunities. The nice thing about local service ads it's all search intent and they're looking for those opportunities. The nice thing about local service ads it's a pay per call model, so if your phone doesn't ring, you don't pay. The other nice thing is if people are calling for a service that you do not want to be advertised, google will credit those funds back so you don't have to pay for them. We see calls range anywhere from 70 to $100 cost per lead, which works out really solid. If you think about a lead on Facebook potentially being $50,. You're getting a name, phone number and an email, versus 70 to 100. And you're actually on the phone with somebody who says I need tax planning, I need accounting, I need payroll, etc. So local service ads have been huge and I would highly encourage anyone who's offering tax planning, monthly accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, tax prep to be on there.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Pairing with that, another strategy that's started to work very well for our clients and for ourselves as the agency is Google business profile and managing your SEO. So putting together weekly articles that are SEO, focused on your Google business profile a really solid way to think about your content and what you want to put out. There is what questions are your clients asking you? What questions are you getting asked on sales calls? Potentially, what questions are your team members asking you that are trying to learn about the business, learn about your products? Taking those questions, those commonly asked questions, taking them to chat GPT, throwing it in there and prompting it to say write me an article that's SEO optimized on this topic. That's going to spit out essentially what it is you're looking for to help educate your audience, but, more importantly, give you the keyword search so that you're organically climbing the ranks with your SEO and your Google business profile.

Speaker 2: 3:58

Another piece to Google business profile would be maximizing your Google reviews. So if you haven't done it in a while, I'd strongly encourage you jump into QuickBooks or wherever your CRM for your clients are. Export your current and past client list, go to your Google business profile, grab your review link and email out all of your clients the link to your Google business page to leave a review. Kindly ask them. Hey, would love if you could leave us a review. We're growing our presence online. Your feedback would mean the world so we could help other businesses like we've helped yours. Side note don't send this out to everyone at once. Just drip out three, four emails a day so you don't get a ton of influx overnight of brand new reviews. Google's gonna flag them and not put them up on your account. They'll look at them as spam. So that's local service ads and Google business profile. If you have any questions with that, feel free to reach out to us over email or LinkedIn. More than happy to pick up the conversation.

Speaker 2: 5:08

Another thing that we started doing for our clients and we started doing for ourselves that has worked very well is the newsletter feature on LinkedIn. So some of you may know, some of you may not, but the newsletter feature is it's actually a bit of a hack for getting multiple notifications out for one piece of content. The really nice thing about the newsletter is, as you grow your subscriber list, so your connections on LinkedIn, every time you publish a new newsletter, linkedin is going to email all of your subscribers. Email all of your subscribers. Linkedin is going to send a mobile notification to everyone who has the mobile app and it's going to send a desktop notification to everyone on LinkedIn. So you're getting three notifications for the price of one. So if you think you have, say, 5,000 connections on LinkedIn, you create your newsletter. You start getting people to subscribe to that. You're not going to take it's not going to take you very long to get that subscriber list north of a thousand contacts. Every time you publish your article, you got a thousand free emails that LinkedIn is sending out on your behalf, driving traffic back to your page with your links.

Speaker 2: 6:20

Think of your newsletter as a vehicle that should be providing 90% value educating your audience Again. Think about the questions that you be providing 90% value. Educating your audience Again. Think about the questions that you're getting on sales calls, the questions your clients are asking. You Go to ChatGPT, ask it to help you write content that's SEO, optimized, very easy to digest, and that's where you're going to, and then, of course, add in your own edits to personalize it and remove that kind of AI cover that it'll have At the very bottom. That's where you're going to want to have your links with your call to action your link to your website, a link to, maybe, your podcast, like this one, a link to your school community, wherever you want to be sending traffic, include all of your links. The more consistent you get with that that's the name of the game consistency the more consistent you're getting with that, the more you're going to have that omnipresence of constantly staying in front of your audience.

Speaker 2: 7:18

A couple other strategies that are working really well for exposure for us and for our clients and we're really starting to see some of the fruits of those labors is starting a school community One. It can be. It's best. My opinion is to set this up as your low ticket offer low touch points with your clients who are in there. Whether you have touch points with your clients who are in there, whether you have maybe it's an office hours for for anyone in your pipeline who's looking for for questions to get answered. You can charge $47 a month, $97 a month. They would have those office hours to access you one-on-one. You can have as many calls as you want toast per week. You could have different trainings put in there.

Speaker 2: 8:08

It's a really great way for the prospects who aren't a good fit for your offer right now or aren't quite ready to move forward with you. They can get into your ecosystem. They can see what sort of value you're providing to your audience at a very low price point. Get a little taste of what it'd be like to work with you and it's very low overhead for you regarding time, regarding resources. So if you haven't done that already, a couple of our clients have opened up a school community. They're slowly growing. It's a great way again to get people into your ecosystem, especially those who maybe are phoning in all the time and trying to look for free advice.

Speaker 2: 8:47

Start a school community. There's a link in the show notes to start a school community. But start a school community. You can get people in there Again, super low ticket. If they have a couple tax questions, instead of you giving away this information for free, they can have access to you for, say, one hour a month. Know, 20 minutes a week. You have your open office hours and then everyone who's not a good fit for your primary services just send them the link to join school. It's super hands-off, it's really easy and you're able to provide a ton of value to your audience.

Speaker 2: 9:21

The last thing that we've seen work really well and something that we started um, I'd say, back in the summer as well, along the same time we were doing local service ads is starting a podcast. Podcast has been awesome for brand exposure. Podcast has been awesome for interviewing really big players in the industry, picking their brain and getting to learn a little bit more about what's working for them, what's not working and getting introduced to people within their network. We've been able to have a ton of awesome conversations with different accounting firms, different business owners that I never would have imagined if we wouldn't have started this podcast. If you're not looking to start your own podcast, which may be a little bit more labor intensive on the front end. I got a couple of resources I can put you in touch with. We actually have some in our school community on starting a podcast. But if you're not looking to start your own podcast, guesting on podcasts.

Speaker 2: 10:22

It's an awesome way to tap into other other individuals audiences. An awesome way to tap into other individuals' audiences. It's a great way for exposure. Better practice at public speaking even though it would just be one-on-one, it's great practice telling your story, telling your offer and, again, just getting in front of other people's audiences and leveraging their audience. And you just never know where those conversations are going to go, what one conversation will lead to and the opportunities it will create down the road. So my suggestion to everyone who's listening to this think about the bigger picture of what you're looking to accomplish with your marketing, with your exposure.

Speaker 2: 11:03

Are you reaching out to enough people daily on LinkedIn? Whether you're doing that individually, you have an assistant helping you out, you're using some sort of automation. Are you getting in front of enough of the right people on a daily basis? Are you asking your current and past clients for reviews? Are you generating inbound calls? Current and past clients for reviews? Are you generating inbound calls? Another thing do you have anything on your website so that people can reach out to you super easy, like a chat widget? Do you have a way for people to submit a form to book onto your calendar? Are you asking the right qualification questions? Does your website have the up-to-date information? We were speaking with a prospect the other day and their website had. They didn't know whose number was on their website, so they're potentially sending calls to someone else's business that they're missing. These are just some things to check over as we start the new year to really make sure you're geared up for success Again starting a school community, something low ticket, where people can jump in, people can ask questions, they can review some resources you have, that you've built up your different lead magnets, getting them into your ecosystem so they have a sample size of what it's like to work with you before making a larger investment.

Speaker 2: 12:21

And then the last couple things I was just mentioning either starting your own podcast interviewing sometimes maybe it's your ideal clients, sometimes it's thought leaders in your space getting access to different associations you can use that as a prospecting tool but also just having really beneficial conversations to grow your own network and see where those conversations go. Maybe you have someone you're able to connect within your network to the individual that you're interviewing and they have an awesome relationship out of that. The other piece is guesting on other people's podcasts. Again, you never know where these conversations are going to go. You can chop up all of the content from your recordings, turn those into reels, post them on your social media pages. There's a lot you can be doing, repurposing a lot of your content so that you're not working that hard to have so much content going out.

Speaker 2: 13:20

The last thing I'll add in, just because it came top of mind again all of the podcasts that I go on, some of the ones that we're hosting, we're chopping up all of that content, we're turning it into reels, we're posting on Instagram, linkedin, facebook. Then we're actually taking those recordings or taking those reels from YouTube. We're pulling the transcript. We're going into chat, gpt, write me an article based off of the transcript. That's here. Boom, you have a new article post and go out on Google business profile, go out on LinkedIn and you're repurposing that video, driving traffic back to the video to for more engagement on that topic that you're just speaking on. So hopefully these are some tips that will really help you leverage and grow your, your, your brand, your brand awareness in 2025. We'll probably throw in a couple more of these one-off um clips, but I'd love to hear some feedback. If this is what people are looking for or if they prefer the interview style, all right, we'll see you in the next. We'll see you on the uh, the next one.

Speaker 2: 14:22

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of cfo chronicles the secrets behind success. I hope you found value in today's conversation. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. If you enjoyed today's discussion, please rate and review the show. It helps others discover the insights we share here. Second, if you're ready to take your business to the next level and attract the high-end clients you deserve, head over to accountingleadsnowcom or click the link in the show notes to book your strategy. Call it's time to position yourself as the advisor your clients need. And don't forget you can connect with me on LinkedIn to stay up to date on what's happening in the world of accounting and financial growth. We've got more exciting topics coming up, so stay tuned for the next episode of CFO Chronicles. Until then, keep pushing forward. Your growth is just one strategic move away.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Thanks for listening to CFO Chronicles the secrets behind success. We hope today's episode provided valuable strategies to help you attract more high-paying clients. Be sure to subscribe, follow and share with fellow professionals. Connect with us on LinkedIn and leave a review or comment to join the conversation. Your feedback helps us bring you the best insights in finance and marketing. Until next time, keep striving for success and unlocking your business's potential.