4 evergreen client marketing tactics

These simple tactics will help you to generate more fees from your existing clients

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Oct 21, 2022

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In the last newsletter, we looked at why you should market to clients. This week, let’s look at how to do it with some evergreen client marketing tactics.

1. Ask for referrals and reviews

Do most of your leads come from referrals and word-of-mouth? We’ve done a lot of research on this and roughly 85% of accounting firm leads are from referrals.

Which makes it odd that only 20% of firms actively ask for referrals. Do you?

If not, this is the quickest of quick marketing wins. Take this email template, tweak it, and use it to ask clients for referrals. It works best when you’ve just finished a project (assuming it went well!) but can be tweaked and sent via bulk email. I know one firm did something like this every quarter and it always delivered a handful of new clients.

A similar tactic is to ask for reviews on Google or Facebook. Again it works best when you’ve just finished a successful engagement. Here’s another template you can use to ask for Facebook and Google reviews.

Note - it might not happen after one email. A firm owner in the States told me Google Business, on which he had over 500 five-star reviews, was the central plank of his marketing. Aside from showing how awesome his firm was, it helped him dominate the search engine rankings.

But he said that the review usually happened after five emails. He automated this but it shows how important persistence is in marketing. Most people give up way too early because they don’t see instant results.

2. Expert content

Tactic number two is creating expert content. What does that mean?

It depends on the industries and interests of your clients. But essentially you should be creating content (or hiring people to do it for you) that speaks to the dreams and challenges your clients face. Specifically, financial and accounting content.

That doesn’t mean you can stray into other areas but essentially, they’ve hired you for your financial acumen. So write about it!

Here’s an example from Jason Andrew of SBO Financial titled Why discounting is killing your ecommerce business. Think clients find finance boring? This post, which features a P&L and spreadsheet will change your mind.

When you’ve decided on content topics, think about where you’ll post the content. The default option should be your blog which keeps your site fresh, can help people find you via search engines, and is an easily browsable repository for your expert content.

Below you’ll see how to leverage your blog by repurposing the content using email and social media.

3. Email marketing

The first marketing email was sent in 1978 so as old as Matt and way more effective.

Routinely dismissed as old school by many marketing gurus for years, email is cool again and people are shuttering their podcasts to start newsletters. In reality, email has always been a low-cost, low-effort yet high return tactic for accounting firms.

At a minimum, there are two types of email you should regularly send to clients: newsletters and email blasts.

If you’re creating expert blog content as above, your newsletter becomes an easy task. Just pull your recent blog content into a popular email tool like MailChimp and send it to clients once a month.

Only include the first one or two paragraphs with a read-more to take them to the full blog. You could also include timely information like upcoming deadlines and your opening hours at holiday periods.

The goal of the newsletter is engagement, not sales. It’s ok to include the odd promotion but the key purpose is to give clients value and keep them sticky.

When it comes to selling, you should turn to email blasts. These are emails where you want clients to take action. Perhaps you’re running an event: send an email blast to get registrations.

Or you want to do some upselling or cross-selling which can have a dramatic effect on revenue as the client marketing calculator I shared last week shows.

Say you have six add-on services you’d like to sell to clients. Assign each to a month and send an email blast to clients about that service. Remember to segment your list first so that you’re only contacting clients where the service makes sense. Also try to include a case study or success story. The easiest way to upsell is by showing how its already helped others.

Run through all six and then repeat in the second half of the year. Marketing isn’t complicated if you have a list of engaged people and services to sell that can make a difference to their lives.

4. Events

You can’t underestimate the power of getting people into a room.

For existing clients, this can be an opportunity to promote new services you might be launching, or to update them on the latest goings on. Aside from that, it’s also a great opportunity to network and build closer relationships.

Want to make this an opportunity to win new clients as well? Ask each of your existing clients that you invite to bring along 1 other business owner they know. This is a nice way of getting a face-to-face introduction to a warm referral.

Thinking about other ways of getting people through the door? You can also use any partnerships you might have with local bank managers, insurance providers etc, and get them to help promote to people they know in return for a short speaking slot at the event. That’s a win-win for you both.

Marketing By Numbers

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