While writing the April issue of our print subscription newsletter, The Profitable Accountant™, I framed the discussion about one specific marketing tactic by using a framework I created in 2018.
This framework, which I call the Four Core Marketing Strategies (since I’m not creative enough to dream up better names for stuff) explain, well, exactly that… The four most important strategy components of your overall marketing plan.
Hmmm… Let me back up two steps and define some terms and hierarchies.
Whether you’re launching a tax firm or revitalizing an old one, having a written marketing plan is critical to the success of the venture. Within that marketing plan, you want to define your top-level marketing strategies for achieving the overall revenue goals of the business. From the marketing strategies, you’ll then select marketing tactics to actually generate leads, prospects, and paying clients.
In other words, you deploy tactics in support of strategies that together all form the big plan. For example, running ads on Facebook is a tactic that could apply to either your cold lead generation strategy OR your lead follow up strategy OR your client retention strategy. You’ll run different ads, with different offers, to different audiences depending on which strategy you’re trying to support. Same marketing tactic, but very different strategies.
In addition to that, I need to clarify what I personally mean when I’m using four other words:
- A list is a bunch of people or businesses that all share one or more characteristics. They are not leads.
- A lead is somebody that has in some way raised their hand and engaged with your marketing. They haven’t talked to you yet, but they have given you their contact information for future follow up.
- A prospect is somebody that has at least scheduled a consultation with you. I use the same term to mean somebody that met with you, but didn’t immediately convert to a client.
- A client is somebody that has both paid you and signed an engagement letter. Both the contract and payment must be received before I call them “client”.
With that background info, back to the Four Core Marketing Strategies, of which I already listed three of them in the Facebook ad example, in case you didn’t catch that. The core four were a framework I created specifically with tax resolution in mind, but the reality is that they apply to every service … Continue reading