Selling Your Services With Technology

By Thomas G. Stephens, Jr., CPA, CITP

In a slowing economy, many marketing experts suggest increasing investments in marketing efforts. For accountants, these efforts can pay dividends in retaining existing clients, expanding services provided to existing clients, and attracting new clients.

 

To increase your return on marketing investments, consider using technology to make your efforts more effective in two distinct ways – reaching prospects and enhancing the message delivered.

 

Reaching Prospects With Technology

 

While it might seem trite to recommend establishing websites to CPA firms, most websites maintained by CPA firms are not very effective as marketing tools for the firms. Rather, they generally contain only static information such as names and phone numbers of firm members and staff.

 

To be truly effective, websites should offer interactivity to those who visit. For instance, interactive calculators for things such as loan amortization schedules, tax projections and retirement planning are proven methods of causing existing clients to visit your site more often, while also attracting new visitors to your site.

 

Also, be sure that your site has numerous links to other relevant sites. These links increase the likelihood that your site will show up higher in search engine results pages. You might also consider investing in search engine optimization efforts. Such efforts may result in a significant re-design of your site to enhance its relative position in search engine results.

 

Finally, consider implementing two-way portals as either an integrated component of your website or via a standalone application. Portals make it more convenient for your existing clients to communicate with you, making them more likely to seek additional services and become evangelists for your services among their peers. A tool that might be useful in establishing portals include Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace and Windows SharePoint Services; in addition, most major tax software and document management companies include portals in their service offerings.

 

Another proven means of using technology to reach prospects is via effective newsletters delivered as email messages. Newsletters providing timely, relevant, and useful content get read and often get forwarded to others. Numerous tools are available to assist in this effort, including Constant Contact and Office Live Small Business. The cost of delivering newsletters via email is virtually nothing and the returns can be outstanding.

 

Enhancing the Message Delivered to Prospects

 

Besides reaching out to clients, technology can also be very effective at enhancing the marketing message delivered to clients. From simple PowerPoint presentations to more robust proposals, don’t miss the chance to ensure that your proposals stand out from those offered by your competitors.

 

An example of this is the use of Themes in Office 2007 to ensure that your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks all have a consistent and professional look and feel across all Office documents.

 

At a higher level, providing detailed analytical reports can entice existing business clients to engage your firm for additional services, and can cause potential business clients to consider your proposal more seriously than those provided by other firms. Two outstanding resources for these analytics reports include ProfitCents and The Business Analyst. Both of these web-based offerings provide detailed analytical reports more efficiently and effectively than reports developed in spreadsheet models. Report outputs are presentation-quality and can be easily customized to meet specific firm criteria.

 

Now is the time to increase, not decrease, your marketing efforts. As the economy regains its momentum, investments in effective marketing efforts will provide superior returns in both the short run and long term. As you are ramping up your marketing efforts, be sure to consider how using technology will make these efforts more efficient and more effective.

 

Mr. Stephens is a shareholder in K2 Enterprises, where he develops and presents technology-related continuing professional education programs to accounting and finance professionals across the United States. You may reach him at tommy@k2e.com.

 

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Microsoft.