5 Valuable Marketing Assets Your Team Needs Going Into 2023

As CPA firm marketers, we hold the responsibility of finding new, creative ways to stand out from our competitors. And in our fast-moving world where consumers are hit with upwards of 10,000 advertisements each day, it’s safe to say it’s more important than ever to communicate your messages not only quickly, but effectively. So, when the time comes to talk about your firm, its professionals, and services—ensure you’re doing so in a way that creates a competitive advantage. 

Though, while your message is important, like any great pitch, it’s only as powerful as the way it’s delivered. Whether it’s a branded presentation deck, compelling sell sheet, or custom-build proposal document, CPA firms need to have the right tools on hand to clearly communicate and turn potential leads into new business. 

Here, in collaboration with the team from Pitchly’s Data Enablement Platform, we’ll cover the five most valuable marketing assets and tools CPA firm marketers are using to connect with business prospects in 2023. 

Internal Pitchbooks  

Whether it’s a dedicated business development rep or a staff member on the phone with a potential client, pitchbooks are a great way to ensure your firm’s message and selling points are communicated clearly. Before a proposal is drafted, it’s important to have a great pitchbook that can help create an impactful and lasting first impression for your firm and its professionals. 

These documents oftentimes detail the main attributes of the firm, which are used during preliminary calls and meetings to develop new business and secure clients. Pitchbooks often also include visual aids and metrics to showcase your firm’s value, as well as can be customized to speak to whatever niche your client operates in, whether it be industry, size, product, etc. One of the best ways to ensure that this customization creates a connection with your audience is to highlight the firm’s current deal data and expertise.  

Tombstones 

It should be news to no one that social media is a great way to build awareness for your firm’s services and create and foster connections with potential clients. Tombstones are simple graphics that are quickly generated and shared to display the work your firm is doing. Often, the content is extracted from your database of current clients/previous projects to display the range of capabilities of your firm.  

The goal of a tombstone is to make storytelling through a quick and digestible image both easy and assessable across your firm. A great tombstone does a few things very well.  

• They’re easy to create: By using defined templates and centralized data, it shouldn’t take any heavy design to create an effective tombstone. They should only utilize a few numbers and words to tell the story. 
• They’re easy to identify: Each tombstone should almost look like it is a part of a series, using your CPA firm’s logo and brand. 
• They’re easy to share: When a new tombstone is created, employees should be able to easily find and share it from a library of up-to-date and approved pieces.  

Case Studies 

While tombstones are a customizable way to share quick, easy-to-share, bite-sized success stories that draw attention, oftentimes potential clients will look for a longer-term case study as they get further into the decision process. In the same way we read online reviews, we want to find an example of how a product or service has solved a pain point or challenge that applies to ourselves. 

Like with any form of effective marketing, it’s important with a case study not to talk about how amazing your firm’s services are, but to show and demonstrate why they are by using data and compelling numbers. For example, showcase the amount of money your audit team helped a client recover or the revenue growth your advisory services helped stimulate. 

One Source of Truth for Corporate Bios 

Oftentimes, as CPA firm marketers, we’re not only promoting the services our firms offer to clients, but the professionals who conduct them. Potential clients want to know the managers and partners who will be working with them, their backgrounds and certifications, as well as whether they have any specific industry expertise.  

Though, in a business environment with older generations leaving the workforce and younger professionals switching jobs more often than ever, it can be difficult to keep track of who’s where and what’s up to date with bios. This can leave many employees confused about where to go and left sorting through out-of-date versions. 

Consider consolidating wherever you store your corporate bios, monitored and updated by a committee of a few people, to a central online repository that can serve as a singular source of truth for the whole firm. By both determining one place, as well as implementing a clear process of how and when bios are added, removed, and routinely updated, employees can easily access them when creating proposals, speaking at events, or simply updating their LinkedIn profiles. 

Quick, Consistent, and Custom Proposals 

When it comes time to submit a proposal to a potential client, it’s important to keep three things in mind—speed, consistency, and customization. If you’re lacking in just one of these three categories during the proposal process, your firm is risking not only value business, but a potential lasting client partnership. 

When it comes to speed, if a proposal takes upwards of two weeks to send to the potential client, you risk them already signing on to another firm for their services. For consistency, every proposal that goes out should have the same corporate branding and firm information, as well stay visually consistent with your up-to-date brand guidelines. And finally, no client wants to hear they’re receiving a cookie-cutter product or service, as opposed to something custom-built to speak and cater to their challenges and pain points. 

Whether it’s a business development representative, senior manager, or even partner, it’s important that anyone involved in the closing or proposal process has simple and fast access to up-to-date templates that can be customized to fit the target client’ unique business needs. 

A solution like Pitchly’s Data Enablement Platform not only ensures that all of the data you include in your proposals is up-to-date, but it also streamlines the creation process with easy-to-update templates, dynamic content, and simple database-wide filtering.   

The Bottom Line 

As more businesses continue to shift to both hybrid and return to office models, it’s important that CPA firm marketers continue to create materials that enable our colleagues to effectively communicate about the firm in a way that stands out, both in person and digitally. If you’re looking to learn more about how marketers are engaging with clients digitally, propelling business growth, and enabling their CPA firms to thrive, join us at the AAM Emerge Virtual Conference next month. 

This article was written by Charlie Beeler in conjunction with Hannah Lambert from Pitchly.