Q&A With Becky Livingston

How are you approaching client service in a work-from-home world?

We talk a lot about marketing personalization. The accounting industry created an unprecedented amount of content last year, for both businesses and individuals. To keep audiences engaged, we need to go beyond the basics of, “Here’s a regulation and here’s how you apply it.” Instead, we need to provide our audiences ideas on how to prepare for change and approach it in ways that work specifically for them. Include words like “you,” “we” and “us” to help their content feel more personal and to build empathy.

Although CPAs typically may communicate with their audiences through email and social media, some are starting to use text messaging and chat bots to provide immediate responses, especially during non-business hours. Professionals should remember that not every meeting has to be through video. Clients will often say to me, “I feel like I’m on Zoom all day long!” Voice-only conference calls might seem outdated by now, but they can be a great opportunity to multi-task without feeling the pressure of someone staring at you from a screen.

What are the top trends right now in accounting marketing?  

Using artificial intelligence (AI) for content curation is key. It’s increasingly important to provide an online experience that meets your audience’s needs in real-time. For instance, most website visitors don’t want to search or filter lists of blogs to find the information they need. Whether it’s payroll regulations, tax tips or something else, they want your website to recognize the topic they’re interested in and build them content based on it. Clients are excited to start using AI, and I think their clients will be excited about the results, too.

Voice search is another big one. Voice search tries to identify content based on intent, which can often come in the form of questions like, “How can I do this? Where is this? How much is that?” Those intent phrases — words like “how,” “where” and “why” — matter a lot because they drive which content your audience is fed.

CEO Becky Livingston and her firm, Penheel Marketing, help CPAs and small business owners build marketing muscle through big-picture thinking and strategic initiatives. After a decade in business, Livingston shared her insights on creating high-quality client experiences in 2021 and beyond.

If you want to learn more about marketing personalization, you can read about how to Acquire New Clients Through Personalization and Focus Your Marketing and Business Development Through Market Segmentation and Personalization. You can also catch Becky Livingston’s Q&A on the Spring 2021 Growth Strategies issue, page 18.