Marketing and Public Relations for Accounting Professionals
Marketing and public relations, contrary to what most people think, go hand in hand in pushing a business or practice forward. And according to Scott Cytron, making these two work seamlessly together to establish your brand is very important - even for accounting professionals.
Scott Cytron is the President of Cytron and Company, a firm that helps professionals and B2B/B2C companies with their PR, marketing, and communications strategies to help them bring their business to the next level.
In this episode of Sales Tax and More, co-hosts Michael and Ellie interview Scott about why PR and marketing is important for accountants, how his company can help them in reaching out to potential clients, and the three things that they encourage accounting professionals to do the moment they walk through his door. Stay tuned.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Michael introduces his guest, Scott Cytron
Scott differentiates public relations from marketing
Is marketing effective for accounting professionals?
Why consistent and reliable communication with Scott’s clients plays a big role in building rapport with clients
The importance of encouraging clients to take risks and being decisive
Why accounting professionals need to measure what they are doing in terms of marketing
What Scott means when he tells accounting professionals to ‘pay for play, don’t pay to play’
How to get in touch with Scott Cytron
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Ellie Moffat's email: emoffat@salestaxandmore.com
Connect with Michael
Sponsor for This Episode
Sales Tax and More assists companies and their trusted advisors like CPAs with sales tax needs. They offer consulting and research, registrations, returns, and so much more. Over the years they have assisted thousands of sellers both foreign and domestic with their tax issues in the United States and in Canada.
Episode Transcript - Audio Version
[0:10] Intro: Welcome to Sales Tax and More, your go-to resource for all things state tax-related. Now, here's your host, Michael Fleming.
[0:26] Mike: Hi, I'm Mike Fleming, founder of Sales Tax and More, and today's co-host of the Sales Tax and More podcast, where we talk about everybody's favorite topic, which is, of course, sales tax. And while sales tax is everyone's favorite subject, we've decided that we're going to begin having guests, who are experts in their field, who we who can speak about subjects that we believe are going to be of interest to the audience out there. Now, before we introduce today's guests, I want to introduce you to my co-host, Ellie Moffat. Ellie, want to say hi?
[0:56] Ellie: Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here. I love being a part of this podcast. For those of you who don't know about Sales Tax and More, I'll do a quick introduction to that. So Sales Tax and More is a full service, consulting and solutions firm we have a really great team of experienced tax professionals who are very dedicated to fulfilling your state tax-related needs. So we do a lot of consulting, research, registrations, and like our name states more so you can always ask us questions but Mike, I’ll flip it back to you and we can move on.
[1:29] Mike: Now, today's guest is Scott Cytron, and he's the founder and president of Cytron and Company, and they're known for helping companies and organizations improve their bottom line through strategic public relations, communications, marketing programs and top-notch client service. He's an accredited consultant, and he works with companies and professional services, such as medical, legal, accounting, engineering, high tech companies, and business to business, and business to consumer product service sales. Now, I've known Scott for many, many years. More than I care to admit. And I can personally tell you that Scott knows his stuff. So, Scott, you wanna want to say a quick hello?
[2:15] Scott: Hi, everybody and Ellie and Mike, thank you for having me on.
[2:18] Mike: Okay, thank you, thank you for appearing. Now, Scott, I have a question that we've talked about previously. And I think it's a great way to start off today's, you know, discussion here. What is the difference between public relations and marketing?
[2:38] Scott: Well, I think that's a great question, Mike, to start out with, because I get that question all the time. Whenever I speak, people want to know about it. There are two schools of thought out there. There's one school of thought that marketing is completely separate from PR. And I'm of the school of thought that PR is actually a subset of marketing. So if you think about sort of an umbrella, you have marketing at the top, and under that, you have PR, you have other communications tactics, tools, strategies, whatever they are. And you know, marketing, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, it's about selling a service or a product. In the case of accountants, anyone that I think would probably be listening to this, or watching it, would want to say they're selling a service more likely than anything else. But there are some products of course sold. PR, on the other hand, is how you position what you're selling. And sort of the, the image you're trying to create around the service or product that you're trying to to get out there in the marketplace. And I always, whenever I have a prospect or whenever I'm speaking again, before groups or talking with anyone in the profession, they want to know about PR I always I always start out with the question - Would you rather be rich or would you rather be famous? And yeah, there's a really well known movie way back, I won’t tell you how old I was when it came out, but there's a movie way back called Rich or Famous, and it kind of goes into that. And so, you know, I get sort of a quirky look like, well, I don't know, I don't know, I'd rather be. Ok, so if you'd rather be rich, that's about marketing what you're doing. It's about making more money. It's about trying to gain as much foothold as you can in the marketplace to sell more products or services. If you're interested in becoming famous. That's where the PR aspect may come in. Because a lot of times, company owners, they're happy with their marketing, they're selling their product or services, but what they find is they want to be more well known within their profession. So when it comes down to PR tactics, we look at things like speaking at conferences, getting their name placed in publications, getting articles byline by them and putting those publications. In other words anywhere, someone would begin to recognize, you know, somebody's name along with their company. And of course, you know, you can rattle off the top of your head, very, very famous people in today's marketplace, but there are a lot of not so famous people that also want to get well known. And that's where PR comes in
[5:21] Mike: Absolutely.
[5:22] Ellie: Yeah. Scott, thank you for highlighting those differences and kind of explaining that to us, then. I think we read in here a lot that acquiring new business is one of the top concerns of accounting professionals. I mean, that seems pretty clear. So is marketing effective for accounting professionals?
[5:41] Scott: Well, I think it can be. I think that's another really good question. I think it's, yes, absolutely. But they have to be in it for the long haul. If you're expecting, you know, my gut feeling is if you're expecting immediate results, which let's face it, a lot of accountants do want immediate satisfaction with what they're doing, because that's the kind of business they're in. They're looking at numbers, they're looking at their clients' numbers, they're looking at, in your case, you know, sales, tax reporting compliance. Those are things that are fairly immediate to report and audit and figure out. In the case of marketing, it's not such a fast thing. Yeah, you could go out there with a widget and sell 200,000 widgets tomorrow on a home shopping network, but, you know, we're talking about accounting here and about, you know, the accounting profession, and something like that takes time. In the case of accounting, again, it's a service they're selling. It's going to be a slow drip in terms of results from marketing. But if they're in it for the long haul, I think they'll definitely have some results here. And I always say, accountants are very good at numbers, but they're not great at marketing. I'm very good at marketing and PR, but I'm lousy with numbers. Don't ask me, this is why I have a financial bookkeeping program right on my Mac that I open every morning, because you wouldn't want me to balance your checkbook. So, again, you know, accountants are very good at numbers, not so great at marketing, but they can be taught marketing, certainly, because they're very smart people. They know what they're doing.
[7:21] Mike: Alright, so thanks for sharing. It looks like marketing can work for accountants. What's one of the first things you do, that you have accountants do, when you start working with them?
[7:37] Scott: Well, the first thing we do is we come to a consensus on messaging. Okay, so messaging is very, very important. And when I say messaging, I mean, being able to speak to what you do in a very consistent way. Again, consistently all the time. In other words, if you're having a conversation with one of your clients, and you start telling them what you do, and what your service is, and then you turn around and have another conversation somebody else, what you're saying to the first client has to be the same thing you're saying to the second client or prospect. You can't, you can't be something different than what you are. And as soon as you can get that messaging down, and we get it down on paper, we just say - Okay, let's, let's hit the five key points, that your business is involved in, what you're trying to be, who you're trying to portray, what you're selling, what you're marketing, let's get that down on paper, because it's very important that you look at that all the time and figure out - Okay, this is what we're doing. So once you have those messages down, it's very, very easy to pivot off of that with any strategy or tactics you're trying to do for marketing or PR. So that's one thing and I think there's, there's two more that I'd like to talk about. The second one is, if you, what we have clients do is we tell them that they've got to take a risk, okay. They've got to take a chance on doing something different than what they're doing. If they're doing everything right, they certainly don't need us. They don't need anybody at all, no matter how great they are at marketing or PR to guide them and tell them what to do, so we always say you've got to be able to take a risk. And you know, that's not something that's easy for a lot of accountants to grasp because . . .
[9:22] Mike: Yeah, mostly risk-averse, so
[9:24] Scott: I know, and they're used to, they're used to control. They're used to being in control, and absolutely knowing what's right around the corner. And with marketing, and especially PR, it's not always like that. You have to be able to take a risk. The other thing, the last thing I want to talk about this in this area is they've got to be able to make a decision. Okay, so that sounds easy, but I've worked with a lot of clients who were absolutely the nicest people on the planet. I had a client one time he was in financial services and, named Bill, Bill was absolutely the nicest person you would ever want to meet. If I said, Bill, give me the shirt off your back. He would take it off and give it to me no questions asked, not even wanting to know what I needed it for. But when it came down to him make a decision, he just couldn't do it. He was so unsure of the path that he wanted to take himself, that he ended up making, not making any decisions. And so over a, I'm not kidding you, a 12-year course of work that we did with him, finally, about the eighth or ninth year I said, Bill, you got to find somebody else to work with. You can't make a decision. We can't move forward. Oh, I'll give you more money. Okay, so the first time I was like - Alright, so he's giving me more money, I guess I'm worth what I'm saying. Again came time to make a decision, same thing,I’ll give you more money. Please don’t leave me. The third time I said, you know, I'm sorry, but you just have to, we just have to move on because it's not doing you any good to pay us for services if you can't move forward with what you're doing. So you got to be able to make that decision, and I know that's hard. It's hard. It's hard for me in my business to make decisions and have long term impacts.
[11:12] Mike: Same here.
[11:13] Scott: Yeah, absolutely.
[11:15] Ellie: Yeah. Scott, you didn't just give us the first thing you gave us three great things there, which is fantastic. And this question really might reiterate some of this, but what is the number one thing that you see accountants not doing that they should be doing in regards to their marketing efforts?
[11:33] Scott: Well, the thing I hit home on the most especially, you’ve got to measure what you're doing. So let's say for example, again, you have a new niche within your practice. Let's say you want to go, you want to start a forensic accounting practice, or you want to, what's another good example? You want to niche a certain industry, let's say you want a niche in e-commerce, or retail, or franchises, whatever that is. And so you go out there with a grand plan, you may have staff on, you know, you may already have staff who can do that, who can find those find and secure those clients, do the work, but, or you may have to hire, but at the end of the day, have you really increased your billings? Have you contacted more clients? Are you able to get more clients because of that, that new line of service you're offering? In other words, you've got to measure what you're doing. And that can be done. You know, a lot of marketing will say - Well, it's hard to measure what you're doing because a lot of what accountants do, a lot of what the accounting profession does, isn't, isn't concrete. In other words, it's, let's say you're going out with, again, with a product or you're going out with a service, trying to measure its effectiveness, there are different ways to do it. Some of them have to do with numbers, some of them have to do with value, in other words, your value to the marketplace, but any good marketing percent will find a way to help you measure what you're doing. And I always say, you know, when we started engagement with a firm or a company, we say - Let's, let's do a three-month check-in, let's see how things are going. Because now they may not be seeing results on their end, we may not be seeing the results they want to see, and yet, they may not even know what they want to see. So again, we need to check in pretty regularly after that three month period. Because again, you know, they're paying money for something. And if they don't think they're getting something in return, then you know, what good does it do?
[13:36] Mike: Yeah, that rings so true, Scott. I mean, one of my mantras is, around here, we can't manage something if we can't measure it. So what you're saying, you know, just rings you know, perfectly with me, it's resonating. So thanks for sharing that.
[13:55] Ellie: Yeah, Scott. We've, we've already added a lot of value in this episode, and we're not going to stop quite yet. So, um, what should people be avoiding? I mean, you talked a lot about what they should do, what most people aren't doing, but what's something that is accounting professionals need to avoid?
[14:17] Scott: It boils down to three simple words pay for play, don't pay to play. And what I mean by that is don't take ads out in publications, either print or online. You can look at doing some possible google ads if you want. I don't think they're extremely effective. If you've got, they're effective for businesses who have a large local presence or have something that's very niche. But in the case of accounting, accountants when I'm, you know, they want to market to an audience outside their local area most of the time. And because of that, I wouldn't put a lot of money into ads. I certainly wouldn't, you know, like, for instance, I've been asked in the past well, Susie Q contacted me to, she, you know, she's got a radio show, and she contacted me to be on her show, and it's only going to cost me $3500 to be on the show. Okay. So instead of just shutting them down, I would never do that. I always sandwich my remarks somehow, but instead, but I'll ask questions like - Okay, what kind of radio show is it? Is this something on a local radio station that's well listened to by your potential clients or your audience? Or is it something kind of obscure or maybe it's something on the internet somewhere, maybe it's something else? What kind of audience does she have? And why the heck is she charging for people to be on? Because in the PR world and somebody in the marketing world, you'll want to get that non-biased, third-party endorsement. In other words, you do not want to pay for space. It's the same thing as like, like spending money for an article in a publication. You wouldn't do that. You would want the article place to the publication because the editors or the publishers thought it was something good for their audience. So again, I wouldn't pay to play, very rare instances, in very rare instances, it pays off but otherwise probably not.
[16:27] Mike: Great. Thanks, Scott. You've shared a lot of great tidbits of information here. As always, every time I listen to you, every time I speak with you, I myself learn something. If members of our audience want to reach out to you, or work with you, number one, how can you work with them and how can they get in touch with you?
[16:47] Scott: Well, I'd love to talk with anybody who's interested in working with us. Absolutely. I have what's called a father-son practice. My son works with me. He's been with me over six years, and. . .
[16:59] Mike: Great guy
[17:00] Scott: I know, and I've been in business almost 25 years. This Thanksgiving will be 25 years on my own. And we have a lot of fun, so I want to work with people that are fun, always. They're welcome to call me, the number is 972-743-4671 or they can find me at my website which is cytronandcompany, so it's C as in Charlie, Y, T as in Tom, R, O , N as in Nancy, and company, everything spelled out, dot com.
[17:31] Mike: All right, well, thank you again, Scott for appearing. And for those of you who need sales tax questions answered or any services or solutions, you can reach out to Ellie directly at emoffat, that's E, M, O, F, F, A, T at salestaxandmore.com, or you can visit our website at salestaxandmore.com, all spelled out. In addition to the services we offer, we have a series of free webinars that provide CPE credit, and we appreciate you listening to us today. Thanks, and I hope to hear from you, or have you come to the next edition of our Sales Tax and More podcasts. Thanks. Bye Bye.
[18:19] Outro: Thanks for listening. Be sure to click subscribe and check out all of the resources we have out on the web.