Episode 72 // What kinds of content should you be making?

Speaker 1 (00:00.32)
One of the challenges I think a lot of firms have is they’re kind of just operating in random acts of marketing or random content pieces. It’s like, we need a blog post. we need a podcast episode. we need a newsletter article. And we’re thinking about the type of media, but we’re not thinking about it in a strategic way. We’re not thinking about like, hey, could I be creating one big piece of content that then gets translated to all these media types?

where I’m having to work a little bit smarter and a little less hard.

You’re listening to the Remarca Brand Podcast, where authentic brands win.

Speaker 1 (00:48.142)
Alright everybody it’s another episode of the market brand podcast. This is Mike Jones with We are super excited to get back to publishing these I think it’s been a little little break here I’m already excited We’ll get in a kind of cover. We’re gonna be talking about Media today, how do you choose? What kind of media you should be publishing in your marketing mix? I’m really excited to get into that But before we do that Sam we’ve got to do a name ten things right?

Sam Pagel.

Speaker 2 (01:00.856)
been a

Speaker 2 (01:15.63)
We do. Everybody has been asking for another name 10 things. today, today we get a lot of mail, like physical mail with letters. Yeah. So. Yeah, I know, it’s crazy.

every week. Almost every day. Yeah. Most of it’s junk mail, but we do occasionally get listener mail.

We do. Alright, today we are going to name 10 podcasts that will never see the light of day.

right? Mike. The big crunch. It’s just people munching on potato chips.

That would be yeah That would be terrible I’m gonna say tales from the fry cooks Which actually I might listen to But it would just be like the mundane stories of like yeah today We had a couple orders of french fries and some burgers

Speaker 1 (02:08.962)
The sounds of fly fishing. It might actually be really calming. peaceful. Yeah. But I feel like by episode 10 you’re like, I think I’ve heard this one before.

Let’s go with grocery store manifesto. It’s just somebody miked up at the register for about 10 hours of season.

I’m gonna yes and that. Grocery store list. The podcast. Wow. It’s just people reading their grocery lists.

That’d be exciting. Yeah. Yeah, that would be really yeah scintillating

Yeah, imagine that on your commute.

Speaker 2 (02:48.014)
Let’s stick with the grocery store theme and we’re gonna do investigative dumpsters. It’s going to be a 60-minute style looking into the back alley dumpster at the grocery stores.

I’m still laughing, that one’s great. Spreadsheets 101 as a podcast.

I’m to see what they find in there.

Speaker 2 (03:14.786)
That sounds really fun. It would just be like, it wouldn’t really even be like talking. It would just be them like trying to spell out the

The columns and rows and then formulas

Yeah, the formulas. Left car- no, no, right parentheses. Okay, that’s good. I think that was seven probably? Sure, why not? Number eight, let’s go with highway counting. Counting cars on the highway. That’d be really fun.

I’ll yes and that and go with just slug bug. It’s just a family on a road trip playing slug bug and recording it.

Slug. Slugbook. The podcast. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:59.17)
That would really, that would be almost like kind of a horror one, jump scare. Cause you’re just listening to road noise and all of sudden it’s like SLUGBUG! Don’t listen to that one while you’re doing work at your office. Final one, podcast the podcast, Mike. It’s just, you know, it’s just the podcast. Okay.

So meta.

Speaker 1 (04:25.422)
I’m gonna take it to 11.

Social, the podcast. And it literally just reads someone’s social posts. Yeah, it just reads their feed. Robot voice. Siri reading your social posts.

Like a robot voice. Wow.

Speaker 2 (04:43.758)
be really cool.

Yeah, for the socially addicted.

can’t believe I made this sandwich for lunch today.

On that note, let’s switch gears speaking of media like social media Today’s topic is all about how do you choose? What media you should be producing like what kinds of content? Should you be putting out there in the world in your marketing specifically for professional services firms and accounting firms in particular? And just to kind of recap work how we’ve gotten here. So we’ve done this series of episodes really about

how do you take your brand and put it out in the world? So it’s kind of connecting things that we talked about in our very first book about how do you create a brand? How do you know that you’ve created the right brand for your organization, for your firm? What are the tools that you can use to build a great brand? But now we’re really wanting to dive into the marketing side of brand. How do we take our brand? We’ve defined it really well. We’ve done that.

Speaker 1 (05:54.328)
We’ve thought about how to make it authentic, really true to our firm, and how we wanna build lasting relationships with our brand. How do we actually put that into the world in a way that actually is authentic to us, that’s true to us, that’s effective, it resonates with the audiences that we wanna reach? And so we’ve spent a number of episodes kinda talking about different aspects of that. First we talked about getting your team on board, right? This really has to be internal first.

Inside out marketing is really this idea that we keep coming back to in every one of these episodes And that starts inside all right starts inside with your people Really getting them on board with your brands kind of goes back to a little bit of the branding process And really making sure that when you roll it out everyone’s on board. They really understand it. They know how to communicate it They’ve given you tons of feedback in that process and said hey, here’s what’s true about us Here’s what maybe isn’t quite so true so you can really lean in and know that

the brand that you’re putting out is as authentic as possible and that everyone is on the same page helping you do that. And then we talked about how to then shift gears to external, right? How to start looking outside. So inside first, then outside out, finding your audience. Where do you start? Who should we even be talking to? Who should we be targeting? And this was applicable not just to, you know, early stage firms or maybe smaller firms.

But really any firm, even if you’re a really big firm, there’s a lot of times where you’re like, man, we don’t know exactly who we should be targeting. Maybe we know what industries we’re in. We’ve got a number of them, right, that we’re really getting into a lot of geographic markets that we’re in. Maybe we’re even international in that. But then you need to start thinking about roles, positions, the values that your different roles provide. We talked a lot about personas in that. And then we had to talk about, what do we say? Right. We know who we’re targeting.

What do we even say to them? And we spent a whole episode talking about the message of your marketing. How to make sure that that is rooted in your brand, it’s truly authentic, and really resonates with your audience. think that was a really key point in that episode that I would encourage everyone to go back to. That one I think in particular is a really good tee up for this episode that we’re gonna be talking about today. So today is all about what kind of content do I make, right? What is the media?

Speaker 1 (08:16.898)
What is the type of content I should be creating now that I have my message? I know what I’m supposed to be saying. It’s rooted in my brand anthem. It’s indicative. It’s taking care of the issues and the values and the concerns that my target audiences have. Again, we’ve married inside to out, right? Inside and outside with our brand and how we’re bringing that to market. Well, now what do we do? How do we create the content? What kinds of content should we be putting out there? Should we, should I be doing videos?

Should I be doing podcasts? Should I be writing articles? Should I be, I don’t know, on TikTok creating little shorts? Maybe I should just be out on the street with a sign, spinning that around. I’d really like to see an accounting firm try that one out. That’d be A mascot. Get somebody with the pickle mascot out at the street and spin that sign. Yep. Yeah.

That’d be a great idea.

So Sam, what do you think? Kind of kick us off here. What are some of the first thoughts that come to mind when you think about what kind of content should I make? Maybe where should firms be starting in that process?

Well, I think this is a really helpful conversation because if you’ve been in marketing for any number of years, you’ve probably felt the draw to have to do all the stuff, right? you probably. You’re a liar. You probably see your competition. You probably see your competition or, you know, maybe the big players in your industry doing

Speaker 1 (09:36.462)
You felt that Sam. You probably never felt that.

Speaker 2 (09:51.136)
of stuff, right? They’ve got a video production team and they’ve got podcasts and they’ve got, you know, magazines and they’ve got a year-end catalog that they send out. Everybody’s going to be doing different things, but what is important for your firm? And I think this conversation is really helpful because it’s, I hope it’s going to kind of give you permission as a marketer in your firm to only do what’s right for your firm.

and to not feel the draw to say, we got to have a TikTok account and we got to be on Facebook. And did we post everything on every social media channel? And we got to get our pot. You the partners want a podcast and all these things because you you can get carried away.

What’s the hot? What’s the hot media type of the day? And if we go back, let’s let’s reverse gears for two years Everyone was talking about meta. Mm-hmm. We all have to be on the metaverse, right? I was like that’s a cut. That’s a kind of content That’s a type of media that you need to produce Man, I’m really glad none of our clients leaned in on that one is clearly that has not taken off. Yeah, not like

That’s right.

Speaker 2 (11:03.822)
Not quite. So I think this conversation is really helpful because it probably is overlooked quite a bit in kind of the stage of, hey, we know who we’re talking to, this is our target market, these are the people we want to be advertising to and talking to, and then you can kind of just skip to like, all right, well, we have to do all the things now. But really, Mike, you have to look at

the inside of your firm first. And how do do that?

Yeah, I think that starts with just looking at the personnel that you have, right? So maybe even one step before that, look at the personality of your firm, right? So if you have specific personality traits that you’ve developed, you kind of have a persona or an archetype or a metaphor that you’ve developed. Think about what matches that personality, that culture that you’ve developed. Some of that even is helpful to look at individuals in your firm. Look at your subject matter experts.

How do they like to communicate? Are they writers at heart? Are they more verbally oriented? They like to talk, right? Doing lots of presentations. Are they more visually oriented? Perhaps they like to create visual, lots of graphs and charts and visualizations of data. Or maybe they’re just like super data centric, right? They’re all about gathering data, finding lots and lots of data and finding good insights within that. So I think

Some of this goes back to like, who is your firm? Find that cultural identity, find that personality, look at the individual personalities of your subject matter experts, and start to go, okay, what kinds of content are we already creating? Just naturally by the process of doing the work that we do. Find the content types that they’re producing with their clients. If you find like, man, they just love to have lots of meetings with all their clients, that would probably lend itself to understand that

Speaker 1 (13:03.042)
Your culture has an affinity towards verbal communication. So maybe consider how can we lean into that from a marketing standpoint? Let’s get our subject matter experts on a microphone. Let’s get them on a zoom call. Let’s record that and produce some great audio content. Maybe there’s a video element to it, but it’s not highly produced, right? If they’re more of like presentations, very polished, right? Think about how video could be incorporated. If they’re more of the writing type,

Maybe lean into that and say, hey, we’re going to write a whole series of articles on a particular viewpoint that we have for the industry we’re targeting or something really interesting. Put put white papers together, right? Put, put a whole series of case studies into a book, right? If your firm is more about visualizations, right? Maybe it’s, you know, lots of visuals. Maybe that’s just a part of your firm. Maybe there’s a little bit of artistic bent.

which would be a little unique maybe for an accounting firm, but we know some accounting firms, they’re very visual in how they produce their work and just the environment that they want to work in. Lean into that, create visuals. Maybe you’re going to be doing a lot of social posts, you’re going to be creating a lot of infographics. And then if you’re more of a data-centric firm, which maybe that’s a lot of firms, especially when comes to accounting, maybe think about…

You know, how can you leverage that ability, that kind of superpower that you have in your personality, do surveying, right? Create a really interesting data set or go find and aggregate a bunch of data sets. Think about the things and the problems that your clients are encountering that you’re already answering their questions for and then just expand it, right? So I’ll give an example that might be helpful. We know that a lot of our

A lot of our target audience, so this is a little bit looking outside, which we’re gonna talk about here in a minute. But looking inside first is like, hey, we’re really good at verbal communication, so we do a lot of podcasting. I think that’s a great example of just leaning into your personality as a firm, knowing that the personnel that we have, the way they like to communicate, if it’s highly verbal, I just know for me, even for you, for Chris, sitting us in front of a microphone, we can riff really well.

Speaker 1 (15:24.93)
And we can work through a lot of ideas very quickly and develop them out in a way that like, you you sit me in front of a laptop with a blank Google doc page or word doc page. I’m going to probably need a little bit more time to kind of think through my ideas and come up with something and then really write it and polish it. Yeah. So I think there’s lots of opportunity to just kind of really assess what best fits us. I would say I’ll caveat that.

You know, the smaller the firm, the more important or helpful it is to lean into what you’re already good at. Because you have a limited amount of capacity, have limited budget, you have limited people to really produce a lot of content. Right? And at the end of the day, you do need to produce some content. Right? We’ll talk a little bit about how much as part of this episode. It might be less than you think. But you still need to be producing great content.

So the best way to get there if you’re a smaller firm, if maybe like producing content is hard for you, maybe you’ve been using a lot of like other people’s content, either paid license content or maybe just recycling articles and you know, just republishing stuff, that’s fine, right? That’s fine. But it’s not producing a unique point of view. If you want to have a unique point of view, and I think every firm should be angling for that, they should be, you should be aiming for that. We talked about that with the brand anthem, right? Like you should have a unique

viewpoint on your industry, your world, on the work that you do in some way, shape, or form that you can tell others about and differentiate, right? And say, hey, we do it different. Here’s why.

If you want that, the easiest way to get there is to actually give the people in your firm the best chance to produce that content. As marketers, yes, your job is to make sure that lots of content is getting produced, that it’s the right content, it’s high value. But it’s not your job to necessarily know the content, to be the content expert, to be the subject matter expert. That’s what everyone in your firm is doing.

Speaker 1 (17:34.754)
building the subject matter expertise or have built it. So unlocking them to communicate that expertise is what you need to do. Yeah. So find ways to do that that meet them where they’re at the culture of your firm and then the individual personalities of the people that are your subject matter experts. Larger firms. This still applies. Now it might be a little different. You might not have like a really strong content preference as a

company when you’re really big, right? Because the reality is you probably need to be producing a lot of different types of content. And we’ll talk about why that is in a minute here when we talk about looking outside, looking at your audiences, understanding the kinds of content they want, right? At the same time, as a big firm, you’re gonna be probably launching new initiatives, creating new verticals, new service lines, perhaps even integrating in

Going and looking for you know merger acquisition of you know, want to grow our service lines, right? We want to grow into another area of service that’s related Those are all opportunities to go back and look at your personality as a firm What’s the core personality look at the individuals that are going to be involved? What is their personality? What best fits them and give yourself the best chance to create really good valuable content?

and not hit yourselves over the head over and over and over again, trying to get content out of subject matter experts. I feel like that’s one of the biggest challenges that we hear across the board from big firms down to small firms. I can’t get my subject matter experts to give us enough content. I go, well, how are you asking for it? What type of content are you requiring them to deliver it in? If it’s like, hey, I really need a video and I can’t get time and I can’t get the video produced because it’s hard,

with my subject matter experts or maybe let’s be honest, they’re not good on video, right? Then get the content a different way, right? Do it in a soft interview where there’s no cameras. Yeah, we got a recorder on the table or we’re running zoom. I’m gonna hit record, but let’s forget about that. We’re just having a conversation. I’m gonna ask you some questions. You’re gonna give me content back. We’re gonna polish it up. We’re gonna turn it into a video.

Speaker 1 (19:57.516)
We’re going to use a voiceover, right? Get rid of all those issues and just get the really good content, get the unique points of view and context out of them. So that would be my encouragement to everybody. I know that was a long winded there on that question, but I think it’s really, really valuable to at least run the exercise and go, what fits our firm? Because I think what everyone wants to do is what I’m to tell you to do next, which is

Go go understand your audience and all the types of content that they want right? How did they want to consume content? So Maybe we should talk about that

There’s a scenario too, Mike, where you might be in a firm where it’s almost impossible to get time with your subject matter experts. They’re too busy. Or there’s four to five months out of the year where they’re like, I can’t talk to you. I’m too busy.

I guarantee you there’s four to five months a year they can’t talk to you. If you’re a good firm.

So then so then what do you do and and that’s that’s where it takes planning and it takes really knowing the makeup of your team to plan for those times and there’s probably a lot of scenarios where the marketer is tasked with kind of creating something out of nothing and And so how do you how do you address that Mike from what we’re talking about looking inside first? How do you address that?

Speaker 2 (21:27.182)
pain point. We’ve heard that a lot of like, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to like I don’t know how to talk about audits.

Yeah. Well, I think part of the challenge is that there’s this like smorgasbord of content topics that you’re trying to hit and it’s not strategic. So one point I’d make is go back to your strategic plan and go, where do we really want to grow? We don’t need to be publishing content on every topic. If we’re especially for a smaller firm and we really have one area where we really

Want to grow right because at the end of the day marketing yeah, you’re about maintaining You know a level of lead gen for every service area or every industry that you’re in but at some level like your real like ultimate mandate is to is to increase firm growth and ideally within certain areas right whether that’s a specific industry or a couple industries that you want to launch or really lean into in one year the reality is you just cannot

do everything to the same level across the board. And so like if you have a subject matter expert in a particular service line or a particular industry who just is not giving you what you need and their service line and industry is not part of the growth strategy, I’d be like, great, you don’t need to worry about that one. Now that’s a conversation you probably need to have with your managing partner or your CEO or whoever is kind of leading the charge on your growth strategy.

for the firm. Yeah. Because I don’t know that you can make that decision in a silo. But just say, we’re not getting it. We’ve tried this method. We’ve tried that method. We’ve tried interviews. We’ve tried giving up templates. They fill in. We give them questionnaires. Like they’re just not getting it to me. And honestly, that’s not my mandate this year. This is where this other area is where we want to grow. So I’m going to put all my more of my eggs, maybe not all my eggs, but I’m going to put more of my eggs in this basket and really develop the subject matter experts on this side. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:30.926)
Maybe you’re more willing to give you that because they have that mandate to you right so if you’ve got a partner subject matter expert on one side Who’s just like I’m not really into growth I? Didn’t therefore is not incentivized to get you more content right and that’s another part of this is just leaning into incentives and understanding like Hey, if they don’t if they can’t connect the dots on why they should be delivering you great insights They’re not gonna do it yeah

They’re too busy. I mean, that’s just the reality. Bigger firms, I think you’re gonna find that there’s somebody who’s willing to generate content. I think a lot of it’s training too. And I think especially if you can go after your younger subject matter experts and give them lots of tools, lots of training, build it into their workflow. That’s another really key piece is like, hey, every client is an opportunity for content, right? There’s a story there to be told.

So build that into the onboarding and the client experience so that as they’re working on that client’s account, they’re generating content for you. And they’re not even thinking about it because they’re like, this is just part of the client experience. I asked them for anecdotes. I asked them for data. We’re tracking how we’re doing with them. I have to fill out these sheets that kind of give marketing a little bit of a description on it. Or, I mean, you want to really…

Really build it in, like put it into your all hands and say, hey, you’re going to be presenting this month on one of our clients, like a win for one of our clients. That right there is content for marketing. Yeah. Right. So if you make it like, hey, you’re going to be presenting to the firm. And so they’re totally incentivized to create that content. Yep. And then you grab it, take the recording, transcribe it, turn it into whatever piece of content you need to reach your audience. And I think that’s

where we need to get to is like, okay, yeah Mike, we need to be doing content that fits us because that will help us generate the most content, the highest quality content possible with the subject matter experts that we have. But I have an audience that really wants content this way. So we need to talk about that.

Speaker 2 (25:49.622)
Yeah, you can’t ignore your audience. No, you can’t know you can’t put a podcast out every week that nobody cares about nobody listens to Yeah

Perhaps your audience doesn’t listen to podcasts. Yep.

And I think too your audience is gonna focus you even more and this goes back to knowing Your audience and also knowing your personality and how you’re perceived a little bit, you know You could be a firm that where you want to be, you know, highest-end accounting firm In your region and so all your branding all your visuals very high-end very, you know Fancy just looks nice looks like top top of the line

You probably wouldn’t want to do like an iPhone video of your managing partner as your monthly video content. Like that wouldn’t fit. On the opposite side, you you might be over producing content that is just like, this looks like almost too nice and it makes me uncomfortable as one of your clients because I don’t know you this way.

Or the frequency isn’t there, right? this audience needs content every single week. And if you’re shooting too high on the production value, you might really struggle to produce really high level production every single week. So yeah, that might be where it’s like, hey, we’re doing a lot of LinkedIn posts, doing a lot of photos, right? Maybe internal culture type stuff, or just kind of behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 (27:24.514)
That may not need to be all over produced. You know, might not need to have a professional photographer taking every one of those photos. Certainly, you know, if you can get somebody trained or, you know, give them some opportunity to grow in that and get good at it. But maybe do you have to be great? No. I’d worry more about like, hey, we’re producing the content that really fits this audience. I think that’d be the first point I’d make is that before you get too hung up on the type of content, like the media type,

I’d really make sure that you’re developing content that actually is of value. Yeah. And that goes back a chapter or back an episode in this series of like knowing what to say. And part of that is knowing what’s valuable to your clients, knowing what’s valuable to your audiences. And I would say even what’s valuable down to the role that that person, so creating those personas down to the role within the organizations that you’re targeting and saying, what are the real problems they’re having?

What kind of content what kind of message do we need to put in front of them? Like what kinds of things really matter to them and will be really helpful And now we can think about what kind of media type best fits that So one of the things I think that was kind of eye-opening is we were talking through all this We talked about before we’ve talked about many times and we do this with some of our clients. We’ve done it for ourselves but it kind of hit me it was like One of the challenges I think a lot of firms have is is they’re kind of just operating in you know

random acts of marketing or random content pieces. It’s like, we need a blog post. we need a podcast episode. we need a newsletter article. And we’re thinking about the type of media, but we’re not thinking about it in a strategic way. We’re not thinking about like, hey, could I be creating one big piece of content that then gets translated to all these media types where I’m having to work a little bit smarter and a little less hard?

Now you’re gonna have to work hard on that piece of content because it needs to be super high value. Right, so I’m thinking like, you know, if going back, okay, maybe your firm’s personality is more like verbal, right? So podcasts, that really leans into our subject matter experts. They love to talk to people, maybe one of them’s a great networker, loves to, you know, just can carry a really good conversation, ask really good questions, has good interpersonal relationship skills. Great, get them on a podcast, interview people.

Speaker 1 (29:51.736)
But what if instead of like, we need to interview another person. And it’s just this like chunking through a random list of businesses, business owners you’re trying to target and just saying, hey, we’ll have a conversation with them. What do we talk about? I don’t know. We’ll just talk about their business. Okay. Kind of interesting, right? Certainly somewhat helpful from a networking standpoint, maybe business development. But man, like I’m not interested in that. I’m not sure that many people would be interested in listening to that, right?

outside of maybe that company you’re targeting and their kind of network. Well, what if you had a unique point of view on an industry, right? And you said, all right, now we’re gonna line up interviews of people in this industry and we’re gonna talk about this topic. We’re gonna address this issue or this unique point of view, get their take on it. Maybe they don’t agree. Great, that’s a great conversation.

But now if we do a 10 part series, we do 10 interviews, by the end of 10 interviews, we now have a complete series, right? So now I have podcast content, hopefully I’ve got transcriptions from all that, so my SEO is working for me. I probably have been doing promotion for each episode, right? So you have social posts going out, maybe running some boosted social, running some display ads that all point back to this. And every episode is building on the last one.

Right? They’re all adding up to this larger topic. So there’s a reason for people to be invested in the series, not only the single episode. And certainly, yeah, you bring on the, you know, the guests, they’re going to push it out on their networks. You’re going to get a little, little buzz there. At the end of it, though, wrap that up, put that into like a summary video, put that into a webinar, put that into an ebook, put that into some larger piece of content.

that now all those things can point back to and say, get the big piece of content. And that could be a gated piece of content or not, you know. And then that gated piece of content or that big piece of like content becomes a source for all of your other content for months to come. Yeah. Right. So that could be pull out a single chapter out of that ebook. Right. Release that. Those could become articles. Every one of those is an article that you can publish on your blog. You probably

Speaker 1 (32:15.534)
could find multiple ways to publish those as different articles, slice and dice them a bit. All your social comes right out of that. Grab graphics from it, maybe add some charts and graphs, add in some third party data. I mean, you could really just take this and run with it as far as you can. And now all of a sudden, you own that industry from a content standpoint. You’re creating a unique point of view. You have really high value content, stuff that’s beyond an article or beyond a social post.

you’re really producing something like these really interesting conversations in a podcast format. Maybe there’s a video element to that. You’re creating this really interesting ebook. And again, this is now hitting. So if you know that your audience, different people want to want to digest content in different ways, some are going to want audio, some are going to want video, some are going to want articles, and they might not even want the same kind of content every time they come back. Right. They might want to experience it or use it in a different way.

So having every one of those types gives you great opportunity to really saturate a particular market and say, we are hitting everybody possible within our persona, within our ideal customer profile. So I’m a huge, huge fan. I call that like a content Bible, right? So you’re creating kind of one big piece of content and there’s different ways to produce that. Like we said, you could use a podcast or you could just go straight for the ebook.

Or you could do like a really big industry survey, maybe find some partners in that. Go survey tons of people, get tons of data, analyze it, produce the results, do indexing, do maybe some award type stuff. There’s lots of opportunities there. But now all of your content generation is focused. And that might eat up most of your content budget. know, your time budget and your financial budget are for a six month or 12 month period.

But man, how much more effective is that spend gonna be than just random acts of marketing that don’t really add up to something larger and really don’t focus people on like, okay, this is where we wanna grow.

Speaker 2 (34:25.666)
So think the beauty there is it is so easy to take one source of content. Typically, we find it’s easiest if that’s like a verbal or like a recorded Zoom call, right? Yep. Hey, let’s jump on a 10 minute call. We’re going to talk specifically about you mentioned, you know, last week that you had a great interaction with this client who is, you know, the CFO at an oil company.

I just, let’s talk through that. Why was it so good? Let’s talk about the challenges that we helped them solve and you know, the disappointment they had before that now is a win for them. And so you talk through that for 10 minutes, it’s recorded. You have the audio of that and that might not be something you put out into the world, it depends. But you’ve got the source material, right? And now you’re not just like putting a

I’m be high polished enough.

Speaker 2 (35:23.086)
prompt into chat GPT that says, tell me about accounting for oil companies and make it good. You have real stories and you have the unique perspective that your firm brings. So that could potentially become a podcast episode that could become a long form article that you post on your website. It could be, you know, 25 different social posts that you parse out from that content.

And if there’s a video component there too, if you’ve recorded that on zoom or if you use a different service to do that, there’s a YouTube video. So it’s never been easier to take one source of content and, you know, produce that into all these different channels.

Yeah, if you want a big basketball fan, NBA follower, which is probably not a great thing to let everybody know. know some people are like, that’s stupid. Why do you follow that? Sam’s laughing at me right now because he thinks it’s stupid. But like I think about like sports and how they leverage this principle, right? The keystone content, they’re like Bible is the games. Yeah, right.

So every game is highly produced, they invest a ton in it, right? But think about how much leverage they get out of one game. You think about like the highlight reels that come off of it, the ads that they produce out of the game footage, the social media content, and you look at a lot of teams right now on any sport, like any major professional sport, they’re generating tons and tons of great social content just from the game.

Now, are they doing other stuff too? You know, behind the scenes stuff, interview the players? Sure, right? Like, this isn’t the totality of your entire marketing strategy, but it should be the center of it, right? And then you can riff off of it and say, well this player got highlighted today, so let’s go back to our archive of interviews we did over the summer in the off season, and let’s pull that clip from that interview that…

Speaker 1 (37:34.998)
You know this week on social will highlight this player because man they did really well in the game last night right and now you’re playing into like what what people are paying attention to now obviously counting firm law firm some other professional services firm Your your content probably doesn’t get the pull an NBA basketball game gets But that’s not the point right the point is actually and if you’re creating really foundationally fundamentally like

really valuable content off that main piece, that keystone or Bible piece of content. If that is like, I have to have that, right? Look at your ideal customer profile, build that persona, think about what would be just, I have to have the answer or this data or this story, right? This interview, like that is something I must have. Then create

That piece of content and everything else you do to promote that, all the other content is just promotion at that point, right? That’s something that is gonna drive a lot of attention to the people that you’re trying to reach. I would also give everyone one more caveat, the media. When you’re about outside your firm, right? So we talked a lot about inside, now we’re moving to outside, we’ve talked a lot about outside, like looking at your audience, looking at these ideal customers.

Think about what kind of content they like to create. Not just what they like to consume, but what kind of content do they like to create? And I’d say on two levels, think about this. One is where people like to create, they tend to be. Right? And so the type of content, maybe they’re more into video, more into podcasts, more into writing content. Think about the individual firms that you want to get in front of or the individual companies you want to get in front of. And actually think about

What kind of content do they create so I can put content out just like them, right? There’s a feedback there that’s gonna resonate with them. The other piece of that is do collaborative content, right? So again, think podcasts are the really easy one. I know very few companies that are unwilling to get on a podcast. At least if it has something to do with what they do, some kind of industry tie in. And even then they might not care because they’re just like, want PR, I want publicity, right?

Speaker 2 (40:02.19)
Create that.

Content with them, right? So that’s another reason why it’s like well, where are they? Where are they putting out their marketing? What kinds of content are they creating? Go ask them. Hey, can we create some content together do a joint webinar do a joint case study? If it’s an actual client you already have yeah do industry survey together, right and you’ll actually find that that partnership Not only creates more marketing buzz, right? Cuz they’re gonna talk about it as well as your firm’s gonna talk about it and you’re gonna market it but it also like

gives more value to it, right? Because now the industry looks at it goes, this is backed up by another industry player. And that can also be just a great business development strategy. I’d encourage people to think about that.

I’ll yes and your sports analogy Mike. All right. Because what naturally what a lot of sports teams do in their marketing social media all that stuff is leverage the individual players right that did something good that made a really great play that was like must see basketball or baseball or whatever you’re watching. In a similar way you probably have partners at your firm or key players

Are really well known for work. They’ve done maybe in a specific industry or a region or a city Start to leverage those kind of I’ll say celebrity type people in your firm like the personalities that you know because we’ve talked to a ton of firms and typically there’s one or two or a couple several people in the firm where like Everybody just knows like that’s the restaurant guy. Yep. he is he is locked in with with

Speaker 2 (41:44.92)
the all the local restaurants here. It’s probably because he’s worked with them. Maybe he just loves those food, loves going around. But he’s just like, everybody knows him and he’s that guy. Like start to leverage that and don’t have that guy talk about the oil field industry. Have him talk about the restaurant industry. That could be really fun too. He could get really into that or she could get really into that. If he’s he or she is passionate about.

loves food

Speaker 2 (42:11.818)
know, the restaurant scene in your state or your city or even, you know, maybe it’s a couple different cities around the country. Focus on that. Have fun with that.

What if they go and interview chefs or even just make food with chefs around town, do a little series, video that of them making food together, and then put out a recipe book with those chefs, know, let them, joint collaborative content creation here, and then put an analysis of spend per recipe.

Yeah, you gotta have the right

Put a little account accounting in there somehow, but like if that’s the flavor right you know maybe put a little accounting Spin on it. Yeah, put some kind of tax spin on it Yeah, put some kind of like business financial business audit kind of spin on it

Or even make it event based. We’ve talked to firms where I think specifically in their city maybe there’s a week, like restaurant week or something, or small business week, where you go out and you feature some of these small businesses that you work with or restaurants that you work with and have a lot of fun with it. And the restaurants and small businesses, absolutely they’re gonna buy into that. That’s free publicity and free marketing for them. So that could be another idea where you’re leveraging

Speaker 2 (43:34.316)
the experts at your firm who are known for a certain industry or a certain type of work and you’re leveraging those personalities in a really positive and dare I say fun way, right?

Yeah, and I think the key there too is like, I think a lot of firms get events, right? Like they understand how to leverage events. What I don’t know that they all understand is like, you need some way to capture that and reuse it over and over beyond the event itself. And not just like, we posted some social, right? We took some photos. Cool.

It shouldn’t be about the event itself.

It should be about the content that that event is creating so like if there’s a You know, there’s a conference element like people are speaking they’re presenting in that event if there’s like Unique experience that’s having like capture video of that transcribe the audio Go and interview the different, you know people so I’m thinking like restaurant week going back to that idea It’s like, okay. Are you gonna get like really thoughtful?

Great deep content on accounting as you interview restaurant chefs No, probably not right what you are gonna get is really interesting stories from the chefs about their business, Lean into the business element of it because that’s ultimately what you’re doing, right? You’re helping them improve their business or keep it Financially viable. Yep So have them tell their story that is content right there. I’m like, why is that not published as an article? Why is that not published like do a response? Yeah

Speaker 1 (45:06.286)
Podcast to those like where you talk about the principles behind what was in the story. Yeah, right Go put that together into like, you know recipe book for success. Yeah, sorry Something real cheap very cheesy. Yeah Moves you. wait, we’re moving into dairy territory now

we can’t help ourselves on that one.

can’t. Too much dairy in our lives.

We should we should remind everyone there there has to be value here right for the people that you want to be talking to you can’t it can’t all be just like tell us about your you know your flan recipe this is amazing People don’t need another guy Fieri experience especially from an accounting firm, but there’s there should be That value and maybe you know to go back to the restaurant example State of the industry right in your region or your state

State of the restaurant industry or whatever that industry looks like the the business owners the chefs the the CFOs the CEOs They’re gonna have a pretty good pulse on that at least from their own point of view and that’s valuable. That’s very valuable Both to them. Maybe it’s there the people surrounding their business, but probably also their competitors There’s there’s probably a lot of interest out there for for different types of content So we kind of went down that rabbit trail

Speaker 2 (46:32.942)
of specific examples on how to create that content.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, even slice, slice that content a little bit and say, Hey, you know, are we, are we really leaning into more of the entertainment side or the education side or the selling side with this piece of content? And I would argue perhaps when you start with like a really big high value piece of content, right? Like that Keystone type of content, it’s going to do all three. And then as you promote it, you can lean into those different aspects of it.

Sometimes maybe this social post or this ad or this article we wrote about that Keystone piece of content, maybe that’s more on the education side. We’re gonna pull a little bit more from that. Or this one’s gonna entertain a little bit more. Or this one’s really about closing the deal, Getting you to actually think about the services that we provide. And I would argue, you need to be hitting all three. Your firm’s personality is gonna lean into that too. Like, entertain might look different for one firm than another.

in of their personality. If you’re pretty buttoned up, pretty serious, if you’re in some pretty serious markets, right? Your entertainment’s gonna look a little bit different. Maybe it’s more like wine and dine entertainment, rather than like humor and jokes and puns. So, think about that a little bit.

think we’ve touched on this throughout the episode now, but how do you know, like once you’ve got the article written or the audio produced or the video edited down, where do you put it?

Speaker 1 (48:11.416)
That’s next episode.

Man, come on!

Yeah, that is next episode. We should talk about that. We’re gonna talk about that lots of ideas there I think you probably see a format similar You’re gonna understand like there’s pretty clear format to all these which is start inside then look outside Yep, right don’t get that backwards I’ll encourage you as you’re thinking about that between now and the next episode think about like how inside starting there Produces the best opportunity for success the best opportunity to be authentic

the best opportunity to grow in a realistic and sustainable way, rather than just being completely overwhelmed. How many, I mean, you thought there were a lot of options when it came to types of content. Wait till we talk about channels. my goodness, there’s so many, right? It can quickly overwhelm you, right? Just think about social. How many different social channels you could be on. So start inside first, then look outside.

Speaker 2 (49:19.918)
The Remarca Brand Podcast is a project of ReSound and is recorded in Tempe, Arizona with hosts Mike Jones and David Kosand. It’s produced and edited by Sam Pagel. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and at Remarcablecast.com. If you’d like more episodes, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. To contact the show,

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