2020 could not be worse for many accountancy and tax practices.

Swathes of businesses across travel, hospitality, creative, entertainment and non-food retail face an immediate existential threat. If it’s bad for them, it's going to be really bad too for those practices with lots of these clients.

Kelso Consulting has been looking into the popular business buzz topics of 2020 and how they compared to recent years.

To see some of the media's popular business topics of early 2020, and our views on the ones that will re-emerge after their near obliteration by coverage of the Covid emergency, click here to read our media buzz themes research.

Because we felt more of our clients should be considering Google Ads for some of their campaigns, we teamed up with Google Ads expert Dominic Renshaw of AdExtra who gave an excellent overview of what is involved and how to set up and maintain a successful campaign.

Thought leadership is all about having interesting and attention-grabbing insights on the big problems facing your customers.

You could be using these insights in interesting articles and blogs, well-argued reports and white papers, and also delivering them in videos, LinkedIn posts and of course face-to-face in meetings and when speaking at events.

But is there research out there showing it brings commercial benefits for accountancy firms?

Yes, there's plenty!

For instance, when it comes to generating demand and increasing sales, below are some

One of our most visited blogs over the past few years discusses how law firms can get the most from their PR agency.  The advice in it also applies very much to other professional firms, such as accountancy firms. 

We have recently updated it ... although not by much as its advice has "stood the test of time".

Click here for our new and improved "Getting the most for your accountancy firm from your PR agency".

If you are looking at your relationship with your PR agency, or maybe appointing one for the first time, you will be interested in another of our blogs.  This one has been our highest read blog every year since it was written about three years ago!

We recently held a webinar on "Successful blogging for accountancy firms" with accountancy outsourcers Initor Global'.

At one level, successful blogging is surprisingly simple!  You just follow these 6 straightforward stages:

The key steps for success with your accountancy firm's blogging are:

1. Ensure the quality and relevance of the blog to your target reader
2. Blog regularly (firms that blog once or twice a week get dramatically more leads than those who do it only once or twice a month)

The first half of this blog looked at the pros and cons of long blogs.

In this second half we look at the pros and cons of shorter, punchy 350-500 word blogs on topics of interest to your clients and prospects.

There are a lot of benefits to shorter blogs, as opposed to the long essays that some professionals like writing.  They include:

1. Since it is far less time-consuming to write shorter articles, it is easier to get your team engaged.  

Should your firm be writing short punchy blogs, say 300 or 400 words, or longer ones that explore an idea thoroughly and give plenty of information?

They both have their place, and in a perfect world your accountancy firm's blog may well have both. But before you start pasting any old stuff on your blog, let's explore the pros and cons of both... which will also explain why we typically recommend businesses new to blogging to get going with shorter ones to start with.

However, short or long, a blog is no good if nobody reads it.

Kelso Consulting has been appointed by Ozlop as the innovative start-up prepares, after initial early successes, to scale-up its distinctive outsourced bookkeeping service.

David Vine, Ozlop’s managing director, says: “While it is still early stages for us, it is important that Ozlop is laying strong foundations for growth in 2020 and 2021. Part of this will be ensuring we have a strong reputation based not just on our service but also more broadly on our expertise in helping small businesses, particularly microbusinesses with a busy owner.

Webinar: Successful blogging for accountancy firms

Posting interesting blogs regularly on your website is an effective and straight-forward way for accountancy firms of all sizes to attract leads.

Straight-forward, but often difficult for many to sustain, with common problems including:

- Getting stuck for ideas
- Writers-block when it is time to draft 
- Making the process unnecessarily time-consuming

- Shallow content that does not engage readers

Our recent "Building a business-winning reputation" webinar looked at how accountancy firms can build a strong business-winning reputation, and how to get the communications strategy right to achieve this.

This webinar is now available as a complimentary video and podcast. Just click here to watch it now or download it for later.

Accountants inherently understand the importance of having a good reputation.

If your accountancy practice does not appear prominently on Google when business owners are searching online for advice, you are missing out on one of the largest sources of leads for accountancy firms.

The good news is that most accountancy firms don't have to apply complex secret techy techniques to dramatically improve their search engine rankings.  

In fact, topping Google can often be achieved primarily through applying straightforward rules and a bit of thought to the text and other content on your own web pages and social media.

Kelso Consulting's Tim Prizeman leads the expert advice for SME accountants in this month's edition of Accounting & Business, the ACCA Journal.

Many accountancy firms fail to appear in one of the most effective sources of new leads when prospects are searching.... the first page of Google.

While many have put in the effort and generate a regular flow of suitable leads, many other practices either fail to make it a priority or are in denial about its benefits (which of course becomes a self-fulling prophecy).   

Not sure where your practice appears?  

Simply open up a browser and type in the sort of search a potential client would make (NB - not your firm's name!  Also, best done from a private browser window to stop your results being skewed by your browsing history).

The "Big Four" oligopoly of giant accountancy firms is again lobbying hard to protect its position and prevent some sort of break-up restoring a nearly-as-Big Five or maybe six.

Their past efforts have been successful, and their new impetus follows damning comments from leading MPs on the various Parliamentary committees investigating the collapse of Carillion and the role of the Big Four firms. Their ire is particularly high as the Big Four billed Carillion, its pension schemes and the Government £71 million since 2008 relating to Carillion: yet failed to notice anything was wrong.

Grow your practice in 2018 with great advice from our seminars for accountancy firms

Kelso Consulting once again has a series of our popular seminars and webinars for accountancy firms in the first half of 2018, covering a range of business development issues, including public relations, social media, online ads and thought leadership. 

We'd like to invite you and your colleagues to attend!

Particular aimed at accountancy firm partners, together with their marketing directors, we will be hosting our seminars in London and, for Thames Valley businesses, in Newbury.

A round up of recent highlights from our other blogs

You may well be interested in these Posts on Kelso's other blog feeds from over the past few weeks as they are also very relevant to accountancy partners:

How to work with a PR agency: Retainer vs Project

What accountants really need to know about ensuring a successful first encounter with the media!

You've heard about the power of media, maybe your competitors are getting great coverage, and you have been tasked with getting lots for your accountancy practice: but neither you nor the partners have done it before.

That's not a problem as everyone has to start somewhere. But many accountants and their marketing teams approach media relations with misconceptions and unrealistic expectations which, at the very least, lead to missed opportunities and often mess the whole thing up.

Football accounts report delivers 20+ years' of success for Deloitte 

Today Deloitte is the UK's premier sports business consultancy.  But once upon a time it had no such practice - until three of its professionals decided to combine their professional passion with their interest in sport.

It holds plenty of lessons for professional firms of all sizes... and other types of professionals too.

Twenty years on, Deloitte advises the top names in sport across a wide range of financial and business issues.

Public Relations agency to deliver high impact press coverage & Search Engine ranking boost

Cloud bookkeeping and accountancy provider Pandle (www.pandle.co.uk) has appointed Kelso Consulting as part of an ambitious Public Relations campaign to sign up 1,000s of freelancers and small business customers in 2018.

The UK’s cloud bookkeeping market is crowded with several providers, and Pandle is distinctive through its intuitive and straightforward interface particularly aimed at Britain’s 4.8 million self-employed people, most of whom have little or no financial training.

It's time for accountancy partnerships to be measuring the return on investment from their marketing 

Gauging the return on investment of marketing activity is a fundamentally important metric 

for accountancy firms looking to grow, yet practices 

we meet struggle to know whether the amount of time and money they spend on marketing is producing an effective return.

I used to strongly advocate accountants putting effort into their profile, building up their network and using LinkedIn for communicating. It seemed on the verge of turning into a really handy mini-CRM for social selling.

But no more, useful functionality is now disappearing without notice or warning.

Some of the important disappearances include:

• Ability to categorise your contacts into groups - gone!
• Ability to send messages to these groups - gone!

Accountancy firm mergers - making them work

Over the years I've observed many mergers at accountancy and other professional firms.

Some have been stunningly successful, some have been failures and many somewhere in between.

Clearly they were all intended to be huge successes, but something went wrong for many.  What was it?

Well, I'm not an M&A expert but my observation is that those that went wrong had two things in common.

For accountancy firms looking to add oomph and impact into their thought leadership

Members of the Kelso team have been working with accountancy firms on thought leadership since before the term was used (20+ years!), so we've seen and solved a fair few problems in our time, many of them recurring ones!

In a few weeks time I'll be on a panel at a marketing summit discussing how to measure the return of investment for Thought Leadership activities.

It sounds an esoteric subject and immediately begs some specific questions like:"What is Thought Leadership?"; "What resources are being invested and how do I cost such inputs as non-billable time?"; and "What actually is the return I am looking for and how will I know when I achieve it?".

It's easy to start over-complicating things, so the key question accountants and their marketing teams involved in Thought Leadership projects should be asking are:

"Successful marketing is all about storytelling" is an idea who's time has come... or a bit of a fad, depending on your perspective. Certainly the amount of articles about it seems to have risen exponentially in recent months.

It wasn't always thus. I remember an occasion some 12 yearsor so ago when my colleague told the CEO of a tech company that standing out and being memorable "was all about stories"... well, the blank look he got back certainly told its own story.

At our recent webinar I shared a straight forward 6 step process for getting your accountancy firm to the top of Google, which is a hugely valuable place for any business to be, including those professional practices selling high value services.

Got a problem or need a supplier? The first thing most people do now is look on Google.  You probably do too.

And it is not just people looking for holidays and plumbers.... it is businesses looking for high-value suppliers and solutions for complex accounting, financial and management challenges.

Do you read the regular advice comments from John Timpson, the chairman of high street cobbler and key cutter Timpsons?

They appear in the Telegraph and elsewhere, and I am a big fan of his sensible advice for growing and managing a business... and given how ubiqtuous his firm is on Britain's high street, he has a track record of success to back up his advice.

Recently, in his column he dealt with a question about whether a firm should start doing press and PR activity to generate customers.

It is a question many accountancy firms' partners have asked. At big firms it is a resounding "yes",

While Twitter and Facebook encourage strangers to become connected, LinkedIn is all about relationships. However almost daily I am contacted by strangers who are merrily ignoring the rules set down by LinkedIn that state you should only connect with people you know.

The strength in LinkedIn for lawyers is the relationships between people who connect with one another. It allows for recommendations and referrals that simply cannot happen between complete strangers.

A wise proverb states ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but in terms of LinkedIn We’d suggest it is ‘The friends of my friends are my friends’! The contacts of your contacts are going to be brimming with opportunities if you are in an accountancy firm.

Making the right impression when you want to build rapport with someone is vital, not least in business. Ever heard the saying: ‘you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression’?

Yet on the social media channel that means business LinkedIn the majority of introductions are abrupt and use the standard ‘I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn’.

If you have ever been on Twitter you will have spotted those anonymous eggs that denote profiles that have not added a photograph and often flags a complete novice or worse a spam account. On Facebook the silhouette makes you suspicious and on LinkedIn, where it really matters, no photo means no business!

When I see the anonymous head and shoulders silhouette on LinkedInit usually means it is a profile that lacks any attention and however professional the person is, you cannot help but make a judgement about a lack of attention to detail.Picking the right photograph is important too!

Awards help accountancy firms of all sizes stand out

Ambitious accountancy firms looking to establish a leadership position in their markets should have awards as powerful proof-points.  If you don't have some, you need to get them!

 It is easy to rationalise-away the importance of awards. 

9 signs your accountancy firm's thought leadership is doomed to fail

Do you have your ‘Company Website’ displayed on LinkedIn, literally? The default setting for the link with your contact info is to your company web address and at first glance this makes sense.

In fact the Contact Info button – just below your number of connections on LinkedIn, is where your connections can easily discover your email, Skype address and telephone number. Other information includes being able to list up to three web addresses, include your ‘Company Website’

What does your headline say on LinkedIn? If it simple declares you to be an ‘Accountant’, ‘Owner’ or ‘Managing Director’ then you are missing a major trick on LinkedIn; you should be using this to promote the difference you can make to clients!

Your headline is the text that appears immediately beneath your name and is a key part to getting you found on LinkedIn and driving people to engage. Equally it is your chance to appear dull and uninteresting – so get it right and use best practice for your headline on LinkedIn.

Did you binge over Christmas? No, we don’t mean third helpings of turkey or a bloat of mince pies (it should be the collective noun!). Did you gorge yourself on Netflix? Have you seen House of Cards? Or did you finally see Breaking Bad? How about Orange is the New Black?

With over three million users in the UK subscribing to Netflix for unfettered access to so many TV series and movies there is a good chance you have spent some time over the Christmas break streaming.

We are back for a busy autumn with plenty of business available to be won - but lots of accountancy firms after it and strong pressure on fees.

It is those firms that are distinctive and memorable that get recommended for the best appointments.  Those demonstrating distinctive expertise can charge more than their rivals and still win the work.

How do accountancy firms get into such a great position of being recognised as having distinctive expertise?

Does your accountancy firm need to better stand out against your competitors?  In a crowded market   another Budget breakfast and bought in tax tables isn't going to do it!

Business owners and directors are looking for accountants that bring value through their insights and ability to solve commerical problems.  But how do you demonstrate it?

We've been working with accountancy firms for over 20 years to help them stand out.  

Football accounts report delivers 23 years' of success for Deloitte 

Today Deloitte has the UK's premier sports business consultancy.  But once upon a time it had no such practice - until three of its accountants decided to combine their professional passion with their interest in sport.

I recently had an interesting and wide ranging discussion with Peter Scott (www.peterscottconsult.co.uk) who advises numerous professional firms on strategy and management issues. Having previously run Eversheds for eight years as managing partner, he's certainly got great insights to share.
 
Part of our discussion covered how professional firms use PR agencies.  He mentioned many really don't understand how to best use a PR agency, what skills good agencies bring to the party, and what are the best ways to work with them.  Why didn't I write something on the subject he suggested?

Are you locked in a death spiral with your PR agency?
 
We often come across accountancy firms who have been sucked into the "PR death spiral" with their agency (and in-house too).  Here's how to recognise it:

Initially it all began so positively.....

A new PR team had arrived, and make lots of sensible-sounding requests for articles, materials and other content from the partners to pump prime the campaign.  It is quickly supplied by partners keen for coverage and wanting to play their part in a successful campaign.  It is a great start and hopes are high.