Determining whether your marketing efforts are working

How do you know if your marketing is effective? Karen Love, Director of Practice Growth at PKF Texas, talks about how the firm measures the success of its culture and marketing.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, vice president of strategy at Savage, and I’m here again with Karen Love, director of Practice Growth at PKF Texas. So Karen, welcome back to the show.

Karen: Thank you. I am really happy to be here.

Robin: Oh, wonderful. Well, I think what’s great is last time you were here, you talked about how important the culture is to the brand at PKF Texas.

Karen: Yes. Right.

Robin: But now, there’s more to it than that ’cause you have to find meaningful ways to help kinda promote that thought leadership in the culture through your marketing. So tell me; what are some of the ways it’s been effective for you?

Karen: Well, there’s several ways, and it’s all very interrelated, but one of the ways that we get all the topics in a queue, if you will, are to bring people that are representing all of our niche practices together, and it’s a lot of young professionals all the way up to the seasoned professionals. And we talk about the unique topics and the future trends, and then we decide what articles and what vehicles we will use, whether it be our blog, which is an award-winning blog – back in 2004, we were the first accounting firm to have a technology blog – whether it be our series called, Your Route to Profits, where we send out thought leadership ideas on everything from key performance indicators to how you exit your business.

Then, there’s all kinds of other ways we do it, where we will have panels. We have white papers, and we have all these things on our Web and our mobile site, of course. So these are vehicles that we use to get our thought leadership ideas out there.

Then, there’s The BusinessMakers Show that we do, where we do vignettes, and that’s hosted by Greg Price, one of my partners, and we talk about cool ideas and innovative ideas and things that our clients and prospects wanna know about. And we offer it up there – zero charge.

Robin: Wow. Well, that’s wonderful to hear. Now, I think the question everyone wants to know is, how do you know if it’s working or not? How can you tell if all of this is effective?

Karen: Right. And of course, that’s a tricky one because in marketing, especially when you’re in an accounting firm, people are wanting to know what they quantitative numbers are, and it’s a qualitative thing. Now, there are some hard numbers that come in that you can look at, like Google Analytics and things of that nature, which we do, but then the more important thing is the trends that we’re seeing with more engagements that are coming in through our website now, and that’s definitely increasing. And I am seeing trends where the marketplace shows that the accounting firm will be the most profitable firm if it’s getting the majority of its interaction from website introductions.

Robin: Well, I’m glad that you’re keeping on top of that –

Karen: Thank you.

Robin: – to show how effective it can be.

Karen: Thank you.

Robin: Great. Well, thank you for joining us, Karen.

Karen: Thank you.

Robin: Stay tuned next week for another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Pannell Kerr Foster of Texas (PKF Texas) is a Houston-based CPA firm offering a full range of business consulting, technology, assurance, entrepreneurial advisory and tax solutions. Dedicated to middle market companies, the company is part of PKF International, which connects them to offices located in more than 480 major cities in 119 countries. https://www.pkftexas.com/