Association for Accounting Marketing Summit (as part of AICPA ENGAGE 2019)

Advising your clients on their plans for retirement is more than just setting aside money in an IRA. Find out how to guide them through the important conversations about retirement plans including unique ways to save on taxes, attracting and retaining quality talent, and meeting fiduciary requirements. As your business clients’ most trusted advisor, you are well positioned to help guide them toward a dignified retirement.

Join our session to uncover critical retirement strategies and opportunities to further assist your clients in achieving their financial goals.

1. Review current state of retirement readiness and the regulatory environment.
   
2. Compare features and options to maximize savings potential.        
   
3. Highlight the exclusive benefits provided by the AICPA to help you and your clients prepare for retirement security.

AAM's President and President-Elect will recap the organization’s accomplishments during the past year, introduce new board members and discuss initiatives for the year ahead with video highlights.

As the CEO of Clifton Gunderson for 16 years, I was privileged to work with many partners and staff that understood the dynamics of marketing to our current clients, to prospective clients, and to clients that were previously lost. This session will focus on lessons learned and best practices in executing on those three dynamics. In addition, the session will address successful marketing training techniques for the rising staff stars in your firms.

Learning Objectives:

1. To obtain a clear understanding of the constant need to market to current clients, future clients, and to former clients.
   
2. To provide current successful marketing training techniques for the firm's staff.
   
3. To provide marketing lessons learned and best practices from the MP's perspective.

AAM partnered with the Hinge Research Institute to conduct their third bi-annual study of marketing budgets within CPA firms. In this session, the Managing Partner of Hinge Lee Frederiksen will uncover insights from the research, help attendees benchmark their marketing budgets against high-growth and average-growth firms, and provide guidance on building an effective marketing budget.

Learning Objectives:

1. Learn how high-growth and average-growth accounting firms budget marketing expenses.
   
2. Learn which marketing techniques are more effective for accounting firms
   
3. Benchmark your firm’s marketing budget against high-growth and average-growth firms.

One of the hardest stages for content marketing is the Decision stage — actually converting visitors to take action on an offer or to request an RFP. This session will focus on strategies to improve conversion, including identifying the actions that you want visitors to take once they arrive at your site and the gaps you may have in your campaigns that fail to move potential clients from Awareness and Consideration to Decision. We will use examples of actual campaigns to help participants map out their own inbound marketing strategy for conversion, discuss follow-up touches that bring buyers back to the table, and determine when it's timely to have partners engaged in outreach and closing.

Learning Objectives:

1. Attendees will leave with an inbound marketing strategy map that focuses on the right conversion tactics for their firm.
   
2. Deep dive and creation of content that applies to the conversion stage of inbound marketing.
   
3. Fill gaps in the inbound marketing approach that support conversion and real prospects.
   
4. Tie marketing efforts to conversion ROI to justify digital focus

This presentation will be focused on developing and executing on a strong sales pipeline process. The 'billable hours shield' is alive and well as it relates to the time our client service professionals are willing to put to their business development efforts. Key points of this presentation include setting up a consistent and efficient follow up plan with a focus on holding people accountable as they build their sales pipeline. This presentation will also discuss a methodology to limiting the number of key prospects per client service professional and an example of a marketing campaign and process utilized to improve your win rate.

After attending this presentation, attendees should be able to:

1. Assess their own current business development process and determine in what areas, as it relates to holding their client teams accountable, they need to tighten up the process.
   
2. In addition, attendees should recognize instances where it is time to escalate any concerns to their executive team and should feel empowered to do so.
   
3. Finally, attendees should be able to use the example of a marketing campaign and to construct one of their own or infuse their own plan.

Is unconscious bias hindering you, your team or your organization? Unconscious bias is bias that happens automatically. It is triggered by our brain making quick judgments and assessments of people and situations based on our background, cultural environment and personal experiences. Have you ever arrived home from work and don’t remember the drive at all? Or perhaps you moved, but drove to the old house on your way home. Once neural pathways are formed, like your daily commute, they become almost automatic. We don’t spend time thinking about each turn on the way home, our body just does it. While this can be helpful for remembering your route home, it can be detrimental in other areas of our lives. In this session we will explore these biases, how they might be hurting, us, our team and our organization and what we can do to create new neural pathways and combat unconscious bias.

Learning Objectives:

1. Define unconscious bias Identify the unconscious biases that might be driving you. 
   
2. Create an action plan to combat the unconscious biases in you, your team and your organization.

The European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR is causing many U.S. businesses and organizations to take a hard look at data and information collected from customers and others who are citizens of or persons who reside within the EU member states. This new law recognizes the rights of EU citizens as the legal owners of 'personally identifiable' data and information that uniquely identifies each EU citizen or resident. This session will provide attendees with an increased appreciation of this new regulation and its requirements on US organizations and compare the regulation to the recently enacted state of California Consumer Privacy Act.

The session will provide attendees with:

1. An understanding and appreciation of the European Union's GDPR, and its potential impact on organizations providing products and services to EU citizens and residents.
   
2. Information on the types of services licensed CPAs can provide to clients, share insights on questions clients may ask attendees.
   
3. Steps practitioners can perform to help clients ensure they are complying with the law and that help organization's provide assurances regarding their data privacy practices and controls.

In this session, attendees will learn how Rea & Associates developed an engaging, award-winning podcast -- before podcasting was cool. We'll cover how a podcast can help invigorate your brand, make your people famous, form meaningful conversations and build trust and credibility with the people you want to reach, and streamline your content strategy.

You'll learn how Rea launched its podcast, unsuitable on Rea Radio, and the lessons we learned along the way. We'll share our internal and external promotion strategy and the tools and equipment you need to get started. If you've been considering podcasting as a strategy, you don't want to miss this fun and engaging session.

The session will cover the how and why of starting a podcast and attendees will learn:

1. Why a podcast/selling to your firm
   
2. Pre-launch objectives
   
3. Launch date promotion
   
4. Keeping it fresh
   
5. Overcoming obstacles
   
6. Our top lessons learned
   
7. Using as a content hub
   
8. How we work smarter, not harder
   
9. Top tools/equipment used
   
10. Skill sets required

Solo firm marketers are continuously pulled in many different directions, filling multiple roles and wearing many hats. Where should you focus your limited time and resources to maximize your impact for the firm? This session will help you think strategically to direct your talents to those areas that will yield meaningful results for firm management, enhance your visibility and credibility within the firm, and directly impact the firm’s team members and bottom line. Sharing lessons learned from more than 26 years working as a solo firm marketer, along with best practices from other solo firm marketers and industry experts, the goal is for participants to leave this session with a renewed focus and a specific action plan geared toward activities yielding the greatest results.

Key takeaways will be in the form of action plans and ideas for customizing and implementing at the participant’s firm. This is a critical-thinking, idea-sharing, and problem-solving session geared toward generating thoughts on how to make examples and experiences shared work for everyone in their own unique situation.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will learn how to apply strategic thinking to align their goals with those of firm management. Focusing on the AICPA’s “Top Five Issues,” participants will be provided with specific examples of how marketing can play a role in each of these areas. Sharing personal experiences and the experiences of others in the industry, the goal is for participants to leave with tangible ideas for programs and projects that can be tailored for their unique situations and help them directly impact their firms and, ultimately, their careers.
   
2. Participants will learn how to think “big picture” and establish themselves as an important resource for their firms beyond the marketing function.

Thirty years ago, the AICPA revised its Code of Ethics to allow advertising, and accounting marketing was born. Ever since, firms have wrestled with how to link marketing investments to tangible sales results. Today we look across the industry and find no shortage of sophisticated marketers blazing trails. However, the challenge to align marketing and sales continues to perplex many growth leaders.

Most definitions of marketing and sales place one before the other in a continuum, rather than each in its own silo. There is a relay, although there isn’t a distinct handoff. Rather, the two functions continually support each other. Herein lies the key to true integration: Align all marketing and sales roles and responsibilities along a single, unified client development process.

Participants will be provided with a 'Marketing and Sales Alignment Guide' with a summary of key points that can be used for future reference.

Participants will explore and learn:

1. The distinctions and connections between the marketing and sales functions.
   
2. A five-phase client development process and the role of each function across the phases.

Discover how a regional firm made its after-hours networking/business development experience one of the most successful initiatives in the firm’s 37-year history. Learn about every detail from invitation design and event branding, to guest list and gift baskets, and even the method of follow-up that turned this event into one of the most talked about and well-attended referral-based networking events in the city. The event grew from 75 attendees in year one to 175 attendees in year four. And, we will share best practices from this event that we now apply to all firm events, including a modified version of this same event in another city.

Learning Objectives:

1. Hear about our “secret sauce” for combing professional, social and personal touch concepts, creating a win-win atmosphere for your referral sources.
   
2. Discover how to get your top referral sources asking for your event invitation.
   
3. Learn how we trained our supervisors and managers to develop and/or solidify referral sources and ultimately increase new business.

AI has made it possible for marketers to accomplish tasks they’ve been talking about for decades. In this presentation, I’ll discuss how you can tackle three essential firm-growth goals, including marketing campaign performance, sales and revenue impact, and customer loyalty, using AI resources. Leveraging crowd-sourced knowledge, they’ll be examples of how to increase efficiencies and to unify data from disparate sources, automate and future-proof data models for scale, and reduce optimization cycles.

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify AI tools to help you increase efficiencies within your firm and impact growth.
   
2. Plan your strategic approach to tackle the three, essential firm-growth goals.
   
3. Pinpoint crowd-sourced information to make informed decisions.

Communication is at a crossroads and this includes the digital space. Organic or paid? Influencer marketing or from the brand? Regardless of where you net out, your brand deserves to be in the spotlight. Gone are the days of relying solely on organic content--the best communicators are executing solid paid digital strategies on social media and beyond. From Facebook boosted posts and targeted ads to Twitter campaigns—each comes with its own parameters for reaching niche audiences and expanding brand reach. If you haven’t established a paid social media strategy, this is your next move. We’ll cover what to track, how to track it, and the most effective way to set up your information to be understood and analyzed by key decision makers in your company.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will understand the digital channels that are most effective for paid campaigns and how to best use their time in developing those for their audience.
   
2. Participants will be able to organize a paid digital media strategy from start to finish - creating content, scheduling and planning, and analyzing stats.
   
3. Participants will understand the how, why and how often to track results and how to tie them to your brand’s overall growth goals.