Thought Leadership: A Powerful Marketing Tool

Source: AICPA CPA Insider

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Lee Frederiksen. 

Clients hire CPAs, in large part, because they seek expertise. Thought leadership – becoming publicly recognized as an authority in your field – is a powerful way to display that expertise and attract clients. That's why it's crucial for accounting firms to showcase their in-house expertise as part of their marketing efforts.

Cultivating multiple experts will help ensure that you always have a well-known expert in house. Boosting the visibility of multiple experts in your firm may seem a considerable challenge. Yet there are several straightforward and replicable steps firms can take to raise individual experts' profiles.

How to Become a Thought Leader

Display your expertise across multiple platforms. Increasingly, that means producing online sources of information such as blog and social media posts. It also might mean providing industry keynotes, producing webinars, and writing books.

Even in a digital world, live speaking engagements – at industry conferences, civic organization meetings, and the like – remain popular. Such engagements also offer good business development opportunities and can result in referrals. 

To have the most impact, consider writing a book. Our survey determined that 85 percent of the fastest-rising visible experts had one characteristic in common: They'd written a book on their area of expertise. Penning an authoritative book on your topic of expertise adds to your credibility while also getting your knowledge in front of a wide and relevant audience.

The most successful thought leaders are highly focused on a niche or an area of expertise they homed in on early in their careers. Specialization allows experts to develop deeper knowledge of their subject area, but it also helps them become associated with certain topics in the public eye.

For the complete article, read “Using thought leadership marketing to build your practice.”

From AICPA CPA Insider, January 12, 2015, www.CPA2biz.com.