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The declaration came in a room full of marketers at the Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM) Summit a few weeks ago in Portland, Oregon. And it drew nods from the crowd. “The audit, as we know it, will be gone in five years,” said Ed Kless of Sage, a business management solutions provider. Kless was talking about the impact of technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence, which are already reshaping the industry. Against this backdrop of surging disruption, the AAM Summit’s theme was fresh thinking – with a focus on trends, tools and best practices to make accounting firms stand out regionally and nationally. Here are a few of the conversations and topics that stuck with me after I left Portland:
  • Make Accounting Marketing Personal. In the opening keynote session, comedian and former CPA John Garrett discussed how accounting firms can differentiate themselves by letting their personalities shine through in their marketing. For an industry constantly focused on numbers, audits and processes, this makes sense. By humanizing their organizations (and talent) through networking, community relationships and creative thought leadership, firms can rise above the noise.
  • Evaluate and Optimize Your Marketing Technology Stack. No matter the size of the firm, investing in the right marketing technology can yield incredible benefits. In the “Building Your Marketing Technology Stack” session, two firms (one with an annual revenue of $250 million, the other $5 million) shared how they invest in technology to optimize their marketing. These firms understand how syncing brand awareness, customer nurturing, conversions and analytics are critical to growth.
  • Online Reputation Matters in the Accounting Buyer Journey. The session “Online Reputation for Accounting Firms” introduced some powerful research. For example, 33 percent of prospective accounting firm clients will read online ratings, said Kat Kocurek from Inavero, a satisfaction survey provider, and more than half of prospects referred to a firm will research it online. This reaffirms that the days of relying on relationships and handshakes in the buying process are long gone.
  • Hyperlocal Marketing Matters. However, when I spoke to marketers from smaller accounting firms in Michigan and Virginia, they told me that building local relationships is still critical. Incentivizing accountants to network and build community relationships remains a key part of the hyperlocal marketing strategy.
  • Business Development Is Everyone’s Responsibility. For many smaller firms, getting the partners and accountants to support marketing activities can be critical to growth. One session covered how gamification and simple incentives like branded giveaway items could encourage accountants to network with prospects in the community.
  • Diversify Content. I also spoke with many marketers looking at developing new thought leadership content to engage their audiences. There were a few firms even exploring the notion of podcasts. In one session, the speaker described how podcasts provide engaging information for target audiences hungry for insights.
  • Long-Term Thought Leadership. If your marketing team is thinking of building a thought leadership platform, it’s worth the effort to think ahead — how will that platform evolve in three to five years? In “Winning in the Market for Ideas,” a former Big Four marketing chief emphasized the importance of building a thought leadership campaign over the course of several years to keep up with evolving preferences in the marketplace.
The accounting business, like so many others, is subject to the same disruptions and evolutions buffeting the rest of the business world. Firms that will win out are the ones that will build aligned sales and marketing approaches and ultimately apply fresh thinking to the changes that are rushing through the industry.

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CHALLENGE

It’s a question professional services firms often face: How do you keep a multi-year research campaign fresh and relevant to continually support and enhance a client’s overall brand while expressing authority on pressing issues? Answering that question – and finding ways to refresh longstanding, institutional research campaigns — is key for many of Greentarget’s clients in an era of closely watched marketing budgets and an emphasis on ROI.

There are few professional experiences more exciting than the launch of original research, and consulting firm Strategy& established itself as a primary authority on CEO transitions through its annual CEO Study. But over time, the Strategy& communications team became concerned that the survey, while still relevant and strongly received, was in danger of fading into the background.

Strategy& engaged Greentarget to revitalize the research and ensure that the annual CEO Study did not lose its mantle.

APPROACH

Market research on narratives related to CEOs revealed a surge in media coverage related to female CEOs, chiefly around compensation disparities and the increasing number of female CEOs involved in IPOs. Additionally, Greentarget’s research revealed that data surrounding the increased tendency of corporate boards to pursue “outsider” CEOs (executives hired from outside of the organization) was sparse at best.

With this context, Greentarget suggested Strategy& pivot from the typical approach of presenting the entire data set holistically and instead segment the data in line with the themes of outsider and female CEOs. Greentarget also helped Strategy& identify a panel of female partners to carry the insights forward authentically through a combination of earned, owned and shared media, another departure from the firm’s typical approach.

  • Shaping the Narrative with Owned Content
    The team drafted content, including blog posts, on behalf of female consultants for publication in media outlets and the survey report’s microsite. A post about the challenges organizations face and the approaches they must take to build a pipeline of female leaders resonated with Strategy&’s audience, with nearly 2,000 views and a 52 percent full-read ratio.

    Using Twitter’s behavioral-targeting tools, Greentarget designed social media campaigns extending the reach of the survey’s themes. The team also developed targeted paid campaigns on LinkedIn to reach C-suite and executive-recruiter audiences.
  • Spreading the Word
    Greentarget’s media relations team not only shared top-line findings about women and outside CEOs, it pursued additional angles from the survey with unexpected media targets to expand the reach of the survey. For example, the team positioned the finding around whether MBA graduates make better CEOs with the management and diversity reporter at Bloomberg Business, which resulted in a story with prominent placement that featured Strategy& subject matter experts.

    Greentarget launched a real-time monitoring process that identified news hooks and topics to help Strategy& stay abreast of CEO transitions and related news. For example, a few weeks after the survey published, Nestle hired an outside CEO, and Greentarget used the announcement as an opportunity to offer the survey data to reporters and secure additional interviews for Strategy& spokespeople.

    Greentarget’s content team helped Strategy& spokespeople develop strong points of view on the survey findings, resulting in multiple blog posts from spokespeople like DeAnne Aguirre, the Global Leader of Katzenbach Center (part of the Strategy& network).

    To target new relevant prospects and markets, Greentarget developed a global FAQ document and other marketing materials to support regional marketing teams and further promote the survey findings and relevant data to additional networks. This approach offered a bridge between the firm’s thought leadership and business development, leveraging insights to spark conversations with prospects.

RESULTS

  • Enhanced Reputation While Establishing a Position of Authority
    The report garnered 100 more top-tier media stories than the previous year, including mentions in the Financial Times, The Economist, Fox Business, Bloomberg and Washington Post. In all, Greentarget secured more than 150 media placements worldwide.

    On the social media side, engagement rates on Twitter and LinkedIn well outpaced the average for both platforms. Furthermore, 94 percent of social mentions and 89 percent of overall social impressions were earned – meaning Greentarget’s recommended survey themes were on target and resonated with the intended C-suite audience.

    The materials Greentarget developed, including the regional FAQ document and blog posts, helped secure media coverage in key markets such as the UK and Germany, reinforcing Strategy&’s global position as a premier consultancy.

    Overall, Strategy& leadership considered the effort the most successful survey campaign to date.

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Greentarget and Duff & Phelps, the global advisor that protects, restores and maximizes value for clients, won The Holmes Report’s 2018 Diamond SABRE award for Superior Achievement in Research and Planning. The SABRE Awards recognize campaigns that demonstrate the highest levels of strategic planning, creativity and business results. Greentarget and Duff & Phelps were recognized for their campaign, “In Defense of Fairness Opinions.” As the industry leader, Duff & Phelps felt a responsibility to elevate the conversation around fairness opinions, an important industry practice relied upon by corporate boards. While Duff & Phelps could speak to its own client work, the firm needed empirical evidence to demonstrate the utility of fairness opinions as an industry practice. The solution required analyzing thousands of pages of data filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (which could only be done using artificial intelligence). The result was a report entitled, “In Defense of Fairness Opinions: An Empirical Review of Ten Years of Data.” Greentarget partnered on the thought leadership campaign, including the research program, content development and media outreach. “Boards of directors seeking fairness opinions have long been left to rely on their own intuition and experience in scrutinizing valuation estimates. The report provides directors with new data and empowers them to ask more informed questions,” said Chris Janssen, Global Head of Transaction Opinions at Duff & Phelps. “It’s an honor to be recognized for our efforts and commitment to providing clients with cutting-edge thinking on a long-standing and valued business practice.” “This program demonstrates how data-driven storytelling can address the most complex questions in technical industries,” said John Corey, Founding Partner, Greentarget. “Data-driven storytelling provides a powerful complement to the quantitative research programs we’ve delivered for years. Leaders in business services that can integrate big data, machine learning and predictive analytics into their marketing programs can add tremendous value to their clients. We were honored to work with Duff & Phelps on this ground-breaking campaign, and we are thrilled to see Duff & Phelps and Greentarget recognized for this prestigious award.”

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We spend a lot of time talking about how to adapt sophisticated thought leadership to new media since questions like “How do you elevate the conversation on Twitter” weren’t being asked 15 years ago. And we treat that pace of change as remarkable – a sign we’re living in an age of exceptional ingenuity. But communicators have been adapting to shifting media landscapes for centuries, trying to meet audiences where they are and take full advantage of the available platforms. If you want to see what I mean, you should visit an art museum. For Employee Appreciation Day this year, Greentarget threw it back to our school days and took us on a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago (our colleagues in New York took a similar trip to Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum). Once we arrived, our friend Howell Malham Jr. introduced us to Gloria Groom, a curator at the Art Institute; together they led us around the European Painting and Sculpture wing, stopping to give us historical perspectives on four particular pieces. Each piece was not only a work of lasting importance in the art world, but also an example of the artists, and subjects, directing the conversations of their time. The last piece we saw, Model for a Statue of Louis XV (1746-8), struck me the most. Gloria noted that the statue was essentially a solution to a communications problem. King Louis XV of France was perceived as weak and incompetent by the French citizenry. So he did what any resourceful king would have done: commissioned a sculptor to create a massive statue that would portray Louis XV the way he wanted to be seen – as a stirring, dynamic leader who did heroic things with swords. To depict Louis as a strong leader, capable of leading with wisdom and conviction, the artist Jean Baptiste Lemoyne put a scroll in the king’s outstretched right hand. The sword in his left hand suggests the king was a strong warrior, ready to lead his people to victory. Louis’s relaxed pose conveys a sense of confidence, inviting the French people to trust him, to believe in his prowess as a ruler. The piece at the Art Institute is not the statue itself, but the model that was to serve as a reference for the monument. The model is a little over two feet tall and made from terracotta, a pliable material that, nearly 300 years later, still bears the artist’s imprint on its surface. The material makes the piece look like it’s still in progress, as if Louis XV could still be imploring the artist to make him a bigger sword. It’s a far cry from today’s image-making, which leans heavily on social media and made-for-mobile video. But while commissioning statues is no longer the norm, we haven’t entirely abandoned the idea that image can be shaped through art. Gazing at the miniature statue of Louis XV, I kept thinking about Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of former President Barack Obama, unveiled a few weeks before our field trip. In the painting, Obama leans toward the viewer, hands folded over each other, as if listening intently to whatever we’re saying. It clearly reflects the demeanor Obama projected throughout his presidency: a calm, collected thinker invested in his people – a listener. Unlike Louis XV’s statue, the Obama portrait is part of a tradition going back to George Washington. But presidential portraits have shifted over the years. Early American presidents were depicted in dark colors, appearing stoic and unwavering. Later POTUS painters have taken a more casual approach, with more colorful surroundings and relaxed poses. While the medium and images change with the times and technology, some things are timeless. Whether it’s terracotta or Twitter, it’s the message that matters.

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Mark Zuckerberg likely didn’t begin his congressional testimony in Washington last week hoping to do much more than limit the damage to his company’s tattered image. And, in a testament to the effectiveness of solid media training, he probably accomplished that goal. But Zuckerberg could have done so much more. He could have elevated the conversation around Facebook, data privacy and the future of the internet. To be fair, Zuckerberg took a couple of baby steps. He said that his own data was compromised, which effectively humanized a man who badly needs humanization. And he laid plain his company’s business plans (they aren’t changing). But the wunderkind who had the foresight to build one of the world’s most important companies stayed stubbornly locked on the past – and failed to discuss the future, notably how Facebook and other companies can secure the data of billions of people. Sure, by remaining defensive and focusing all of his energy on the testimony, Zuckerberg made sure he’d get out of Washington alive. But he didn’t fulfill his obligation – the way we see it at Greentarget – to drive a smarter conversation. We believe that business leaders like Zuckerberg, who have informed and unique perspectives on important conversations, have a responsibility to help their audience better understand those conversations. That was especially true in Zuckerberg’s case – billions of people trust Facebook with their personal data. And yet for all the preparation that Zuckerberg put in, he didn’t realize the opportunity he had, in front of an audience of millions, to address the fears of those who had their information stolen – or are worried they could be next. At Greentarget, we regularly counsel clients on how to get their message across. In interviews with reporters, published opinion pieces, public speaking and other forums, the same principles apply. Fortunately, Zuckerberg – and indeed a whole host of Silicon Valley executives – will have more opportunities to improve on the communications front. What Zuckerberg Can Still Do Zuckerberg is one of the world’s most important business leaders, so he still has a chance to build on what he said in Washington. The best way to do that is to consider what Facebook users want to know. Where is their data? What steps should they be taking? Do they need to worry about this again? Exactly what is being done to address the problem? It all needs to be conveyed in layman’s terms, but with precision. This might sound obvious. And yet, so many Silicon Valley leaders – who are best positioned to answer these kinds of questions – have remained silent and instead crossed their fingers that Facebook would take the fall, leading to a stalled conversation. Regulators, corporate executives and average Joes simply don’t have the knowledge of Zuckerberg or his counterparts in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley. How They Should Do It While there’s no question that a two-day congressional testimony is not the same as a 30-minute interview with a reporter, Zuckerberg applied the concepts and tactics that go into media training – the type we often provide our clients before conversations with reporters. Namely, Zuckerberg stuck to his message, he retained composure and he didn’t answer any question to which he didn’t confidently know the answer. And if we had trained Zuckerberg, we’d have said he almost nailed it – with one exception. We always tell our clients to leave a reporter with three things at the end of the conversation – and most of the time, the reporter will never have considered at least one of those things before. That’s the definition of driving a smarter conversation. It’s giving new information to someone who is going to put it out in the world for the public’s consideration. Of course, Zuckerberg probably wasn’t going to conclude his testimony by giving regulatory advice to Congress or laying out detailed technical plans for his company. He has shareholders to answer to, and executives like Zuckerberg might perform better in a less combative environment than Capitol Hill. But he could have explained how Facebook’s approach to data collection will change in the next year. He didn’t, and that’s too bad. But the good news is that Zuckerberg, even among tech executives, has a massive megaphone. The question is, will he use it – and will others in the valley do the same? Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and everyone else should focus on sharing their perspectives on technology and data privacy, including their successes and failures. There are questions that must be answered, and there are others that we don’t know we even need to ask. It’s possible that Zuckerberg limited his testimony to looking backward because he doesn’t know what the future of data will look like. If that’s the case, he and other Silicon Valley executives need to tell us what they don’t know. Simply posing those questions would make this a smarter conversation.

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It was a pretty impressive maneuver. When Kentucky Fried Chicken ran out of fried chicken in the United Kingdom, it managed to turn it into something of a PR coup – all in the course of a week. Humor was key to KFC’s approach – reversing its namesake letters to “FCK” in a large newspaper ad and playing off the riddle “Why did the chicken cross the road?” And that was indicative of a larger crisis strategy – one that showed up in another narrowly averted PR disaster for Crock-Pot, which was identified as the cause of the death of a beloved (though fictional) character on the hit show “This Is Us.” The successful efforts by both companies made us think about crisis PR response lessons for professional services organizations that might confront similar situations – even if the details will obviously differ. That is, unless a law firm or management consulting outfit ends up running out of drumsticks.
  • Words matter – and the first words matter most. In most crises, quickly responding is as important as the statement itself. The morning following the “This Is Us” episode that implied Crock-Pot’s responsibility in the character Jack Pearson’s death, the company published a statement sharing the audience’s devastation and encouraging consumers to continue using their slow cookers in his memory. A timely and persistent demonstration that your organization cares is critical to properly addressing a crisis, as is demonstrating empathy. KFC, meanwhile, handled its persistent crisis with apparent ease, taking to Twitter every couple of days after the chicken shortage to reiterate that the situation was under control.
  • Address situations head-on. KFC’s statement was successful largely thanks to its full-page apology, which was simple and sort of genius. It featured a stark photo of an empty chicken bucket accompanied by the text, “A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It’s not ideal.” Successful statements include acknowledgment of the issue, denial (if something isn’t true), acceptance of responsibility (if it is), actionable steps and reinforcement of an organization’s values without diminishing the impact the event has had or will have on stakeholders. It’s also important that organizations reinforce critical facts. For example, Crock-Pot’s crisis response team provided the media with facts such as, “For nearly 50 years, with over 100 million Crock-Pots sold, we have never received any consumer complaints similar to the fictional events portrayed in last night’s episode. In fact, the safety and design of our product renders this type of event nearly impossible.”
  • Empathize, dammit. The perception that you don’t care is the single biggest predictor of broken trust, reputational harm and loss of competitive advantage from a crisis. Just as a single term or phrase can destroy a company’s reputation, it can also save it. Empathy was key to the effectiveness of KFC’s and Crock-Pot’s statements. The first words in KFC’s message were “We’re sorry” followed by a clear acknowledgment that their consumers, team members and franchise partners were all affected. Crock-Pot began each of its messages with empathy and concern for their users (and “This Is Us” fans), describing their own sadness over the character’s demise.
  • Be ready when you have to take action. Wouldn’t it be great if all crises ended with quick, clear and sympathetic public statements? Here’s something that won’t shock you – they don’t. Good leaders take action because they know that when a crisis strikes, empty words don’t mitigate the situation. All stakeholders – whether employees, consumers, stockholders, board members, media, etc. – expect an organization to take action. We advise our clients to have a crisis plan in place ahead of time – one that plans for potential threats and identifies which employees will be doing what when a crisis arrives. At that point, you should make sure to gather all the facts and determine the appropriate message (and who needs to hear it). And make sure to continuously evaluate the circumstances and modify the course of action as needed.
Crises are unpredictable, so having a crisis preparedness strategy in place for the moment you run out of fried chicken or find yourself implicated in the death of a beloved fictional character – or the B2B equivalent – is crucial. It may just save your organization’s reputation.
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