Top of Mind Is Your Moat: Why “Being Busy” Isn’t a Growth Strategy for Accounting Firms

Intro

Welcome to the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast, where our experts share best practices on running your firm in the digital age. This podcast is brought to you by CountingWorks PRO. Let's get started.

Lee Reams II

Welcome back to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. I am your host, Lee Reams II, and today I am joined by Rebekah Winters Barton, our Chief Visibility Officer. Rebekah, if you can say hello.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Hello, everybody. I'm glad to be back.

Lee Reams II

Yeah, I was discussing before we skipped the last podcast. I did one on pricing and advisory, and Rebekah wasn't with us, but a lot has been going on in Indiana, where you're based, since we last spoke. Between Indiana football all of a sudden being the kings of Indiana, Notre Dame running home with their ball kind of thing, and then Stranger Things, of all things, there's a lot going on in Indiana.

Rebekah Winters Barton

There's a lot. I've learned all about the Upside Down, so I'm ready for Christmas. My daughter says Christmas. It's true. An Upside Down pop-up we've never had, and I feel like they're very remiss from a marketing standpoint here in the state.

Lee Reams II

All right. Well, let's see what happens. Today, we are talking about something that I think is somewhat undervalued in this profession. I hear it often, and I think this is a critical item. We've talked around it a lot, but if you want referrals, more importantly, if you want advisory opportunities, if you want your firm to survive in the AI age, you need to be top of mind with both your client base, your prospects, and more importantly, tools like ChatGPT and Google AI.

Lee Reams II

Most firms, and I call this the client experience layer. There are basically three layers of running a firm, right? You're going to have layer one, which is the work: my tax software, my bookkeeping software, my deliverables. Layer two is going to be the team: our workflow, our practice management. But layer three, the client experience, is often the most important layer of them all. That's your onboarding, your communication, your newsletter, your reminders, your web visibility, and your visibility on tools like ChatGPT.

Lee Reams II

Today we're going to talk about how to optimize top of mind, why it's so important, and why it's not just marketing. It's not just posting more on social media or blogging. It's not about shouting louder. It's deeper than that. Top of mind is your moat. Your client relationship is your biggest asset, right? It protects you from competitors. It's going to protect you from AI-driven tools. It's going to keep your value in the minds of your clients as they start seeing all this different noise. I call it keeping them from these shiny new tools that have no real authority. If you have created that moat, if you're top of mind with your client, I think you're going to be very successful in this AI age.

Lee Reams II

So let's jump into this a little bit and talk about the myth. Rebekah, this is the idea: I don't need to market. I am so busy as is. Why do I care about top of mind? I'm already running as fast as I can and making as much money as I can. How do you usually talk about that to our clients?

Rebekah Winters Barton

There's a lot to unpack here, and obviously we'll get into some of it a bit more, but I think one of the biggest things is that marketing is not just to get new clients. Marketing is about upselling existing clients. It's about getting better clients, not just more clients. It's about allowing you to streamline who you're serving and maybe get rid of some of those compliance-only people or people who don't necessarily come back year after year, in order to offer these higher-value advisory services.

Rebekah Winters Barton

That's been the buzzword for a couple of years in the tax and accounting world. We believe here that marketing is not about posting more, being busier, or spending hours of your day on social media. It's about being intentional with what you're posting and being intentional with your messaging in order to garner the types of clients that you really want to work with.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. We're talking about this client experience layer, and this is whether clients decide to trust you or how much they trust you. I think that is core in anything from upselling advisory to how long they stay with you. Will they refer you? Do they leave five-star reviews for your practice? Do they remember you between the seasons, quote unquote? Most firms today are missing this layer completely, and that's why things feel chaotic at times. So when someone says, I don't need marketing, the real question is, how are you staying top of mind the other 10 months of the year? If you're not showing up, someone else will.

Lee Reams II

Now this new giant albatross, ChatGPT, is like, oh, there's top of mind not only on the human side, but I have to be in these conversational LLMs as well. Being busy is great. It means demand is there. But staying busy means you need to stay visible, right? Marketing systems don't just add work. They help you upgrade your client mix, reduce what I call client overwhelm, and stay top of mind automatically.

Lee Reams II

Busy doesn't mean the right clients. This is something I think people need to understand. Often, it means you're underpriced or overloaded. Marketing isn't necessarily for more clients. It's for better ones: fewer high-value, advisory-ready clients. When you start looking at systems, they give you your time back. Onboarding, client communication, e-signatures, and all these things automated are what keep your firm, if it's a great experience, top of mind. That protects your revenue.

Lee Reams II

Clients forget fast. Competitors appear faster. We've seen this already in how AI has changed even the employment demand and how firms are investing in the future. There are a lot of things happening today where, if you don't stay top of mind, I think it's going to be a problem. So let's go back to what top of mind actually means, Rebekah. How would you define this?

Rebekah Winters Barton

Top of mind to me is staying in your client's mind, staying in the forefront of their inbox, and staying in the forefront of their social media throughout the year. It's not just a tax season thing. It's not just letting them know, hey, we're here for you when it comes to filing your taxes every April. It's letting people know that you're there for them when life events happen throughout the year: when they need advisory, when they decide to open a business, when they decide to sell a home, when they decide to start a new savings account for a new baby, and all of these different things that happen throughout the year. Being top of mind means that you're the first professional who pops into their head when they realize they need help with anything related to their financial life.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. You don't want them to have to Google. If someone says, hey, do you have a recommendation? I'm trying to put together a new company. I have to figure out my business entity type. I have to establish controls and accounting systems. You don't want it to be, oh, let me Google this, or hey, let me think about that a little bit. Top of mind, if you're doing your job in outbound marketing communications, means they remember you without trying, right? Your name pops up immediately anytime they're talking about taxes or someone's talking about money, payroll, equity comp, anything.

Lee Reams II

That's the equivalent of a favorite restaurant in your area when someone new comes in. Top of mind, Rebekah, would be, I know right away these are the places I would recommend. Why is that so important when it comes to the tax and accounting side?

Rebekah Winters Barton

It is a good example because you want to be the very first person who comes to mind. You want, not only within people's minds, to have a good enough reputation with what you do that you immediately pop into people's heads as the premier professional in your area for advisory services, wealth planning, or whatever it is that people may need, but also on the AI side.

Rebekah Winters Barton

I think we've done a podcast on how your next referral may not come from a person; it may come from an AI system. This is where being top of mind matters both in human minds and within AI minds, so to speak. By establishing yourself as the premier provider of whatever services or whatever niches you're serving within your region, you can be top of mind in all of these areas and therefore be the first recommendation and the most likely person to get the phone call. People typically go with the first recommendation they receive as long as the reputation is solid.

Lee Reams II

Let's go into how you establish top of mind. We talked about this client experience layer. Let's give four or five takeaways, things that you see our best-producing firms doing. It's outbound, it's pulling in people, it's creating content, it's owning a niche, but what are some takeaways here on these small touches repeatedly? Consistency is a huge deal here. You don't put together a top-of-mind strategy or process and then do it for a month and stop. Give some takeaways here on how you would tackle that as the easy wins that someone could take from this podcast.

Rebekah Winters Barton

There are just a few things that I want everybody to be doing that our best-performing firms do. One of those is segmentation: sending segmented newsletters and segmented emails that really hone in on exactly what different factions of your clients need at any given time. That's super important. So I think segmentation is one.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Two would be video. Video is king on the internet. People love video. Whether it's YouTube, Reels, or TikTok videos, it doesn't really matter which platform. Whatever platform performs the best for you and you're most comfortable with, you need to be doing some type of video in this day and age.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Third is blogs. The internet still loves blogs. I tell people very often that it doesn't matter if your blogs are getting thousands of views. That's a big piece of pushback I get: well, nobody even reads them. It doesn't really matter if they're getting thousands of views because the internet still cares. When someone is in ChatGPT and they've established a relationship with that AI assistant, and they're asking about a topic that you have created a content cluster around, guess what ChatGPT is going to recommend? It's going to recommend that content cluster because you still have web authority, even if it's not necessarily getting thousands of views a week.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Blogging matters significantly. I also want to say that speaking to people throughout the year is critical. A lot of tax professionals fall into this trap of only advertising their services or only landing in someone's inbox when it's January. That's not helpful when it comes to getting year-round, top-of-mind clients who need you at different points of the year. That's where sending emails at different times of year, reminding them of upcoming tax deadlines, business tax deadlines, life events, and different things like that can all be really good ways to stay top of mind for all of your clients throughout the year, no matter what their needs are.

Lee Reams II

You mentioned how the game is moving to AI and ChatGPT and Perplexity. Obviously Google is making a move. A year ago, it was, Google's dead. OpenAI is going to kill them. Surprise, surprise, they have the machine and the distribution, and it's really hard to disrupt. So what happens now when we're saying top of mind is not just staying visible to your humans, your current clients, and prospects that you're trying to market to? It's now staying visible to the machines.

Lee Reams II

You mentioned a couple ways to do that, but explain the difference. There are a lot of tax and accounting firms that are still using old-world SEO blue-link techniques, and they have a total disconnect around where all the search has gone and how it's different: keyword-based versus conversation-based. Explain how you become top of mind inside that ecosystem. I'm talking about the AI ecosystem where AI treats you like the expert. In order to do that, you need to publish like an expert. That's where the niche comes in. That's where reviews from other third parties come in. That's really where you can create this incredible moat. How do you set that up? What are the techniques that you're seeing work today that can really help people's visibility and top of mind with these AI bots?

Rebekah Winters Barton

There are a lot of things you can do, and this is actually one of my favorite things to talk with clients about right now because there is such an opportunity here. It's easier to rank with AI than it ever was in Google. You're not playing the game against Forbes, NerdWallet, H&R Block, and all of the big guns. You're not doing that anymore. If you have true authority in an area, AI will recommend you, especially if you're local to the area.

Rebekah Winters Barton

AI develops relationships with people in a way that Google never did. It understands their intent better than Google ever did. It understands facets of their life that play into their financial needs more than Google ever did. So you need to approach it differently than you ever did with Google. This is not about keywords. It's not about the blue links, like you said. It's not about backlinking. Not that these things don't matter at all, but they matter significantly less in GEO, which is generative engine optimization, than they did in the SEO world.

Rebekah Winters Barton

What we want to focus on is creating content clusters that focus on specific topics, really building authenticity, really providing your expertise, and giving people advice that is actionable and that they can use. Highly local content is also really important here. You want to be focusing on people in your target market and physically in your geographic location.

Lee Reams II

I know we've done it. We're talking top of mind right now, so I get it. You're telling the type of content you create, but I think there's a disconnect and you need to finish the circle. It's about having your own personality, being authentic, and having your own firm narrative or personal narrative as well. How do you infuse that into your marketing communications and your web presence to feed AI your personality, so the AI engines can match your attributes with their users' attributes and give them highly personal top-of-mind recommendations?

Rebekah Winters Barton

A great place to start is to think of the personality you want your firm to have and to be cohesive with that copy and with that personality across all of your platforms. We have one client who I love. They are really not afraid of being a little bit sarcastic. They're not a typical tax and accounting firm. We were able to use a lot of humor on their website. It's kind of funny. It's kind of in your face, but it's very high-level expertise.

Rebekah Winters Barton

That kind of thing is going to stand out to an AI system. It's not the type of copy you normally see on a generic tax and accounting site. It's very much, we'll tell it to you like it is. It was a lot of fun to work on, but it also always stands out to me as a great example of infusing the personality of the accountant into the website. So think about the personality you have. Think about the personality you want your firm to have if it were a person. Then start using that in all of your communications.

Rebekah Winters Barton

The more cohesive and comprehensive you are with developing your brand persona, the better off you're going to be in AI systems. It wants to see that the Facebook posts match the tone of the blog posts, which match the tone of the YouTube videos, which match the tone of this random guest blog they did for a local business organization. All of these things matter, and they all come together on the back end of the web to form your brand persona. There is nothing more important in the AI age than your brand persona and your brand identity.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. A way to think about it is, let's say you want to portray your firm as a boutique CFO advisory firm for tech startups. That's the start of your persona online. If you're also infusing, hey, we work in a certain region and we know this region better. We're Silicon Valley. Then you start infusing talking points of, I like hiking in the mountains, I go to Tahoe on the weekends, I go to Yosemite, whatever. I'm just giving you an example.

Lee Reams II

We start tying in all these parts, topics, and points of view into your narrative. I think you'd be more top of mind and have a better, tighter relationship with your humans because you're doing that. We had a firm in Indiana that included all these great historical buildings in their website. They are in a smaller town, and they had really professional images of themselves in the area and in the neighborhoods. That really tightens that kind of, hey, I'm here for you. It makes that relationship tighter. Explain the psychology about that and why that's so important when we talk about how to be top of mind for whatever you're trying to do.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Absolutely. I'm laughing because I drive past this particular firm every time I go to the Home Depot, so I'm very familiar with them. But yes, what you said is super accurate, and it's smart for firms to lean into this. To be top of mind, you do need to have a relationship with either the person or the AI system. In order to do that, the best thing you can do is build a connection with them.

Rebekah Winters Barton

People think first, and AI systems recommend first the businesses that they have the deepest connection with. So if you're doing things like posting photos in the community, posting about community events you're involved in, actually physically being involved in the community, and having booths at local festivals, all of these things come together to help you be the very first professional that comes to mind or gets recommended by AI systems when people ask for tax and accounting help in that area.

Rebekah Winters Barton

It's really all about connection and authenticity, which is what it comes down to a lot, not only with relationships with actual people, but AI systems function very similarly in that way. They want to know that you're trustworthy. They want to know that you're involved. They want to know that you care, and they want to understand exactly what you're doing to build connections with people in that local area.

Lee Reams II

Basically, they're curating a story almost like a movie trailer about your firm based on information it's finding about you online. What you're trying to do by being consistent is make it repeatable. The internet and algorithm start seeing similar talking points, similar areas of expertise, and similar topics that you're talking about. That's how you become that persona, that superhuman, that super accountant for X and X user.

Lee Reams II

Explain what other sources feed that trailer content, meaning something maybe on Reddit or your reviews on TaxBuzz or Yelp. Explain that a little bit more so people understand that it starts in creating your total story. Your story is not just what you put out there on the internet. It's also other people's points of view, and that's how both humans process information and how the algorithms do it. Explain that a little bit more, and we'll start wrapping this thing up.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Exactly. It is very important. Everywhere you're mentioned online ultimately plays a role in your brand identity. I think that's something that's really critical to remember because it doesn't matter if you're the one who mentioned yourself or if someone else mentioned you. Every mention of you plays into what the internet thinks about your firm.

Rebekah Winters Barton

This is why positive reviews are so important. Social proof and people talking about you on the internet matter. It's also why the things you do in your actual day-to-day business matter so much online. Because if you're doing something like hosting a booth at a local festival, for example, then someone posts about you on their social media: hey, my kids had a great time at this game that was sponsored by X business. That's going to play into you being a community-involved, family-friendly, client-first firm. All of these little things that you might not think have a huge impact, especially not on the internet, actually can the second someone makes a post about you.

Rebekah Winters Barton

It's also really important to remember that AI systems in particular pull very heavily from Reddit. Lee just mentioned Reddit. That's a great place to get involved with posting. AI systems pull a lot of answers from Reddit, so it's a really good place to start establishing authority. It's also a good place to get some eyes on your content that might not find you in another place. They might not be reading blogs or getting your newsletter, but they might be asking a question on Reddit about tax and accounting help.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Another place is YouTube. I've already mentioned YouTube, but YouTube can be huge in AI systems. It pulls YouTube videos very heavily, especially if they answer very specific questions in a tangible way that makes a lot of sense to people. If you start a series answering common tax questions in your city, you have a really good chance of ranking really fast.

Rebekah Winters Barton

That's just a couple of examples. There are thousands of ways you can get eyes on your content and thousands of topics you can cover. These are just a few simple ways to actually get started and actionable things you can do to start building that brand identity. I highly recommend sitting down and thinking of some attributes you want your firm to have, and then using those and infusing those attributes into all of the content you put out there, whether it's an email response, a social media post, or a full-blown evergreen blog post that's 2,000 words. Everything you do does matter, and it all adds up to help you be that top-of-mind professional in your area.

Lee Reams II

So let's wrap this up. The big idea today is top of mind is your moat. It's your defense. It's your unfair advantage if done correctly. Think about it this way. AI tax tools can file a return. Intuit just invested, what, a hundred million or did a $100 million deal with OpenAI. There are a lot of things that are going to happen. Software companies can start automating onboarding. Competitors can undercut your pricing. But none of that can replace trust you've built slowly and consistently over years and years.

Lee Reams II

If you want a moat, this is it. It's inexpensive. It compounds. It's evergreen, meaning it can protect itself. Once you establish it, it protects your firm from this disruption. When a client thinks of you first, everyone else is basically invisible. They're not going to ChatGPT asking for help, right? That's the power of top of mind. It's the accountant's version of being the default choice.

Lee Reams II

Hopefully we've wrapped up why top of mind is so important and why I see so many firms missing this element altogether. If you step back, perhaps look at your client base, maybe look at your processes, and ask, if I invested more in this, would I have better clients and higher-paying clients? Maybe I could increase my compensation threefold or fourfold with fewer clients just because I identified it, and I didn't let the business run me. I started running my business. I think this is really important.

Lee Reams II

Obviously, at CountingWorks PRO, we circle around this entire process. The client experience layer is what we are all about. How do you optimize this? How do you automate it? How do you keep it in your tone? That's what we do here with Max and CountingWorks PRO. There are ways. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed, but we talked about a lot of things. Hopefully this does resonate. I believe the future is going to be about firms that are able to protect their moat, protect their client relationships, and get as much revenue per client as possible. I think that's really the moat that you should be working on.

Lee Reams II

It's not about shouting. It's not about advertising. It's just showing up consistently in all places your clients already look: social, the web, reviews, and ChatGPT. Hopefully this has been valuable. Hopefully this sparked something for you because top of mind truly is the hidden driver behind everything. Rebekah, what are the firms that are doing the best? They're following all these examples, and they're killing it. They are getting advisory work. We had a client who just turned on our advisory playbooks. I don't even know if they realized we turned it on during the onboarding process. All of a sudden, they're coming back going, wow, we're getting so many inquiries. I got all these advisory clients. It is as simple as just doing it, putting in the system, and being consistent. Give some feedback on what that client had to say.

Rebekah Winters Barton

That was actually a great conversation. He was like, I don't know where all these advisory calls are coming from, and we showed him that it had been turned on for him. He was really excited, but it just goes to show that it does work. Our playbooks obviously are very tailored to specific niches and specific service offerings, and they're basically drip campaigns that just go out automatically and let our clients' clients know, " Hey, I offer this. Hey, this is available to you.”

Rebekah Winters Barton

He is proof positive that it is working and that following these steps, having these custom narratives, and expressing your personality on your website does all matter. It does all make a difference, and it actually has an impact on your bottom line and on how you're able to help your clients. It's really a win-win all around for people. There's no reason not to follow these steps, and hopefully, you should see a lot of success from it.

Lee Reams II

All right, we'll wrap this up. Stay visible, show up consistently, build your moat, and hopefully this resonates with you. Hopefully, there are a few takeaways here or there that you can put into your practice in the coming months. We'll see you next time on the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. Please feel free to share our link with non-competitors. Feel free to comment or ask us questions on the YouTube version, Apple Podcasts, or wherever we put this. We appreciate you being a listener, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.