S2E11 - Kate Colbert | Think Like a Marketer

Welcome to Change Your Mindset (formerly known as Improv Is No Joke) where it is all about believing that strong communication skills are the best way in delivering your technical accounting knowledge and growing your business. The way of building stronger communication skills is by embracing the principles of applied improvisation. Your host is Peter Margaritis, CPA a.k.a. The Accidental Accountant, will interview financial professionals and business leaders to find their secret in building stronger relationships with their clients, customers, associates, and peers, all the while, growing their businesses.

S2E11 – Kate Colbert | Think Like a Marketer

My guest today is Kate Colbert, the Founder & President of Silver Tree Communications and Silver Tree Publishing and the author of the newly released book Think Like a Marketer: How a Shift in Mindset Can Change Everything for Your Business. Kate provides great marketing advice for people in any kind of business, and she tailored this conversation for the financial professional.

Now, this isn’t about converting accounting and finance professionals into marketers – It’s about helping people like accountants make better decisions about their accounting practice by thinking like a marketer.

In Think Like a Marketer, Kate discusses the five principles that will help you make this mindset shift and change everything for your business:

Communicate for connection and meaning, not just to transact sales. (For a little bonus reading on this subject, check out this article in the Journal of Accountancy: “Networking Tips for Quiet People: A Little Preparation Can Take the Fear Out of Networking”)
You live and die by your customers’ insights. You may think accounting professionals are a group of subject matter experts who are all about the data and numbers, right? But thinking like a marketer requires looking at numbers that most professionals just aren’t. For example, when is the last time you did a client satisfaction survey?
Market yourself in a way that’s strategy religious and tactic agnostic. This is not about where you go to church – If that you have a marketing strategy that you’re confident in, you need to be sticking religiously to that strategy. But in terms of the tactics you apply and the activities you do in marketing, you need to be really open-minded and agnostic.
Create cultures and processes that align with your brand. What are you willing to do differently in your day-to-day processes, up to and including the way the building is laid out, in order to really deliver on the story that you’re telling to the marketplace about what makes you a better accounting firm than the accounting firm down the street?
Do everything in service of maintaining a virtuous cycle of creating value for the customer while capturing value for you.

I am confident if you execute to these five principles, you’ll begin to see signs that your marketing is resonating with your audience and having an impact.

“It doesn’t matter where you are in your journey. Whether we’re talking about a book that you just wrote, or if we’re talking about a business that you founded, or a business that you work in, the perfect time to start thinking like a marketer is now.”

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