Ep. 164: Gordon Van Wechel - Growth Strategies for Professional Practices

Contact Gordon Van Wechel:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonvanwechel/
Email Gordon Van Wechel:
gordon@thealchemyconsultinggroup.com



FREE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD! Gordon's best
selling book "Core 5 Marketing":
https://bit.ly/Core5BookOffer-IMA


www.thealchemyconsultinggroup.com


www.alchemytransitions.com


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Adam:
(00:05)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam
Larson. And this is episode 164 of our series. Today's featured
guest is Gordon Van Wechel. Gordon is president of the Alchemy
Consulting Group. He is a business marketing strategist and he
helps firms recognize the true business value, grow their
business, and provide strategic support to professionals in
business. In this episode, he talks with Mitch about the value of
working with an agency and the benefits that come from proper
advertising. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation
now.
 
 Mitch: (00:49)
 So Gordon, thank you again for joining us. And, you know, I
just want to start off our conversation by asking, in your
opinion, your experiences does a professional practice need to
have an agency working for them?
 
 Gordon: (01:02)
 Well, at the risk of sounding a little bit, self-serving
Mitchell, because I do run an agency. I'll answer the question
with a yes. But let me give you some reasons why I say that.
There's such a multitude of marketing channels available today.
If you think back just 15 years ago, you know, a practice had,
you know, the yellow pages, they worked off of referrals. Google
was in its infancy, YouTube hadn't been invented, social media,
wasn't a factor, you know, they could do radio and TV, but there
just wasn't that much to choose from. So it was relatively easy
to get the word out. That's changed today. I mean, it would be
easy for you and I in two or three minutes to come up with 50
different effective marketing channels that a professional
practice can use and, and be effective. Now a lot of times when I
speak with professional practice owners, they'll say, well, you
know, my business is referral based, so I don't really need to do
any advertising.
 
 Gordon: (01:57)
 What they don't realize is that there are multiple surveys
out there that say that between 85 and 90% of the people who are
referred to a business will first go online and they're looking
for two things. They're looking for the company's website,
because that kind of proves that they're legitimate and, and they
want to look at that about us page and see who they might be
dealing with so they select that company. But the other thing
they're looking at is the reviews. That social proof has become
critically important in the mind of a prospect because they want
to know that the vendor they're considering is doing an excellent
job with their current client and is likely to do an excellent
job with them. Well, putting all of that together, managing `that
diversity of channels and keeping up with the testing, knowing
where their prospects are going for information updating of
campaigns, you can't legitimately run a practice plus do all of
that. So for those reasons, I think that having an agency is
important even for a smaller, professional practice. But the
caveat to that is to find an agency that understands your
business and that's willing to work with you where you're at with
the budget that you have available at this time and grow with
you.
 
 Mitch: (03:13)
 So I think you've probably already addressed two of the
answers or possible answers to my next question. But you
mentioned, relying on referrals and then potentially budget
concerns, my next question is what are some of the biggest
mistakes that you see professional practices make for those that
do pursue some form of marketing? You know, what are some of the
obstacles or challenges that you find to be most familiar?
 
 Gordon: (03:41)
 Sure. I think one is not having a really clearly stated
value proposition in their advertising. You know, the value
proposition is why should I choose you versus the multitude of
other firms that are available to me in the local marketplace?
Something that we enjoy doing with a new client or even a
prospect is we'll have them open up their website and take a
screenshot of the homepage, the portion that's above the fold,
that a prospect can see when they open up the website, take a
picture of that and print it out and then do the same thing with
four or five or six of their competitors. And what they'll be
surprised to see is how similar all of those websites are. You
know, they all promise the same things. They all use the same
platitudes and generalities. Many times the only difference
between those pages is the phone number.
 
 Gordon: (04:31)
 And if that's the case, then what your prospect is left
with is the impression that everybody is the same. And if
everybody's the same, all that prospect's going to be concerned
about is who is going to give me the service for the cheapest
price. And, that's a war that I don't want to get into. And I
don't think many business owners do. Nobody wants to be in the
race to the bottom. So not having that clearly stated value
proposition and in today's marketplace, the absolutely most
effective way to state that is in a little short, 60 to 75 second
video of the business owner looking right into the camera and
saying, here's who I am. Here's who my firm is. Here's what we
do. And here's why you should consider using us. And just 1, 2, 3
bullet points, you know, whatever that value proposition is and
state it as clearly and succinctly as possible and literally in
60 to 75 seconds. Any longer than that and people aren't going to
listen.
 
 Mitch: (05:29)
 So taking that a step further, what is the most overlooked
marketing channel professional practices could be using more
effectively based on what you just shared, it feels like
potentially a lot of practices are very interested in the social
media, maybe? Maybe their website is their go-to, you know, from
your experience, what kind of gets overlooked and really should
be focused on better?
 
 Gordon: (05:51)
 Well, let's assume that a firm has a decent, basic website
in place and it doesn't have to be a 10 or $12,000 major
investment. It's got to be something that, as I just said, states
their value proposition clearly and gives a person some insight
into what the firm stands for and who some of the people are.
Assuming that's in place and they have a Google business page
that's in place and optimized that's the foundation. The next
most overlooked step is retargeting. Now retargeting is a form of
paid advertising. If you're not familiar with that term, you've
certainly experienced retargeting. If you've ever shopped on eBay
or Amazon or, really most any of the major retail...