We’ve discussed before how selecting a niche to focus on can be an immense boon for your firm. If you’ve outsourced accounting tasks then you’ll have freed up a lot of time to focus on building yourself up within your chosen niche. But how do you do just that – how do you become the expert accounting firm for your chosen niche?
Sponge up niche knowledge.
For the sake of example let’s say you’ve decided to become the firm of choice for restaurants, hoping eventually to branch out to associated businesses – produce suppliers, kitchenware manufacturers, and so on.
You’ve outsourced accounting tasks like basic tax work and bookkeeping, leaving you time to study this niche. Get to know *all* of the hurdles that a restaurant faces – marketing, dealing with suppliers, hiring good wait staff, etc.
You do this to show that you’re completely familiar with the industry (plus it makes for good networking). Get to know people who report on the field in newspapers and prominent websites. Offer them content from your perspective – write articles like “The Top 5 mistakes new restaurateurs make with their finances.”
The more you can speak from a position of authority on the niche field as a whole the more you’re going to be regarded as the authority accounting firm in the industry.
Offer niche-specific value packages.
The benefits to you that come from offering specific packages are two-fold. First, when restauranteurs are searching for a firm they’re definitely going to be interested in you if you offer a value-pack of services that is called “The restaurant value pack” with its outsourced accounting services as opposed to going through generic offerings to see what suits them best.
Second, it helps build that authority we mentioned in the first point. If you’re offering specific packages then you must really know the restaurant business really well, and that makes you an easy pick for restaurant owners.
Get known in social media.
Start a blog for your firm, writing articles with tips, hints, and help for your niche audience. Link to your articles via Twitter and Facebook. Run workshops or seminars. Become the source of newsletters that show the rise or fall of your field as a whole and comment on how things can be improved.
The more solid pieces of helpful info out there with your name in the byline, the more chances you have as being recognised as being the go-to firm for your chosen niche.
Tap your niche audience for ideas.
So you already know that outsourced accounting services free up time for you to focus on your client base. But how do you best serve them? Ask the experts – your client base.
This goes for everything from what kinds of articles you should write through to the packages (and pricing thereof) you should be creating.
Once you have a general consensus of the basic offerings all restauranteurs are going to want from an accounting package you’ll have the basis from which you can build value-add packages. You’ll be able to generate packages that offer the basics plus another additional service or two at half-price. You might make less per individual service, but since it was unlikely that they were going to be bought by your niche clients you’re now making extra money on something you never would have sold otherwise.
