Marketing for benefit plan audit engagements is an integral part of many CPA firms' business development strategy. The delivery timetable, fees generated and ability to position the firm for additional work makes these engagements attractive. Many firms conduct a plan audit marketing program once or twice every season and give little thought to it the rest of the year. Most miss additional opportunities because deadlines have passed and there are other projects on the calendar. A rigid, deadline-focused, quick-moving process may result in missed engagement opportunities.

With some creativity, the same information used to qualify prospects for the plan audit-marketing effort can be "twisted" to drive other marketing programs. Key information such as the plan year-end, total number of participants and current audit firm (found on Schedule H or Schedule C of the Form 5500) will provide significant "marketing intelligence." With this information firms can modify EBP audit efforts to appeal to prospects at different times of the year and offer supporting services that may be required.

Every firm focuses their benefit plan audit marketing with the goal of obtaining 12/31 engagements. However, the "marketing intelligence" can open the door to four other types of opportunities:

a€¢ Financial Statement Audits. Many companies use the same CPA firm for both their financial statement and benefit plan audits. When they make a decision to change auditors they may be open to hiring two audit firms. If they are locked into their financial statement audit firm, pitch them the idea of "unbundling" the plan audit for independence, service or fees. This is becoming a common practice.

a€¢ Tax Planning & Return Preparation. If an organization is using a large firm for their auditing, do they need to pay the same high rates for their tax needs? A bank may require a large firm on the audit report, but have little interest in who handles tax matters.

a€¢ Fiscal Year-End Benefit Plan Audit Opportunities. Generally, the financial statement audit coincides with the benefit plan year-end. By searching for non-12/31year-end plan audits it can lead to non-12/31 financial statement and tax work. Searching for engagements with a February or April year-end, you will be able to secure deliverables in the traditionally "slower" months. Properly researching target areas can create a year-long benefit plan audit-marketing campaign.
For example, a benefit plan with a February year-end is required to file the Form 5500 by October 15 or if an extension is filed then January 15. These deadlines are driven by the DOL's requirement that seven months after the plan year-end the appropriate documentation must be submitted. This rule applies regardless of the plan year-end date. The best time to market to these opportunities is March through July. During this period executives speak with audit firms, learn about service differentiators and assess which firm will best address their needs. If your firm has already moved on to another project you can miss a number of these engagements.

a€¢ Fiscal Year-End Prospects in Small- to Mid-Size Entities. Using 5500 filings you can search companies to identify smaller plans (less than 100 total participants) that do not require a plan audit and have a non 12/31-year end. This will provide a prospect pool of focused opportunities with financial statement and tax needs.

This area is where creativity can open the door to "good" prospects. For example, although most benefit plans with less than 100 total participants do not require an audit, they still have to file a Form 5500. The information provided can be used to create a financial statement audit and tax prospecting campaign.

Each firm's approach to marketing to these opportunities is different. Flashpoint has found five key factors necessary for a marketing campaign to be successful. These include:

a€¢ Prospect selection. Focus on opportunities your firm has references to support. If a firm's largest plan audit has 150 total participants they will have a hard time winning a 10,000 total participant plan audit. Set reasonable expectations when determining the target pool.

a€¢ Database. Once the right mix of prospects has been identified, create a database from which the campaign can be managed. Unless you have experience with this activity it may make sense to hire an outside resource to assist.

a€¢ Direct Mail. Send each prospect a direct mail piece highlighting the reason to consider changing firms. Focus on the "pain buttons" most companies face; these include poor service or increasing fees. In our experience it is usually a mix of these reasons that cause companies to make a change.

a€¢ Follow Up. It is imperative to call each prospect and follow up on the initial mail piece. Very rarely does an executive call off of a mail piece, but they do respond to phone calls and remember the mail piece. Engage the prospect in discussion, reinforce "pain buttons" and position your firm as a solution.

a€¢ Nurture Opportunities. If the prospect is not ready to make a change now, that is normal. Sometimes the CFO or Human Resources Director is not the only decision maker in the process. They may have an audit committee or another internal committee to report to. It may take time for a prospect to sever the relationship with the current auditor. Be patient, as good opportunities may take longer to grow into an engagement.

When should a firm conduct EBP audit marketing? The time to target benefit plan audit opportunities with a 12/31 year-end is from January to June. During this time companies are making decisions about their current firm, assessing service levels, fee rates and determining whether to identify an alternative provider. Unfortunately this falls right in the middle of busy season. As a result, marketing efforts either do not "get going" or they are started and then no follow up occurs. If a firm waits until mid April to May to begin looking, the chance of finding qualified opportunities are significantly reduced.

Learning how to do affiliate marketing is really not all that hard to do, as long as you're willing to take action and get to work once you've learned what to do. Basically, you are writing reviews for other people's products and services. This process is called "preselling" and in many cases it works like a charm. The general idea is to tell a true story of a problem that you or someone else was facing and how the product or service helped to solve that problem. This is just one angle, of course. You wouldn't want to write a review like that for every product, but on many products this is very effective.

The main reason that you want to presell people at your website is because they're going to be sent to a sales letter at the merchants website through your affiliate link already. You don't want to hit them with a sales letter and then immediately send them to another sales letter, do you? Of course not. Your main objective is to give an honest, unbiased review. That means tell the parts of the product or service that you didn't like as well as what you did. This will help to build trust with your visitors because it separates you from other "salesy" web pages and makes people more "warmed up" and receptive to your recommendations. Honesty is always the best policy.

Once you've written your review you'll want to give the prospect a strong nudge to lead them where you want them to go next. You really should have an offer of some kind for a free course or free ebook that they can download that's related to the offer. This is assuming that they're not already on your list. I got a bit ahead of myself. Otherwise, you just want them to click on your link. Tell them nicely, but firmly to click on the link. Something to the effect of "I could continue to talk about xyz product, but you know the old saying that a picture is worth a 1000 words? Why not check it out for yourself Right Now at ..."

Do you see how harmless that was? I basically said "I've told you everything that I can about my experience with this product, but you can get a PICTURE of it Right Now (I capped the R and N) by going to ...

The best piece of advice that I can give you is to test this for yourself. You can get testing and tracking at different places like Adminder for under .00 per month that will tell you how many people click on your link. You should always use anchor text so that people don't see an affilate or tracking link. This will make some people shy away from clicking.

Do you already have One Week Marketing from PotPieGirl?  Are you think about getting it?  If so, you probably know the basics behind the strategy. Research a niche market, create a Squidoo Lens and then build traffic to the Lens through article marketing, social networking, etc.  But is there anything that can be expanded upon?  Are there parts of One Week Marketing from PotPieGirl that you would like some more information on?

One PotPieGirl critic complained that he could not get is article submitted to EzineArticles.com.  Perhaps One Week Marketing wasn't clear that articles should be unique content.  You cannot copy and paste content from other sources.  It takes effort to research a topic and produce good, unqiue content and that's why PotPieGirl tells you up front it is work.

One Week Marketing from PotPieGirl talks about niche market research and finding keywords.  But, PotPieGirl says it is more important to get your pages and content out there, and then see what sticks.  You need to keep in mind that your niche must have some traffic (that is people looking for information about it) and there must be a viable product (a product with some Clickbank gravity proving the product fulfills a need and sales letter works).  Next your keywords must have some organic traffic, and still have only a few results in a Google Search.  You'll have a hard time ranking well for a keyword with too many competing pages.  Finding niche markets, products and keywords that fit these criteria is not easy.  But you can hopefully increase your PotPieGirl ROI by going after what your research has shown to be potentially profitable.

One Week Marketing from PotPieGirl also talks about using forums and blog comments to drive traffic to your pages.  Unfortunately a relativity new html feature called the "nofollow" link may decrease the effectivness of this tactic.  The nofollow link is a way for forums and blogs to tell Google they don't endorse a link.  Google doesn't apply any pagerank to a nofollow link and it doesn't count as a backlink.  If you plan to use these technique, you should concentrate your efforts on forums or blogs that have don't use nofollow links.  PotPieGirl wrote her course two or more years ago, and nofollow links may not have been as widely used as they are now.