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This article, which appeared on a leading professional services marketing blog, provides an overview of the evolution of Kyle's CPA Video Blog, from its inception to its status in August 2012. By early 2013, this vlog, which uses humor to attract people to Brown Smith Wallace's serious thought leadership content, has had 22,000 views of its five episodes. The article provides insights into how this innovative strategy was developed and discusses the national branding impact and the seo improvement that resulted.
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Accounting Humor: Oxymoron or Brilliant Marketing Strategy? | | BBR MarketingBBR Marketing
http://www.bbrmarketing.com/blog/accounting-humor-oxymoron-or-brilliant-marketing-strategy/[8/28/2012 11:14:08 AM]
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Accounting Humor: Oxymoron or Brilliant Marketing Strategy?0 COMMENTS
by Sarah Warlick, copywriter and editor
The answer can sometimes be a resounding “both” as illustrated by a series of video blogs (vlogs)produced by a creative senior auditor at Brown Smith Wallace in St. Louis, Missouri.
Adding video to your company website is an effective way to boost SEO and communicate with newaudiences. Despite that knowledge, many firms have found the concept difficult to apply depending upontheir industry. Professional services firms suffer from a general perception of being staid and dry, definitelynot the YouTube crowd. Kyle’s CPA Video Blog shreds that image, approaching hipster levels of irony withits self-mockingly exaggerated lack of animation and lame accounting “jokes.”
Kyle’s latent talent began toemerge when the firm askedemployees to make videos foruse in the recruiting area of theirwebsite, where video is aparticularly good fit. Heproduced and starred in three ofthe entries, gaining the noticeand admiration of Mike Bowlan,Brown Smith Wallace’s directorof marketing. After another ofKyle’s videos left people inhysterics at a company event,Mike began to realize the videoswere a strategic marketing assetand encouraged Kyle to makemore. He’s now done several,including a vastly entertaining list of the Top Ten Reasons Accountants Are Cooler Than You Think andhis newest vlog that educates viewers about aspects of the new healthcare legislation commonly referredto as Obamacare.
Says Mike, “We generally get the best results from our email campaigns when we cover tax subjects sowhen we saw an item about the “new” mileage rates from the IRS, which basically hadn’t changed, Ifigured this was a great place to start with humor – it would be hard to offend too many people with thistopic. So, in February, we launched “Kyle’s World Premiere.” The video made quite a splash. “CPATrendlines immediately picked it up and featured it for two weeks on the homepage. When I soughtfeedback on various LinkedIn marketing forums, I was flattered by the responses from many of themarketing, business development and social media leaders in the profession whom I admire for thedifferences they make. They recognized the clear differentiation it provided our firm, the personality itshowed and the ability of the firm to think outside the box.”
It wasn’t only marketing folks who appreciated the vlogs. Measurable results matter for social mediamarketing just as they do in any other kind of campaign, and the numbers from this strategy have been
Top 10 Reasons Accountants Are Cooler Than You Think
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