Brian Erickson:
Thanks for joining the Cardwell Beach marketing podcast. My name is Brian Erickson, chief strategy officer and partner at Cardwell Beach. In this series, we’re interviewing senior marketers across industries to develop perspective on what marketing will look like in a post COVID-19 world. Today’s guest is Bruce Ditman, the chief marketing officer of Marcum LLP, an independent public accounting firm that assists clients with accounting and advisory services. Their clients include private and public businesses, non-profits and private equity funds. Bruce, thanks so much for joining us today.
Bruce Ditman:
Hey, Brian. Pleasure to be here.
Brian Erickson:
Great. So weathering the storm and we always have the tax season storm, I’m sure in your industry, and you’ve got some additional storms going on currently. So accountants and other professional service providers are often considered trusted advisors that are critical for success during uncertain times. How has Marcum reached out to existing clients to play that advisory role during the COVID-19 crisis?
Bruce Ditman:
Well, sure. It’s a good question. It’s a question that everyone in our industry and industries like ours was scrambling to figure out. And I think the answer is pretty clear for us. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen our TV commercials, but our take on that trusted advisor position that you mentioned, is we want to be their first call, we want people to ask Marcum. So in that spirit, when everything went haywire and we found ourselves in the midst of a crisis, not just a health crisis which, of course, is paramount, but also a going forward business crisis for all of our clients and all of the global economy, we knew that people in crisis want one thing, maybe even above all others, which is just answers.
So we made it our mission, and this was really a seven-day-a-week round-the-clock mission, executed by the professionals, the knowledge base and then implemented through digital marketing webinar, flashes, all manner of communication devices, modern, not in-person communication devices, to get information out quickly and effectively, to not just our clients but our entire sphere of influence, our contacts, our friends.
An answer today might be wrong tomorrow, so that meant that we had to write every day, and we did, and across multiple sectors, industry practice areas and topics. So really what we wanted to do, play that advisory role, was to anticipate what people were worried about, what they needed to hear about and learn about and provide them as much information as we possibly could and let them know that we were here to help.
Brian Erickson:
That’s pretty awesome. Definitely a lot of value in over communicating especially the fluid situation. Just the more you can get out there, even if you have to revise it or retract anything down the line at least you are staying in constant touch and people know what’s going on.
Bruce Ditman:
We want to be a resource. And I think probably a lot of firms have answers, but we want people to know that whether they’re our client or not they could go to our Coronavirus Resource Center and find some answers, that we were doing whether it was being asked of us or not.
Brian Erickson:
So have you made any notable pivots from a service offering perspective?
Bruce Ditman:
I think pivot may not be right, but certainly we have added offerings, specifically around the PPP and other governmental programs having to do with the virus and the shutdown. That has been something that is obviously new, that we felt was very important to be available for and that people have appreciated us offering.
Brian Erickson:
Was there an active effort to tie new offerings back into your core brand promise or was it seamless and really already aligned and it was more about just promoting the actual services?
Bruce Ditman:
The new offerings tied very well and very easily back into our brand promise. One of the things that we like to say is, “Ever wonder where the people with all the answers get all the answers? Ask Marcum.” That’s what we were doing for people. So we wanted to be there. These are largely advisory services that we’re providing around PPP, around Main Street lending, whatever the case may be. So it fit very well into our brand. And hopefully, I like to think that it further jelled that trusted advisor or first call relationship.
Brian Erickson:
In relaying these new services and approaching things like PPP, I’m sure there was a lot of variation across industries in the way that people were looking for advice. How did your marketing accommodate those differences?
Bruce Ditman:
So, we definitely tailored thought leadership to industry without question. We held numerous webinars, which I’m happy to say, we often had a capacity a thousand people at a time within industry to talk to them. But the truth is that our clients are companies, really our clients are people and they’re people who are running businesses and they needed to know what tools they had available to them to keep their businesses open and running, to keep the economy going, to keep people employed, to keep people getting paid, to preserve what is likely their legacy, or a part of it, in their business.
I think if you take that approach, recognize that there are people behind all of this who are also freaked out just like we are, trying to ease their pain and recognize what they’re holding, the bag they’re holding isn’t full of money. The bag they’re holding is full of people and those people’s families and their lives. Then I think you can talk to just about anybody about this.
Brian Erickson:
That’s a really important thing. I think as marketers, we can get so caught up in just value proposition and positioning and all the technical aspects of how you do the job that we all do. But it really just comes down to empathy at the end of the day. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.
Bruce Ditman:
Sure. There’s a place, for sure, for specificity and that may be the point of differentiation or another point on the sales journey. But if you don’t have empathy and you don’t recognize that there’s a person on the other end of this who is scared, in this particular case, perhaps is worried that they’re going to have to let go of people whom they respect, who they value and it’s completely out of their control. It’s no fault of their own and/or the business that perhaps their family’s been in for generations or that they just started off the sweat of their own brow, their fear is it’s circling the drain, again for reasons that is completely out of their control. That’s universal. Then you can go and say, “We’re construction experts, we’re high tech experts, et cetera, et cetera.” But without that you’re really just being salesy.
Brian Erickson:
We have the universal human aspect, obviously we have the industry focus and specialty aspect. Across those two more macro approaches that you’re taking, how has your tactical mix of marketing channels changed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic? Obviously, you’re not taking clients out to dinner, you’re not doing big events, but are you using different platforms or tactics outside of the obvious ones than you were prior to the pandemic?
Bruce Ditman:
Yes. Some of that is just an issue of timing and coincidence, but certainly the mix has shifted dramatically. We’re a fully integrated marketing department that you have integrated strategy across all manner of media and other tactics. However, obviously, 90% of our marketing/business development efforts are going to be happening virtually. Whereas before Marcum had a really robust homegrown event schedule, I don’t know, around 20 events of a few hundred people each around the country aligned mostly by industry, but also in other areas like large women’s event and other ones, technology events, whatever.
None of those are going to be happening in any traditional sense. They’re going to be happening virtually now. So transitioning, we had the tools and we were doing it. It’s transitioning to being an event-heavy firm that does a hundred percent of it’s events virtually is a process.
Learning then how to capitalize on those without your ability to grip and grin, how do you do it? And that’s been a very steep learning curve because that’s how we are. We’d like to go to market and I think it’s working, but it’s been time of innovation. I’d have meetings with my team and talk to other people in late March or April and the spirit really is we are now writing the new normal. This is new territory for almost everybody, we are not a DR company, if you’re a DR company, especially if you were a digital DR company selling swim trunks on Instagram, didn’t change that much.
Firms like ours and most business, we were making it up in the way that people make things up when things change. The way that they made it up when websites started, the way they made it up when digital advertising started. And one thing that we are leveraging now more than before is account-based marketing, some account-based marketing tools, which we are very excited about.
Brian Erickson:
That’s fantastic. I just want to pause for a second and really stop and admire the fact that the chief marketing officer of the multi-thousand employee advisory firm is also just making it up. We’re all just making it up. So I think if there’s one thing that everybody can feel okay about is that nobody knows what’s going on right now, right?
Bruce Ditman:
Yeah. All we have to do is be responsible, be smart and be empathetic, apply that to our efforts and we’re going to make mistakes, but what are you going to do? I’ve never marketed through a pandemic before. They didn’t have SEO during 1918. The principals have to hold, right? So it’s not spaghetti against the wall. It’s like, “Well, what do we want to do and how do we do that in our current environment?”
That’s the challenge. That’s where we rise and we fall. And then hopefully in any organization we learn what works and what doesn’t work. And we concentrate our successes and move forward.
Brian Erickson:
And I think that’s some of the greatest value in really being clear about defining your brand and your company values. Using it as a framework for dealing with a shifting landscape and changing situation, having a guiding light to come back to when you have to make really quick, unprecedented decisions. I think that’s one of the benefits and I think you guys have done a really great job of that.
Bruce Ditman:
Well, thanks. We’ve obviously grown, I’ve been there more than 10 years now at Marcum and was always a dynamic fast-growing firm but we’ve managed through Jeff Wiener’s stewardship and leadership, we’ve tried to be nimble. We’ve tried to let the best idea always win and never do anything because that’s the way we did it before. Hopefully that spirit, it populates into my team and everyone else and then we’re figuring it out.
Brian Erickson:
Nice. Well in the spirit of figuring it out, what comes next? And obviously no one knows for sure, as we’ve just discussed and everyone will be affected differently by COVID-19 from small businesses to corporate entities to high net worth investors. How do you see your messaging or tactical mix adjusting across a very different, let’s call it suite or spectrum of clients that you serve over the next six months, 12 months, 18 months? Do you see any really clear trends or changes that you think are going to happen messaging or tactic-wise as we come out of this?
Bruce Ditman:
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think we had a period where we were in a snow globe. That period is over, we are not out of this by any stretch, but that period is over. And this is the new normal conversation, which is going to be the crazy part, the weird part that we’re in now, and then the part after that part. The world is going to continue to change, and I think it’s not going to snap back to the way that it was. I know it’s not going to snap back in a month and I don’t know that it’s ever going to go back to the entire way that it was. All things in nature and in business have a reaction to trauma, and they don’t always come back exactly the same.
I suspect from a marketing and advertising messaging business development perspective, that we will rely much, much more heavily on virtual tools. I think the industry, through this period, will figure out what works best and will take advantage of it more. What exactly that is? I’m not sure. I wonder, not about my firm, but just in general, I wonder what will change in the world when it comes to conferences and large events, travel. There is no replacing a face-to-face meeting or sharing a meal with someone, and as soon as that can be back to normal, I think it will come back, so that’s great. And this summer camp experience of spending a couple of days with someone at a conference, where you see someone for two days a year, but they’re your pal, because you’re in Flagstaff in 110 degrees together and sitting through seminars or whatever, I think that still has a lot of value.
I suspect that a harsher eye will be taken to what is actually necessarily something that has to happen in person and what won’t. Also, I’m not sure that everyone’s going to go back to work, to an office. So what does that mean? Well, it’s funny, but it means some interesting things that we dealt with early on, for example, the traditional media like, business journal. No one was receiving those business journals in March, in April, in May, unless the business journal somehow got their home addresses and some claim to have had them. But that’s got to change. You’ve got to get people where they are. So I suspect that firms and people that leveraged print media still, which I understand is on the out, but it’s the old thing, especially locally, regionally, are going to minimally transition to the digital versions of that, so that whether someone’s in the office or not, they’ll be able to receive your messaging.
We’re TV advertisers, cable TV, network TV. During this there’s some evidence that people’s viewing habits had changed, that they were not getting up as early because they didn’t have to. They’re watching more later morning news, which is interesting, I’m not sure that it’s a game changer, but the OTT is worried that everyone is been burning through their Netflix and burning through their Hulu. I know that marketplace has not fully taken shape yet and it will.
I mean, I still watch something with the kids and there’ll be a blank where there’s an ad. This is like the old days of local cable, I think they got in front of their skis a little bit and said like, “This is the future.” And it is the future, but the future’s in the future, it’s not now. And you guys got to price it and plan it the right way, you know what I mean?
I think that from just talking about media, if that’s all right, I feel the same way about the podcast world, where for years, this is a podcast, I used to have a podcast, I was an early adopter. And for years it was DR-nearly-free stuff. You’re Adam and Eves. We’re Squarespace and your MeUndies and that’s great, and it worked great for them. I can tell you, because I talked to all of them at the time, the Wall Street Journal, less of the New York Times, but a little bit of the Times, Bloomberg Media for sure, and the networks didn’t get it. They thought it was webcast. And they would take their morning news and call it a podcast. Well, that doesn’t work, this has no value to me, by the afternoon the news has changed.
But they wanted to all price it like using the mattress model. And it has gotten organized, but that marketplace is going to reorganize to understand that people are not sitting in their office much, they are not listening to the radio much, and people expect on demand. So whatever the medium is, how do you advertise to someone who’s on demand? I guess is the question that I’m going to.
Brian Erickson:
And you guys, you’re not just saying that you take an integrated approach, you really push the boundaries. I don’t know how many bus wraps I’ve seen for other accounting firms. I was in San Francisco, I saw that many times, bus wraps, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them in New York as well.
Bruce Ditman:
Absolutely. We have the Hampton Jitney. Our bus wrap program, it was unconventional, it was something we tried and it’s been, what I would deem, very successful. It is efficient and successful in spreading our name, in being visible. 15 years ago, or however long it was when I first started, bus wrap companies would call… they were cardboard panels for attorneys on there. And they’re still there, but what I always call a snout-to-tail 40-foot vinyl raft billboard, going through the metropolitan areas that we have offices, it makes a lot more sense, if you can divorce yourself of any prejudice that you might have about it. It’s a crowd favorite, we have a campaign around it. We’ve got a hashtag #MarcumEverywhere. People love seeing them when our clients travel and they see it. It’s a great campaign.
Brian Erickson:
That’s pretty awesome. And how long has that been going on?
Bruce Ditman:
Oh, wow. At least five years.
Brian Erickson:
I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed it sooner. I just had seen them back to back there, San Francisco, New York, and it just stuck out to me. So there’s that multiple impressions until till you recall, right?
Bruce Ditman:
For sure. It takes multiple impressions. I don’t keep a log of every bus that I see in my head. It’s not even necessarily the next bus impression you get, it might be a digital ad or a TV commercial, and then it all comes back. We started with the Hampton Jitney when we continue to run the multiple jitneys. And if someone said to you, “I want to wrap a bus.” You may say, “Get out of here.” Or someone says, “I’d like to put a 40-foot billboard on the Upper East Side, Long Island, and in some of the densest traffic in America, so it’s going to be visible to people,” you would probably say, “Yes.” And that’s really how we look at it.
Brian Erickson:
That’s a great paradigm shift or way to reframe that medium. And I think a lot of people would, I think totally be in line with what you’re saying there. So in the spirit of standing out and brand recall on the personal front, so obviously we’re potentially approaching record-breaking unemployment here and many marketers are going to find themselves in transition. What are the skill sets that are most important for marketers to emphasize right now to remain competitive, to stand out, so that as hiring managers are going through stacks of resumes that they do recall your personal brand?
Bruce Ditman:
Sure. I don’t think there’s any place in our business or businesses adjacent to ours, for marketers who are precious about marketing and contemptuous about sales. So what do I mean by that? Not everyone has to be a salesperson. I come from a sales background, so I understand that everything I’ve learned about marketing in a decade plus that I’ve been doing it here and elsewhere for longer, is through that lens. But that is not the attitude for now, “Hey, that’s not marketing, that’s sales. Talk to someone else about it.” While you don’t have to do cold calls, if you don’t have the thought that this is going to end up with two people shaking hands or signing a paper or building a relationship towards a sale, then you are at a massive deficit. So that’s like a psychographic for people looking for work.
But I can’t imagine anyone hiring without thinking about that. I don’t care if you’re a data analyst. A marketing data analyst is used to being in a room somewhere, they’re unfortunately stuck in a room with no windows and they tell you to crunch numbers. Do you know how to mobilize that data or those data for sales in business development, let’s call it business development all caps. If you are a CRM technician, how can we better leverage our CRM to this preface in all aspects? I think people need to be focused on demonstrating value. And one of the big ways of demonstrating value is that if you are a copy editor, okay? That’s your entire job, you’re a copy editor. And you’re going to go work in a business like ours or something similar, you should keep that in mind as well. You’re not just fixing commas and having Oxford comma arguments. You’re thinking, “Is this compelling content that someone will read and want to talk to us about?”
So I think that would be number one. Number two, you need to know digital. You don’t need to be a digital advertising expert or a web designer, great if you are. If you are, remember the purpose of you being there is to develop business, not to win web design awards, but you should be fluent in all manner of digital marketing and advertising.
Another area that is enormous for us as we’ve been talking, we haven’t put a name to it but it’s content marketing. Are you familiar on how to do this? Are you familiar with the tools that facilitate its implementation and execution? Can you read and write good, even if you’re not writing? All of those things, I think jump off at someone’s resume or come up in an interview.
Brian Erickson:
Back to your first point. That’s probably my biggest pet peeve in the marketing space as a whole is just don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty with the messy business aspects and marketing is not art. Art is fantastic, but it’s subjective. Do you like it or do you not like it? And does it win an award from somebody who likes it or doesn’t like it? Or on the marketing side, are you leveraging art to generate a business result? And I do think that it is helpful if you have come up through a sales background in marketing to highlight the benefits of that, because you’re forced to do it and it’s an important mindset to have.
Bruce Ditman:
People should be artful in everything that they do, they should be artful in making their burger at the cookout, but it is not art. You are cooking or preparing a meal and nourishing your family or whatever it is. There is a place to elevate things to the point of art, this ain’t it. We should be artful, but this is a science. We apply our science to this effort and hopefully in an artful way. And if we can make someone laugh while we’re doing it, that’s great and you can make someone cry while you’re doing it—intentionally—that’s great. But if you want to leverage emotion for that point, that’s great, too. It’s not a soulless business, but it is a business.
I always tell people, we’re not a marketing firm, we don’t work in a marketing firm, we work in an accounting firm. And we do the marketing part of driving that business. Our goal, if you grab someone in the hallway, imagine in your mind, the high school hallway of Marcum, which it doesn’t exist, but imagine it’s a big high school and someone grabs you and said, “Why are you here?” If you say, “To drive business,” you’re cool. Now the question of how, now you can start talking about your science and your artfulness. But we got to keep that in mind.
Brian Erickson:
Nice. I would love to see that happen in an actual high school setting, that’d be pretty funny. So how can somebody communicate that as they’re going through a job search, I totally agree with all of those qualities, but how would somebody stand out in that way to you?
Bruce Ditman:
Sure. Well, so talk about the simple stuff first. Make sure that your resume represents your skillset and that your rap, whatever it is when you talk to people, represents your skillset. Oh, “I’ve done 30 hours of HubSpot training and where I was before we had a dozen, various content products, newsletters, surveys, indices.” Whatever the case would be, “Here’s how we leveraged them.” Not, “Ta-da look what I made.” But rather, “Here’s how we leveraged them.” Here’s the business cost for it. Here’s a solution. Here’s the outcome. So I would absolutely take that approach.
And if you were in a position where you were sheltered from the business part of our job, okay, take some time, call people you used to work with, get your head and hands around how you fit into this machine.
In my case, this is a national, global accounting firm, what is our business purpose? How did we execute on that? And are there results for that? I’ll just be candid with you. I’m not a big fan of—unless you’re a sales person, an actual sales person—I’m not a big fan of marketing people putting on their resume that they increased revenue by $20 million. I think that it’s a curious paradox that most marketing people spend their whole career saying, “Well, there’s no exact way to measure the outcome of this.” And then when they’re on the market, they’re like, “We had $20 million in increased sales because of what I did.”
Brian Erickson:
Very funny observation, I would agree with that.
Bruce Ditman:
So, and on that front, by the way, just as a side note, I’ve got a bunch of core philosophies in our group, and this is one of them is that you can do ROI on anything, as long as you agree to the R before you make the I. Otherwise the presumptive R is always going to be sales. But in any case, I would caution people from making wild claims like that if they do, if that’s what someone wants, okay.
But what I would say is, “Here’s how I activated all of these hours and all this marketing effort into a sales effort, into leadership.” Whether that is thought leadership or whether that was again, driving a sales process, generating leads, all of those things.
Brian Erickson:
That’s some great advice, definitely looking for folks that can fit into a team. And I think just demonstrating how you’ve done that in the past through specific examples is always helpful. Great. Well, Bruce, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today, very much appreciated.
Bruce Ditman:
Thanks. It was a pleasure.
Brian Erickson:
So definitely make sure to follow Bruce on LinkedIn. He certainly practices what he preaches and puts out some fantastic content. Bruce Dittman, Marcum, LLP. This is Brian Erickson with Cardwell Beach. Thanks again for listening. And please make sure to check back for more senior marketers, sharing their perspectives on what marketing will look like in a post COVID-19 world.
