Whether you’re an independent accountant consultant or run a larger firm, PR is one of the best channels to communicate your brand’s credibility and show off your expertise.
Contrary to common belief, you can do PR on your own, you do NOT need to hire a PR Firm, and, in most cases, if you do PR yourself, you’ll be much more effective at it.
Finally, you do not need to spend a lot of time on PR—usually five to 10 hours per week should get the ball rolling for you.
In this article, I am going to show you four simple tactics that you can implement right away, with no prior experience needed. I say that because, much like you, my background was not PR or marketing—I was an engineer. I fell into this field 10+ years ago, have done DIY PR myself since then, and been through multiple acquisitions as a result.
Ready to learn? Let’s jump into it.
1. Leverage Quora to build rapport and authority
The key to successful PR is building a relationship with a journalist, blogger, or podcaster who has your customers as their audience. One of my favorite ways of doing so is by leveraging Quora, a question-and-answer website.
Here is the process you can use and adopt for your own keywords around “accounting” or any specific tax questions your target market might have.
- Identify a list of journalists whose readership matches your target audience. In my case, it’s journalists who recently covered “PR tools and marketing.” In your case, it might be journalists who covered “tax deduction questions.”
- Research the journalist by figuring out the specific topic of their last three articles. In my case, I found an article on topic of “worst PR mistakes.” In your case, you might find they wrote an article on “pass through income tax deductions in Trump 2020 tax code.”
- Go to Quora.com and type in “tax” in the search bar to find a question being asked with the keywords from the bullet above. In my case, the question I found was about “rookie PR mistakes.” In your case, it could be a question about “tax deductions,” or “worst financial mistakes and tax implications.”
- Answer the question and link to that journalist’s article in the answer. You can see my answer to the question of “rookie PR mistakes” below. In my answer, I linked up and quoted the journalist from the first bullet, and I also referenced another blog post I wrote on my own blog about this topic as a bonus. You don’t need to do that. It’s just nice to do. That way, the journalist can see that I was not only promoting her on Quora here, but also in my blog.