Tesla’s Brilliant Brand Positioning (And How to Use Content to Position Your Accounting Firm)

Are you struggling to get your point across? Is it hard to get through to your dream clients? The way you leverage your content is essential to brand positioning.

Brand positioning means positioning your firm in a way that separates it from your competitors. There are many ways to make yourself stand out. Take, for example, Tesla’s content marketing approach.

Tesla makes some of the world’s most expensive electric cars which come off an assembly line. Despite its pricing, the brand is in a league of its own and highly successful.

Why?

Tesla leverages content to focus your attention on vehicle quality, not on price. High quality and innovative features are the main selling points. Those aspects come before the idea of luxury vehicles.

The company also benefits from CEO Elon Musk’s unique personality. Tesla’s unique selling proposition has generated a great deal of excitement. And as a result, share prices have skyrocketed.

There’s a lot you can learn from Tesla. Using content to position your brand can offer incredible benefits. And it’s something that you can use to establish your accounting firm as VITAL. 

To get the most out of your content, here are a few concepts you need to understand.

How You Want to Position Yourself

There are many ways to position yourself. As an accounting firm, you want people to know that you’re serious. And you want your content to attract the right clients.

Tesla does a great job of positioning itself through its content marketing. The world views the company as innovative, but also fun. As an accountant or CPA, you can’t exactly take the same approach. 

You can be fun, but you don’t need to emphasise that with your content. Your aim should be to position yourself as VITAL for your clients. 

Of course, “vital” means “absolutely necessary or important.” VITAL also stands for: 

• Valuable
• Impactful
• Trusted
• Agile
• Lucrative

Great content can showcase all of these traits. But sometimes it’s enough to position your brand as the embodiment of one or two of these five attributes. 

If you’re VITAL to a business, you’re essential to its success. Clients and businesses that need accounting services are looking for these five characteristics. 

Examining the Framework

To better understand how to use content to position yourself as VITAL, let’s look at each of the five traits. We’ll take them one by one. That will help you see the big picture and the value in this positioning for accounting firms.

Deciding your positioning is so important that we refer to it as a marketing and sales Superpower. It’s step one in our Genius model, Superpowers For Accountants ®. That will help you attract and retain high-value clients.

1. Valuable

When you create content, you need to bring value to the table. Ask yourself how your content benefits prospects and clients. It’s crucial to avoid wasting your readers’ time when you’re  positioning your brand. 

Your content can offer value in many ways. It can offer immediate assistance. It can discuss potential solutions. It can say something about what and how your audience can improve. 

Through content marketing, it’s possible to offer immediate value. It might help to think about value as substance. Does your content say anything worth listening to? Will it make any difference to your clients’ lives after reading? 

That’s how you start creating separation between your firm and the rest.

2. Impactful

The impact your content makes often depends on what you can provide. 

So, you’ve established that your content is valuable. But how much of an impact does it have? Will it change your reader’s life in a positive way? 

Valuable pieces of information are everywhere. What do your readers get from you that they haven’t seen anywhere else? 

You have to be careful when recycling content. After all, you don’t want to end up with something bland. If your content offers the same information as other websites, it’s not impactful. It’s just the same old thing, and your readers will quickly move onto something else. 

3. Trusted

If they don’t trust you, your clients won’t reach out to you for help. You want to get them to a point where they automatically seek out your services. And make no mistake, up to 90% of prospects base their decisions on trust.

Through content marketing, your readers can get to know you. This helps to build trust, which is not something that happens overnight. It’s something that develops over time, just like a relationship.

To emphasise building trust with your content, avoid pushing for a sale. Your content should have a friendly tone. Focus on having a conversation, as opposed to making a sales pitch.

Show interest in your prospects and their problems. At the same time, show confidence in your ability to solve those problems. When readers see that you’re interested in their pain points, you can build trust. 

Most prospects are looking for one thing. They want to see that you put them first. And that you can identify and relate to their pain points. Then you’ll get the chance to fix those pain points.

4. Agile

In these times, agility means everything. Your ability to adapt to changing times can make or break you. In other words, you’re able to stay ahead of the curve – not just the competition. It also shows that you have a modern accounting firm that serves modern businesses. 

One way to show that you’re agile is to provide insightful content. It also helps if you offer signature solutions to modern problems. For instance, you could show a unique flair for solving the type of issues that plague digital businesses. 

An agile accounting firm has always provided value. But showing this trait now is more important than ever before. Especially with an economic crisis on our hands, and many business owners in dire need of help.

Being agile also relates to your ability to pivot and to help clients pivot. It’s important because it shows that you can do more than traditional accounting tasks. You can come up with new and better solutions to old problems. You can identify new problems and offer solutions ahead of the competition.

Agility also comes from implementing innovative ideas in your niche. This is what your firm must do if you want to evolve beyond traditional compliance work. 

Today’s business owners want more than that from their accountants. 

They want to save money and transform their companies. If you can do that, then you are agile.

5. Lucrative

What makes you a lucrative accountant for your clients? First of all, it means that you can save them money.

This is how you show prospects that you’re worth your fee. Any money a client pays for your advisory services is an investment. If you’re lucrative to them, then you’re worth the investment.

So, how much do you charge per month? Is it £1,000 or £2,000? Or more?

Now, how much money are you saving your client? How much better are you making their business?

Is their decision to employ your firm a compliance decision or a financial one? For example, paying an accountant $200 is a compliance decision. The client pays because they need a job done.

However, when a company pays in the thousands, that’s a financial decision. That’s an expensive service. So is that service lucrative? Clients expect it to be.

Only you know how accurate and fair your pricing is. The main idea is to show that working with you is lucrative for the client. To show that you can deliver on their investment. And that your fee is only a fraction of the lucre you can gain for your client.

Five Things May Be All You Need to Succeed

These are the five things that you need to demonstrate through your content marketing. That’s how you can show that your firm offers VITAL services. It’s how you can uniquely position your brand to stand out and attract and convert clients.

It’s also how you can build a sterling reputation and solidify client retention. These traits help you to build strong and long-lasting relationships. And it’s easy enough to highlight these qualities through your content.

Once you understand what VITAL stands for, you have a map. It will show you how to create an accounting firm that’s essential to your ideal clients. And it will show you how to structure your content to get their attention.