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How We Turned An Accountant Into A TikTok Sensation (No, Really)
How We Turned An Accountant Into A TikTok Sensation (No, Really)
Accountants don’t exactly scream “social media stardom”. We’ve joked for years that if you can market an accountant you can market anything, though the joke rather misses the point. Accountants are sitting on gold. Get your numbers right and you get your business right, and when your audience is business owners, that advice genuinely changes things for them.
Enter Sam Rollins. Chartered accountant, director of Trinity Accountants in Coventry, and our accountant (yes, ours). She knows her subject inside out and, crucially, she’s brilliant in front of a camera. What she wanted was a way to reach small business owners without a single pushy sales tactic, which happens to be the sort of marketing we like best. So we made her an offer: get in a podcast studio and let us do the rest.
How we built Sam’s content machine
The plan was simple enough, and none of it is hard to copy.
- Get her on a podcast. We told Sam she’d be great at it, especially if we chopped the videos into clips for social. We arranged the studio, she brought a colleague, and they hit record.
- Ask what people actually ask. Before anyone touched a microphone we dug into what business owners genuinely wanted to know. We checked the internet, scoured social media, and even asked AI. Then we agreed the list together. No guessing.
- Turn one afternoon into a month. Each month we take the podcast, cut it into short-form videos, and push them out across her channels. Sam records, we do the rest.
- Try TikTok on a whim. A few months in we wondered why none of this was on TikTok. It wasn’t even a channel Sam had. Total afterthought. It became the star of the show.
The clever bit isn’t the kit or the editing. It’s working out what to talk about before you talk about it, then being consistent enough that people start recognising your face. The show is called Behind the Numbers: Real Talk for Small Businesses, with Sam doing the talking and her Trinity colleague Rachael keeping the conversation moving. Nine episodes are live so far, covering everything from choosing a business structure to the real cost of employing staff.
The videos took off
Some of them went properly viral, which is lovely and does very little for your bank balance on its own.
This is where plenty of businesses get stuck. Views feel like winning. They’re visible, they’re satisfying, and they’re easy to screenshot for a meeting. But most people watching a two-minute clip about VAT are never going to ring an accountant, and that’s completely fine. They were never supposed to.
The number worth caring about is what happens to the people who do get in touch.
What actually converts
About a quarter of the enquiries that mention the podcast or the videos turn into clients.
That’s not a rate you get from cold outreach. You get it when somebody has been watching you for months before they pick up the phone, so by the time they make contact they’ve already made up their mind. And for an accountant, a new client means recurring revenue for years rather than one sale and a handshake.
Sam said it best:
“I’ve had new clients tell me they found me on TikTok and had already watched loads of my videos before they got in touch. By the time they enquire, they feel like they already know and trust me – there’s no hard sell at all.”
We never once asked for the sale
No click here. No contact us now. No desperate calls to action anywhere in the content. People find Sam, watch her videos, and get in touch off their own back.
That’s the part most businesses find hardest, and we understand why. There’s a real temptation to bolt a sales message onto the end of everything, partly because it feels like you’re doing something. It almost always makes the content worse, and it changes what the viewer thinks they’re watching. Give people something genuinely useful and a decent number of them will work out the next step without being told.
Why we now steer clients towards podcasts
It’s worked well enough that we now push all our podcast clients onto TikTok. When someone comes to us asking for social media, we often steer them towards a podcast with clips instead.
It won’t suit everyone, mind. If you hate being on camera this is the wrong plan, and we’ll say so rather than take your money. But if you know your subject and you can hold a conversation, one afternoon in a studio gives you months of content. Which is also why we bang on about getting comfortable in front of an audience.
TL;DR
Sam Rollins runs Trinity Accountants and happens to be brilliant on camera. We put her in a podcast studio, worked out what business owners actually wanted to know, then cut each episode into short videos. TikTok was an afterthought and became the biggest driver. Some clips went viral, which on its own means very little. What matters is that around a quarter of the people who get in touch become clients, and we never once asked for the sale.
Fancy a content machine of your own?
If you know your stuff and you’re not scared of a microphone, we can turn one afternoon into months of content. Contact us and we’ll work out whether it’s right for you. If it isn’t, we’ll tell you that too.
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