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I’m trying something new this issue: a guest post from an expert outside core CAS, but squarely focused on helping accounting firms build stronger CAS lines. Full disclosure, Full Stadium is a sponsor of this newsletter, but they are also a team I’ve personally worked with in my own firm and know provides real value.

Guest Post: Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool Is Being Human

By Micky Deming, Founder, Full Stadium Marketing

There is a bookstore in Birmingham, Alabama that got covered by NPR, USA Today, Good Morning America, and The New Yorker. It sits on a dead-end street in a building that looks like an old clapboard house from the outside.

Every book in the store is signed by its author, in person.

The owner does not charge a premium for this. His explanation to The New Yorker: "Our books don't cost more, but they are worth more." The store has 5,000 people on its email list and negotiated a discount rate with a local hotel because so many customers travel from out of town just to visit.

I keep coming back to that story when I think about what is happening in accounting firm marketing right now. Not because accounting firms sell books. But because it shows something that matters a lot in 2026: being genuinely, undeniably human is becoming a competitive advantage, not just a nice-to-have.

The Content Flood and What It Means for CAS Firms

AI-generated content has flooded every channel. Mentions of "AI slop" across the internet increased ninefold in 2025 from the year before. Merriam-Webster named "slop" its 2025 word of the year, defining it as low-quality digital content produced mostly by AI. Researchers are documenting what they call "authenticity fatigue": users migrating away from public feeds toward private communities, invite-only groups, and human voices they actually trust.

For CAS firms specifically, this creates a real problem and a real opportunity at the same time.

The problem: if your marketing is generic blog posts, templated social media, and AI-written newsletters, you look exactly like the next firm. Your potential clients cannot tell you apart.

The opportunity: the firms that show up with a real perspective, in communities, on podcasts, and at conferences, become the ones that get remembered. In professional services, being remembered is most of the battle.

What Being Human Actually Looks Like

Ted Gioia, writing in The Honest Broker this past February, made a related observation: "Concierges and curators are now the ultimate status symbol. Just like the elite travelers who get to skip the check-in line, the elite online journeyers get to bypass the algorithms."

He was writing about a broader cultural shift. People are actively seeking out what is real in a sea of what is automated. For CAS firm owners, that shift is an opening.

You already have the most valuable thing in this environment: genuine expertise in a specific domain, and real relationships with clients whose businesses you understand deeply. The question is whether your marketing reflects that.

Dan Gertrudes at GrowthLab Financial described the human value well in a recent piece on CAS and AI: "Clients won't be hiring an accountant because we love spreadsheets; they hire because they want greater confidence and someone who can bring calm to complexity and clarity to the chaos." That is what you are actually selling. No AI replicates it.

The Most Valuable Thing You Do

Most business owners do not really understand their own numbers. They can read a bank balance but not a cash flow statement. They know revenue is up and cannot say why margin is down. That weakness is not an entrepreneurial failure. It is exactly the thing a good accountant, CAS provider, or fractional CFO exists to complement.

I believe that need is real and largely unmet. Business owners deserve to be financially literate about their own companies, and the people best positioned to teach them are the ones already sitting in the numbers with them. Whoever takes that education seriously becomes more than a vendor. They become the person the owner cannot imagine operating without.

That conviction also happens to be your richest content strategy. Every concept a client wrestles with, every figure they misread, every decision they nearly made because they misunderstood what a statement was telling them, is a lesson thousands of other owners in your niche need just as badly.

The numbers are a huge source of anxiety for businesses. You meet a genuine need, and you become the obvious expert on the problem. Teaching is not a detour from growth. It is the most direct route to it.

Becoming the Embedded Influencer in Your Niche

There is a concept that Ryan Deiss, founder of Scalable, has been talking about lately: the embedded influencer. His argument is that traditional influencer marketing is fading because audiences can spot paid promotion from a distance. What is working now is when a real person inside a brand or a niche becomes genuinely known for their perspective, not their promotions.

For CAS firm owners, this is not a marketing tactic. It is a description of what you already have the potential to be.

Show your face. Share your real perspective on what you see in client financials. Talk about the questions you get asked most often and what your actual answers are. Post a short video walking through a concept that trips up the business owners in your niche. Be the person in your professional community who consistently adds value rather than just broadcasting services.

The firms I see building real momentum are not the ones with the slickest websites. They are the ones where the owner is clearly a human being with a point of view, not a logo with a tagline. Deiss calls this the 10-80-10 model: a human voice opens and closes every piece of content, with the substance in between. The human layer is what earns the trust.

Why Focus and Consistency Are What Make It Work

Being human alone is not enough. You can show up authentically once and have no one notice.

What makes the human approach compound over time is pairing it with focus and consistency.

Focus means knowing exactly who you are talking to. If you are building a CAS practice, you likely have a sense of which client types you do your best work with. Lean into that. The more specific your perspective, the more your content lands with the right people. What do you see in the cash flow patterns of a particular type of business? What questions do those owners consistently get wrong? That level of detail is what makes someone feel like you are talking directly to them.

Consistency is the multiplier. The firms with growing reputations have been showing up in the same places, with the same message, for a long time. Not perfectly. Not with a big team. Just reliably.

The payoff runs in both directions, human and machine. Word of mouth still drives the majority of professional-services growth, and that flywheel starts with being known. But consistency has a newer dividend too: an analysis of AI-cited content found that roughly 75 percent of the authors AI tools cite publish at least five times a month. The systems are quite literally rewarding the people who show up reliably under their own name. Being known starts with consistently showing up as someone with a real point of view.

This Is Also How You Get Found in AI Search

There is a practical marketing payoff to this approach that goes beyond word of mouth.

The way buyers research has shifted. The average Google search query is 3.37 words. The average ChatGPT prompt is 23 words. People are asking AI tools specific, detailed questions, the kind they would ask a trusted advisor. When someone types "what accounting firm specializes in advisory services for nonprofits in my area" into an AI tool, the system is looking for sources that have been consistently, specifically answering questions like that over time.

This is what researchers are calling Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO. And the firms best positioned for it are not the ones with the biggest content budgets. They are the ones with the most specific expertise and the most consistent presence in a defined community. The evidence is converging on one platform in particular: a March 2026 analysis from Profound found that LinkedIn is now the single most-cited domain for professional queries across ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, and Perplexity, with published posts and articles increasingly displacing static profile pages as the source of those citations. A separate SEMrush study of 325,000 prompts ranked LinkedIn the second most-cited domain overall, behind only Reddit, and found that articles between 500 and 2,000 words earn the most citations, with roughly 95 percent of cited content being original rather than reshared. The visitors who arrive from AI tools convert at higher rates because they show up already looking for exactly what you do.

The microcommunity you participate in is part of this. AEO strategist Kaleigh Moore, a former journalist now researching how AI retrieves information, maps these dynamics as a stack of trust signals, with the most weight going to the signals furthest from your own marketing: a real expert publishing under their own name, cited by others, mentioned across independent platforms. When you are an active, helpful voice in a specific professional community, contributing in forums, showing up at niche conferences, being cited in industry newsletters, you are building exactly that kind of presence. Being known in the right rooms does not just produce referrals. It shapes how AI tools describe you when someone asks.

Where to Go From Here

Everything above is the mindset. Here is how you put it into motion.

Start by thinking about your three best clients. Not the biggest, not the oldest. The ones you do your best work with. The ones who trust you, refer others, and actually take your advice. Now sit with a few questions about each of them.

What did their world look like before they found you? What were they dealing with, not just financially, but in terms of stress, confusion, and uncertainty? What changed after they hired you? Was there a specific moment where you can point to the before and the after? And when they refer someone to you, what do they actually say? What is the thing they lead with when they describe what you do?

Think about the most recent tax season. Was there a client who came in overwhelmed and left with clarity? Someone who had been carrying a weight they did not fully realize they were carrying until you helped them put it down? Those transitions from chaos to calm, from uncertainty to confidence: that is the transformation you provide. And if that client went through it, there are many others like them out there right now who have not found you yet.

Those stories are your marketing. Not your service list. Not your credentials. The specific, honest, human account of what it looks like when someone like you helps someone like them.

The firms building the strongest reputations right now are not the ones with the most content. They are the ones showing up with enough specificity and consistency that the right people recognize themselves in what they publish, and feel like they already know the firm before they ever make contact.

Step 1: Think through the examples. Pull out a notebook and write down the three client stories you thought of above. What was the before? What was the after? What would that client say if someone asked them why they refer you? Get this on paper before you do anything else.

Step 2: Tell the story. Pick the most compelling of the three and write it up. Not as a case study with sanitized language and vague outcomes. As a real story, in your own words, with enough detail that someone in a similar situation would read it and think, "that sounds exactly like me." Post it on LinkedIn. Put it on your website. Share it in the communities where your ideal clients spend time.

Step 3: Build a content calendar. Consistency is what turns one good story into a reputation. Map out four weeks of content grounded in what you actually know: the questions you get asked, the mistakes you see, the things you wish your clients understood before they hired you. Put it on a calendar. Show up on the days you said you would. Do it again the following month.

A Note on the Hard Part

Everything above is simple to understand and genuinely difficult to sustain. The firms that fall off do not fail because the strategy is wrong. They fail because consistency competes with billable work, and billable work always wins. The owner who planned to post every week gets pulled into a deadline, misses two weeks, and the reputation engine stalls.

This is the exact problem we built Full Stadium Marketing to solve. We understand the value accounting firms bring. We get to know how you serve your unique community, and deliver that message to your audience. 

That is the difference between being human once and being human for a year. One earns a nod. The other builds the reputation that referrals and AI search both reward.

The Alabama Booksmith is not remarkable because of a marketing strategy. It is remarkable because it does one thing with complete conviction, over and over, and makes it very easy for people to talk about. You already have the expertise. You already have the stories. The only question is whether you are letting people see them.

Micky Deming is the founder of Full Stadium Marketing, a content marketing agency that specializes in helping accounting firms turn their expertise into a consistent, human content engine. Before starting Full Stadium, he spent years inside a fast-growing accounting firm and built his career on a journalist's craft: getting experts to say what they know in a way people actually want to read. If you want to see where your firm's visibility stands today, Full Stadium offers a free Growth Visibility Report, a personalized assessment delivered within 24 hours. Learn more at fullstadium.co.

Thanks for reading, Luke Templin!