The 4 Marketing Objectives (That Your Accounting Firm Needs to Focus On)

No accounting firm can thrive without effective marketing. Discover the objectives that will help you attract clients more effortlessly.

Get a taste in this article or skip straight to the implementation on our webinar on:  Marketing during busy Season: Why you need to and how to implement proven strategies.

Jan 26, 2023

01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

90 minutes with Questions

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1016702849592/WN_ObAZLa4nRfKuK6U4J4CseQ

Accounting firms need to go the extra mile when it comes to marketing. As they’re selling services that many businesses would rather not talk about, their target audience is often hard to draw in.

And yet, many accounting firms don’t put in nearly enough effort to make this happen. Because of how specific their services are, they think that marketing efforts that work for other business won’t work for them.

Because of this, they mainly rely on referrals and positive word of mouth. This may be a great way of getting new clients, it’s far from the most effective. It gives you no control over your lead flow, which translates to no control over your future growth.

Plus, it’s often quite limiting, as you can’t reach a broad audience this way. The best you can hope for is to passively get more clients through those you’re already working with. In most cases, however, this won’t result in as many new leads as your full potential allows.

The good news is that there are many different ways to market your accounting firm more effectively. To take full advantage of them, you must first set a few key marketing objectives. 

Let’s go over the most important.

1. Understand the Numbers that Marketing Influences

Many accountants ask the wrong question about marketing. They often start with:

‘How much marketing do I actually need to do?’

Unfortunately, this question is too vague and devoid of any tangible goals.

A good marketing campaign starts with the right goals. Preferably, these goals are in the form of numbers.

For example, your goal might be to increase the percentage of revenue that comes from compliance work. This would call for a different marketing strategy than, for example, increasing your conversion rates of new clients.

This is why before you think about how much you should market your firm, you must first figure out how. You can answer this question simply by setting a clear goal that you can measure by tracking the corresponding number that you want to grow.

For an accounting firm, the relevant numbers may include:

• Number of different client groups
• Average project value
• Average hourly rate (AHR) for different services (advisory AHR, compliance AHR, etc.)
• Number of new clients per month/quarter/year
• Number of leads generated 
• Revenue
• Average per-client fee

You can boost all of the above, as well as many other numbers, with the appropriate marketing campaign. Decide on what you wish to grow and then move on to figuring out how to do it.

2. Know Your Niche (and Market to It)

Niches are something that many businesses, including accounting firms, often fail to get right. They think that fitting into a niche limits their reach and the number of possible clients that they can get.

You must get rid of such a perspective of niches as soon as possible if you want your marketing to be effective. That’s because your goal isn’t to work with everyone who’s willing to pay. You might think it makes sense from a financial standpoint, but you’ll end up losing more than you’re getting. 

Because marketing can be very expensive - it not done correctly. You’ll be paying for too many leads and not even conversions, jacking up your cost per conversion. If you don’t narrow your targeting, you’ll rack up many of these losses.

Not to mention that your firm isn’t going to perform every aspect of accounting equally well. To get a client, you might promise something that you can’t deliver. Subpar service can only hurt your reputation.

This is why you must identify what you’re best at and deliver it to the right niche. You can create the ideal client persona by asking the following questions:

• What’s their line of business?
• What’s the size of the companies?
• How much time have they been in business?
• How risk-averse are they?
• Where are they from and where do they spend their time?

With your ideal client persona, you’ll know exactly who to target with your campaigns. This will make your marketing much more effective.

Just for an example, our client Paula has just picked up her first niche client and she credits it for giving her confidence boost. She sold her program test run for $2,850 per month at an AHR of $500-$715.

Similarly, our other client Jonathan decided to target mostly energy companies. In one week, he managed to sign two of such clients up for full-service fractional CFO/Controller. We’re talking about tens of thousands in monthly fees here.

To recap, remember that finding your niche is vital to success. After that, you can move on the following objective:

3. Create a Detailed Marketing Plan

Marketing is so much more than sending a message to your audience. If you want your campaign to be effective, you must carefully plan its every aspect.

A typical marketing plan includes:

• Your unique selling point (USP) – What sets your firm apart from the competition? Each marketing campaign must highlight the top reason or reasons why a prospect should hire you over a competitor.
• SWOT analysis – A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis shows how well you know your firm and its potential. You have to know this before you can communicate it to your audience.
• Target market – This is the niche that you’ve defined as explained in the previous section.
• Services advertised – Knowing your niche and your USP, it’s time to think about how your services can best meet the needs of your ideal clients. What would your audience have the most interest in? What services are the most profitable? These are some of the questions that your marketing plan must answer.
• Marketing goals – What do you want to achieve with your campaign? How long will it take to do it? What metrics will you use to measure the progress? This is where understanding the numbers from the first point can be of great help. 
• Marketing tactics – Finally, how do you plan to communicate your message? What channel will you be using? What’s the content required? Come up with a detailed schedule of marketing tactics that you’ll use to promote your services to the right audience.

Think of this as a blueprint of the marketing plan that you must create. Each of these aspects requires careful planning, so take your time. After all, having the right plan is already half the job done.

4. Invest in the Right Tools

The best thing about modern marketing is that it’s much easier in practice than in theory. So, if you’re overwhelmed thinking that there’s so much that you’ll have to do, don’t worry as technology can take a lot of the work off your shoulders. Once you figure out how to use it, things will go much more smoothly.

Of course, the first step is to figure out which tools you need in the first place.

While some tools will depend on your specific goals, there are a few that are universally useful.

For example, all types and levels of marketing can greatly benefit from a good CRM (customer relationship management) software. It automates many repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing you to focus more on actions that add value to your campaigns. Plus, it helps you stay connected to your audience so that you can better nurture your relationships with the leads.

Similarly, there are many cloud-based apps that can lend an assist. Just like you use modern software to deliver better and more timely accounting services, you should do the same for your marketing. These apps can help you manage your campaigns, automate certain tasks, and generally do more marketing work in less time.

Lastly, you’ll want to use a good email client or newsletter platform. Email is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your leads. Better yet, it’s cost-effective and you can serve up valuable chunks of content for enticing them to work with you. If your content is compelling enough, email can be the best way to turn a stranger into a paying client.

Put Yourself Out There

You might pick up some clients through referrals, but not nearly enough for scaling. This is why you need to get serious about marketing your firm and actively seek new clients with effective campaigns.

To get a head start join our upcoming webinar:  Marketing during busy Season: Why you need to and how to implement proven strategies.

Jan 26, 2023

01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

90 minutes with Questions

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1016702849592/WN_ObAZLa4nRfKuK6U4J4CseQ

No accounting firm can thrive without effective marketing. Discover the objectives that will help you attract clients more effortlessly.

Get a taste in this article or skip straight to the implementation on our webinar on:  Marketing during busy Season: Why you need to and how to implement proven strategies.

Jan 26, 2023

01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

90 minutes with Questions

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1016702849592/WN_ObAZLa4nRfKuK6U4J4CseQ

Accounting firms need to go the extra mile when it comes to marketing. As they’re selling services that many businesses would rather not talk about, their target audience is often hard to draw in.

And yet, many accounting firms don’t put in nearly enough effort to make this happen. Because of how specific their services are, they think that marketing efforts that work for other business won’t work for them.

Because of this, they mainly rely on referrals and positive word of mouth. This may be a great way of getting new clients, it’s far from the most effective. It gives you no control over your lead flow, which translates to no control over your future growth.

Plus, it’s often quite limiting, as you can’t reach a broad audience this way. The best you can hope for is to passively get more clients through those you’re already working with. In most cases, however, this won’t result in as many new leads as your full potential allows.

The good news is that there are many different ways to market your accounting firm more effectively. To take full advantage of them, you must first set a few key marketing objectives. 

Let’s go over the most important.

1. Understand the Numbers that Marketing Influences

Many accountants ask the wrong question about marketing. They often start with:

‘How much marketing do I actually need to do?’

Unfortunately, this question is too vague and devoid of any tangible goals.

A good marketing campaign starts with the right goals. Preferably, these goals are in the form of numbers.

For example, your goal might be to increase the percentage of revenue that comes from compliance work. This would call for a different marketing strategy than, for example, increasing your conversion rates of new clients.

This is why before you think about how much you should market your firm, you must first figure out how. You can answer this question simply by setting a clear goal that you can measure by tracking the corresponding number that you want to grow.

For an accounting firm, the relevant numbers may include:

• Number of different client groups
• Average project value
• Average hourly rate (AHR) for different services (advisory AHR, compliance AHR, etc.)
• Number of new clients per month/quarter/year
• Number of leads generated 
• Revenue
• Average per-client fee

You can boost all of the above, as well as many other numbers, with the appropriate marketing campaign. Decide on what you wish to grow and then move on to figuring out how to do it.

2. Know Your Niche (and Market to It)

Niches are something that many businesses, including accounting firms, often fail to get right. They think that fitting into a niche limits their reach and the number of possible clients that they can get.

You must get rid of such a perspective of niches as soon as possible if you want your marketing to be effective. That’s because your goal isn’t to work with everyone who’s willing to pay. You might think it makes sense from a financial standpoint, but you’ll end up losing more than you’re getting. 

Because marketing can be very expensive - it not done correctly. You’ll be paying for too many leads and not even conversions, jacking up your cost per conversion. If you don’t narrow your targeting, you’ll rack up many of these losses.

Not to mention that your firm isn’t going to perform every aspect of accounting equally well. To get a client, you might promise something that you can’t deliver. Subpar service can only hurt your reputation.

This is why you must identify what you’re best at and deliver it to the right niche. You can create the ideal client persona by asking the following questions:

• What’s their line of business?
• What’s the size of the companies?
• How much time have they been in business?
• How risk-averse are they?
• Where are they from and where do they spend their time?

With your ideal client persona, you’ll know exactly who to target with your campaigns. This will make your marketing much more effective.

Just for an example, our client Paula has just picked up her first niche client and she credits it for giving her confidence boost. She sold her program test run for $2,850 per month at an AHR of $500-$715.

Similarly, our other client Jonathan decided to target mostly energy companies. In one week, he managed to sign two of such clients up for full-service fractional CFO/Controller. We’re talking about tens of thousands in monthly fees here.

To recap, remember that finding your niche is vital to success. After that, you can move on the following objective:

3. Create a Detailed Marketing Plan

Marketing is so much more than sending a message to your audience. If you want your campaign to be effective, you must carefully plan its every aspect.

A typical marketing plan includes:

• Your unique selling point (USP) – What sets your firm apart from the competition? Each marketing campaign must highlight the top reason or reasons why a prospect should hire you over a competitor.
• SWOT analysis – A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis shows how well you know your firm and its potential. You have to know this before you can communicate it to your audience.
• Target market – This is the niche that you’ve defined as explained in the previous section.
• Services advertised – Knowing your niche and your USP, it’s time to think about how your services can best meet the needs of your ideal clients. What would your audience have the most interest in? What services are the most profitable? These are some of the questions that your marketing plan must answer.
• Marketing goals – What do you want to achieve with your campaign? How long will it take to do it? What metrics will you use to measure the progress? This is where understanding the numbers from the first point can be of great help. 
• Marketing tactics – Finally, how do you plan to communicate your message? What channel will you be using? What’s the content required? Come up with a detailed schedule of marketing tactics that you’ll use to promote your services to the right audience.

Think of this as a blueprint of the marketing plan that you must create. Each of these aspects requires careful planning, so take your time. After all, having the right plan is already half the job done.

4. Invest in the Right Tools

The best thing about modern marketing is that it’s much easier in practice than in theory. So, if you’re overwhelmed thinking that there’s so much that you’ll have to do, don’t worry as technology can take a lot of the work off your shoulders. Once you figure out how to use it, things will go much more smoothly.

Of course, the first step is to figure out which tools you need in the first place.

While some tools will depend on your specific goals, there are a few that are universally useful.

For example, all types and levels of marketing can greatly benefit from a good CRM (customer relationship management) software. It automates many repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing you to focus more on actions that add value to your campaigns. Plus, it helps you stay connected to your audience so that you can better nurture your relationships with the leads.

Similarly, there are many cloud-based apps that can lend an assist. Just like you use modern software to deliver better and more timely accounting services, you should do the same for your marketing. These apps can help you manage your campaigns, automate certain tasks, and generally do more marketing work in less time.

Lastly, you’ll want to use a good email client or newsletter platform. Email is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your leads. Better yet, it’s cost-effective and you can serve up valuable chunks of content for enticing them to work with you. If your content is compelling enough, email can be the best way to turn a stranger into a paying client.

Put Yourself Out There

You might pick up some clients through referrals, but not nearly enough for scaling. This is why you need to get serious about marketing your firm and actively seek new clients with effective campaigns.

To get a head start join our upcoming webinar:  Marketing during busy Season: Why you need to and how to implement proven strategies.

Jan 26, 2023

01:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

90 minutes with Questions

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1016702849592/WN_ObAZLa4nRfKuK6U4J4CseQ