For accountants, marketing is defined as the process of promoting the firm's full range of services to clients and prospective clients. Being a process it should be planned, ongoing and follow logical steps.
Your marketing efforts should let you broaden and deepen the services you provide to existing clients, improve the overall quality of clients and expand the base of preferred clients. A word of warning, you need to be selective about the type of client you are targeting. Winning new clients with 'computerised shoebox' records will keep you busy, but they won't improve your profitability or practice value.
Be careful not to confuse marketing with selling. Selling happens after your marketing has done its job and created a meeting with the client or prospect. Your first marketing priority is to focus on your existing clients and what you can do for them to attract more referrals. Most firms struggle to 'ask' for referrals and simply hope satisfied clients will refer their friends, family and small business colleagues. To maximise referrals it needs to be systemised and we have developed a number of tools to take that uncomfortable 'selling' feeling out of the process.
Let's be honest, most accountants are reactive when it comes to marketing. That's in part due to the nature of the profession where we generally respond to client-imposed deadlines or requests. Others struggle to create capacity and make all sorts of excuses why they don't have a website or a marketing plan. To some extent, GST disguised the need for accountants to market their services but a decade later the landscape has changed and...
The demographics of the profession suggest we will see a flood of practices for sale over the next few years and baby boomer practitioners with an ageing client base could be in for a shock. It has been a vendor's market for a number of years but who is going to buy a practice where the top 30 clients are business owners aged over 55? More than 30% of the practice could disintegrate within 10 years and buyers will gravitate away from these practices towards the pro-active, innovative and systemised firms who offer strategic business advisory services, run client seminars, adopt the latest technology (including a quality website) and regularly communicate with their clients.
Another emerging issue for many practitioners is the trend line in fees and profitability. Many baby boomers postponed their retirement plans after their superannuation balances took a beating in the global financial crisis. These practitioners are now burnt out and no longer have the energy or passion to re-grow their business. Their financials usually show an annual decline in gross fees, profitability and referrals which is a repellent for prospective buyers.
This is a wake up call for baby boomers, if you don't start appealing to the next generation and attract some younger clients you'll pay the price a few years down the track. A decade of GST has made us all busy but that hasn't necessarily translated into profits. Many firms have simply become 'compliance sweatshops' that are characterised by a lack of capacity and systems, poor growth rates and no marketing plan. Their compliance emphasis means they offer very little job variety, their lower profits mean they pay lower salaries and they perceive
websites to be a waste of money, not a recruitment or marketing tool. It's therefore no surprise they struggle to attract quality Gen X and Y staff.
The definition of business insanity is continuing to do things the same way and expecting a different result. If your website isn't attracting new business, you don't target niche markets and you just hope referrals will happen then it's time for change. There has never been a more important time to be marketing and while there is no silver bullet, you need to recognise that all your business resources play a role in marketing including your staff, right down to your letterhead, business cards, website design, signage and the reception area. A useful starting point is to download our e-booklet,
'The Marketing Essentials Guide for Accountants'. It is really just the tip of the marketing iceberg but introduces some valuable tools to help you get traction with some popular niche markets including business start ups, trades people and clients buying a negatively geared property.
The contents of this basic guide have been extracted from our publication,
'The Accountant's Marketing Toolkit' that contains 150 pages of marketing theory supported by numerous purpose built tools, templates, software programs, letters and checklists on a CD. Combining the strategies with the tools will help you develop your marketing plan and attract record levels of referrals.
Our marketing consulting services and tools are creating results for accounting firms. We develop strategies and provide software, systems and processes to ensure your marketing generates a better return and more referrals. Have a read of our
Marketing Case Study to get an indication of how these services work. To discover more, call us today on (03) 9824 5300 and learn how we are 'Helping Accountants Succeed'.
