It is surprising how many accountancy firms take an ad-hoc approach to their marketing, focusing on whatever latest offer has popped up in their inbox or across their desk. Whilst the intention may be to capitalise on this ‘new’ opportunity, in reality, this approach to marketing is very disjointed, is difficult to monitor results and can be more costly. Having over 20+ years’ experience, I can assure you that effective marketing needs structure and commitment.
The key to this is creating a marketing plan. In doing so your firm is more likely to achieve the results it set out to achieve. When writing your plan, you should consider the following:
Set marketing objectives
it is important to identify what you are trying to achieve. Is it:
- growing fees;
- client retention;
- attracting new clients;
- raising or maintaining your profile;
- launching a new product or service;
- or something else?
By setting out your objectives, all the activities you do should take you closer to achieving these objectives.
Identify your target audience
Give some thought to the services you’re trying to sell and who would be your target market for these services. Ideally, identify who your perfect client is and make them the focus of your marketing campaigns. For further tips read ‘How to attract your perfect client’. You may pick up other ‘non-targets’ along the way, but by focusing on a few groups or sectors, you will be able to make your activities more effective and make your marketing budget go further.
Firm up your message
Think about how your service(s) can help your target audience. Identify what its features and benefits are and make sure this comes across in all your marketing messages. Also, consider how your messaging can make you stand out from your competitors. It is highly likely that you will require different messages for different services or target audiences.
Spread your activities
Creating your marketing plan in an Excel spreadsheet is a good way of making sure there are marketing activities happening throughout the year and not just across 1-2 months. However, in recent times I have found focusing on 6 months at a time is more effective and provides more opportunities to review and adjust the plan for the second half of the year.
Set a marketing budget
Setting a budget alongside your marketing plan helps you to see how much you are forecasting to spend on each activity. You can then monitor this on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis and identify which activities are giving you the best return on investment.
Monitoring results
If you have established your objectives, it is much easier to track the success of each of your activities and to make changes along the way to get things back on track if you need to. A detailed marketing action plan will help you to identify what activity has taken place, how enquiries were logged and followed up from that activity and ultimately what business was converted from it.
The drip-feed effect
Most people are familiar with the drip-feed approach to marketing, and the truth is, it does work. Doing a little and often and adopting different marketing channels to promote who you are, what you do and how you can help people, will start generating results. But you have to be committed to it and keep a steady stream of marketing activities taking place.
Ultimately, by creating a marketing plan for your firm you will save time and money. By identifying your objectives and who you want to target you can plan your activities more effectively. As well as focusing your efforts on the right places, this also means you’re less likely to say ‘yes’ to the ad hoc marketing requests that you receive.
For more details about putting together your firm’s marketing plan contact me on 01822 833300 or email vicki@momentumforprofessionals.co.uk.
