Question – Are your marketing goals realistic?
If your answer is one or more of the following:
- We want more clients
- We want to increase turnover
- We want to add value to existing clients
you are doomed to fail.
You have to quantify exactly what you want. When you know what the end-game is, you can set in place the plan to make it happen.
Be realistic
If you want to double the size of your income in the next 3 years, yet your marketing efforts in the past have only resulted in minimum growth, you are going to have to do something dramatically different. You are going to have to change your approach.
Be specific
Where increasing turnover is your goal, specify how much and in what time frame. Then work backward to calculate how that looks in practice. So, if you want to add £100k onto your fees in the next 12 months and your current average fee per client is £2,000 pa, you’re going to need 50 new clients within the year. How does that compare to your current new client acquisition rate?
If your current marketing activities are only bringing in 20 new clients a year, what will you do differently this year to make sure you secure 50 new clients?
Also, bear in mind the time it takes to generate enquiries to turn them into ‘warm prospects’ and the gap between signing them up as a new client and then billing them.
Working out the numbers part is easy. Implementing the marketing activities to achieve the target numbers is the difficult bit!
The marketing activities you carry out will vary depending on who you’re trying to target and how much in additional fees you want to sign up. For example, different marketing activities would be deployed to attract new start-up businesses than say established businesses with a turnover of £10m plus. You need to bear this in mind when deciding what marketing activities will best help you to attract the clients you are looking for.
The marketing conversion time is also likely to be a lot less for signing up a start-up than trying to attract an established business that already has an accountant.
Your marketing budget should reflect your objectives
Budget is also critical and one of the main reasons why many practices fail with their marketing activities. If your annual marketing budget has historically been £10-£15k a year, from which you’ve increased your fees by £25-£35k a year, you are unlikely to suddenly double your gross recurring fees unless you significantly increase your budget or the amount of time you are prepared to put into marketing. You could achieve it by getting lucky, but luck is not the most proactive way to grow your practice! Want to know how much you should be spending on marketing? Read our blog ‘How much to spend on marketing’ (whilst it’s aimed at accountants, the principles are the same for any professional services business.
The old saying of “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” applies greatly to marketing. So if your strategy is to dramatically grow your practice in the next 1 – 3 years, you need to give due consideration to quantifying the figures involved and what marketing activities you will do differently in order to achieve your targets.
