What type of marketing works best?

The term ‘marketing’ means different things to different people. In this blog, we consider the different forms and what type of marketing works best for your practice.

The common forms of marketing

I tend to view marketing as involving three distinct strategies:

• Lead Generation
• Profile Raising
• Client Communications

Here’s how you would adopt these different strategies.

Lead Generation

If you want to grow your client base and your fee income, you should look to implement a lead generation strategy. Typically this would involve:

• Creating a list of contacts who you want to target. This list may be a bought-in list or one which you have researched yourself.
• Sending letters or emails, sometimes with an accompanying leaflet.
• Making a follow-up call a few days after sending the initial information. The aim of this call is to start the conversation, you can check that they have received the mailing/email and if not ask to resend it (so it gives you another opportunity to contact them again).
• Use the follow-up call to find out more about the prospect, listening out for any opportunities where you could be of assistance.

The ultimate aim of the follow-up call is to arrange to meet them to further your discussions. Whilst this may be possible after just one call, in reality, this may take several calls over a period of months before a meeting is arranged. This is particularly so if the person you are targeting already has an accountant. In such cases, you need to nurture them over the phone and get to know them and their business in more detail. In essence, you are employing a ‘next in line’ strategy, so that as and when they start to question the service they receive from their existing accountant, you become their first choice of a new accountant.

If you are targeting business start-ups, the same lead generation strategy as listed above can also be deployed. However, if you are not having to dislodge an existing accountant, the process from initial contact to arranging a meeting tends to be a lot shorter and you’re more likely to get appointments made during the first phone call.

These days more firms are also including LinkedIn and other social media as part of their lead generation strategy. In this instance the process is likely to be:

• Do a search on LinkedIn for specific job titles or industries you want to target.
• See if you have any mutual connections with the target people who you could ask to introduce you.
• If you don’t have mutual connections, send a personal LinkedIn connection message, asking to connect (don’t use the standard LinkedIn “I’d like to add you to my network” invitation message).
• Use your LinkedIn news feed to post content that your target may find interesting and which may get them to start engaging with you.
• A couple of weeks after the first connection, send them a direct message, perhaps with a link to a blog or free resource on their website which could be of interest to them.
• Try to keep in touch through direct messages, with the aim of arranging a phone call and ultimately meeting up.

Regardless of whether you use phone calls or social media to make follow-up communications, the secret to success is ‘just do it’. All too often I hear feedback from accountants saying that “we’ve tried telemarketing and it doesn’t work”, but when you drill down a bit further it usually transpires that they only tried on one occasion to get hold of the contact and weren’t successful, or they just didn’t make any follow up calls at all and relied solely on the letter or email to make the contact get in touch.

If you don’t feel comfortable in making these follow-up calls, use a third party telemarketing/appointment making specialist who is skilled at taking the time to make the follow-up calls, engage with the contact, and ultimately confirm an appointment for you.

Raising/maintaining your profile

If you want to adopt a more organic approach to growing your fees, you should consider a profile-raising strategy. This may involve ramping up the amount of marketing and PR activities you implement or having a plan to maintain a certain level of awareness in your local area, or perhaps in specific trades/sectors, you are operating in. This can also be seen as a ‘maintenance’ approach to marketing.

Profile raising activities cover many different aspects of marketing and some or all of them can be adopted, depending on the manpower, budget and time you have to devote to implementing them.

Ideas for profile-raising activities include:

• Writing blogs
• Social media posts and engaging in relevant target groups and forums
• Adverts
• Writing articles for local publications
• Attending networking events
• Holding seminars or webinars
• Sending print or email newsletters
• PR stories – new appointments, awards won, new offices, mergers and acquisitions etc.
• Sponsoring sports or community events
• And so on.

Ideally, you should create a 6 or 12-month marketing action plan that sets out what activities will be happening and when so that you have a constant drip-feed approach to your marketing.

Client communication

If your strategy is one of client retention, you will need to adopt marketing activities that are aimed purely at enhancing your client communications. Our blog, ‘Communicating with Clients’ details what actions you can take to facilitate this.

Depending on the number of clients you have, it may not be possible to treat all clients the same. So in many cases partners will segment their clients into three different categories which identify the following client groups:

• Top clients (good fees and great to work with) – you want to have regular, proactive communication with this group.
• Middle clients (OK fees, but there may be the possibility to do more work for them) – you may want to communicate with them only 3 – 4 times a year.
• Bottom clients (low fees, possibly limited to what else you can do for them, maybe bad payers!) – this group may only need 1 or 2 communications per year.

Once you have segmented your clients into such groups, it is then easier to implement client communications based on how much time and effort you want to invest with them.

For example, your communication to your top clients could include:

• 1-2-1 meetings 2 – 3 times a year
• Invites to lunch/dinners/corporate hospitality or exclusive events
• Seminar invites
• Personalised tax health checks and tax planning sessions
• Personalised newsletters

Whereas your bottom clients may only receive a couple of communications a year, which could include email newsletters and/or a budget update.

Your client communication activities should be seen as a way of engaging with your clients, reminding them of the different ways you can help them, and keeping them sufficiently connected with you that they resist the temptation to move to a different accountant, should the opportunity arise.

What type of marketing works best?

The secret to successful marketing for your practice is adopting a combination of all three of the above marketing strategies. For example, running a series of profile-raising activities alongside a lead generation campaign helps to provide additional contact points with your firm. Then when that prospective client is turned into an actual client, a proactive client communications strategy helps to reaffirm they made the right decision to move to you.

With all three strategies you can ramp up the level of activities according to your current situation, i.e. if you need to generate more fees, do more lead generation activities/contact more people, but then ease back on these activities when you have increased your client base.

If you would like to discuss the different marketing strategies and which would work best for your practice in the coming year, do get in touch. You can book a free marketing review call here, and we can start your marketing conversation.