I recently presented a webinar to members of the ICAEW portfolio careers community on how to market their portfolio careers’ profitability.
On reflection, many of the points I covered in the session are also relevant to sole practitioners and those running micro-accountancy practices.
For many micro-accountancy practices, their budget can be the biggest barrier to marketing. The session considers this and focuses on marketing activities that are budget friendly but do require the practitioner’s time.
I have set out the key points below.
Fine-tune your marketing strategy
Your Offering – Consider what type of services you provide or want to provide. Take into account your expertise and qualifications, but most importantly, be authentic and enjoy what you do. Understand how your service offering makes a difference to your clients and gives you a competitive advantage.
Your Perfect client – Identify who is your target audience and ideally pinpoint your perfect client. Your marketing needs to adopt whichever channels your perfect client ‘hangs out’ in. To find out the best way of identifying your perfect client read ‘How to attract your perfect client’.
Your Communication Strengths – Think about what skills you are good at. For example, do you like going to events and meeting new people; writing blogs; making cold calls and chatting with people on the phone; presenting to an audience? Think about which communication skills you enjoy doing and focus on them in your marketing. If you try to do something you know you don’t enjoy, you’re unlikely to do it.
Your Objectives – Give yourself targets to work to so you can track success. This could be a target number of new clients, your projected fee levels, launching a new website, attending 3 networking events each month, and so on.
Your Messaging – Your marketing should highlight how you add value to your clients, how you can help them, and how you can make a difference. Don’t just list your services.
Effective marketing channels to use
Online presence – This could be a website and/or a social media presence, but ultimately you must have an online presence. You need to make it easy for people to find you and find out about the services you offer. If you adopt social media into your marketing plans you have to be proactive on the platforms where your clients and target clients hang out. Use this to engage with target people and groups and to raise your profile.
Networking – Identify face-to-face and virtual networking events, conferences, and exhibitions, where your targets will also be – and attend/get involved. Offer to present at events if you feel confident to do so.
Cross-selling – When working with existing clients, listen out for additional opportunities for how you could help them. Learn to spot issues and suggest ways in which you could fix them.
Free Marketing Review
If you would like to chat through your marketing ideas before implementing them, why not book a Free Marketing Review call? Sometimes having someone to bounce ideas off can make a real difference and help you to get started (and to keep going). So why not book a call today?
