Marketing Strategy Roadmap for Accounting Firms

Remember the days when you needed a roadmap? Before smartphones they were the only way to get to where you needed to go. Before a trip you studied, you picked your route, and then you executed — while still leaving enough room to make decisions in real time based on new evidence (maybe a detour is needed because of road closures.) That’s how your marketing strategy should go. Let’s talk about it.

The problem: You don’t have a marketing strategy.

We see two common scenarios with larger accounting firms who are dissatisfied with their marketing:

1. They have invested a lot of money into marketing, sometimes over a long period of time, but don’t ever really know if it’s working, or what parts are working best. They get good looking reports from their marketing agency, but they wonder if it’s generating real ROI.
2. Up until now, the firm has grown effectively by acquisition or strong networking and referrals without doing any marketing, but for the next phase they want to grow with marketing. The problem is, they don’t have a marketing strategy or budget and aren’t sure where to start.

The Goal: A strategic approach with expected results

There’s no ROI guarantee in marketing. Every business has its own strengths, weaknesses, risks and opportunities. But there are ways to improve the likelihood of success. It usually takes between $5-$10 to add $1 to recurring monthly revenue, so if you want to add $50k per month to your bottom line in the next year, you would expect to spend between $250k and $500k. The more money you plan on spending, the more value there is in taking time to understand and plan.

That’s why we created the Marketing Roadmap for strategy and planning engagement. We work through 4 phases over the course of about 8 weeks:

1. Discovery. We get to know you and your firm, understand your business model and value proposition, and create a positioning statement.
2. Audience. We develop customer personas and your core messaging.
3. Budget. We help you develop a budget based on a reasonable cost of acquisition for new clients and your goals.
4. Tactics. We develop a marketing strategy for your firm going forward, and to lay out a 12-month scope and sequence for various marketing priorities. With your Marketing Roadmap in hand you can
   turn around and hire us to do many of the things we propose, or you can take the plan and pull together other resources and partners to implement it in your own way.

To start a conversation about developing a local marketing strategy, contact us today!