So, you started your accounting firm, but you are not quite a millionaire yet. This, of course, is a problem.
If you are not attracting enough business your marketing strategy may be off the mark. Marketing done wrong is a great way to waste money and achieve very little.
Let’s get to the bottom of the science behind effective marketing.
Why marketing is a science
A few pamphlets here and a few Facebook posts there is not a marketing plan. That is just a business owner trying a few things he knows how to do and hoping for the best.
Unfortunately, hoping for the best isn’t great for getting results, and in terms of marketing, what you really need is a systematic and scientific approach. Getting this right will allow you to:
- Know how to focus on the best marketing strategies for your business instead of blindly trying random things.
- Run quick tests to determine which marketing tactic will work best for you.
- Know where to make changes to a specific marketing plan to make it better suited to your business plan.
- Scale your marketing to get the most out of it.
To be successful at marketing, you need to think like a scientist. A scientific approach lets you solve a problem by making observations and doing experiments.
Approaching your marketing in this manner lets you predict which marketing tactics will work the best by running small tests to gather info.
Using this info you can make the necessary changes to improve your marketing experiments. Sumo.com gives the following summary of how this all comes together:
Step 1: Address a problem, and be specific, for example “how do I get 100 clients through my door every day.”
Step 2: Research the specific problem you identified.
Step 3: Hypothesis. “Doing x and y will lead to the desired outcome.”
Step 4: Experiment. Do a small test to see how well x and y works.
Step 5: Analyze. Was your hypothesis correct? Why, or why not?
Step 6: Conclusion. Document what you learned so that your successful marketing strategy can be repeated in the future.
This is one approach you can take and it is no doubt a good one. After all, who can argue with science?
| 5 Accounting Firm Marketing Ideas |
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With the internet at our fingertips marketing has become much more intricate, and the options are endless. Here are some ideas to get you going: Your website is obviously important. The content on there needs to be valuable, and of a good quality. If you are strictly a numbers person, invest in a language professional to help you out. Your potential clients will not trust in your ability with numbers if it looks like you struggle to put a proper sentence together. Your website needs to be updated regularly. If you are unfamiliar with SEO (search engine optimisation), spend some time on an online tutorial. Write an ebook. Here you can provide your client with information on a subject that you know people tend to struggle with. Gathering email addresses to send your ebook to allows you to add these contacts to a database, and following up with email marketing. Establish a relationship with your target market on social media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok – all can be used creatively for marketing purposes. There is still a world outside of the internet. Serving your community is a great way to get your company’s name out there. Could you perhaps make a donation to the nearest animal shelter, or sponsor a school’s sports team? Running competitions can attract people to your business. You could, for example, offer a free consultation. The email addresses of everyone who enters can go into that database. |
Successful marketing in six steps
Noah Kagan, the CEO and marketing genius behind Sumo, an online email capture tool, revealed the steps he took to turn Sumo into a mega-success. Take a look:
Step 1: Validate your idea
No marketing plan in the world will succeed if the product you are offering is rubbish. People will not ever spend money on something they don’t want, or on blatantly poor service.
Identify the problem your service will solve for your clients, and find opportunities to grow.
Step 2: Pick an objective for your marketing
Goalsetting is one of the most vital aspects of your path to riches. Having a goal is not particularly hard – most people, for example, want to have lots of money one day.
But have you noticed how many of these people never end up with the wealth they dream about? No yacht, no little house by the ocean, just a constant month-to-month struggle.
This is because “lots of money one day” is not a proper goal and will most certainly get you nowhere. A proper goal sounds something like this: I need R1 million in my bank account by December.
Marketing works the same. Your goal needs to be clear and simple, and state WHAT you need to achieve by WHEN. You need to quantify your goal. Once you have done that, something pretty awesome happens.
By working backwards, you can break down your goal into smaller pieces, allowing you to meticulously calculate the daily activities you need to focus on to achieve it.
For example, if you were to make R1 million in a year, ask yourself the following questions:
- How much do I need to make per month? Based on that, how much do I need to make per week, and per day?
- In order to make this amount per day, how many clients need to make use of my service per day?
- What are the specific actions I need to take in order to get this number of clients through my doors every day?
Essentially, you are breaking a big goal down into bite-sized pieces, and determining where your focus should lie in order to reach this goal.
Step 3: Define your customer
The purpose of a marketing plan is to create something that makes such a strong impression on your target market that they can’t resist making use of your services.
This is impossible to do without knowing exactly who your target market is, and you need to know as much about them as possible..
What do they do for a living? How educated are they? What are their hobbies? Where do they live? Where do they go on weekends? Where do they spend their time online?
All of this information can help you streamline your marketing plan.
Step 4: Model your objective in a spreadsheet
This refers back to where you worked backwards from your goal and broke it down into smaller pieces. Put this into a spreadsheet, and do it in such a manner that all the time you spend on marketing is planned.
Everything you keep busy with should directly contribute to your goal. According to the Pareto Principle 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs.
Simply put, this means that 20% of your actions will lead to 80% of your results.
In terms of marketing, there are a lot of things you could do, but you need to figure out what the 20% is that will get you results, and then focus on those things.
Put your daily activities that will lead you to your specific goal into a spreadsheet, and from there you can transfer them straight to your diary – and there you have a roadmap to a successful marketing strategy.
Step 5: Daily targets and weekly reviews
It does not end there. You need to track your activities daily. Are you putting in the work? Are you doing the tasks you set for yourself? Can you hold yourself accountable? Is your plan working?
Review your marketing spreadsheet weekly to see if your efforts brought about the expected results. This lets you identify the actions that work, so you can do more of these and cut out what doesn’t work.
Step 6: Adjust your marketing plan where needed
Having planned everything in detail, and put on a spreadsheet where it is easy to see what should be happening, along with regular tracking, your next step should be clear.
The work you already put in allows you to see exactly what works for your company, and what doesn’t. Now you can tweak your marketing plan to perfection.
There is nothing wrong with trying new things in order to get more clients – but set a time limit when you do this and stop it if it doesn’t work.
Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.
Conclusion
Like we said earlier, a drastic mindset shift is needed if you think marketing is just a few random social media posts and printing some pamphlets.
You need to have a plan with very specific goals in place, and you need to know exactly what to do to reach the goals that will catapult you into success.
