Marketing is a key component to growing your practice, but all too often, accounting firms don’t know how to define an effective strategy or can’t tell if their current marketing efforts are working.
Commonly, accounting firms keep doing the same thing with their marketing year after year without taking the time to evaluate the value of the activities. To determine if your firm’s marketing strategies are working, it’s important to regularly assess your efforts.
So, how did you do last year?Consider your 2020 marketing plan. Did it adequately balance activities that allowed you to enhance existing client relationships, nurture connections with centers of influence in your community, and build awareness with the prospects you are actively pursuing?
You’ll also want to be clear what metrics you’re using to evaluate your marketing: new clients, retained clients, expanding service to existing clients, inbound referrals, gross revenue, net profit? The measures you choose as your benchmark should be directly related to your marketing strategies. Clarifying specific measures gives your team the ability to review efficacy of past activities and allows you to create benchmarks for future performance.
Now that you’ve identified how you’ve met your 2020 marketing objectives you can also evaluate the return on investment. In order to properly assess the efficacy of your marketing plan, you should be tracking its costs, the revenue generated as a result, and its ROI.
If you’ve reviewed 2020, and you can’t point to an ROI or your ROI isn’t in a range you consider acceptable, then perhaps a marketing audit could help you to better position your firm to achieve it’s marketing and growth targets in the coming years.
So, what is a marketing audit?
A marketing audit analyzes your firm based on factors like competitors, your niche, and your marketing processes to addresses questions such as:
- Are you allocating marketing dollars effectively?
- Are you missing important opportunities in your marketplace?
- Are your marketing activities well balanced to address critical business areas?
- How is your marketing connecting with your sales?
- Do you have the proper tools to execute your plan?
- Does your team know how to capitalize on your marketing efforts?
If you have the right experts at your firm, you can contemplate these questions in-house. You can also seek the help of an outside firm that specializes in marketing audits.
A marketing audit will help key individuals at your firm identify any gaps in your marketing plan, so you can address them as part of your practice development plan. A thorough marketing audit will give your firm the insight it needs to benefit from the marketing you put in place.
Finally, a strong marketing audit should include:
- A current industry review;
- Geographic market opportunity analysis;
- A competitive environment overview;
- Website, social media, and brochure review;
- Firm performance benchmarks; and,
- A long-term marketing plan recommendation.
The goal with any marketing plan should be results, and the only way to know if you’ve achieved those results is to assess them after the fact. By conducting a Marketing Audit, you’ll know exactly what’s working and what’s not. Better still, you’ll have a clear idea of what you need to change in your marketing strategy in the future.
