This video explores where high growth firms spend their marketing budgets compared to firms that aren’t growing at all.
Transcription
Hi, I’m Lee Frederiksen and today, I wanna talk to you about how to increase the impact of your accounting marketing budget. In a prior post, we went over how to save money, but this is the one where I wanna focus on increasing the impact. Now, let’s start by going back to what are the things that accounting firms spend money on? These are the top expenditures where people who are in the accounting firms, where they’re spending their marketing budgets. Notice that it starts a lot with sponsorships, charitable giving, networking events, these kinds of things. Now, do they really work or are there better ways, are there better places to spend your money? So what we’ve done is we’ve looked at high growth firms and compared them to firms that aren’t growing at all, and say, “Where are the best ways? Where are high growth firms spending more than no growth firms?” And that’s where I wanna focus on.
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Now, the first one of these is online advertising. They spend about the same amount on advertising as low growth firms, but they spend it differently. They’re putting a much higher proportion of their spending in online advertising as opposed to general space advertising. So that’s a good place to invest. Another one is networking events, trade shows, and conferences. And that works well if you are following up and you’re doing speaking engagements at these conferences, you’re networking, you’re taking full advantage of the conference. It’s a good place. That’s a good investment if you’re doing all of those things. And of course, the conference needs to be target audience, they need to be in front of your target audience not just some random business people in the community.
The third thing is content creation and educational events. Those two things, kinda, travel together because you’re creating educational content for these educational events, and these educational events is you’re using educational content. So creating educational content and educational events both convey what you do, what your expertise is and a consequently very good ways to leverage your limited marketing dollars. Outside consultancy, and agencies, and freelancers. What we’re finding is more and more…there’s a trend to high growth accounting firms leveraging their limited resources by outsourcing some of these with freelance writers, with specialized agencies. We’re seeing that with accounting firms are coming to us more and more to say, “Hey, we wanna get our expertise more visible. How do we do it? How can you help us leverage in that?” So you’re letting other experts do what they do. And marketing automation, which is another good way of leveraging using some system that helps track and automate the processes. All of these are super investments and give you a much higher return than what firms typically spend their budgets on. Good luck with your marketing budget.
