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Calculating Your Accounting Firm Marketing Budget

Calculating Your Accounting Firm Marketing Budget

The eighth in a series of blog posts based upon The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms: How to Create the Roadmap for Your Firm’s Growth.

There are at least two ways you can look at developing an accounting firm marketing budget. First, you can look at the amount spent in the prior year and increase/decrease, as appropriate.

Second, you can look at what you would like your firm to accomplish in the upcoming year and determine the amount necessary to help make it happen.  This is proactive approach and gives your marketing program a greater chance to succeed.

I’ve been in this industry a long time.  I started as a marketing coordinator at my first CPA firm at the end of 1985.  In all that time, the average that is spent on marketing in CPA firms still averages between 2% and 4% of net revenue.

The latest study on spending from the Association for Accounting Marketing shows that, as a fairly unbreakable rule, most firms are spending under 2% of net revenue on marketing. A tabulation by Inside Public Accounting finds much the same thing.

Marketing Budget Items

  • Advertising
  • Consultants
  • Content creation
  • Direct mail
  • E-newsletters
  • Inbound
  • Meals/Entertainment
  • Membership dues
  • Networking
  • Newsletters
  • Postage
  • Promotional items
  • Proposals
  • Research
  • Salaries
  • Seminars
  • Social media
  • Sponsorships
  • Subscriptions
  • Technology
  • Trade shows
  • Training
  • Webinars
  • Website
  • Miscellaneous

Want to learn more about The 90-Day Marketing Plan process? Click here today!

Capstone Marketing Blog, Marketing

Learn to Leverage Marketing Tools for Your CPA Firm Marketing Plan

The seventh in a series of blog posts based upon The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms: How to Create the Roadmap for Your Firm’s Growth.

Now that you’ve set your goals for your CPA firm marketing plan, it’s time to consider the marketing tools you are going to utilize to achieve them.  Here are marketing initiatives that accounting firms are using more of from research conducted by my colleague Rick Telberg at Bay Street Group.

 

Leverage marketing activities

It warms my heart that networking with prospects and referral sources is still number one.  Networking is still the best way for CPAs to generate leads.  Yet, look at what follows.  Upgrading the firm’s website. E-newsletters. Social media. Thought leadership. Seminars.  Four of the top six items relate to social media and technology, non-face to face marketing tools.

Utilize several different marketing tools and make sure that you leverage everything you do.  If you conduct a webinar, make sure you record it and put it on your website. Take the webinar content and write blog posts. Send an email with the webinar summary to your clients.  Everything that you do marketing-wise, do it more than once. Think about how many different ways you can take each effort and leverage it with other marketing tools.

Want to learn more about The 90-Day Marketing Plan process? Click here today!