Leverage Your Marketing Activities

As accounting firms prioritize growth and marketing, many are expanding their marketing programs and increasing the time spent on strategic networking, content creation, and developing packaged service offerings.

While most partners understand the benefits of ramping up marketing efforts, many feel overwhelmed by the increase in their non-billable hours.

Fortunately, there is a simple answer for sharing the weight of marketing responsibilities and getting the most benefit: Leverage your marketing efforts. Just like when you leverage your accounting or tax engagements, you build efficiencies and improve time management. Here are a few of the other added benefits of leveraging your marketing activities.

Increase Your Firm’s Reach in the Marketplace

Many networking events and conferences are ideal places for managers and staff to hone their networking skills and build out their networks. As your firm begins to increase attendance at these strategic events, be sure to register managers and staff as attendees. To ensure they are truly building their networks, ask them to report on their activities, and coach them on the strategic relationships they should be building to help grow the firm. By including managers and staff in networking, you are doubling or even tripling the number of contacts you have in the marketplace, increasing your reach.

Nurture the Next Generation of Thought Leaders

As managers and staff attend conferences or write blogs and newsletter articles, they are becoming subject matter experts in the industry or service areas that are important to your firm. Now, in addition to just becoming more experienced through time on the job, managers and staff are also building their knowledge base and can become your next generation of thought leaders. The added benefit of building out industry or service knowledge is improved client service; your clients will appreciate working with a service team that has a deep understanding of the issues relevant to their industry or company.

Build a Growth and Marketing Culture

Organic growth in an accounting firm doesn’t happen overnight. Growth is a result of building a firm culture that values marketing and relationship building. As you leverage marketing efforts down to managers and staff, you are teaching the importance of marketing in the firm’s culture. When the time comes for staff members to become managers and managers to become partners, you will have created a group of leaders who will be able to continue your firm’s vision and growth.

Both Inside Public Accounting and Accounting Today publish lists of the fastest-growing accounting firms. We encourage you to reach out to these firms or to other industry consultants to gain ideas for how to get your managers and staff involved in marketing.