Creating Marketing Ownership and Accountability to Accomplish Big Change

In my blog post, “Clients Are Your Best Marketers—Leveraging Referrals and Testimonials in the Age of Social Media”, I shared about a busy time in my life when I was renovating my very old house. During that time, I completed a ton of work – it was like living in a new house! Recently, I was reflecting on how I was able to accomplish so much change in a relatively short period of time, and I realized it wasn’t because I was Superwoman. I was able to accomplish my vision by creating smaller, manageable tasks and assigning those tasks to the right people.

Similarly, many accounting firm practice and marketing leaders are seeking a big change in their marketing efforts.  Whether it is a goal of achieving double-digit revenue growth or building out a specialty niche, the vision for that goal can seem too large to attain.  We can apply the same principals to those large goals as I did to my house renovations.  Here are some benefits for creating marketing roles and assigning owners in order to help you achieve those larger marketing objectives.

Creates accountability and builds stronger team members.

When assigning each marketing role and responsibility, you will want to identify an “owner”, who will have overall accountability for the success of that process, and “contributors”, who are still a critical part of the team and process.  We recommend having only one owner that can be truly responsible for the success of that process or task.  In order for the owner to be most successful, you will want to give them the ability to develop their own tools for getting things done.  But you will still need to be available to offer guidance, direction, and training to help build their skills as owners.

Gives you the power to delegate and frees up your time.

Once you start outlining the roles in marketing and business development, you will quickly recognize that you don’t have to own all of the work yourself.  Think about ways you can assign roles and tasks to various partners, managers, staff and administrative professionals.  You’ll quickly find that many of the processes you “owned”, such as events, proposals, and reporting can really be managed by others with your oversight and guidance. This will free up your time to keep an eye on the big picture and make sure your marketing efforts are heading in the right direction.

Identifies gaps in your resources.

As you go through this process of assigning roles and responsibilities, if you find yourself hanging on to ownership of certain responsibilities, be honest with yourself about why.  If the only reason is that you aren’t sure who the right person is to own the process, then you may be identifying gaps in your resources.  This can usually be resolved by training or recruiting – either way, developing marketing roles and responsibilities will help you to be more proactive and strategic about both.

In order for this process to be successful, be sure to communicate marketing roles and responsibilities clearly and often to everyone involved.  As your marketing efforts evolve, so will ownership and participation.  We recommend updating your roles and responsibilities as you refresh your annual marketing plan.

To receive a copy of our Roles and Responsibilities template and to learn how you can build this into your marketing program, contact us at marketing@inovautus.com or 1.888.491.9330.