Building Your Bookkeeping Firm Marketing Funnel

Even if your bookkeeping firm employs only a handful of people, you still need to be sure you have a reliable way to consistently bring in new business.

Though word-of-mouth referrals and other random-chance methods of getting new clients may work for a time, there’s no guarantee you’ll find business through these methods. They’re also highly susceptible to external factors—the economy, industry trends, etc.

Fortunately, building a funnel in 2024 doesn’t have to be an extremely complicated, time-consuming task. Technology has allowed firms with minimal resources to create a functioning, efficient marketing funnel. Whether you’re brand new to the idea or have created several of them in the past, there are a few of our best strategies to help you create a fruitful funnel that brings you leads consistently.

Pick a few key focus methods

It’s not uncommon to see larger organizations have a presence on almost every marketing channel. You might be scrolling your social media feed and see them in a sidebar ad, then turn on the TV and see them advertising during your favorite show.

While this is great for companies that have tens of millions of dollars to devote to marketing, it’s not realistic for most bookkeeping firms.

Instead, you should hone in on one to three platforms to put all your attention and financial investments towards. Some of the most common digital marketing channels for bookkeepers include:

• Social media advertising
• Search engine advertising
• Organic social media groups
• Email marketing
• Native ad placements in popular publications

We suggest narrowing it down by focusing on the channels where you either already have a healthy presence or have staff and/or contractor relationships that can provide your firm with expertise in a certain area.

For example, someone on your marketing team may have a passion for building a visual social media presence via Instagram or a natural knack for writing long-form sales messages that would fit perfectly in an email. If you can align your firm’s expertise with your chosen marketing channels, it will help campaigns run longer and more successfully.

Integrate marketing across departments

One of the biggest challenges we observe in small and mid-sized bookkeeping firms is the “silo” effect, where multiple groups within a company are working on the same project but don’t communicate with one another about that work. This leads to wasted effort and feelings of frustration internally, which can quickly spiral into a serious problem among team members.

If you want to overcome the siloing problem, take intentional steps to ensure people on your team who may normally work in different parts of the firm have the opportunity to interact with one another. Host team meetings, send out emails including people who may not usually receive them, etc.

Even if they aren’t always working on the same projects at the same time, it can only benefit the overall firm to have different departments building a stronger rapport with one another.

Review the data from your bookkeeping firm marketing funnel

It feels great to get into a consistent groove where you have the right people and processes dialed in to operate your marketing funnels, but this isn’t enough to guarantee success. You should be taking time regularly to measure the outputs of your funnel to make sure they are actually producing. So many firms (and businesses in general) invest a significant amount of time and capital into building out a marketing funnel that seems impressive but doesn’t actually generate results in the form of leads for the firm’s sales team.

Marketing is a world governed by results. If your efforts to attract new leads to the company are working as expected, there’s no need to change anything—in fact, you should probably do more of what’s working! Make sure your marketing is always driven by data, not the latest trend in technology or what looks the best on your quarterly reports.

Pick the right technology to make bookkeeping firm marketing funnels more efficient

If you’ve spent any time looking at options for marketing technology, you probably know that there are plenty of choices available.

Each year brings an exponential increase in the number of options: just check out the development of Chief Martec’s annual Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, which tracks the number of available marketing technology products and their growth year-over-year.

In 2024, their research tracked 14,106 options on the market—a drastic increase from 2011, the first year of the graphic, when there were only 150 such products available.

Besides using marketing technology to help with email, social media and other platforms that can bolster your funnels, consider implementing an accounting practice management software tool to help tie together the different functions of your business. A practice management platform can help your bookkeeping firm centralize workflow management through task tracking and notification systems, while also providing detailed reporting and analytics to help ensure you know where you stand with your marketing efforts.

With an efficient approach to building your funnel and the right tools to keep things organized, you’ll find a steady flow of leads that will help you meet all of your firm’s growth and revenue goals no matter how much things may change around you.

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