Common Marketing Mistakes to Avoid at Your Bookkeeping Firm

Marketing is one of those disciplines that requires both creativity and data-driven analysis. This can be an issue for some accountants and bookkeepers, who are often stereotyped as being analytical thinkers who don’t do well with creative tasks.

But from our years of experience both building our own practices and working with lots of other accountants and bookkeepers, we know this idea is simply false. Many financial professionals also thrive in fields that require lots of creativity, like music and art. The challenge with marketing for bookkeepers is the creativity required is unfamiliar – imagine picking up an instrument you’ve never seen and trying to play it. You’d probably make many mistakes before getting the hang of it – just like marketing for your firm.

In this article, we’ll share a few of the most common mistakes made with bookkeeping marketing so that you can avoid these pitfalls and give your firm a better chance to succeed at raising awareness among potential clients.

Neglecting social media

Bookkeeping firms – and businesses in all kinds of other fields – have plenty of common excuses for not maintaining an active presence on social media. Some may think it’s unnecessary since they already have plenty of clients, while others may feel the kinds of clients they want to attract aren’t present on social media. Whatever kind of preexisting beliefs you may have about social media, the truth is there’s no good reason for your firm not to be active on at least one platform.

That’s not to say you need to have extensive resources devoted to a presence on every social media network. There’s no need to post dozens of times a day – all you need is to choose one or two networks where your clients are most likely to be present and then take advantage of the many social media tech tools available to help plan and execute social media campaigns. To start, aim to post consistently on a weekly basis. Remember to carve out some time to engage with replies and interactions on your social media profiles as well – people who take time to share their thoughts with a business usually value the feeling that someone is really listening.

Not marketing to existing clients

When some people hear about marketing to their current clients, they might worry that it could feel like a bother. You may feel like you should finish a project before offering additional services to clients. But as long as you aren’t overbearing about your marketing practices, there’s no issue with presenting new services to clients. It could be a need that they’ve been trying to handle, especially if it’s an area new to your practice, like strategic advisory. Consider some subtle ways you might highlight your new offerings, such as creating an occasional “client newsletter” with updates on major events within the firm and new services.

Siloing your organization’s marketing efforts

We’ve encountered many firms where marketing is left to a single team or even a single person, depending on the size of the business. There’s no issue with having a so-called “champion” who is responsible for marketing, and it’s valuable to have an organizational structure that governs these tasks within the firm. However, firms should be careful that efforts to assign marketing to a specific person or team don’t result in a “siloing” effect, where results and progress updates are reserved for one or a few people in the organization.

If you don’t share the goals, patterns, and insights derived from your firm’s marketing, you will limit your ability to create an organization centered around serving your client profile—a key element of positioning your business for success in the digital-first landscape.

Not connecting your marketing processes with the rest of the firm

There’s lots of great software tools available for bookkeepers and accounting firms who want to take some of the manual effort out of marketing for their business. The challenge arises when the software itself leads to even more time spent managing the way different programs work together. The more tools you have in place, the more it feels like you have to manage.

One of the best ways to avoid this challenge and the other issues mentioned throughout this article is to make use of a centralized accounting practice management software suite. These programs allow you to handle multiple processes critical to running your firm in one place. Many of them can also help you with basic marketing functions or can easily integrate with popular tools for bookkeeping firm marketing.

As you look to plan and deploy your firm’s campaigns throughout the year, take time to find a technological solution that makes it easy to avoid these and other marketing missteps. Software is a more complicated and crowded sector than ever, but with the right choices, you can turn technology into an ally that gives your firm’s marketing a significant boost in efficiency.

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