3 Business Considerations That Support An Effective Marketing Audit

If a firm's business goals are unclear, marketing can get perceived as a series of activities detached from the overall purpose, mission and vision of the firm.

Growing accounting firms should occasionally consider auditing their marketing investments to ensure alignment with the firm's overall vision and goals. This can, however, lead to questions about the organization's high-level thinking and even generate questions such as:

• Are we clear on our long-term business goals?
• Are we clear on how to measure the success of our business strategy?

It's easy to get caught up in the daily grind of client service (and who can fault a CPA firm for prioritizing clients?) so that the importance of aligning business strategy with supporting marketing activities becomes a second-tier priority.

But an effective marketing audit requires that alignment. If a firm's business goals are unclear, marketing can get perceived as a series of activities detached from the overall purpose, mission and vision of the firm.

Once an alignment is in place, though, it becomes much easier to determine if your marketing investments are successful. Is your marketing communicating the right brand message to the right audience? And has the firm's leadership team identified and communicated to the marketing leader an agreed-upon set of KPIs to determine the overall success of the marketing program?

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Review Your Business Goals and Strategy

If you’re a smaller or mid-sized accounting firm, the first step is taking time to evaluate your business goals and the strategy you have in place to achieve them.

Are you still satisfied? Do the goals and strategy reflect your situation? Or has it been a while since you evaluated your plan and is an update required?

There are no right or wrong answers, and this evaluation process is not meant to make anyone feel like something has been neglected. Small firms, especially, face resource constraints that can make it challenging to stay current with strategic efforts.

But this is a critical step as your team conducts a marketing audit. ???

To build alignment with a marketing program, your evaluation should first of all ensure you have a strong, in-depth understanding of your current and prospective clients (defined as an ideal client profile). Take into account--or research further, if you need to--your ICP’s demographic information, goals, pain points and buying preferences.

By understanding your current clients, in addition to prospective clients, you recognize that a business growth strategy can include expanding services to those individuals and businesses who already benefit from your existing partnership. ???

Strategic Brand Messaging and Positioning

Branding is not just about creating visibility to grow customer awareness of your business. Your brand message--that is, the messaging you send out into the marketplace--should reflect your deep understanding of what you learned about your ICP when you reviewed your business goals and strategy. That message should be crafted to resonate with potential buyers and articulate how your services are different from those offered by competitors. Your message should also be positioned in a way that communicates superior value.

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Understanding where your ideal clients consume information (in digital or in-person formats, for example), is another critical component to building your ICP. In turn, this will help you evaluate during an audit whether your marketing is invested strategically. Are the investments concentrated on those arenas and in such a way that they are likely to reach and resonate with potential buyers?

Key Performance Indicators for Marketing

Finally, there are a ton of articles outlining important key performance indicators a marketing team should develop. I have included common ones below.

Because we live in a data-driven age though, it is easy to drown in a sea of unimportant (or less important) data. This is where a marketing audit can determine whether you are capturing mission-critical numbers.

Getting caught up in vanity metrics, for example, such as likes or comments on social posts or other tactical data, such as website traffic reports or email open rates, is a mistake. That data supports higher-level marketing decision-making but is not fit for executive-level reporting.

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A disciplined marketing strategist should be expected to report to leadership the following business metrics.

• Return on Investment: ROI reviews the profits generated from marketing investments measured against their costs to determine if current strategies are as effective as they could be. If current strategies are effective it might suggest that a greater budget allocation could increase profitability. If not, a shift in marketing strategy may be needed. ??
• Customer Lifetime Value: This estimates the total revenue a customer will bring to a business over the course of the relationship.?A clear LTV calculation can also impact how much the firm agrees it is willing to invest in acquiring and retaining future customers. ?
• Customer Acquisition Cost: This metric helps calculate the cost of acquiring a new customer and can be measured against the above-described LTV. It is exciting to bring in new business but if the costs dig uncomfortably into profitability, then determining how to improve CAC should be a priority.
• Conversion Rate: The conversion rate examines the rate at which your audience engages your marketing assets.?This can reflect sign-ups for a white paper or an email click-through rate. The conversion rate helps identify the success of brand messaging and lead generation activities.?This is likely the least important of all the KPIs listed here though it will be of interest when your firm launches a new campaign and wishes to evaluate its initial reception.
• Sales Growth: This is one of the most critical KPIs, which examines the amount of revenue generated by marketing activities over a set period of time. Knowing the amount of sales growth attributed to your marketing efforts will ultimately determine how effective your marketing is. This in turn can help you decide, during an audit, whether anything needs to change in your marketing program.

The foundation of any successful marketing audit begins with a clear-eyed evaluation of your business goals and strategy. Do you know who you are trying to reach and what messages will attract them? As you go to market based on everything you know about your potential or current clients, have you set up the right key performance indicators?

If these pieces are in place, your marketing audit will be successful and your accounting firm will know whether its current program requires updates or whether you are already positioned for a successful and exciting growth trajectory.

Are you a solo practitioner or a small or mid-sized accounting firm struggling with your content to drive growth strategies? The Marketing Strategies 4 Growth newsletter offers weekly insights generated from nearly 20 years of professional services marketing experience. Subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter or, for additional content, you can also subscribe to my Substack account. I specialize in delivering marketing solutions to help professional services firms get unstuck and back on course for growth.

Joe Kovacs, APR ([email protected])

www.kovacscommunications.com

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