Why Your CPA Firm Can’t Get Marketing Traction with New Services

12 Tough Questions About Marketing Strategies and Tactics

iShade, a website dedicated to creating a new interactive community for accounting firms, recently posted a resource from the well-respected consultant Gayle Crosley called “The Business Discipline of Practice Growth - Why Can't CPAs Get Traction with New Services?!”

In the piece, Ms. Crosley, postulates that the experiences of CPA firms with new services have been hit or miss because they use a "build it and they will come" approach and that  “…they are unfamiliar with some of the fundamentals in bringing a new service to market, and often incorrectly pattern their efforts after bringing products to market.”

While she delivers excellent observations about the need for firms to do a better job at competitive analysis and strategic planning before launching a new service, I’d like to add a few observations from my years of experience as a CMO and consultant in the accounting industry: CPA firms can’t get traction with new services because of a combination of undercapitalization and ineffective marketing strategies and tactics.

All of the analysis and planning in the world will still bring you no closer to growing your firm’s top line if you do a lousy job at execution. 

Once your firm has decided to develop a new niche or bring a new service to market, the hard work begins.  Here’s a list of 12 really tough questions to ask for taking the next steps after analysis and education, as Ms. Crosley suggests.

1. Have you committed hard dollars in your budget to launching and sustaining the niche or service?
2. Have you made partners accountable for managing the niche or service, and do they have clear revenue goals?
3. Have you given your marketing department or consultants clear direction on your expectations and their responsibilities?
4. Have you calculated the ROI you except to achieve for the marketing spend, and do you have the infrastructure and marketing technology in place in to measure that ROI?
5. Do you have clear points of competitive differentiation and have you expressed those points in your marketing materials?
6. Do you have a current and clean database of targets?
7. Have you crafted and funded a multi-channel marketing strategy?
8. Do you have relevant trade association marketing strategies and tactics?
9. Do you have a solid internet strategy and inbound marketing strategy ?
10. Do you have, and have you funded lead generation campaigns to launch and sustain the niche or service?
11. Have you determined a way and a means for executing a content marketing strategy based around thought leadership?
12. Do you have a way to capture and measure marketing analytics and metrics

Both Ms. Crosley and I agree that bringing a new niche or service to market should not a casual “let’s try and see if it works” type of exercise. Planning needs to be done at both the strategic and tactical level and given the proper amount of funding. How many of your clients have had a new venture fail because of undercapitalization?

You can undercapitalize in terms of hard dollars, firm resources, and commitment, or a combination. It’s a good bet that you can find a considerable number of business failure examples among your current and past client roster. As the saying goes, “those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it”.