Marketing and growth in Australian accounting practices
Do you need to benchmark and compare your accounting practice with best practices in Australian accounting firms, to better identify opportunities to improve your own practice?
To help practices better understand their key business drivers, The Access Group has commissioned an independent research firm, Momentum Intelligence, to create a series of accounting practice benchmarking reports, known as the Your Future Practice series.
Accounting practices offer a wide range of services to a wide range of clients and to effectively identify best practice when starting or buying an accounting practice, it’s important to lay down a roadmap for accounting practice success.
In this article, we are going to look at the key takeaways from our latest edition of accounting practice benchmarking reports around marketing your practice and growing its people, clients and technology.
What is the Your Future Practice series?
The Your Future Practice series of accounting practice benchmarking reports explores the best practices in high performing Australian accounting firms.
The benefit of these accounting practice benchmarking reports is to help accounting professionals to identify where there are opportunities to improve their own practice by comparing themselves with the very best Australian accounting firms in the industry.
The data insights from the Your Future Practice series of accounting benchmarking reports will inspire Australian accounting practices to take affirmative action in their accounting practice growth strategy.
For advice on how to set benchmarks for your accounting practice, check out: What are accounting practice benchmarks?
How can our accounting practice benchmarking study help your practice?
This edition of our insightful accounting benchmarking report series explores the results of our marketing & growth survey with 435 high performing accounting firms throughout November 2022 and was distributed by Accountants Daily.
The report insights can help accounting professionals to diagnose, optimise and organise their practice in ways that can continue to support more clients in achieving their financial goals.
4 key takeaways from our accounting practice benchmarking report
1. Staff motivation = accounting practice success
The key driver of success for many service–based practice is people. Regardless of your practice’s size, niche, tactics, or skill, people are the underlying drivers pushing an accounting practice forward.
Only 1 in 3 practices (34 per cent) indicated that their staff are highly motivated to complete their daily tasks and contribute to their firm’s success.
The study highlights the importance of these factors when considering the likelihood that practices will achieve their revenue targets in line with their growth objectives.
2. Define your accounting practice client profile
Accounting practices who can identify, define and engage with clients of a similar profile will be able to promote efficiency and scale within their marketing and growth program.
Despite this potential opportunity, the study highlights that only approximately 1 in 5 (22 per cent) of practices surveyed have a completely defined client profile.
The first step of establishing an effective marketing strategy is to truly understand the type of client that best suits your practice from a profitability, lifestyle and business continuity perspective.
3. The importance of client relationship management in accounting practices
Client management software (otherwise known as a CRM) is an invaluable resource for accounting practice looking to grow and to expand their customer base.
The accounting practice benchmarking study found that only 14 per cent of practices surveyed have a CRM that is used in its entirety. Meanwhile, an additional 31 per cent conceded they have a CRM but it is not used to its full potential. Therefore, less than half of all accounting practices surveyed have a CRM solution in place.
With our client management software for accounting practice, you can track all client activities across your practice, helping you to increase the effectiveness of your communications.
4. Accounting practice marketing tactics differ with size
Marketing is often a low priority for many practice owners, but understanding the tactics that are most effective is a critical next step in growing your practice.
The accounting practice benchmarking study found larger accounting practices are more likely to deploy more marketing tactics compared to small accounting practices. Larger practices are more likely to invest in digital marketing and community engagement tactics compared to smaller practices.
Slightly less than 1 in 2 practices (46 per cent) are using digital marketing tactics and only 1 in 4 are using community engagement tactics to grow their client base.
Evaluating your accounting practice marketing strategy and looking to encompass more advanced or active tactics will help the overall growth of your practice, including actively requesting referrals from clients. Practices that actively request referrals and leverage digital marketing outperform those that do not.
Your practice roadmap to marketing and growth
The insights from the Marketing and Growth edition of the Your Future Practice report will give you an opportunity to reflect on your practice to drive forward growth, so that you can continue to support more clients and achieve and exceed your revenue targets.
