By Gareth Burton

Clients often ask me about how we approach our sales and marketing, particularly online.

Please note that I am an accountant, NOT a marketer so I certainly cannot claim to be an expert; these are just my own thoughts on how we market ourselves as an accountancy practice that I’m sharing.

Firstly, and certainly most importantly, think about the service that you say you deliver and the service that, if you’re totally, completely and brutally honest with yourself, that you will ACTUALLY deliver. If your actual level of service cannot surpass that of your marketing then you will be doing your business more harm than good. I honestly took three years to get our staff, systems and service levels right before I considered a ‘full’ marketing strategy. That might not be what you want to hear but I think too many people focus on ‘the future’ and ‘growth’ before they actually try to get the foundations for growth in place.

The premise behind this idea could take up an entire article on its own but in a nutshell, the world of marketing is changing. It used to be true (and still is) that you could identify the potential customers you want to work with, find out what they want to hear, find out how to get your message in front of them and then clearly explain how you understand their needs and prove that you can satisfy them. The things is though, the world has changed. Think of how you buy on eBay and Amazon. You don’t believe everything that the seller tells you, you simply look for what you think you need and then let everybody else tell you whether they’re ACTUALLY as good as they say they are. Do you ever buy something online with a rating of less than four stars?

The point is this, if you start attracting people with unrealistically high expectations right now, although it may feel good in the short term, it will harm your business in the long term because those customers will not only be going elsewhere but they’ll be the ones giving you two stars online and preventing others from joining you.

When I developed my first marketing strategy I realised that I couldn’t deliver on what I wanted to say and so I had to spend three years getting my house in order to be able to stay true to my promises. I’m still doing it as well by the way! I think of a promise that I want to make and then I improve our operations until we can fulfill that promise.

As a small caveat to this, whilst improving operations I still continued to grow the business. There are plenty of small things that can make a difference to the top and bottom line that we did internally whilst we improved our business, I’m just warning against starting too early on the ‘big dream’ of lots of new clients that many small business owners seem to be fixated with.

So that’s step one, sorry if I sound like a traditional introverted accountant but I think that in a business world where we are swamped with books, blogs and events talking about ‘strategy, growth, pipeline and added value’ (all of which I fully support) I see many businesses adopting the ‘brand new customers only’ approach and forgetting about the fundamentals at home. If you feel as though you’ve got your house almost in order though (it’ll never be perfect!) Then next time around we might start getting into something that you can get to work on.

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