As a firm owner, it’s important to master how we approach our market for new business. For many firm owners in today’s US market, obtaining new clients is slower and harder than in more robust markets. We have to remember this as we seek to bring in new clients. Our internal strategies have to match up with the external situation we find in the economies in which we serve. 

For example, if you are a high-value advisory firm, your prices will tend to be higher. And in ‘expansive’ markets, many potential clients are willing to invest in advisory services to help them as they grow. But as an economy shifts and ‘tightens’ up, pricing as an advisory may lead to a slow down of new clients being brought into the firm. Your outreach practices have to match the economy you are selling into. We often forget this, and it can take us by surprise as a market becomes tighter with its willingness to try a new firm. 

There are many ways to perform outreach to get new clients, such as:

• Networking,
• Digital and content marketing,
• Web strategies like SEO and online ads,
• Referrals and partnerships,
• Purchasing lists of target clients,
• Hiring a lead gen firm,
• Advertising,
• and even cold calling or direct outreach.

It’s easy to get complacent thinking that what works in one phase of life will continue to work in different economic seasons or firm sizes. Our firm has always invested heavily in ‘thought leadership’ as a big part of our marketing, specifically using content marketing through this channel. Now we are focusing more on networking. We’ve always networked as a subset of our thought leadership work (i.e. we meet new people as we speak at conferences), but now we are stepping up direct networking to move into circles of new networks that we haven’t been in before. This takes time, but we are finding it can totally be worth it and fun to meet a whole new group of people. 

As we move more decisively into networking, we can’t just drop the other content marketing we’ve been doing for many years. So we have to strike a balance. One way to strike a balance between the various efforts of your marketing outreach is to first define what your goals are. You have to know: “What are you trying to achieve?”

• If you want to employ thought leadership into the growth of your firm, then this effort will take longer to employ since it is a very trust-based marketing outreach.
• If you are trying to make money and bring in revenue to support the expenses of your firm, then you may want something faster like networking (or even local networking, which is different than digital networking online).

If you are trying to decide what to do to balance your marketing outreach, here are some questions to consider:

1. Do you want to grow, or just pay your team and pay your bills? These are not necessarily the same thing. In this economy, many firms just want to replace clients that are leaving. They just want to keep paying their bills and keep their good team for when the economy picks back up. Growth, on the other hand, means you want to bring in work that is more than what your team can perform – ultimately leading you to hire more team members to continue to fulfill more and more revenue. Growth means you want more than what you have now, not just to pay your bills. 
2. Is your desire for growth more short-term or long-term? Some marketing strategies can be more long-term and effective for the long haul (like thought leadership), or you may just want to bring in more clients in the short-term for more stable cash flow. Short-term is more of a cash flow focus (money in), while long-term marketing is more about investment (money out). 
3. What time do you have to commit to marketing outreach? Marketing takes time. We can hire people to do marketing for us (from agencies to contractors) which is meant to leverage our time more efficiently, or we can do it ourselves to save some money. 
4. Will you market internally or externally? Marketing internally, or trying to leverage the client base and network you are already close to, can be faster. Marketing externally (something our firm is considering right now) to break into new circles or new niches takes longer and may take some investment as well. Internally will hopefully produce cash faster, while an external focus can move your firm into a whole new market or group of people that could feed you leads for many years to come. 
5. Will the economy let you do what you want to do? If the economy will meet you eagerly and be willing to pay for new services to help your target market grow, then you can pitch some cool new, expensive services. But if the economy has tightened up then it may want to purchase more basic services for now. For accounting firms, we can sell advisory, discovery, and exploration services to a growing economy, or we may need to sell basic recurring services like accounting, tax, and payroll services in a tighter economy.  

And here are some principles to guide you as you consider your marketing outreach:

• Always be marketing. Do something related to the growth of your firm’s revenue, no matter how small it is; just balance what you are doing as the economy changes through different seasons of your firm.
• If you have between 5 to 8 people (or more), then you need to be actively investing in marketing services or activities to sustain the level of revenue you need to keep your team and firm healthy (especially if any of those people are full-time).
• Balance what marketing outreach you perform. As the economy changes, and clients come and go, change how you do your outreach to match what is most effective in that season. 
• Do some planning. Don’t just perform ‘scatter shot’ marketing – plan it out. Scatter shot is not very effective since marketing is so elusive and often ambiguous. Ask what you are trying to achieve and see if your activities match what outcome you want from your marketing outreach.

As a last point, author Karen Reyburn’s book, The Accountant Marketer, is a foundational guide on all things marketing for accounting firms. Let us know how your marketing outreach is going, and what strategies you are employing in this economy. 

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