This video explores some ways you save money on your accounting marketing budget by looking at the things that firms spend the most money on.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Lee Frederiksen. Today I wanna talk about how to save money on your accounting marketing budget. Think about that. A way to actually save money on your accounting marketing.

So let’s start with what are the things that firms spend the most money on. Where does the actual budgets go in real life accounting firms? What you see is that the biggest single expenditure is sponsorships, followed by charitable giving, networking events, entertainment events, all of these. These are where firms are actually spending their money today. And particularly if there is any partner disgression in the budget, that really increases the amount that they spend on these kinds of events.

But are you getting the kind of return you need? Are these the most efficient or the most effective way to spend your marketing budget? And as it turns out, they are not. And the way we found this out is that we looked at the firms that were growing, we looked at what they spent their budgets on. And we looked at the firms that weren’t growing, that were languishing there and how did they spend?

Check out the 2017 Marketing Budget Benchmark Study and find out how much firms are devoting to marketing spending

So here are four specific things where you’ve got an opportunity to save money. The first is sponsorships. This is something where high growth firms shy away from. Unless you can find a sponsorship that’s related to also a speaking events, and what you’re doing, networking all of your target audience. But just sponsoring a hole at a golf event, or charitable golf event, or putting your name in association as one of the sponsors, gold, silver, platinum sponsors doesn’t do much unless you’re actively involved and you’re demonstrating your expertise.

Same with marketing materials. A lot of people spend a lot of time on marketing materials. Tell me what you should do, but that’s not really the best way to attract clients. It’s better to educate them. Membership and dues, again, a lot of money gets spent in accounting firms on memberships and dues, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Yeah, we spent all this money on marketing,” but then none of the partners goes to the event. Nobody is there. So what’s the big advantage of those memberships if you’re not taking full advantage of it? And then of course, internal events and parties. “Let’s roll a party, celebrate, and spend time with our clients.” Well, it may make you feel good, maybe a good thing to do, but it’s not a good way to spend your marketing money if you’re interested in actually growing your firm.

And in the next post, what I wanna do is talk to you about, what are the best ways where you should be spending your money.

Lee Frederiksen, Ph.D. Who wears the boots in our office? That would be Lee, our managing partner, who suits up in a pair of cowboy boots every day and drives strategy and research for our clients. With a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology, Lee is a former researcher and tenured professor at Virginia Tech, where he became a national authority on organizational behavior management and marketing. He left academia to start up and run three high-growth companies, including an $80 million runaway success story.