Building a Better Accounting Marketing Budget

Building an accounting marketing budget can be difficult when you must consider the different ways to reach new audiences, and where you should be focusing your firm’s marketing efforts in the upcoming year. During the latest AAM High webinar, Lee Frederiksen Ph.D., MP of Hinge, spoke about the different approaches and factors to consider in building your best accounting marketing budget.

Accounting Marketing Budget Creation

First, he spoke about the four most common approaches to accounting marketing budget creation.  These approaches are: Ad Hoc, Legacy Budget, Consensus and Strategic Marketing. Frederiksen recommended taking a strategic approach by thinking about the following issues. One, what are your business goals? Two, look at your target client groups, the ones you want to get more of, and how they are finding ways to solve their business issues. Third, is your budget allocated to maximize your success? And fourth, look at your tracked results, and adjust to what you saw worked and didn’t work.

Accounting Marketing Budget Spend

Once your team has gone through those four questions, the next big and most common question marketers face is: How much should you spend on marketing and what you should spend it on? One of the easiest ways is to look at your industry, and competitors, and use them as a benchmark. What are they doing or using and how do you compare? Next is to look at your firm’s business goals and decide how to accomplish those goals and tools needed to get there.

Hinge research shows 68.5% of people found firms through digital means while 31.5% work through more traditional methods, Frederiksen said. Then, as people go further down the marketing funnel, that number increases to 72% digital and 28% traditional.

After considering how people are finding your firm, think about where to budget your marketing dollars. Are there any one-time big expenses like re-branding or a new website that you want to get done? Is there a specific technology such as marketing automation, that you want to add that would have a larger first-year cost?

The Most Important Question to Answer

Of all the questions that Fredrickson brought up, the one he stressed the most was, ‘‘What are your business goals?” Once you can uncover the answer to that question, he believes that you will be able to build your best accounting marketing budget to date.

To hear the entire webinar, in which Lee Frederiksen Ph. D., MP discussed a range of factors when building an accounting marketing budget, access the recording at https://register.gotowebinar.com/recording/6481093679897617159