Know Your Firm: Strategic Marketing Goals
June 30, 2017
Scott Dine
Partner + Technical Director
4 min read
Know Your Firm: Strategic Marketing Goals
Know Your Firm: Strategic Marketing Goals
Focusing Your Strategic Marketing Goals
The entire purpose of a strategic marketing plan is to advance the business objectives of your CPA Firm. But it can’t get off the ground if the organization doesn’t agree on its business objectives, and nowhere have we found so many businesses without clearly defined objectives as the public accounting industry.
The difficulty lies in the structure of a partnership. Many CPA Firms have various partners with vastly different practices who are in completely different places in their careers. What one partner believes is an important objective of the firm may not even show up on the radar of another. This causes confusion among marketing professionals in the accounting industry. Frequently, the marketers are forced to choose between competing messages and objectives.
This puts marketing professionals in a difficult spot. A lack of focus from the top means strategic marketers have to market without a strategy, which undermines their efforts from the start. Not surprisingly, the marketing group will be unable to produce the results that the accounting firm expects.
While you may never get every partner in a firm to agree on all of the business objectives, a good start is to empower a strong managing partner. That way, the strategic marketers can work toward the objectives of the leader. But what if the firm has no such leader?
At Catalyst, I frequently send out a discovery questionnaire. It’s a simple series of questions I pose to the ownership groups periodically. These can be conducted anonymously or openly. I use whichever method that I think will get the most participation. The questions should focus on:
- How each partner views the firm today (including strengths and weaknesses).
- How each partner views the goals and future of the firm (both short- and long-term).
- What each partner believes should be the primary objectives in the upcoming year.
Usually, I provide a series of suggested answers and ask them to pick the ones they feel are most important or best describe the firm. If you allow for responses to be wide open, you’ll have a difficult time grouping answers and identifying common goals. One purpose of the survey is to uncover any opposing opinions, but the primary purpose is to find agreement that allows us to build unity of purpose into our marketing strategy.
Understanding the objectives of your firm is the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts. If you don’t know where your leaders want go, you have no chance of getting them there. Going through this process on an annual basis will make your marketing efforts more effective and also make your life a lot easier.
Share this: