A One Page Marketing Plan—Emphasize the “Doing”

Source: CPA Marketing Best Practices Newsletter

Patrick McEvoy’s newsletter has some excellent practical advice for creating a marketing plan and ensuring its execution.

CPAs are wont to think their plans must be perfect. McEvoy says the plan should be one page. He lists steps to effective marketing:

1. Decide on a niche
   1. Find market segments that are not being serviced well.
   2. Find out what the people in that market really want from you. (they probably want to make more money and hope you can help them).
   3. Gauge the size of the market.
   4. Find out your competitors’ weaknesses. McEvoy says your competition is “doing things exactly like you—namely, they are boring the prospects to death.”
2. Find out how prospects make decisions on using an accountant. People buy what they want more often than they buy what they need. “Your clients aren’t buying drills, they’re buying holes!”
3. Write a marketing message. There are two types of messages.
   1. The response to the question, “what do you do?” “I help businesses improve their bottom lines.”
   2. A comprehensive marketing message that:
      1. Crystallizes your prospects’ major problems
      2. Tells why you are the one to solve them
      3. Guarantees that you will perform
4. Use narrow marketing mediums. This means direct mail, seminars, or trade journals, not mass media.
5. Set goals not only for revenue and profit, but for quantities of new clients. And quantify your efforts—number of articles to be published, number of direct mail pieces to be sent, etc.
6. Create a budget. Typically a CPA firm can spend up to 50 percent of annual revenues to get a client.

From: CPA Marketing Best Practices Newsletter, January 23, 2006, www.cpamarketingbestpractices.com. For the complete article, click here.