The Value and Power of Marketing

Source: CPA Trendlines

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by Bruce W. Marcus.

We are entering a new phase of marketing, in which marketing is not only integrated into the practice but actually helps shape the nature of the practice. This is marketing 3.0. It is characterized by marketers who fully understand the nature of practice, as well as the techniques and skills of marketing professional services.

There is a new generation of accountants that fully understands that marketing is as much part of the practice as billing and other financial controls. Even the process of the growing field of knowledge management, long considered primarily technical for acquiring and managing internal data as a management function, is beginning to include marketing data as integral to managing a firm.

Where once project management was taken for granted, there is now a more sophisticated approach, as part of a growing firm management professionalism needed to improve productivity. Competition has sharpened the practice and helped introduce new services that better serve both the firms and the clients. It has led to more streamlined firm management and service structures.

It's a partnership between the professionals, who are imbued with a true understanding of the meaning of marketing to a contemporary practice and their inevitable role in it, and marketers, who fully understand the markets and services, and the personalities of accountants.

If the last generation marketers better understood the craft of marketing professional services, the marketers of 3.0 better understand the practice of accounting, the profession's disciplines, fundamental characteristics and tasks in the actual practice of accounting, as well as the distinctive personality traits of accountants. At the same time, both marketing and accounting professionals better understand the principles and practices of marketing.

For the complete article, read “When Practice Drives Marketing and Marketing Drives Practice.”

From CPA Trendlines, http://cpatrendlines.com, November 21, 2011.