Marketing value: a well-rounded marketing plan can showcase your Type-2 services.

• Author: Frederiksen, Chris
• Position: PRACTICE MANAGEMENT

The CPA profession is undergoing numerous changes that are reshaping the way we practice and require increased attention to marketing.

One key change is the migration from total dependence on Type 1 (historical) services to a blend of Type 1 and Type 2 (future-oriented, value-added) services.

VALUE-ADDED SERVICES

Most progressive CPA firms are offering value-added services, which are more interesting, add more value for the client and are more profitable.

Value-added services that offer the greatest leverage are financial services and strategic services. Financial services include investment advice, money management, insurances and mortgages, and focus on all areas of a client's financial well-being.

Strategic services include strategic planning, profit improvement, benchmarking, cash management and KPI analysis.

These financial and strategic services are comparatively low risk, high reward and relatively easy to add to a practice.

But they are discretionary purchases for clients and therefore have to be more actively marketed, unlike historical services, such as accounting, tax and audit, which largely sell themselves because clients need these services.

The first step in your marketing program is to determine your marketing focus by considering the following:

* Can we (or do we want to) focus on a particular industry, business or profession?

* Can we (or do we want to) specialize in a particular service or product?

* Can we do both?

A MARKETING MANAGER

The most crucial step in ensuring marketing success is hiring someone to manage and coordinate the effort. In small firms, this is usually a part-time position and, if you have a minimal budget, a student sometimes can successfully fill the role.

What doesn't seem to work is a split position, someone who works half-time as an administrator and half-time as a marketing manager--marketing always draws the short straw.

A marketing manager should have excellent social and writing skills, database management skills, event organizing skills and, most important, a willingness to do phone follow-up work.

Your marketing person will need some basic tools, the most important of which is a contact management database system, such as ACT, Goldmine or Maximizer. These systems, which cost less than $500 for a stand-alone package, are custom-built for marketing. Each person, company or contact entered in the system can be tagged with an almost unlimited number of attributes and allow the database to be...