I’ve made some mistakes.
And this was a big one.
I built a marketing function that didn’t properly understand how we won work. As you can imagine it was part of the reason why our marketing stopped working. Then add massive changes to search and LinkedIn and our marketing was dead in the water.
With the benefit of hindsight, here is how I would NOW go about building a marketing function to drive high quality leads to our business.
Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club
Document the processes that work
Before you even think about outsourcing or hiring anyone to do your marketing for you, you need to document your processes. That means everything you do for what I would call the whole of Business Development: Marketing, Sales, Account Management that brings you work.
Hand on heart I did document our processes. But with the benefit of hindsight it was too high level. We’d also missed out setting KPIs. I.e if this is working, how will we see it? Whilst you maybe building a marketing function for someone else to run for you, you still need to be able to monitor it is working. Or, as I found out, pay for it later.
Build a marketing plan
Once you have all the processes working, then it’s time to build a marketing plan. After all, if you can’t articulate how you win business how is a marketing team going to do that? The problem is that many of us don’t really know HOW we win work. Yes, work comes in. Often by referral. But the actual granular detail of the little and big actions that we do to generate work is often hazy at best.
For my paid subscribers I have popped into the section below a link to a video I did for our 8-week launch pad programme to help you put together your marketing plan.
Stop being so trusting
I went so wrong with this. I trusted. Yep, trusted that my new marketing manager was competent and knew what she was doing. As a result of this trust I didn’t check the marketing plan and her actions. In fact, even worse I decided that she would report into someone else in my team who was good at sales, but didn’t understand digital marketing. That decision of putting them at arms length away from me probably cost me £100k of new business over the last 2 years.
When you are building the new marketing function it is essential that your new team members report into you. After all, you are probably the one that knows how all your business development processes link together: However loosely!
It’s not just getting your new marketing function to report into you. You need measures of success for each route to market AND what each person is doing for you. After all you can spend huge amounts of money on content writers, facebook ads without it actually bringing in the right type of new business for your firm.
Optimise your account management
We tend to in this world fetish winning new clients. Whereas most of us have diamonds in our client base. Possibly more work that we can handle, if only client service and account management was prioritised at a leadership and fee earner level. After all, we often trust that our fee earners are doing what they say they are going to do. And they are alert to new opportunities. In my experience this doesn’t happen unless there is a level of monitoring of client service and visible account management.
For example I would be measuring the following: (this is for paid subscribers)
What can now be done quicker with AI?
AI has come a long way now since it burst onto the scenes 2-3 years ago. Before you consider hiring someone else to do your firm’s marketing for you, it’s worth testing out the capability of AI.
I did a short video for our launch pad programme on how to use AI to support your marketing.
Outsource or hire
In the early days of your business my recommendation is to outsource parts of your marketing. After all a marketing executive is going to cost you £25k-£40k on a full time basis. That’s a lot of money to pay out on someone who isn’t going to be chargeable. Just at the point where you need new headcount to be revenue generating in their own right.
There are all sorts of things you can outsource, for example:
Writing your articles and white papers
Social media content
Paid media
The ‘technical’ side of digital marketing such as setting up and sending your newsletter
But, you need to know WHAT you will outsource and then WHAT does good look like when you outsource your marketing. Hence the need for a marketing plan. Without this understanding you tend to find that you may get ‘pretty’ stuff back that looks good, but doesn’t necessarily help you generate leads to high quality clients. This was exactly the problem we had with our marketing. Our social media marketing was personable, fun and funky. But did it showcase our expertise? Did it drive people to our website? Did it actually do more than the equivalent of being a chocolate teapot? No.
A good way of looking at what is worth outsourcing is to audit the amount of time you or others in your team are spending on business development related tasks. Then identify what can be done by others more cost effectively and potentially better. For example:
Digital marketing support: Can someone else set up your emails to your list? Or schedule your firm’s social media updates?
Can a content writer work with your fee earners to ghost write articles for them?
Can someone else repurpose your podcast, webinars or video materials into articles, social media updates or emails to the list?
Can someone else handle the production of your podcast? We do this with our How To Make Partner podcast. I use AI to help me create scripts/podcast notes from my written material or a recording of a group coaching call. Then I do the recording on Riverside.fm (affiliate link) and they do a light edit on Riverside.fm plus everything else for it.
For my paid subscribers I’ve included in the next section what we currently do inhouse and outsource in our marketing for the Accountants’ Growth Club
Start with a ‘do-er’
Once you find that you are paying for outsourced marketing support for more than 2 days a week you will probably find it is more cost effective to hire in permanent help.
Your marketing plan will guide you to what they will be doing. But as a rule of thumb, they should free up your fee earners to service clients and find new opportunities. For me this means your marketing team are likely to support your firm by what I would call “doing”:
Creating the emails you sent regularly to your email list
Creating the firm’s social media output and creating suggested copy for social media for fee earners to use.
Repurposing existing content to create regularly published articles on the website
Event management, e.g. webinars or in person events or trade shows
Keeping the website updated
Add in a manager
Once you have got a ‘do-er’ in your team you are likely to then progress to having a manager. This is someone who:
Creates the marketing plan in conjunction with you
Monitors the KPIs for you
Makes recommendations on how to improve the marketing effectiveness
Manages external marketing suppliers
In summary
What normally happens when your firm grows is you get personally busy and possibly overwhelmed. The knee jerk response to this is to often outsource parts of your marketing without knowing what really does or doesn’t work when it comes to winning new business for your firm.
This is why the first task before you delegate any marketing work to others is to document your business development processes. Then build a marketing plan to achieve the new business you require. And only then consider what to outsource or hire someone to do.
