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Practice Tip - The best marketing products

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12th Oct 2005
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I met with my first ever client last night. She is still a client more than 20 years on. I admit that's why meetings with her and her husband tend to be rather more social events than those I usually engage in with those who provide my income.

But there was a serious purpose to the meeting. I was collecting the information to do her tax return. And when she gave it to me she reminded me, inadvertently, of the best marketing tool I ever created for my firm. It was a 'tax folder'.

Now don't get any grandiose ideas about what a tax folder is. It's an ordinary A4 wallet file. The only thing different about it was it was black (because most people think doing tax is bad news and no one makes black wallet files as far as I can see, so it was easy to find), it had the firm's name on it in white, which really stood out as a result, and it had space for the clients name on it, to be written in a white space.

When I headed a firm that had up to 700 or more tax return clients to manage we sent one of these out with our annual tax letter in April each year, although many clients seemed to use the same one over and over again. As, indeed, my very first client still does, because there it was last night, helped along by now with quite a lot of Sellotape.

Why was it so successful? Simply because it was useful, and so simple that not using it made no sense. All we asked people to do was stuff every bit of paper they thought might be relevant to us in the file as they got it and to send it to us at the end of the year. If in doubt, send it was the motto.

And it worked, really well.

And in the meantime it had our name and number emblazoned all over it so that every time they used it they recalled what we did for them.

So, it might have been simple, but I reckon it was one of the best marketing ideas we had, because people told their peer group that their accountant had given them a system that helped them manage their tax affairs. That system might just have been 'stuff it all in the wallet' but who cared? It was a system. And they liked it, so it won us work.

That's what marketing is about after all.

Richard Murphy
AccountingWEB contributing editor Richard Murphy is a sole practitioner chartered accountant but was previously senior partner of a firm for 11 years. He has also been chairman, chief executive or finance director of 10 SMEs. A collection of previous articles by Richard on practice management themes is available in Practice Management Zone

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By Tim Robinson
28th Oct 2005 16:54

Brilliant
Thank you Richard for such a simple yet brilliant idea.

I cannot believe that 783 accountants have read this article and not thought the same, or at least had the decency to say 'thanks'.

I have often wondered what is simple yet effective and you have confirmed the sort of thing I was thinking of.

Thanks again

Tim

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