How to successfully promote bookkeeping services for your accountancy firm

Promote bookkeeping services for your clients and they’ll thank you later

Business owners often don’t realise quite how helpful a bookkeeping service is until they’ve tried it – not only will this free up the owner’s time to help them further develop their business, updating the businesses financial details on a regular basis will help the owners to control their business more effectively and help to improve their profitability.

In addition, Making Tax Digital (MTD), HMRC’s strategy for digitising the UK tax system, creates a massive opening for accountancy practices and bookkeeping businesses to generate additional fees from this ‘must-have’ service.

Bookkeeping services are an easy sell to new clients

A business may suffer inertia and despite not being particularly pleased with their accountant will stick with them due to the perceived effort involved in changing. Bookkeeping can be a great way to build a relationship with a new client and to prove your effectiveness.

First, be clear on your strategy…

Before you begin to promote bookkeeping services, you must first identify what your strategy is for this particular service line. Typical strategies would be:

• To generate additional fees by getting existing clients or new clients to outsource their bookkeeping services to you.
• To show businesses and individuals that you can take care of their bookkeeping requirements and help them to comply with MTD.
• To promote the added value benefits of having up to date financial records to help businesses make better decisions during the year.

It is likely that you may well use more than one of these approaches – maybe all of them!

… and your target bookkeeping client.

Once you have confirmed what your strategy is, who do you need to target to promote bookkeeping services? This could be:

• Existing clients
• Potential clients

And within these two segments, you may want to further breakdown your target criteria to cover such elements as:

• Existing clients who:
  • Currently do their own bookkeeping
  • May require assistance in order to comply with MTD
  • Are unfamiliar with bookkeeping/accounts packages
• Potential clients who are:
• In a particular business sector that you have experience in
• Of a certain size, e.g. turnover, number of offices, number of employees where you can add value to their business
• Located in your target area

TIP: Email signatures are often overlooked but are a powerful and free way to sell additional services to existing clients. To promote bookkeeping services try a message such as:

‘Did you know we offer bookkeeping services and can ensure that your books are ready for the new Making Tax Digital regulations?’. Get in touch today and find out more.

What is your bookkeeping marketing message?

Regardless of what type of marketing activities you adopt, in order to successfully promote bookkeeping services, you need to ensure your message is consistent. So spend some time thinking about what makes your bookkeeping service better than the next accountant or bookkeeper, i.e. why should someone use you to carry out their bookkeeping.

Typical messages to use to promote bookkeeping services could include:

• We can process your invoices and receipts within 3 working days of receiving them (or whatever timeframe is realistic for you to turnaround the work).
• We save business owners time and the hassle of not having to do their own bookkeeping, so they can focus on running and developing their business.
• We provide a cost-effective solution to routine compliance work.
• By using us, you will have access to discounted rates we have negotiated with the key accounting software companies.
• We do more than just your bookkeeping. We give recommendations on your business based on the financial information provided.

There are lots of ways you can create a bookkeeping competitive advantage. Ideally sit down with your team, to really get to grips with how you add value with your bookkeeping service and turn these factors into your key messages.

Start to promote bookkeeping services today with these effective marketing actions:

If you want to focus on offering bookkeeping to your existing clients, you could:

• Send them an email with links to your bookkeeping page on your website, ideally with testimonials from current bookkeeping clients which highlight how beneficial they have found your services.
• Phone them to discuss their needs and how your bookkeeping service could help.
• Regularly mention your bookkeeping service in your newsletters, whether printed or digital.
• Discuss it during face to face or online meetings with them.
• Have a printed bookkeeping service leaflet created which could be inserted with the annual accounts.

Targeting new clients is vital to grow your business and tactics here include:

• Using social media posts to link back to your bookkeeping page on your website.
• Attending networking events that your target potential clients will be at.
• Advertising in local or regional press and magazines or in targeted trade press.
• Creating a Google AdWords campaign.
• Making sure your website is search engine optimised with key words relating to your bookkeeping service.
• Sending emails or mailings to target businesses, ideally including a leaflet which sets out the benefits other businesses have gained from using your bookkeeping service.
• Making follow up calls to the above email/letters to book an appointment to discuss their business and how regular bookkeeping updates could give them a great opportunity to improve their profitability.

Don’t miss out on this key business growth driver for your firm

We’ve seen bookkeeping used to grow accountancy firms time and time again. If you could add 15% income to 50% of your clients would that make a difference to your business? If you could add a new client each month, would that help your bottom line?

This, often overlooked, service is a powerful item in your business growth toolkit – get started to today to really promote bookkeeping services and you’ll soon see the difference in your business.

Train bookkeeping quickly and easily

The Balancing Act is here to make sure you can quickly train new team members to cope with rising demand for bookkeeping and to make sure you have a flow of the right type of people for your accountancy firm. Get started to day with The Balancing Act.