Does marketing really work? The answer lies in the data.

How often have you heard the M word and thought: “marketing doesn’t work for me. It’s too hard to prove ROI, it’s fluffy and I feel like it’s a waste of time and money”?

You’re not alone, it’s a common view within the accounting community. We’ve made it part of our mission at PracticeWeb to help dispel that myth in the only way we know how – through data.

Marketing isn’t just about winning business or pushing your services, it’s about being in control of how you win that business and grow your firm.

All the ways you position yourself in the market to what you’re known for adds up to mean you can attract the clients you want, at the pace you want them.

Word of mouth (WOM) referrals are great too. It’s show’s you’re doing a good job, but it isn’t scalable.

For example, if you want to turn those WOM referrals from 5 a month to 10, what’s the plan? Ask more of your clients to do your bidding for you and get them to ask more friends? What if they aren’t the right type of clients for your practice?

Marketing offers you a way to create a tried and tested, repeatable and scalable process for winning the business you want from the clients that you want to grow your business around.

Putting you in control of how you grow your firm!

Here’s the evidence

Every month I like to delve into the marketing performance data we have from all our accounting firms that we work with.

It’s a large body of data to draw from, which provides me with a great deal of insight into the performance of a firm’s marketing, from startups to established firms.

This month, I compared clients who have only a website with us to those that have taken our marketing search engine optimisation (SEO) and blogging services as well.

The results make a compelling argument for the return on investment in marketing.

What’s the compelling argument?

We can see that our clients, whether they only have a website with us, or both a website and our marketing services, received an average of 599 visits to their website during the month of May.

This resulted in an average of 21 enquiries for clients who took our website design and/or marketing services, an average conversion rate of 3.5% from website traffic. For context, 2% is often cited as a good base level for the conversion of website traffic – 3.5% is a great result.

However, when we compare the averages to those that just have a website with us, and don’t take up any of our ongoing marketing services, such as blogging or SEO resources, the averages drop, resulting in 25% less traffic to the website and 38% less conversions.

Where things really make a difference is when you isolate our clients who take up our blogging or SEO services with one of our websites.

The average visits to the website rocket by 167% compared to our all client average, combined with a staggering 85% increase in conversions.

That’s a phenomenal increase in traffic and enquiries.

What’s the return on investment?

To invest in our marketing services it costs less than, or equivalent to, a full time member of staff, depending on the services you take on.

Let’s say your average client fee is £1k per year (insert your own average client fee here), you receive 35 enquiries each month from one of our websites and convert 80% of them to clients.

That gives you 28 new clients worth a total of £28k of new revenue into your practice, each month.

The proof in the power of marketing

Data gives you (and us) the power to optimise your marketing efforts, putting you in the driving seat when it comes to growing your firm with the right types of clients.

The marketing performance stats above are real world examples of our clients achieving these results, and winning new business through marketing.

If that doesn’t prove to you that marketing can provide a measurable return for your firm, I‘m not sure anything will.

If this has piqued your interest, why not get in touch with us on 0117 915 0420, or email hello@practiceweb.co.uk