According to a recent growth study, accounting firms were among the slowest growers in 2021, growing at a median rate of 9.3% compared to 11.2% for the legal sector and 18% for technology and software. However, certain accounting firms managed to grow by 20% or more despite the challenges that 2020 posed! And the key difference between these practices and others was marketing.

High-growth practices invest more in marketing - and not just in terms of cash dollar. They zero in on arguably the most crucial element of marketing - differentiation - and create informative content that helps them build a reputation as experts in their field. These firms also find a way to balance their marketing between digital platforms and more traditional channels, and perfecting their marketing by conducting systematic research.

One study found a clear correlation between systematic research and firm growth and profitability. Even firms that conducted only occasional research showed big improvements, while those that conducted more frequent research grew faster still.

"Firms that conduct systematic research on their current and potential clients grow from 3 to 10 times faster and are up to 2 times more profitable."

Of course, how much research you do is irrelevant if you're focussing on the wrong elements. To conduct effective research, you need to investigate the following:

Once you have a clearer sense of these various components of the market and your place within it, you can start planning for the future.

Before you start your research, you should define your research goals and objectives. This helps you to plan your marketing strategy with clarity.

Some practical examples of possible objectives include:

Once you've thought through your specific objectives, you can start working on an impactful strategy.

A flawed marketing strategy can have a dismal effect. Typically, the way firms come up with marketing strategies goes something like this...

The firm will gather a whole collection of partners and senior executives in the board room to come up with marketing ideas to plan for the following year. Everyone will have different ideas of what marketing looks like, should be, or should cost. No one will agree, so some kind of uncomfortable compromise will have to be made. And, as accountants tend to be conservative when it comes to spending on marketing, you may end up avoiding new or untried marketing tactics.

Consequently, what you end up with tends to be a mixture of discomfiting trade-offs, ideas that feel right at an instinctive level (but won't necessarily work), and the same tactics you've used time and again. It's an annoying process with a dull an uninspired result.

However, it doesn't have to be like this.

By conducting research, you can determine what your target clients are actually looking for today, and you can build a brand that stands out from the rest. Research can point you in the direct of something fresh and new. While novelty can be risky, if it's backed by enough quality research, it may be just the thing that your strategy needs.

To start your research journey, you may want to read our article on 10 ways to effectively market your accounting practice. Our tips can be summarised as follows:

Following these general tips, you may want to investigate where your clients turn for information. Do they use Facebook groups, LinkedIn, YouTube? Where would be the best place for you to reach them? Do your ideal clients respond well to email marketing? What has worked for your competitors? What has turned other practices into well-known brands?

One of the tactics that can help you build a reputation as an expert in the field is generating your own content in the form of a blog and then sharing this content via a weekly or monthly newsletter.

For instance, Future Firm runs a weekly newsletter which provides subscribers with the tricks its founder used to scale his firm "from scratch to sale in 5 years". This kind of tagline attracts a certain audience - accountants who would like to grow their firm. The short punchy line on Future Firm's web page serves as bait. Biting means typing in your email address and hitting "Sign Up". This makes the newsletter gated content - content that requires a key to unlock. The clients get the information that they want and you get their email address - a crucial way to access them, their time and attention.

On the other hand, un-gated content - like blog content - may be less irritating to clients who prefer not to receive weekly emails. It may seem counterintuitive to give away quality information for free on your blog, but this content proves that you know what you are talking about and are a trustworthy professional. It may be worth your while to try out forms of both gated and un-gated content and see what generates leads, builds up your reputation, or gets you noticed on Google.

Hinge Research Institute's High Growth Study 2021 was their largest and most comprehensive study of growth in professional services to date, analyzing the responses of 1,293 firms with a combined revenue of $270 billion, and almost 1 million employees. Their sample was taken across consulting, law firm and legal services, architecture, engineering and construction, accounting and financial services, and technology and software. It extended from micro-firms to firms making in excess of $50 million in revenue in the past year.

Companies perceived the marketplace as increasingly unpredictable.

To cope with an increasingly unpredictable marketplace, researching your target audience is key.

49.2% of firms involved in the study conducted research on their target audience in 2020, with 67.5% of these firms conducting their research quarterly or more frequently.

The proportion of new business leads generated from digital sources escalated by 18% in the last year, and the increased digital leads were associated with higher profitability. However, accounting and financial services lagged behind many other professionals when it came to research on their target audience. The report states that this is an untapped area in which professionals could "uncover hidden opportunities, accelerate growth, and reduce risk".

Interestingly, High Growth firms, defined as firms that have a compound annual growth rate of 20% or greater over a three-year assessment period, were nearly three times more likely to conduct research on their target audiences than No Growth firms. These were also the businesses that were more likely to engage in frequent research to keep themselves up to date.

So, what we can take from this is that the more extensive your investigations are and the more frequently you conduct research, the more likely you are to achieve a high growth rate.

Ultimately, research is important when it comes to marketing your firm because no marketing strategy is solid or effective without it. Your firm is more likely to be profitable and fast-growing if effective and sustained research goes into your marketing efforts.

But before you get down to business with research, it's important to ask yourself WHY you are doing what you are doing. Whenever in doubt, pull a Simon Sinek - start with why. Having a clear sense of purpose will drive you towards investigating what needs to be done to grow your firm.

What do you think? Do you conduct research for marketing purposes?