Accounting Firm Marketing 101: Know Your Firm, Know Your Clients
Our firm, Dillon Business Advisors, landed 20 new clients in six months. Eighty-five percent of those wins came from referrals and existing relationships. Things like paid ads, lead gen, or social media — the typical activities that fall under marketing — didn’t contribute. It's tempting to hear that as a case for skipping marketing altogether. If referrals are doing most of the work, why bother with a blog, social media, or updating your website?
Marketing isn’t only about winning new business. When done well, it keeps you relevant and visible, converts referrals and prospects, positions your firm as a trusted resource for the clients you already have, and builds the kind of reputation that makes other firms take notice, whether that's a referral partner, a potential hire, or someone who might want to acquire you down the road.
Before you dive into marketing, you need to clarify two things: who your firm is and who your firm is for. Here's how to work through both.
Part 1: Know Your Firm
Before you market anything, you need to know what you’re marketing. Here are some tips to gain clarity.
#1. Your services aren't your story
Most firm websites look the same, with similar services and mission statements. Your story is what makes you stand out. The first step is to write it down. Answer some of these questions to get started:
What did you have to figure out to get where you are? What shaped how you work? What drives you to show up for clients the way you do, especially on the days it would be easier not to? What have you done inside a client's business that you're proud of? What's different about how you approach the work compared to how you've seen others do it?
Your story is unique to you — it’s something no other competitor can copy because they haven’t lived it.
#2. Get to the outcome, not just the task
While many prospects know exactly what's wrong and what they need to do, there are others who can't put a name to their problem or pinpoint the root cause; they just know something feels off with their business or finances. Your marketing needs to resonate with both — the prospects that know what they need and the prospects that aren't even sure a solution exists. You do this by marketing what your services do for them. This is much more than just listing your services on your website.
To find what your services do for your clients, keep asking "so what" until you run out of answers. Like this:
- We run payroll for clients. So what?
- So their team gets paid accurately and on time. So what?
- So the owner isn't the one chasing it down every pay period. So what?
- So they get that time and attention back to spend on running the business instead.
That last answer is the one that belongs in your marketing because it’ll make the right prospect stop scrolling and think "that's exactly what I need."
#3. Build a voice guide
How your firm sounds matters as much as what it says. Write down three to five words for the tone you want: direct, warm, technical, plain-spoken, whatever fits your firm’s personality and brand. Think about what you'd want a client to say if someone asked them to describe your emails. Think about the one word you'd never want used to describe your firm.
This matters more now than it used to. Between AI tools drafting content and team members writing on your behalf, a written voice guide is what keeps everything sounding like it came from the same firm, no matter who's actually typing it.
#4. Know what you stand for and against
Every firm has things they won't do, approaches they think the industry gets wrong, and strongly held beliefs about how clients should be served. Having a point of view is not the same as being controversial. It means you've thought carefully about your work and have something to say beyond "we provide excellent service."
Get those convictions out of your head and onto paper. You don't have to publish them directly anywhere. But they become the undercurrent in your marketing, which is what makes everything feel like it came from a real firm with real people. This is often the most compelling marketing a firm can produce.
#5. Pull it into one sentence
Everything above — your story, your differentiation, your voice, what you stand for — points toward a single sentence: who you're for. That's your positioning statement, and it's different from your mission statement. Your mission is internal, the reason the firm exists. Your positioning statement is external, built for a stranger, a referral partner, or Google to read in five seconds and know whether your firm is for them. Here’s an example:
Mission Statement: We believe practice owners spent too many years training to become clinicians to lose sleep over their books. The money side of the practice shouldn't be the part that keeps them up at night.
Positioning Statement: We help dental practice owners avoid tax-season surprises through proactive tax planning and monthly financial oversight built around how practices make and spend money.
Part 2: Know Your Clients
The other half of your marketing foundation is knowing your clients. You need to understand who they are, what they care about, and where they spend time — so you can better resonate with and market to them.
#1. Get specific about who you're for
The more specific you get, the more useful this becomes.
"We work with small businesses" isn't a target. "Professional service businesses" is too broad to build a message around. "Healthcare practice owners" is closer. "Dental practices with one or two locations" gives you something you can write to.
Here are some things to keep in mind as you think through your ideal clients:
- Industry or business type tells you what language and examples will land.
- Revenue range shapes what they can afford and how they think about money, since a $500K business and a $3M business in the same industry are dealing with very different problems.
- Business stage affects what they're worried about: a firm growing fast and feeling the complexity catch up with them needs something different than a firm trying to protect what it's already built.
- Ownership structure changes how decisions get made, since a sole owner moves differently than a family-run practice with three partners at the table.
#2. Name the problem, not the service
A business owner doesn't wake up thinking they need proactive tax planning. They wake up thinking about a tax bill they didn't see coming, or wondering if the business is making money, or frustrated that their last accountant never explained anything in a way they understood.
These are just a few examples. Your marketing should talk to the full range of problems your ideal client faces, even the ones they can't quite put a name to. You want them to read your marketing material and think "that's exactly what I'm dealing with."
That's not the full picture, though. Every one of those problems has a flip side: what they actually want instead. When you describe both the problem and the outcome in your marketing, you're speaking directly to what your prospect is looking for — whether they've had the words for it all along or are only just now putting it together. Either way, that's when the right ones reach out.
You've already started uncovering this in the So What? exercise. Those final statements are the flip side of the pain point. If the final statement is "they always know what they can spend and invest," the pain point is "they have no idea where their money is going and it scares them."
#3. Know what gets them to move
Most businesses need better accounting for years before they do anything about it. There's almost always a specific moment that turns that need into urgency: an unexpected tax bill, a business milestone that outgrew their current setup, a bad experience with their last accountant, or a referral that landed at exactly the right time.
Knowing your ideal client's trigger tells you when to show up. If tax surprises are the trigger, your content around Q3 and Q4 planning reaches people right when they're starting to look. If outgrowing a bookkeeper is the trigger, content about the signs of outgrowing DIY accounting puts you in front of them the moment they notice.
#4. Find out where they spend their time
The best marketing channel is the one your ideal client already uses, not the one you feel like you should be on. Business owners in professional services tend to be on LinkedIn. Trades businesses generally aren't. Most niche industries have associations or trade publications. And nearly every business owner asks a peer for a recommendation before hiring a professional, which is why referral partners often outperform every other channel combined.
Don't guess at this. Ask a few of your best current clients where they go when they have a question about their business, whether that's a search, a LinkedIn scroll, an industry group, or a trusted person they call first.
Part 3: Bring It All Together
Pull everything above into one document: your story, voice, positioning statement, and ideal client profile with their real problem, their trigger, and where they spend time. This becomes the reference point for every piece of marketing your firm produces from here, whether that's your website, a social post, or an email to your list.
We provide a free workbook with exercises for each of these activities. Download your copy today.
Collective by DBA supports and guides accounting firm owners and their teams with operational strategy, firm resources, and education through Streamlined OS, Mastermind Groups, and one-on-one Advisory.
