Marketing and business development for accountancy firms and accountants in London, the UK, Europe and the USA
Almost every accountancy firm in the country has decided to do more advisory work. Very few have changed anything about how they market themselves to match.
The compliance base still pays the bills, the partners still own the relationships, and January still swallows the diary. So the advisory ambition sits in the strategy document while the marketing carries on quietly selling accounts and tax returns.
What’s different about marketing an accountancy firm?
Most of your growth comes from clients who already buy something from you. Selling advisory work into a compliance base is a different job from winning new clients, and it depends on partner relationships and internal communication as much as on any external campaign. Add strict seasonality and a commoditised core service, and generic marketing advice doesn’t survive contact with a practice.
The challenges accountancy firms face
Accountancy is the sector where the marketing problem is most often internal rather than external. Your clients trust you, your work is good, and there’s still money being left on the table every year.
Advisory ambition, compliance marketing. The firm has agreed it wants more advisory work. Nothing about the website, the content or the client conversations has changed to reflect it, so clients carry on thinking of you as the people who do their accounts.
Cross-selling that gets discussed and never moves. It comes up at every partner meeting. Everyone agrees. Then a partner who’s been looking after a client for twelve years doesn’t want to complicate the relationship by mentioning corporate finance, and nothing happens.
Partners own the relationships, and the firm doesn’t. When someone retires or leaves, the clients are at risk, because the relationship was personal rather than institutional.
January eats the year. Marketing stops for the busiest months and starts again in a scramble, so nothing compounds. The firms that grow are the ones that have worked out what still runs when nobody’s got time.
You look like the practice down the road. Trusted, proactive, more than just accountants. So does everyone. There’s nothing on the page telling a business owner why you specifically.
Competing with consolidators. PE-backed groups are buying up practices and marketing with budgets you haven’t got. Your advantage is real, but it isn’t scale, and your marketing needs to say what it actually is.
A capable marketing person with no direction. Your marketing executive is producing newsletters, updating the website, posting on LinkedIn. Nobody senior is telling them what good looks like or what any of it is for.
How I can help
If you’re a managing partner without a marketing function
You’re running the practice, carrying your own client load, and marketing is the thing that never reaches the top of the list.
- Build a marketing and business development plan that’s honest about the resource you’ve actually got.
- Work out how to take advisory services to your existing client base without it feeling like a sales push.
- Sharpen your positioning so a prospective client can tell in thirty seconds why you, rather than the practice down the road.
- Work out what marketing resource you need, and help you recruit it when the time comes.
If you’ve got a small or junior marketing team
They’re capable and busy. What’s missing is someone senior setting direction and telling them what matters.
- Give them a plan with priorities, so effort goes where it generates work.
- Mentor and upskill them, so their judgement and confidence grow.
- Provide the senior oversight you haven’t got, without the cost of a full-time hire.
If you’re a head of marketing at a larger practice
You know what needs doing. You haven’t got the hours or the hands.
- Extra senior capacity on specific campaigns, sector launches or service line work.
- A second experienced view on strategy, and someone who’ll constructively challenge it.
- Support demonstrating return to a partnership that wants to see the link between marketing and fees.
Services I offer accountancy firms
Marketing strategy and planning
A written plan covering positioning, target clients, service lines, channels and messaging, with priorities and owners attached. Built around the resource you’ve genuinely got, which is usually why marketing plans get abandoned in the first place.
Marketing reviews and audits
An independent look at what you’re doing, what it’s costing in money and partner time, and what’s actually generating work. Ends in a prioritised set of recommendations you can take to your partners.
Business development
The cross-selling and referral side. Sector and service line plans, individual plans for partners, and a structure for the referral relationships you have with lawyers, IFAs and banks that currently belong to individuals rather than the firm.
Fractional marketing director and CMO services
Senior marketing leadership one or two days a week. For practices that need someone owning marketing at partner level without carrying a full-time salary.
Why work with me?
I’ve been running Helen Cox Marketing since 2016 and have worked with clients across professional services and B2B. A large part of my in-house career was spent at a top ten accountancy firm in the city, alongside work with smaller practices since.
That matters here. Your job is to be good with the numbers. Mine is to give you clarity and direction on marketing and business development, and to know before I start that a plan requiring partner time in January isn’t a plan.
I understand partnerships, fee earners, and the reality of getting senior people to engage with marketing when they’ve got a compliance deadline in front of them.
I’m a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) with Chartered Marketer status.
Who I work with in accountancy
Firms: solo practitioners, growing practices from ten partners upwards, established and top ten firms, and boutique or specialist practices.
People: managing partners, senior partners, heads of practice, heads of marketing and business development, marketing managers, and marketing executives and assistants.
Who this isn’t for
If what you want is volume lead generation for compliance work, or an SEO agency to get you ranking for “accountants near me”, I’m not the right person and I’ll say so on the call. That work exists and other people do it better than I would.
I’m brought in when the question is what the firm should be doing and why, and when someone needs to help the partners act on the answer.
Get in touch
If your firm has decided to do more advisory work and nothing much has changed, that’s usually a marketing and business development problem rather than a strategy one. The strategy is generally fine. It’s the bit that turns it into what partners do on Monday that’s missing.
Book a discovery call and tell me where your practice is.
I work with B2B businesses, law and solicitors firms, accountants and consultancies in London, the UK, Europe and the USA.
Happy clients
Quickly pulled together a plan for us to give our marketing structure
Helen has worked with our accountancy practice as our outsourced marketing manager for the firm. When she came on board she quickly pulled together a plan for us to give our marketing some structure.
Mason Bloom, Partner, Silver Levene
Confident and reassuring approach
Helen is a fantastic asset in running a campaign. She understands the various different channels and is an ace on social media. She has taught me a lot and I would not hesitate to recommend Helen. She has a very confident and reassuring approach.
Melanie Reed, Head of Corporate Tax, RSM
Accountancy firms I’ve worked with
Case study highlight
Transforming a specialist accountancy firm’s marketing strategy
Discover how I partnered with a specialist accountancy firm in London to provide strategic marketing guidance. The CEO approached me for advice, struggling to navigate the marketing landscape and looking for a trusted expert to help him make informed decisions and drive the firm’s growth.
FAQs
Mostly internally first. Your partners need to know what the firm can do beyond their own service line, and your clients need to hear about it in the conversations they’re already having with you rather than in a newsletter. External marketing supports that, but on its own it rarely shifts anything, which is why most cross-selling initiatives stall.
It works with them rather than around them. That usually means individual business development plans built around each partner’s actual clients and network, so the ask is specific and realistic rather than a general instruction to do more BD. It also means making sure the firm holds those relationships too, not just the individual.
Realistically it slows down, and a plan that pretends otherwise won’t survive. What I’d build is a plan that separates the things needing partner time from the things that don’t, so something keeps running through the busy months and you’re not restarting from cold every spring.
Both, and they’re closer than firms think. The same positioning that tells a business owner why you’re different tells a good manager why they’d want to work for you. It’s worth planning them together rather than letting recruitment marketing become a separate thing HR does.
Yes, and arguably more so. A firm with clear positioning, a managed pipeline and client relationships that belong to the practice rather than to individual partners is worth more than one where the value walks out at retirement. That’s true whether you sell or not.
No. Plenty of the practices I work with have one marketing executive, or nobody at all. Working out what resource you need, and in what order, is often part of the job.
It’s a free 30 minutes for me to understand what you’re dealing with and work out whether I’m the right person to help. If I’m not, I’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Let’s talk…
For more information on any of my services, get in touch and let’s talk.