Marketing Your Business

Why Marketing Your Business Is Important

Marketing Your Business is an important element of gaining new customers, reminding existing customers of your services – and highlighting services that you provide that your existing clients are not taking advantage of.

As accountants, we are assuming at this point that you have a marketing budget for your business. We are not the marketing department, we are the accounts department but the two are closely linked. So if you have a marketing budget for your business, how much should you allocate to marketing your business?

Obviously this differs according to the size of your business, because smaller businesses will not have a huge marketing budget and many small businesses will be attempting the “Do It Yourself” route of marketing, which means time over money. If a one man band tradesman – e.g. electrician, plumber, carpenter has a van and they pay for the van to be signwritten. That is a one off marketing cost. Whilst the purchase or lease of a van is quite a hefty expense, it does the advertising for you whilst you drive to your various jobs and being parked at the job site too. Ongoing costs would be reprints of business cards and letterheads for business stationery. Plus you may have membership subscriptions to various online directories e.g. Checkatrade, Rated People and so on.

However, these figures below suggest that more and more activity (and spend) is being done online.

  • In 2016, the average business was expected to allocate 30% of their marketing budget to online activities and this is expected to increase to 35% by 2019.
  • Search Engine Marketing will capture the largest share of online spend with online display (banner ads, online video, etc.) taking the second largest share.
  • Social Media investments will continue to grow as an overall share of online spend, but will only represent about 15% of the total online spend.
  • Mobile Marketing has grown to a point that it’s no longer tracked in the forecast and it’s presumed to be considered across all channels.

Many small businesses – or more specifically one person outfits – are struggling to keep on top of all of the everyday business tasks as well as marketing their business through online channels. Some are not active at all in the online space and whilst they recognise that they need to have a presence online, they may have only established a website but no activity on Social Media exists.

What we are finding, through helping our clients with their marketing budget for their business, is more and more of our clients are needing to outsource their online marketing in order to allow the business owner to run the business itself. This is a cost effective and independently effective method for marketing your business. It increases exposure for your business and if handled correctly engages existing clients, contacts and potential clients in online activity with marketing your business.

If you would like to know who we recommend for this service, feel free to contact us on 020 8643 9633.