The three newsletters produced by Practice Advantage – Business Matters, Personal Financial Strategies and The Profit Improver – are all excellent tools to help firms keep in touch with their clients throughout the year, promoting brand awareness and giving added value to accountancy and business advisory services.

A newsletter that is custom designed with your firm’s colours, a customised masthead, and a name that suits your firm’s brand, however, could be an even more useful marketing tool than any of our standard designs.

Customised newsletters help to give your firm a more professional appearance, while also building your brand image to help you stand out from the crowd. You can also use your customised newsletter as a space to cross-sell your services, giving your firm even more, and helping your firm’s name stay in the minds of your existing and potential clientele.

The latest edition of Business Matters (4th quarter 2009) has been released today. The newsletter includes a range of compliance and non-compliance issues, such as ‘What is in a name?’, ‘Cost effective marketing strategies’, ‘Hidden cost of tax debts’ and ‘FBT risks for employers’. You will also find a book review of ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking, Without Thinking’ by Malcolm Gladwell – the best-selling author of ‘The Tipping Point’.

You can order your own Business Matters newsletter for as little as $925.00 per year. Business Matters is released quarterly, in January, April, July and October.

Practice Advantage is now using Box.net system to deliver newsletters. Clients will receive an email containing a private link to a webspace from which newletters can be downloaded. The good news- no more passwords required.

When clients come to us for a newsletter or website, they don’t always have a suitable, pre-made logo ready for use. Some have never needed a logo before; others have an existing design that just doesn’t make the most of the firm’s image and message. At Practice Advantage, we always try to listen to the market – so we’ve come up with our own custom logo design service.

We are currently offering two options: a typographical (text-based) and non-typographical (image-based) logo. You can order a logo for as little as $195 – which is a lot less than you’ll see at any of the bigger design firms.

Over the last year, feedback from our clients has asked for greater customisation options for our newsletters. Firms want to set themselves apart from the competition – they want their newsletter to reflect their identity, services and clients.

That’s why we are introducing improved newsletter customisation. Our newsletters will still be generically written, but for a small fee, your newsletter will reflect the look and feel of your firm.

Key features include:

• · Custom masthead – re-name, design and colour-match the newsletter masthead
• · Colours – colour-match the newsletter content colours to your firm’s colour scheme

During the last six months, we’ve been very fortunate to receive many referrals from firms who were very pleased with our work. Some referred us fellow accountants; others recommended us to their own clients. Each referral has been a great recognition of our team’s efforts throughout the past year – and now it’s our turn to say “thank you!”

We are excited to introduce a new Practice Advantage Loyalty Program, which will reward you for referring business to us and helping us grow. The Loyalty Program works on two levels, so both the firm referring and the firm to whom we’ve been referred will be rewarded. Gifts include either a US$50.00 or US$75.00 Amazon gift-card.

To find out more or send through a referral, see Refer Us.

This year we trialled the introduction of an End of Year Update prior to Christmas. The End of Year Update pilot was introduced as a response to many firms during the last 12 months who wanted to take advantage of a time when clients reflect and set business and personal resolutions for the new year. We have been thrilled with the positive response.

Features include:

• Practical advice & tax-planning strategies for the lead-up to Christmas
• Special Christmas or holiday message
• Details about opening and closing hours over the Christmas period

We would like to thank our subscribers who in the past have bought our other products and have now taken onboard this new product.

In a slow economy, a firm needs to modify its marketing and client development activities to deal with the new realities. When business slows down, accountants may tend to hide in their offices, ignore the outside world, and hope that business will improve. However, consider this an opportune time to put some extra effort into your marketing and client development activities. Here are a few things to consider in these tough times.

Adding value. Show your existing clients that you really care about their business by adding value wherever possible. When things are slow, clients look for greater value from all of their service providers. Do not give them a reason to find a new accounting firm because you are reluctant to bend a bit on your fees or services.

Repackage your services. Look at your service offerings and see how they could be changed or repackaged to make them more attractive in this situation.
Upgrade or develop a website. If your firm has a website, spend time thinking about how it can be made more effective and take steps to upgrade it. If you don’t have a website, set one up and be sure to add your website address to your letterhead and business cards.

Renew your marketing efforts. Marketing during difficult economic times is always tough. But cutting back on your marketing efforts is the opposite of what you should be doing. When things are slow, use the time to review and re-energize your marketing efforts. While the suggestions above may require some creative thought, effort and money, they will help ensure the future growth of your firm.
Keep in touch with former clients. Send your clients something of value such as a report, survey results, an article of interest or other information, and then follow up to discuss it.

Attend to your prospect list. A down economy is no time to forget about your prospective clients. Just don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell and persuade. Instead, spend most of your time providing information — hands-on material that your prospects can really use. These types of activities will keep your name in front of the prospect and also help communicate the value that you offer.

Broadcast Your Message. When business is slow, you need to get your name, your message, and your ideas out there for prospects and clients to see and hear. Send out a newsletter, or give a talk at a conference at least twice a year. This will spread your name around and generate new leads shortly.

Hello and welcome. We have just released our new website and with it some increased options for our newsletters. After five years serving accounting firms in Australia and New Zealand, a facelift for some of our products were well overdue.

We have some big plans for the next 12 months. These will include re-launching Your Firm Online website (within the next two weeks), plus our equivalent sites in New Zealand. For our New Zealand clients we are working at the moment to accept NZ dollars.

In upcoming weeks you can expect to see some new offerings for our website products. Our client document centre has received a re-write and will be out with some very interesting features. In addition, our Marketing Resources Centre will be open - subscribers will be able to freely access a range of marketing tools from letter templates, marketing plans, checklists, firms surveys plus cheat sheets on how you can kick your firm marketing to the next level.

I plan to post a regular update on our site dealing with the questions that I get from accounting firms every day. I hope you revisit and as always welcome your feedback.

Nic Gadaleta