Base Creative and ICPA collaborate to bring digital marketing advice to UK accounting firms

It’s been months in the making, with plenty of Zoom calls, a members survey, a whitepaper and the preparation of three upcoming webinars. This is the culmination of a Base Creative and the Institute of Certified Practising Accountants (ICPA) digital marketing collaboration.

The ICPA and what they do

The Institute of Certified Practising Accountants is a membership organisation dedicated to supporting accountants in practise across the UK. The organisation offers a wide range of benefits to members, including training, events, software, and more.

How did the collaboration come about?

In the early part of 2021, Base Creative ran a webinar specifically for organisations in finance and accounting, which the ICPA supported and promoted to its members. From there, a closer partnership was forged, resulting in an ICPA members survey around the challenges accounting firms faced with their digital marketing. The results of this survey, combined with our wider expertise and experience working with finance and accounting clients, allowed us to highlight common obstacles and pitfalls in the ICPA x Base Creative Digital Marketing Report 2021.

The top digital marketing challenges accounting firms face in 2021

The survey highlighted these core challenges faced by accounting firms:

• Time. There just isn’t enough of it for marketing. Commonly, a theme of the results was not knowing where to spend time when it was dedicated to marketing. For some, lack of knowledge and expertise in digital marketing often meant time wasn’t being used effectively, or with little beneficial outcomes.
• Budget. There just isn’t enough of that either. Marketing does take time, and it will mean spending money. This is either on ads, a website, paid social media exposure… there’s a bottomless pit of digital marketing ideas. Unfortunately, there’s rarely a bottomless pit of money to allocate to these activities – for any business!
• Local awareness. This was the least expected theme of the survey, but was crucial to so many accounting firms, as they look to do more business locally. It became clear that many accounting firms were unaware of Google’s role in driving local business (and footfall) and awareness within the immediate and surrounding community.

You mentioned digital marketing webinars…

We did. And they perfectly match the key challenges highlighted above. In collaboration with the ICPA, Base Creative will be running a series of 3 webinars to help accounting firms in the UK with their digital marketing.

For ICPA members, links to the webinar series are below.

Improving local awareness in Google

Local awareness is key for smaller practices, so this session will focus on how you can use Google’s tools to improve your firm’s discoverability in the local area.

Watch the replay

Effective marketing for small, medium and large budgets

The second session will look at which digital marketing activities ICPA firms should prioritise based on their yearly marketing budgets.

Watch the replay

How to cut time spent on marketing in half

Lack of time is often the reason accountancy firms don’t market their business, so in the third session, we’ll share easy time-saving strategies that all ICPA firms can introduce, like automation and content repurposing.

Watch the replay