Practice Development Through Marketing
Marketing strategy: part of your business plan
You cannot produce an effective business plan for your practice without first working out your marketing strategy. What you spend on winning and keeping clients, and the fee income that spending generates, sits right at the heart of how the business performs as a whole. Review the two together regularly: projected cost against projected fee growth, then both against what actually happened, so you can tell what is working and stop funding what isn’t.
That discipline hasn’t changed since this article was first written. What has changed is almost everything sitting underneath it: how practices grow, how clients find you, and what technology can now do for both. This update reflects where the profession stood in 2026.
Growing through merger or acquisition
Buying or merging with another practice is still one of the most cost-effective ways to grow. You know from day one roughly how much the practice will expand and when, which lets you plan staffing properly rather than scrambling to keep up. Where a merger brings two practices under one roof, the efficiencies you gain can free up partner time that would otherwise be tied up in day-to-day delivery; that time is then available for the wider marketing strategy.
What’s different now is the climate around M&A itself. The UK accountancy sector has become a seller’s market, with private equity capital flowing into the mid-tier at real pace. ICAEW’s own research on mid-tier firms found that 46% now have secured private equity investment, up from 25% just a year earlier, and firms cite growth through M&A and talent investment as their main reasons for taking it on. If you’re thinking about buying, that means more competition for good practices and, often, higher prices. If you’re thinking about selling or merging out, it means more options and, for many owners, better terms than were on the table a few years ago.
One thing worth knowing before you sign anything: technical debt, not price, is increasingly what kills a deal or drags out an integration. Firms speaking at Accountex London this year were blunt about it. A legacy tech stack, or a partner who won’t let go of the old software, does more damage to a merger than a mismatched valuation ever does. The firms getting this right now aim to have billing and CRM systems fully consolidated within about 30 days of completion. If you’re on either side of a deal, get your systems conversation started early, not after the ink is dry.
As before, resist the urge to be too prudent on staffing once the deal completes. Skimping on payroll to protect margin tends to mean you end up filling the gap with your own chargeable hours, which leaves no time for the market development that got you here; debtor days and stress both tend to creep up as a result. As a rough guide, a well-established practice should be looking to keep gross payroll costs somewhere in the 30 to 33% of gross fees range, and rarely above 40%.
Your existing clients are still your best source of growth
Outside of merger and acquisition, your own client base remains the single richest source of new fee income, both directly through additional services and indirectly through the people they know. That principle hasn’t dated at all; if anything, it matters more now that client acquisition costs online have climbed.
A few ways to put it into practice:
Ask for referrals properly, not just occasionally. Build a simple, regular cycle: a call or a well-timed email every six months asking who else in their network might benefit from talking to you, with a modest incentive for introductions that convert. Use the conversation as a natural opening to mention services they may not know you offer.
Update the in-house seminar. A two-hour evening seminar still has its place, but a short, well-produced webinar or a recorded video explainer reaches more clients with less disruption to their day, and you can reuse the recording as content on your website and LinkedIn afterwards. Bringing in a guest speaker on a reciprocal basis, a bank manager, an insurance broker, a commercial solicitor, still works well and costs nothing but time.
Aim for higher-value work, not simply faster delivery of the same work. ICAEW’s 2026 research on mid-tier firms found that 71% expect AI to free them to move into higher-value advisory work. That’s the real opportunity here. As routine bookkeeping, VAT returns and management accounts become increasingly automated, fee income shifts towards interpretation, forecasting, and genuinely advising clients on their numbers: work that’s harder to commoditise and better rewarded.
A wider range of services to offer
The traditional list, accounts preparation, audit, corporate and personal tax, payroll, insolvency, company secretarial work and so on, is still the backbone of most practices. It’s worth periodically checking your client base for anyone who could use a service they don’t currently take from you. Worth adding to that list now is anything client-facing that has grown up alongside AI and regulatory change: data analytics and management information, ESG and sustainability reporting (UK Sustainability Reporting Standards became a fixture for many businesses this year, and larger clients increasingly ask their smaller suppliers for emissions and sustainability data), cross-border and multi-jurisdictional tax advice, and cloud accounting migration and advisory. ICAEW’s own figures show firms hiring specifically for data analytics, technology, sustainability and regulatory expertise well ahead of traditional accounting skills, a good indication of where client demand is heading, and where an existing practice can differentiate itself from a firm offering compliance work alone.
Building your marketing timeline
Splitting your marketing plan into short, medium and long-term activity still makes sense. It stops you either doing nothing or trying to do everything at once.
Short term, your priority is still your existing clients, alongside a properly targeted approach to new ones. Rather than lineage adverts in the local paper, this now means a well-optimised website, a LinkedIn presence that’s actually active rather than dormant, and, if you want to bring in help, a specialist marketing agency or telemarketing partner who understands the profession’s regulatory guidelines rather than a generic call centre. Building a database and sending genuinely useful, well-targeted content to defined niches (GPs, solicitors, architects, hospitality businesses, whatever your specialism happens to be) still beats a scattergun approach. Have anything you send checked by a client or contact from that same niche before it goes out. The rule hasn’t changed: nothing impresses a prospective client less than marketing that skirts around the substance.
Medium term, this is about deepening relationships: proper conversations with clients about the value-added services they haven’t taken up, a structured referral ask with a genuine incentive attached, and a presence, digital or physical, wherever your target clients actually spend their time.
Long term, the relationship-building side hasn’t changed much in substance even though the channels have. Bank managers, solicitors and other professional introducers are still worth cultivating over lunch. Chamber of Commerce membership, local business groups, sponsorship of something your community cares about, and genuinely useful commentary in the local or trade press all still build reputation in a way that’s hard to buy outright. Being visible and useful, consistently, over years, remains the most durable form of marketing there is.
Making time for business development
Whatever else changes, this doesn’t: build a non-recoverable amount of time into the budget, per partner, per week, protected for marketing and business development. It’s easy to let this slip when fee work is busy, but it’s exactly the habit that keeps the pipeline full for the quieter periods. Moving as many clients as you sensibly can onto monthly standing order, ideally paid in advance, still helps free up that time and smooths your cash flow at the same time.
Where AI and technology fit in
This is the section that has changed the most since the article was first written, and it’s worth being honest about both the opportunity and the noise around it.
AI adoption in the profession is now mainstream rather than experimental. ICAEW’s 2026 research found that 95% of mid-tier firms expect to increase their use of AI over the next three years, and nearly half of accountants already use it at least weekly. But adoption and usefulness are two different things: industry data presented at Accountex London this year suggested that around 95% of AI pilot projects in accountancy still fail to deliver real value, usually because firms bolt on a chatbot-style tool without connecting it properly to their actual client data and workflows. The lesson for a practice thinking about where to spend its time and budget is to be genuinely useful before being clever. A well-configured AI assistant that drafts client correspondence, summarises meeting notes, or flags anomalies in a set of accounts will earn its keep faster than a flashy tool nobody in the practice actually uses.
For marketing specifically, AI is now a sensible way to get more from the time you have. It can help draft first versions of client newsletters, blog posts, LinkedIn updates and seminar materials, provided a real person still reviews and puts their own voice and judgement into the final version. Clients and prospects notice when that step gets skipped. It can also help you personalise outreach at a scale that would have taken a full-time employee to manage a few years ago, and it’s increasingly built into practice management software as standard rather than something you buy separately.
A few other tools worth having a proper strategy for, rather than dabbling in:
LinkedIn has become the dominant professional network for accountancy marketing in a way that Facebook and Twitter never quite managed. A partner who posts genuinely useful commentary once or twice a week, engages with clients’ and prospects’ posts, and shares client wins (with permission) will do more for the practice’s reputation than almost any other single channel.
Client portals are now standard rather than a luxury, giving clients secure, real-time access to their documents and figures, and often including AI-assisted chat for routine queries. That frees your team’s time for the conversations that actually need a person.
Video, whether that’s short explainers, recorded webinars, or a partner talking through a topical tax change on camera, is far more accessible to produce well than it was even five years ago, and it works harder on your website and social channels than text alone.
Cybersecurity and data protection deserves a mention here precisely because it doesn’t get one often enough in marketing conversations. As you put more of your marketing and client interaction online, and increasingly through AI tools handling client data, your practice’s data protection standards become part of your reputation. Getting this visibly right, and being able to say so to clients and prospects, is itself a point of differentiation.
Your website in the age of AI search
A website is still a fundamental piece of your marketing infrastructure, but the way people find it has shifted. Search is no longer only about ranking on a results page. Increasingly, prospective clients are asking AI tools and chat-based search assistants direct questions and being handed a summarised answer, often with only a handful of sources cited. That means the old approach of stuffing pages with keywords matters far less than having clear, genuinely well-written, authoritative content that answers real questions your clients and prospects are asking: the kind of content that a search engine, or an AI system summarising the web, will want to point to.
Practically, that means keeping your website current, making sure it clearly demonstrates your specialisms and the outcomes you deliver for clients, and building out a small library of genuinely useful articles and guides rather than a handful of thin service pages. A client portal login, a simple enquiry process, and content that reads as though a real, experienced person wrote it, because it did, will do more for you now than any amount of technical search-engine trickery.