In order to attract the right type of SMSF clients, accountants need to build a specific brand for the target audience, the head of a data research house has said.
“You need to construct a brand for them and something they can actively purchase rather than just being passive around them,” CoreData principal Andrew Inwood told the 2014 selfmanagedsuper CoreData SMSF Accountants’ Day in Brisbane on Friday.
“One of the interesting issues with the accountancy profession in Australia is that, apart from the small number of players, not a huge amount of energy is put into that space.”
Inwood’s comments were based on research his firm performed indicating SMSF trustees were fairly brand conscious in their behaviour, having a preference for household business names such as the ASX, Qantas, Mercedes-Benz and Google.
The CoreData research also indicated 75.8 per cent of SMSF trustees considered themselves to be either browsers or hunters for information on the Internet. This characteristic, however, made creating a brand and service awareness more of a challenge for accountants.
“You can’t really just tell them things about yourself. The more you say about yourself, the more it gets degraded,” Inwood said.
“What happens with trustees is because there is no search service for this and you can’t just Google who’s the best accountant in the space, they layer up clues about you and the service that you provide.
“So given that these guys are browsers and they’re rich in this space, it’s really important that you start to leave a trail of information in the online environment that allows them to find you and build up a perspective about yourself.
“If they go online and you’re not there, that’s a withdrawal from the trust bank.”
The brand building must occur regardless of whether the accountant was looking to attract new clients or just better service their existing client base, he said.
“Your customers are looking at the online space and forming opinions from the data in this space,” he said.
“So it is absolutely critical that you are in this space or someone else is going to be and they’ll be growing into it.”
