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Writing content for emails, social media and blog posts is the single biggest reason accounting firms stop marketing. It is not the tools, the strategy, or the budget. It is the writing. Someone at the firm has to produce it, or you pay someone else to, and either way the cost adds up faster than most practices realise.
This calculator works out exactly what your firm spends on content creation right now, including the time your team puts in and any outsourcing costs, then shows you what that number looks like against an automated alternative.
Six questions, two minutes, no download required.
It depends on who does the writing. If a partner or principal writes the content, the real cost is their time at a charge-out rate of around AUD $275 per hour. A single blog post that takes three hours to research and write represents over $800 in opportunity cost. If an office manager writes it, the cost is lower per hour ($65/hr) but the time taken is usually longer, and a partner still needs to review the finished piece for technical accuracy. Outsourcing to a freelance copywriter in Australia typically costs $100 to $200 per hour for a competent writer (Clever Copywriting School), but most copywriters are not accounting specialists, so a partner still has to brief, review, and correct the work. The total cost is almost always higher than firms expect.
Most small businesses spend between 6 and 10 hours per week on content-related marketing tasks including writing, scheduling, sourcing images, and posting across channels (HubSpot, 2024). For accounting firms, that time is rarely protected or scheduled. It competes with billable work, client meetings, and practice management. A single 1,000-word article typically takes 3 to 5 hours to research, write, and format before any time spent turning it into an email campaign or social post. Most firms that try to do this in-house find the writing stops within a few months because no one has the hours.
Neither option is as simple as it looks. Outsourcing a single article to a mid-level Australian copywriter costs roughly $300 to $500 per piece. But the invoice is not the full cost. A generalist writer does not know ATO compliance deadlines, Division 7A rules, or how to explain GST obligations to a small business owner. The partner has to write the brief, explain the technical context, review the draft for accuracy, and often rewrite sections. That review cycle adds hours of partner time on top of the outsourcing fee. Writing in-house avoids the invoice but costs even more in opportunity: a partner spending four hours on a blog post at $275/hr has spent $1,100. The third option is using a pre-written content library where articles are already produced by accounting and business specialists, localised for Australian legislation, and ready to send across email, social media, and blog channels. The firm’s role shifts from writing to selecting and scheduling.
Email marketing, the primary channel most accounting firms use for client communication, returns an average of $36 to $42 for every $1 spent (Litmus, 2025; DMA UK). For professional services firms including accountants, overall marketing ROI benchmarks sit between 3:1 and 5:1 (roi.com.au). The 2025-26 AAM Marketing Budget Benchmark Study found that high-growth accounting firms allocate twice as much of their revenue to marketing as average firms. The returns are real, but only for firms that market consistently. A newsletter sent once and abandoned produces nothing. A monthly programme maintained over twelve months produces compounding visibility and trust.
The most effective way is to remove the writing step entirely. Content creation, specifically the researching, writing, and reviewing of articles, is where most of the time and cost sits. It is also the point where most accounting firms give up. Platforms like BOMA provide hundreds of pre-written, jurisdiction-specific articles across tax, compliance, cashflow, technology, people management, sustainability, and industry-specific advice. Each article is available as an email campaign, social media post, or blog article. This replaces hours of writing time with a selection and scheduling task that takes minutes. Use the calculator above to see what that difference looks like for your firm.
