Why an accountancy practice needs a content plan

• A blog is a page on your website. A content plan has a cadence, a routine for reusing each piece, measurement and an owner.
• Most practice blogs stop at post four because no one's job depends on post five.
• Guides, calculators, a newsletter and social cuts are one piece of work cut four ways.
• At Muckin, marketing is its own seat: a marketer on your team, priced as a Production seat.

Go and look at your blog

Most practice websites have one. Click on it. There is a fair chance the latest post is from a Budget three Budgets ago, that there are four posts in total, and that the first one is titled something like "Welcome to our new website".

We run a practice. Our first blog looked exactly like that. It was not a failure of intent. Everybody meant to keep it going. It failed because a blog is a place, and a place does not produce anything. Posts go there to die.

What went wrong at post four

The pattern is always the same. The website launches. The partner writes two posts in a burst of enthusiasm. A manager writes one about a deadline. Then the self assessment season arrives and no one writes anything for six months. By the time somebody remembers, the posts that exist are out of date and the energy to restart has gone.

Nothing about that is a content problem. It is an ownership problem. Nobody's job depended on post five existing. It was everybody's job, which is the same as nobody's. The partner is a fee-earner whose writing time is worth more as client time. The manager has a review pile. The admin team does not feel qualified. So the blog waits for a quiet week that never comes.

The five parts of a content plan

A content plan is a way of running the work. Five things make it one.

A plan

A list of what will be written, for whom, and why: "a guide for landlord clients on record-keeping in September, a calculator for contractors in October, the year-end checklist in November". The plan is built from the questions your clients ask, which your team already knows, and from the niches your practice wants more of.

A cadence

A fixed rhythm that does not bend to the season. One long piece a month. A newsletter every fortnight. Three social posts a week. The exact numbers matter less than the fact they are fixed, because a fixed cadence is what makes the next item non-optional.

Reusing each piece

Most practices think of content as four separate jobs: a guide, a calculator, a newsletter, social posts. A content plan treats them as one piece of work that gets cut four ways. The guide is written first. The calculator comes out of the worked example in the guide. The newsletter is the guide's summary with a link. The social posts are the guide's five best sentences. One decision, four outputs, every month.

Measurement

The things you can act on: which guides get read, which newsletter links get clicked, which enquiry forms mention a piece by name. We will not make traffic claims here, because we do not know your market. Without measurement you cannot tell which pieces produce enquiries, and the plan drifts back into a blog.

An owner

Somebody whose job it is. The biggest difference between a blog and a content plan is a person who is accountable for the next item being published on the date in the plan, and whose other work does not get to push it aside.

Why it is production work

Most practices treat content as a creative job, so the partner ends up writing posts at ten at night. Content in a practice is a production job. It has a source (what your team knows and what your clients ask), a process (draft, technical check, review, publish, cut), a reviewer (a qualified person who makes sure nothing is wrong) and a deadline. That is the shape of every other job in a practice.

So it is done the way every other job is done: by a production person, reviewed by a qualified one. The partner's role is the technical check and the final read, which takes about twenty minutes.

At Muckin that production person is a marketer on a marketing seat, priced as a Production seat. A 40-hour seat covers the month's guide, newsletter and social cuts, and more hours add campaigns and ads. The rates are on the pricing page.

What stays with the partner

The views in a piece are the practice's, and the partner owns them. A qualified person checks every piece before it goes out, and anything that touches rates, thresholds or deadlines is checked against gov.uk on the day. Enquiries build over months. A year in, your website has twelve useful guides on it in place of four dead posts.

A month, roughly

Week one: the plan says this month's piece is a guide for a niche your practice wants more of. The seat drafts it from a brief the partner spent fifteen minutes on. Week two: the draft goes to a qualified reviewer for the technical check and back with corrections; the calculator is built from the worked example. Week three: published; the newsletter goes out with the guide as its lead; the first social cuts go up. Week four: the remaining cuts, a look at what was read and clicked, and the brief for next month. Then it happens again, whether or not it is January.

How it works covers how a marketing seat starts.

Where to start

Work out what a seat would cost you against the hours the practice is currently not spending on content with the capacity calculator, then talk to us about what a plan for your niches would look like. We muck in on the writing. You keep the opinions.

Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change, so check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners and is not advice.