Marketing For Accountants

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Digital Marketing for Accountants CSC

Accountants and CPA firms face challenges getting new clients and distinguishing themselves from competitors. Still, thousands of prospective clients are searching for accountant services, so the problem isn’t the lack of a client base.

In many cases, an absent or ineffective digital marketing strategy keeps potential clients from discovering the firm.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan for your marketing campaigns that outlines the audience you’re hoping to reach, the marketing campaigns you plan to launch, the goals you have for those campaigns and how you’ll determine success.

Digital marketing is a broad term that describes tactics like content marketing, email marketing, paid search marketing and more. Determining which tactics are the best for your firm depends on many factors. We’ll take a look at the different types of digital marketing for accountants and how they work to boost awareness and attract clients.

Marketing Tactics for Accountants

Website Design

Your website is the focal point of your entire digital marketing strategy. This the place where you’ll capture and nurture leads and offer information about your business.
Your website should not only have an attractive look, but it also needs a solid strategy that’s designed to funnel your visitors. Take some time to examine your site’s design and strategy to ensure it aligns with your goals. Here are some aspects to consider:

Think about your niche or specialty and evaluate if your site is attractive to those clients. Is that clear to your visitors?
Is the site easy to use and navigate? Does it load quickly? Does it look identical to your competitors’ websites?
Look at your call-to-action buttons and determine if different, targeted call-to-action buttons would attract different clients that need different services. If you have multiple call-to-action buttons, ensure that the site isn’t so cluttered that visitors become confused. Tailor your call-to-action buttons on different pages to persuade a specific action, such as subscribing to an email list or newsletter, contacting for information or filling out forms.

Once you’ve evaluated everything about your website, you can move forward with your digital marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a well-known marketing strategy that many businesses have implemented to attract clients, but not all do it well.

Content marketing is all about creating content for your accounting firm, but it’s not as simple as starting a blog and watching the visitors roll in. Your content needs to provide value and direction to your clients, so every bit of content should focus on serving their needs first.

Unfortunately, many accounting firms focus on monthly tax updates and the like, which are easy to find and don’t offer much to visitors. Your clients and prospective clients are looking for thoughtful and insightful content that answers their questions and helps with their problems.

A winning content strategy should have the following:

Cornerstone content: This is a long-form content piece that serves as your main lead driver. It should be around 2,000 words and showcase your in-depth understanding of a broad topic, which then connects to in-depth pieces about specific topics. When you’re getting started, you’ll find that your cornerstone content can inspire other topics and ideas that you can link to in the future.
Once you have your cornerstone content and ideas, you can start creating all the smaller pieces that connect back. Consider content like blog posts, FAQ pages, webinars, infographics, long articles and downloadable materials.

Ideally, your accounting firm will create a minimum of 2,000 words a month, which could look like:

A cornerstone piece twice a year.
3-5 blog posts each month.
30-60 social media posts per month.
1 or 2 webinars each quarter.
1 infographic each month.
1 or 2 case studies each quarter.

Though there’s a lot of work involved, having the cornerstone content as a starting point ensures the rest is cohesive and efficient to produce. It may take time for your content to attract attention, but as long as you’re consistent and providing value, you should see an increase in traffic and interest over time.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to online success. SEO is all about boosting your website’s ranking in the search engine results so that more people will find you when they search for accountants or accounting services.

Best practices for SEO include:

Use keyword-rich page titles that show search engines what you’re trying to rank for and encourage clients to click on your link.
Custom URLs with keywords not only help your ranking, but they also attract clients to your website.
Your site or page should have an ‘<h1>’ tag that informs prospective clients and the search engine what the topic is.
Ensure your content is high quality and valuable, rather than only focused on SEO.

The goal of these practices is to inform the search engine of what the site or page is about and what keywords you want to be associated with. Instead of having several pages that are about similar topics, you can use one page that has sub topics that direct back to it.

Like cornerstone content, you can start with broad topics and build a core topic page, then structure your supporting pages and content around it. You can then optimize that content based on the best practices, monitor your results and refine your content over time.

When you approach SEO in this manner, you’re not only establishing yourself as a credible site to the search engine, but you’re also helping your website weather any algorithm changes that may come in the future.

Paid Search Marketing

Though there are many ways to reach clients organically, paid search marketing is one of the most effective ways to get your marketing message in front of the right audience. By using paid search with Google Ads, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and pay-per-click (PPC), you can start generating high-quality leads from users who are already interested in accounting services.

Paid search can be a little intimidating to start, but it’s easy to learn. Here are the steps to get started:

Choose a service around your niche. Focusing your efforts will help you maximize your ad spend.
Design a landing page that’s customized to your goal to guide visitors.
Create a custom offer that inspires visitors to take action. Be specific, if possible.
Google Ads works with bidding on keywords each time someone conducts a search. When you first launch your campaign, keep your bid low. As you begin to see results and tweak your campaigns, you can increase your bid until you begin to see impressions.
Monitor your progress and test your ad copy, landing page, call-to-action phrasing and other details, adjusting as needed. This will help you improve your performance and keep your budget low.

Paid search is a great tool for attracting new leads, but it also gives you a chance to experiment with campaigns with a low investment. You can even use it to test out new products, services or specialties to gauge the market interest before investing.

Account-Based Marketing

If you find that prospective clients are visiting your website but just not booking appointments, you can run remarketing campaigns. These campaigns target prospects who have visited your website but haven’t converted. You can use this as an opportunity to entice them with new content or offers.

You can also use this information to find out what companies are visiting your website with marketing automation tools. If anyone visits your site with an IP associated with a company, you can find out and review the company list for potential accounts to target.

Now you have a targeted list of potential companies that have shown interest in your firm, so you can start ad campaigns or targeted emails to attract them.

Mobile Marketing

With many consumers finding information and shopping on their devices, mobile marketing is more important than ever. Each day, more prospective customers are using their mobile devices for search than their desktops, so mobile optimization is a priority.

When prospective clients are choosing between accounting firms, they’re likely to be on their phones. If your site’s text is too small, the links are too close together, it takes too long to load or it simply isn’t as easy to navigate on a device, they’re more likely to click away to the next website.

Before you can plan any kind of mobile marketing strategy, you need to develop a mobile-friendly website that works seamlessly across devices. Then you can consider mobile advertising, text message marketing, instant message marketing, apps and interactive content specifically designed for mobile users.

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Tips for Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns

Though you have plenty of options to grow your accounting business online, we’ve compiled an overview to help you develop successful digital marketing campaigns.

Establish Specialty and Niche

Before you can develop any aspect of your digital marketing strategy, you need to determine your niche and understand your client base. You should know who they are and what their needs are so that you can provide them with relevant services.

In doing so, you can:

Ensure that your current clients are happy and satisfied.
Stay ahead of evolving trends and the unexpected challenges that may come up.
Know how to approach prospective clients.
Provide future clients proof that you can give them the help they need.

Some accounting firms serve numerous industries, while others specialize in professional fields. Because of this, you should understand the unique challenges your clients face and tailor your approach to reach them.

Once you know who you’re looking to attract, you can channel that insight into your marketing strategy. Whether you’re just launching your business or have a designated marketing budget and strategy, it’s vital to understand your clients and define your marketing goals. Your plan should include your niche, unique selling points, strengths and weaknesses, business targets and overall goals.

Find the Best Marketing Channels

Now that you have a strategy, it’s time for inbound marketing tactics. You can research how people search for accountants, what information they’re looking for and how you can deliver what they need. Choosing the right channels depends on your company’s budget, audience and resources.

Apply Social Media Marketing Strategies

Social media is powerful for all businesses, but it provides unique opportunities for accountants. You’ll need a clear picture of your audience and relevant and timely content to share with them to leverage this power.

When designing your social media accounts or revamping your existing accounts, consider:

Branding: Ensure your logo, header, URL and bio are current and cohesive.
Voice: Ensure your social media posts fit your brand personality. You should keep the tone professional and informational, but you can insert a little humor or conversational speech if it suits the rest of your brand’s personality and your client base.
Content: Ensure your content educates and entertains your prospective clients, rather than selling something. It should also reflect your perspective and values as a brand.
Scheduling: Many tools are available to plan, schedule and publish your content to your various social media accounts and ensure a consistent, cohesive schedule that your followers can rely on. With that taken care of, you can focus your attention on topical industry news, customer support questions and other hands-on interactions.

Social media is a great platform to publish and promote your own content, but it can also be leveraged to connect with prospective and current clients, industry leaders and other professionals. Be sure to share valuable content posted by others to boost your presence and attract new leads.

Use Referrals

Customers value trust in businesses, so referrals from other satisfied customers hold a lot of weight with a prospective client. The best way to leverage this power is by making it easy for your clients to refer friends and colleagues. You could even offer a discount or bonus for client referrals or send thank you emails to show your appreciation.

Reinforce Your Position as an Industry Expert

Content marketing not only helps your clients and demonstrates your expertise, but it also boosts your search engine optimization. Offering valuable, timely content can help your website appear higher in the search engine results page, so more clients can see it when they search for accountants.

Accounting is highly competitive, but having a solid content strategy showcases your knowledge and expertise to prospective clients, giving them more confidence in choosing your firm. Knowing your clients and their needs helps you devise topics, but if you’re just starting out, you can address broad accounting topics or answer commonly asked questions in an article or blog format. Many accountants are branching out into other content types, such as podcasts, YouTube videos, learning platforms, e-books and other digital materials.

The more information and insights you can provide to your clients, the better your chances are of establishing your firm as an industry leader.

Utilize Email Marketing

Email is a time-honored marketing strategy that’s vital to long-term success. You can collect the contact information for current and prospective clients and send them educational or promotional content to retain or attract them.

No matter how much or little you use email marketing, however, be sure to use a signature and keep your branding consistent. You can find an array of email automation and marketing tools that can take a lot of the guesswork and time out of the process.

Measure Marketing Efforts

Even with the best marketing strategy, you won’t find success if you don’t monitor, measure, and evaluate your efforts on a regular basis.

Once you have your strategy, devise a system of goals and assessments at specified intervals. This will allow you to determine what’s working and what areas need improvement so that you can make adjustments along the way. Mistakes are normal, but by keeping track of your progress, you can make smarter decisions in the future and spare some of your marketing budget for tactics that work.

Conclusion

A lot of planning and preparation goes into your digital marketing strategy, but it all starts with defining your brand. Once you have that, you’ll be ready to choose the best marketing tactics for your needs and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

If you’re ready to plan your digital marketing for accountants strategy, M16 Marketing is here to help you succeed. We can handle every aspect of your marketing strategy, from redesigning your website to developing winning social media campaigns, so contact us today to see what we can do for you!