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Your 2021 Guide To Digital Marketing For Accounting Firms

May 25, 2021
Bill Kimball

marketing for accounting firms

You’ll never make another social media post for the sake of posting. If a user is visiting your website, there is a good chance that they are interested in your services.

Alternatively, if you were to inundate your audience with several posts per day, it would only be a matter of time until they tune out your words or unfollow you. In a world of “me-too” brands, design offers a tremendous opportunity to stick your neck out and create a differentiated look. (Is this any riskier, after all, than looking like a carbon copy of your competitors?) And when well executed, design can create an impression of authority and credibility. In addition, your program can only perform at its peak if you understand how buyers of accounting services think. The way your services are found, evaluated and purchased have changed in recent years.

Leveraging the strengths of the PSM Team, she helps you with everything from establishing a brand strategy to content marketing and website development. When you’re already juggling tax deadlines and client demands, carving out time to market your accounting firm can be a tall order. We’ve provided outsourced marketing services to accounting and CPA firms throughout the Midwest and beyond for more than 25 years and are known for our easy-to-follow, four-pillared approach. Successful marketing begins with a plan, and the perfect strategy will be as unique as your firm. Search engine optimization is a complex specialty in digital marketing. It’s easy for accounting firms to fall short in this area because it’s not their area of expertise.

Train the entire staff to understand, appreciate, and reinforce their role in marketing the firm. Retaining clients is essential and will be determined by maintaining our reputation built upon professionalism, trust, accuracy, and timeliness.

You could do well by marketing your services to other healthcare professionals. There’s more to running an accounting firm than staying up to date with tax law. You have plenty of resources to help you keep current with other areas of business. You can find most of the clients for your accounting firm on LinkedIn. Putting up posts related to your services can help attract a large client base from these channels. Opportunities are often external, like alliances or growing markets, but they can be used to achieve your business goals. Similarly, threats are also external, which can make or break a marketing plan.

Simple face-to-face meetings, attending in-person industry events, socializing in your community to grow your business are a thing of the past. In this environment, accountants must think of new and creative ways to conduct business, support their clients, and market their business for growth. If you’re planning to start a blog as a way to share content, just make sure you plan to post regularly as developing an audience can take time. It’s a good idea to plan the improvement and creation of content at the same time, first considering what key information a prospective client would need to know. Whether you’ve spent some budget on marketing each year or are just getting started, you should take the time to define your marketing goals and the methods you’ll use to reach them. All of this should go into a well-documented and researched marketing strategy. But maybe new client relationships have started to stall, or you feel like you’ve reached all of the potential clients in that market.

Marketing For Accounting Firms

This should be part of your marketing plan, and will help you decide how much you can spend on marketing your accounting firm. Become a member of local and national professional associations or civic organizations. Talk about your accounting firm and the services it provides. Take advantage of any resources on marketing different associations in your field may have. Take a look at your newsletters, brochures, business cards, and any other materials you give out about your accounting firm.

It should be done at every opportunity – online and real-world because there is excellent competition in the market, and you want to get the clients first. Finding a good salesperson is more difficult than finding a satisfied client. Your clients – existing or former, interact with other businesses as well. Their recommendation of your firm not only adds value to your reputation but would also help you get new clients. Usingcloud technology for your accounting processescan help you reach a broader market more efficiently than your competitors. Most of the manual processes are automated with the help of cloud so that you can focus more on planning marketing strategies. It may sound obvious, but if there is no marketing plan, then your marketing efforts are likely to be slapdash.

Yet many accounting firms pay little or no attention to the performance of their marketing efforts. They have no tangible evidence of what works and what doesn’t. We use this exact process for our digital marketing agency and our clients. Everything you need to know to build a predictable sales growth system.

marketing for accounting firms

Digital marketing for accountant firms is essential if you want to grow your business and attract new clients. While digital marketing can be a complicated affair, remember that you can always hire a company that provides marketing services to help you. The first step is to identify which social media sites your audience uses so you can include them in the digital marketing for your accounting firm. For example, Facebook is the largest social media site and is extremely effective for direct-to-consumer marketing. LinkedIn is best if your firm specializes in business accounting. The goal of digital marketing is to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to find your company online. Your marketing plan should include a robust array of digital strategies designed to help you grow your firm and increase your profits.

Those sites are largely visual and don’t lend themselves to the information-rich marketing most common for accounting firms. The first step to any successful digital strategy is to build a strong brand and online presence.

Once we understand the buyer personas and the buyer’s journey, we build a marketing plan to meet your aggressive growth goals. That strategy could include any and all of the following tools and techniques. Every day people are looking for tax help, bookkeeping, payroll services, and a great CPA to guide them through challenging financial waters. While you are probably an expert in those things, you probably aren’t an expert in CPA marketing.

Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

This could be in the form of free accounting seminars and hosting small business Q&A sessions. Any kind of direct exposure that an accounting firm receives can be an effective way of setting themselves up as trustworthy experts to many potential clients.

You can also look to your FAQ for inspiration since presumably, you will have addressed the topics of most pressing concern to your clients. You should be targeting mobile users directly with your marketing campaigns. For example, running a Facebook ad with the “Call Now” feature will allow mobile users who see your ad to contact your firm with the tap of a finger. Pay per click advertising is one of the most effective types of online advertising because it targets keywords and you pay only when a potential lead clicks your call to action. On average, PPC ads have a 200% ROI and can increase brand recognition by up to 80%. First, remember that people aren’t necessarily expecting you to be perfect. What they want is accountability and a professional response if you make a mistake or let them down.

  • Write about tax deadlines, budget effects, new tax laws and anything else you think your clients will be interested in.
  • Luckily, Titan Web Agency’s online marketing services for accounting firms have helped accounting firms create lead generation pipelines for years.
  • For example, an accounting firm that works with farming businesses might participate in agricultural conferences.
  • On individual web pages and email campaigns, you can implement A/B tests to determine which messages, images, colors or layouts produce the best outcomes.

Even people who might not be in the market for an accountant now may remember that you provided them with valuable information — and engage your services down the line. To use video content to your advantage, create videos about the topics and questions your audience is already searching for. If you know you’re getting a lot of traffic from people wanting to understand tax deductions, then creating a video that explains the most common ones and how to apply them could be useful. Webinars are online classes that offer valuable information to the people in your target audience. Webinars can demonstrate your expertise and authority to the people who take it, making it more likely that they’ll use your services. While in-person events are often used to attract business, the events of 2020 have given new importance to online events.

Tracking results to better understand which marketing activities offer the best return. We have relatively low major opportunities, fairly low threats, limited growth potential, and relatively low risk. Taxes, payroll, bookkeeping, and accounting issues can be complex, especially for business owners.

Seo Services For Accounting Firms

What’s changed in recent years is how easy it is to find accountants or online accounting solutions. This makes it much easier for business owners and families to change accounting firms. Your outsourced marketing team includes a marketing director and handpicked specialists from the PSM “Dream Team” of marketing experts.

The content you post to the web should be targeted toward your specific audience. Ideally, your accounting firm’s online content will help your target clients solve problems, become aware of industry developments or educate them. Some firms are able to formulate a workable strategy, but they have trouble taking it to the finish line. Their investment is wasted because it is never fully implemented. An initial burst of enthusiasm quickly fades as novelty turns into work. For example, a firm plans a monthly webinar series, but once they produce the first webinar or two, interest fades and the initiative dies. We’ve seen this happen with blogging and networking, too — in fact, any marketing task that requires sustained effort over time.

The best CPA firm strategies are very specific and include a detailed execution plan, including tactics, schedules and assignments. What you learn will make the rest of your marketing more relevant and effective.

Want to create original content but you’re not sure what to do? You can also do some research on social media accounts of your favorite influencers, competitors, and organizations to get some inspiration and creative juices flowing.

The reason companies hire accounting firms is because they make their life easier. They typically don’t understand the intricacies involved in proper accounting, but you do. Help them to further understand accounting and you’ll be developing trust and showcasing your expertise at the same time. People no longer want to be sold to, and tend not to trust hard sales initiatives. That means that to sign new clients, your firm’s accounting marketing has to change.

Digital Marketing Agency For Accounting Firms

For all types and sizes of companies, marketing has become the way to win prospects and nurture a successful business. Marketing for accountants is as crucial for your firm today as it is for most professions out there.

Time to draw them to you, establish a trusted relationship, and show them that you’re the best option for their needs. A brilliant firm name is the basic core differentiator of your brand. For that reason, it’s extremely important to put a lot of time, thought, and research into selecting a new name. Using a name that’s already trademarked means extra expenses for rebranding, ranging from development and research costs to expenses for new websites and business cards.

marketing for accounting firms

Kierstyn is a product marketer with a background in financial services, startups and project management. Her experience is heavily focused in cryptocurrencies, student loans, and home renovations. A great way to stay informed and keep your following informed is to band together with your fellow accounting peers and partners. Verizon recently reported a 20% week-over-week increase in web traffic since the COVID-19 spread, and this increase is not slowing down. Instead of having to start from scratch—our Botkeeper marketing team has compiled 10 powerful strategies that you can implement today. With the current events taking place around COVID-19, business as we know it has changed.

Best practices indicate that 80% of what you post should be informative or entertaining, while only 20% should include a direct sales pitch. Your accounting firm should be an authoritative presence, a place your clients can turn for valuable information and answers to their questions. The goal of social media content is to attract your audience to your website, where you can continue the conversation offline. One of the things we do at Titan Web Agency is to help our accounting clients develop an ideal customer persona representing the customer you most want to serve. When you know who you want to serve in your CPA firm, it becomes easy to find those people online and create content that will appeal to them. For marketing accountants, it’s unlikely to be worthwhile to build a presence on Instagram or Snapchat.