New customers are the lifeblood of every business.
As an accountant, you’ve had an opportunity to witness your clients’ ups and downs, and you know that on some days, they have more business than they can handle while on other days, they experience dry spells.
The same applies to your own accounting firm, and such slumps can impact your cash flow.
That’s why it’s a good idea to spread the word about your accountancy firm and help your target audience get in touch with you.
Given that almost 60% of the global population uses the internet, leveraging digital marketing to promote your business is a must in this day and age.
Credibility is everything in your line of business, and this means that you need to build a strong reputation both offline and online.
Let’s discuss why digital marketing should be among your top priorities when it comes to growing your client base and how to make the most of it.
1. It Helps You Attract More Clients
The fact that you’re an established professional doesn’t mean that it will guarantee you a steady stream of new prospects.
Let’s not forget that 53% of people use the internet to research products and services they’re interested in. That means you’re missing out on a number of new clients if you’re not cultivating a strong online presence.
Digital marketing will boost your visibility and allow you to reach your target audience through a number of channels.
Long gone are the days when traditional marketing was in its prime, and though it should still be part of your overall marketing arsenal, you can’t rely solely on it to bring you new business opportunities. Traditional marketing is disruptive and pushy, and modern audiences don’t like that. It’s also significantly more expensive, while its ROI can’t be precisely measured.
Finally, one of its biggest downsides is that there’s little to no interaction with your audience.
Digital marketing doesn’t suffer from any of these limitations – quite the opposite, it’s subtler, more interactive, and it’s easy to track your metrics and see what works and what doesn’t. And what is equally important, it won’t break the bank.
2. It Allows You to Reach Your Audience Using Tailored Campaigns
Unlike traditional marketing that relies on mass marketing and lacks granular personalization, its digital counterpart can help your accounting business to target individual clients with tailored campaigns.
This means that you can segment your audience into different groups and create separate offers for each one based on their needs. For example, you can create custom campaigns for promoting the services you offer to non-profits, startups, or small businesses.
Similarly, you can additionally expand your reach by using communication channels that different segments of your audience prefer. Some people are more likely to respond to your email, while others prefer messenger or a phone call.
Besides the general information you have about your potential clients, digital marketing provides you with deeper insights and allows you to target them based on their online behavior, geographic location, or areas of interest.
3. It Enables You to Showcase Your Expertise
Digital marketing is extremely powerful when it comes to building trust and credibility with your target audience.
You have numerous tools and techniques at your disposal to educate your potential clients, help them to solve their pain points, and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
Having a well-built website with all the necessary information about your accounting firm should be your first step. Even if you rely on the power of word-of-mouth marketing and referrals, you should invest in building a website that will support your promotional efforts and help you build a strong online presence.
Here’s how you can leverage your website to generate more leads:
Start a blog
This section of your website should be dedicated to helping your audience find solutions to their issues. Create content that will address their biggest pain points, such as preparing taxes, maintaining steady cash flow, or staying compliant with the latest regulations. Offer some free, actionable tips that your readers will find easy to use and implement.
If your blog provides enough value to your readers, they will be happy to subscribe and share their email address with you, which will allow you to get in touch with them through email marketing.
Optimize your website for search engines
Your website and high-quality content won’t be of much use without SEO. This digital marketing strategy will boost your visibility and help your potential clients find your website and content in Google search results. It can significantly improve your search engine rankings and bring you more traffic by leveraging relevant keywords, link building, and optimizing different elements of your website.
Apart from regular SEO, which will improve your firm’s global searchability, as an accountant, you can greatly benefit from narrowing the scope with the help of local SEO. This will allow businesses from your area to easily find you on the internet as a local accountant.
It’s essential to set up your Google My Business profile, as it will put your accounting firm on the map and show it in “near me” searches. The website of SCK Group, an accounting firm from Dublin, is a great example of local optimization.
Provide social proof
84% of people trust online reviews as much as the recommendations from friends and family. That’s why your website should feature testimonials of your happy clients, as well as snippets linking to their reviews on other online platforms. Since you’re practically in charge of your clients’ finances, it’s crucial to show that you’re an expert capable of dealing with company formation, handling their taxes, and finding different ways to save them money.
4. It Allows You to Interact Directly With Your Audience
As we already mentioned, traditional marketing relies on one-way communication, meaning that it will only deliver a marketing message to your audience. In other words, TV, radio, and newspaper ads put your potential client in a rather passive role as they can’t communicate back and establish a more meaningful conversation with you.
As a result, there’s almost no engagement, and that’s the main reason why this method is obsolete and outdated in our social media age.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, gives your audience a more proactive role as they can get in touch with you, comment on your social media posts, and respond to your emails and direct messages.
Apart from being much easier to plan and execute, social media and email marketing campaigns come with another very important benefit – they make it possible for you to collect and analyze your audience’s information and obtain valuable insights into their preferences, interests, and needs.
You can also monitor the performance of your campaigns and identify which channel is most effective in terms of bringing leads. When you launch an email campaign, you can keep track of whether your recipients open your messages, click on the links, and engage with your content.
This way, it’s much easier to focus on what works and eliminate the tactics that don’t.
All these points illustrate the importance of marketing for your accounting firm and show how you can use it to grow your business.
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