Digital marketing has the highest ROI, and yet many accounting firms still mainly rely on the outbound approach and its traditional marketing methods.
Although you can still attract new clients through newspaper ads, TV and radio commercials, and billboards, digital marketing has become indispensable for the firms providing accounting services.
In this post, we’ll discuss how you can take advantage of online marketing ideas for accountants, suggest the most effective online marketing strategies, and talk about the best tactics your accounting firm can use to find new clients.
Why Digital Marketing for Accountants Matters
Traditional, outbound marketing for accountants is disruptive.
Your clients are business owners with hectic schedules, and they don’t like when you interrupt their day with a cold call. Similarly, new technologies allow us to simply skip commercials, while billboards can be successfully ignored.
Instead of tugging at your prospects’ sleeves trying to get their attention, you should try to attract them and make them come to you. And that’s how digital marketing works.
Apart from being significantly more subtle when it comes to reaching and attracting your target audience than the traditional approach, digital marketing boasts a couple of other benefits.
It allows for personalisation and granularity
In other words, you won’t have to serve the same message to your entire target audience.
One-size-fits-all tactics don’t work any longer, and your potential clients will only notice and pay attention to highly-tailored content that addresses their specific pain points and interests.
Its performance can be tracked and monitored
This means that you will know how each segment of your accountancy marketing strategy works in terms of lead generation so that you can make tweaks and improvements.
As a result of all this, you won’t have to rely on the guesswork for client acquisition.
Therefore, you’ll be able to create predictable revenue.
It’s powerful
84% of people use digital channels to research products or services, which means that your odds of targeting potential customers for your accounting firm increase if you use online marketing tactics.
There are different online marketing strategies for accountants, and you can pick the ones that yield the best results for your business. Here are some that you should take into consideration.
Update and Polish Your Website
Having a well-designed, attractive, and easy-to-navigate website is the cornerstone of online marketing for accountants.
As your website is a reflection of your accounting business, it should look professional and trustworthy, as well as, be loaded with useful and up-to-date information. Don’t forget that it’s your potential clients’ finances that are at stake and that they want to hire an accounting agency that’s reputable and credible.
38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive, so it’s essential to update your site in order to encourage your potential customers to explore your website further and prevent them from bouncing off.
Here are some best practices for improving your website.
Use descriptive navigation
Intuitive navigation is a must for every successful website. This means that your visitors will easily and quickly find what they’re looking for, as well as that your website traffic will smoothly flow from one web page to another.
If you want to provide an exceptional user experience, your website navigation should include the following:
- A clickable logo in the top-left corner that takes your visitors to the homepage
- The consistency of navigation elements, meaning that they’re placed in the same location across your entire website
- Links that can be easily noticed and distinguished from the rest of the copy
- Terms that your audience can understand instead of generic labels or industry jargon. “Services” or “Solutions” don’t reveal much about what you offer, so use keywords and phrases that instantly communicate what you do and positively impact your SEO.
Include a prominent call-to-action button
When you manage to attract interested visitors who explore your website, it’s crucial to tell them what to do next. And that’s why you need a call-to-action button on every web page of your accountancy website.
This way, your website will easily turn visitors into leads and increase your conversion rates.
An effective CTA should contain actionable words such as Book a meeting, Download this ebook, or Get a quote.
CTA buttons should be placed prominently so that your leads can easily spot them the moment they land on every page.
Make your website responsive
Almost 60% of people say that they wouldn’t recommend a business with a website that’s not properly optimised for mobile.
If your website doesn’t automatically adjust to screens of different sizes, your user experience will suffer, your visitors and leads will be disappointed, and subsequently, this will hurt your search engine rankings.
To make both your potential customers and Google happy, don’t neglect this aspect of digital marketing.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Did you know that businesses that blog generate 67% more leads than those that don’t?
The reason for this lies in the fact that they provide value to their clients.
Helpful blog posts that tackle your audience’s challenges and issues and offer solutions to them will bring you a lot of traffic. Content marketing revolves around answering your potential client’s questions about accounting, finances, bookkeeping, or tax filing. It’s not about pitching or promoting your services directly.
The trick is to educate your audience and help them keep up with the latest industry trends.
This way, you’ll both offer them valuable content and position your accounting firm as a reliable and trustworthy partner they can turn to when they need some help with their accounting tasks.
People aren’t willing to trust any random accountant with their company’s finances. If they see that you’re an expert in the field of accountancy, they will be more likely to do business with you.
Effective content marketing for accountants requires a lot of research so that you can produce relevant blog posts, articles, e-books, and other types of content that will resonate with your prospects and clients.
Here are a couple of content marketing tips to help you make the most of this digital marketing strategy.
Create lead magnets
Apart from creating regular blog posts that all website visitors can access and read, it’s a good idea to produce premium content and gate it behind a web form.
Your potential clients will readily provide their email address and other useful personal information in exchange for an ebook that will help them with their accounting or a downloadable how-to workbook on how to do taxes.
Such content that will cater to your target market takes more time to produce, but it also has a longer shelf life and allows you to ask your prospects for something in return.
Create YouTube videos
When we’re talking about content marketing for accountants, it’s important to emphasise that it doesn’t refer only to blog posts and articles.
Visually-oriented content is a powerful digital marketing tool too. It’s memorable, engaging, and easy to consume. The human brain is hardwired for motion, which means it’s more likely that video will captivate your audience’s attention than static content.
A YouTube channel packed with useful guides and how-to videos about your potential customers’ most pressing accounting challenges will bring you a lot of high-quality traffic that you can convert into paying clients.
Just make sure to leverage these videos for demonstrating how you can make your clients’ lives easier with the services you provide.
Build a Strong Online Presence
Successful accounting firms have a strong online presence.
This doesn’t only mean that they’re visible in Google searches, but also that their owners or CEOs are perceived as industry thought leaders.
Being an authority in the field of accounting will help you generate high-quality leads and attract potential clients to your accounting agency.
Here are some of the best and most cost-effective digital marketing strategies that can help accounting firms build a strong online presence and credibility.
Start a podcast
Since accounting is a comprehensive field, you can start a podcast and invite entrepreneurs to discuss their own experiences and challenges and share some tips they picked up along the way.
For example, given that starting a successful business is a topic that your target audience is very interested in, you can host a series of episodes dedicated to that topic.
This is a very effective and low-cost digital marketing strategy for accountants that will allow you to improve your online presence and build authority while being very relevant and helpful.
Run webinars
Webinars are another very affordable and successful digital marketing strategy that will help your accounting firm bring in a lot of new business opportunities.
Discussing your clients’ common problems and issues and presenting solutions through a live, interactive webinar is an excellent tactic for improving the awareness and visibility of your agency online.
The hardest part of this marketing strategy is getting people to actually attend your webinar. Asking your existing clients to come and invite someone they know will benefit from it is a simple tactic that works.
Optimise Your Website for Search Engines
Search engine optimisation or SEO for accounting firms is a digital marketing strategy that will improve your rankings and help you attract organic traffic to your website. Without traffic, you can’t expect to generate leads.
As accounting is a pretty competitive industry, so getting to the top of search results should be your No. 1 digital marketing strategy. No matter how great and relevant your content is, your target audience won’t be able to find it in search results unless it’s optimised for search engines.
SEO goes hand in hand with content marketing, and these two digital strategies can do wonders for accounting firms that want to educate their clients and produce valuable content.
Research your keywords
The first step of your search engine optimisation should include keyword research.
This will tell you what your clients are searching on the internet when looking for the services you provide. As a matter of fact, this tactic will reveal the exact words and phrases they type into the Google search box when they want to find an accountant.
For example, your target keywords probably include something along the lines of “tax returns,” “accounting firm,” or “bookkeeping services.”
By strategically adding these keywords to your content and website copy, you’re increasing your chances of ending up among the top 10 results in Google searches. If we bear in mind that more than 90% of content doesn’t get any traffic from Google, it’s clear why it’s important to properly implement this digital marketing strategy. Read content marketing for services businesses.
Improve local SEO
When it comes to digital marketing for accountants, local SEO plays a tremendously important role.
As an accountant, you should focus on people who live in the nearby area, meaning that your target audience will type “accountants near me” in the search box.
Since your accountancy firm is categorised as a brick-and-mortar, local business, you will greatly benefit from improving your ranking in local search results.
To achieve this, start with using location-specific keywords. Another local SEO tactic that you should implement is creating a Google My Business profile and providing your accounting firm’s name, address, phone number, and email address. This information should be consistent across the internet.
If your local SEO is done right, Google will automatically show a call button in the search results accessed from mobile phones so that your potential clients can call you with a single click.
Leverage Social Media
Accounting firms that want to promote their services should take social media very seriously.
These platforms are a must for different purposes, including raising brand awareness, expanding reach, connecting with your target audience, brand building, and offering customer support.
Pick social media networks that your customers prefer and create a strategy that will outline posting frequency and the type of content you will share. Read social media for accountants.
Facebook is the biggest social media platform, which is why you should set up a page for your accounting business there. Besides using Facebook to promote your business for free by posting and sharing relevant content, you can also take advantage of its powerful targeting options.
However, your organic efforts on Facebook won’t suffice, so running paid campaigns allows you to target your customers and increase the visibility of your accounting business on this network.
LinkedIn also comes with paid targeting options with which you can pick your audience and target it with laser precision.
However, to make the most of this social media platform for professionals, it’s crucial to update your profile and provide all the information about your accounting business, post relevant content at least 2-3 times a week, and join groups and communities for accountants. Being active and helping other people by answering their questions matters a great deal because this will help you establish yourself as an authority and build your brand.
Email Marketing
Although its effectiveness is sometimes questioned, the truth is that email marketing is one of the best and most affordable tactics you can use.
77% of consumers say email is their most trusted channel of communication. According to research studies, 81% of SMBs rely on email marketing as their primary customer acquisition channel. So, the numbers corroborate the claim that this kind of marketing works.
But, in order for this strategy to deliver on its potential, it’s critical to have a clean and verified contact list, segment it, and personalize your every campaign.
Email marketing can be used for generating new leads, promoting your accounting services, and educating your audience.
For your every email campaign to be successful, you need to:
- Create a compelling subject line that will prompt your recipients to open your message
- Personalise email copy so that it resonates with every segment of your audience
- Communicate a clear message
- Provide value and offer your recipients high-quality resources
- Include an irresistible CTA
- Follow up with your prospects even if they haven’t responded.
Email marketing automation will additionally boost your efforts as it will streamline repetitive tasks, allow you to scale your campaigns and schedule them ahead of time while making sure that you won’t forget to follow up or respond to your recipients.
You can use this strategy to generate new leads or nurture your existing ones. By starting a regular weekly or monthly newsletter, you can keep your recipients engaged and interested, and convert them into paying customers.
See our guide to email marketing for accounting firms for more information.
Closing Word
Digital marketing for accountants is indispensable if you want to grow your business and make sure you keep up with your competitors. These tips can help you understand how to start with this strategy and get it right, but if you don’t have enough time or skills to set it up and run things on your own, hiring a marketing agency is a worthwhile investment.
I am the founder and manager of BeFound SEO and the main consultant. I started offering SEO services back in 2007 when I had to explain SEO, as most people had no idea what it was and how much it could help their business online. I still love seeing the results from SEO.
When I’m not creating great strategy, I am usually out hiking up a mountain.
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