When it comes to marketing, most accounting firm owners and managers gravitate towards tried-and-true outbound marketing strategies.
However, placing advertisements in newspapers, on local radio/TV, on billboards, and through other traditional marketing channels is no longer sufficient. The time has come for accounting firms to venture into digital marketing. If you shift some or all of your marketing efforts to the digital realm, you will see a steady influx of new clients in the coming months and years.
When done correctly, digital marketing for accounting firms is a never-ending gift.
Marketing Services For Accounting Firms
There is a widespread misconception that digital marketing services are only available to new products/services or businesses that solely sell their value offering on the internet.
Traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, such as accounting firms, can benefit greatly from the prudent use of digital marketing. Today’s digital marketing services can be customized to meet the specific needs of your accounting firm. If you do not employ such modern marketing strategies, you will inevitably fall behind the competition.
After all, the vast majority of people now use the internet to find a service or product. Ideally, your digital marketing strategies will place you among the first few search results when people look for accounting service providers in your area. If you don’t take the plunge into digital marketing, the competition will dominate this extremely valuable online real estate, putting your accounting firm at a significant competitive disadvantage.
Perhaps the best aspect of digital marketing services is that they are completely customizable for each individual business.
Accounting firms can benefit from online marketing services in the following ways:
- Getting in touch with specific clients in your area
- Making significant inroads at a specific time of year (tax season, etc.)
- Achieving specific marketing objectives
- Making an impression on your intended audience
Online banner ads, for example, can be placed on specific websites at specific times of the year to maximize exposure to your target audience. If, on the other hand, your marketing team decides to focus on online content, the use of strategic keywords and key phrases will assist your target audience in finding the content in online searches.
Even the finer points of your social media marketing can be tailored to your accounting firm’s specific goals and benefits. Finally, using online marketing for accounting firms wisely can help you connect with those to whom you want to sell your services in a surprisingly affordable and efficient manner.
Online Marketing Methods
1. Content Marketing
When it comes to online marketing, it is often said that content is king. This axiom remains valid decades after it was first stated. However, simply dumping content on your accounting firm’s blog, homepage, and other parts of your website will not suffice. The web content you publish should be tailored to your target audience. Your accounting firm’s online content should ideally assist your target clients in solving problems, becoming aware of industry developments, or educating them.
i. Provide accurate information
The key to effective content marketing is to be informative. Give your online audience a reason to read or at least skim your content, and they will return for more. The best-case scenario is a consistent stream of online content that benefits your audience while also reinforcing your authority on the subject.
Consider your online content an opportunity to flex your intellectual muscles, demonstrate your industry knowledge, and demonstrate the value of your value offering to your target audience. If you are unsure about your writing abilities, hire an SEO (search engine optimization) writer to create compelling content on your behalf.
The best-case scenario is the creation of intriguing online content that spreads through social and professional networks.
ii. Make use of Keywords
Above all, the online content you create should be densely packed with keywords and key phrases that your target audience is likely to look up. Including these keywords and key phrases will help your website move up the search engine rankings much faster.
Even if your website does not appear in the top ten search results or on the first page of those results, your content has the potential to propel your website up the rankings in the coming weeks, months, and years.
2. Social Media
Social media has become the epicenter of online advertising. But which social media strategy is best for accounting firms?
Some businesses use overt social media ads to reach their target audience, while others use covert marketing methods to reach their target audience through various social media channels. Are you concerned that creating a social media profile will not result in a significant online following? If this is the case, it may be best to use a combination of overt and covert social media marketing.
i. Overt and covert social media marketing
If you go the obvious route, you can pay for ads promoting your company on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. Most audiences, however, respond best to covert advertisements that offer some sort of advice, insight, or other assistance. Simply tweeting accounting industry updates on Twitter or posting links to industry updates on Facebook, for example, will raise awareness of your industry’s inherent value.
If you go the social media route, be mindful of how frequently you post. Do not bombard your followers with one social media post after another. Allow your audience to digest your social media content. Maintain a consistent flow of updates, links, and other useful information on your various social media channels. Your audience will gradually grow as a result of this strategy.
Alternatively, if you bombard your audience with multiple posts per day, it will only be a matter of time before they tune you out or unfollow you.
ii. Post Engagement
Recognize anyone who responds to your social media posts. To draw attention to the feedback, “like” the response, provide your own response, or retweet the response. Furthermore, if a follower comments on one of your social media posts with a question, answer it as soon as possible. A delayed or non-response will give the impression that you do not care about your clients or potential clients.
Hire a part-time or full-time inbound marketing specialist or social media manager to handle social media posts, client interactions on these platforms, and other similar duties if necessary.
3. Email Marketing
Consider yourself a business owner or manager who receives an email from an accounting services provider.
Even if you have an in-house accountant, you are more likely to open and read an email message than a traditional piece of mail delivered by the US Postal Service. Furthermore, if the email messages were personalized for your specific business, you would be far more likely to read them.
This is why so many accounting firms and other businesses use email marketing to reach out to new clients and reconnect with old ones.
i. Automation
Automated email marketing can reduce the time required to reach your target audience, but it is important to tailor messages to specific clients. People are improving their ability to distinguish between personalized messages and those designed to appeal to the broadest audience.
ii. Focus on the Audience
Be careful when selecting the audience for your email marketing campaign, as sending emails to those who do not need or are uninterested could turn them away from your business. Include an email subscription form on your website and other marketing materials to make it easy for interested parties to add their email address. Include those who have been highlighted as leads yet have not converted, as well as those who have paid for your accounting services in the past.
iii. Content
Use appropriate and engaging content to provide industry updates and help clients solve problems, promote discounted services, and include a polite request to leave a positive review on an online review directory.
4. Paid Advertising
Nowadays, paying for advertising on the web often makes more sense than paying for advertising in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and other traditional outbound channels. There are numerous methods for marketing your accounting services on the Internet:
- Social media ads
- Banner ads
- SERPs ads
- LinkedIn ads
The best part about paid online advertising is that it is typically much less expensive than traditional ads on traditional outbound channels. Popular cost models for such advertisements include cost per click (abbreviated CPC), cost per action (abbreviated CPA), and cost per thousand impressions (abbreviated CPM). If you choose a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression model, you will only be charged for the number of clicks/views the ad generates.
Your paid advertisements may appear on search engines, related websites, and/or social media platforms.
Google paid advertisements are particularly popular. This platform enables business owners and managers to place classified-style ads on easily visible sections of search engine results pages, abbreviated as SERPs. These ads appear when someone searches the web for keywords similar to those used in your paid online ads. Spend more money on this marketing strategy. Your ad will be top-ranked as a result, increasing its visibility on SERPS for maximum exposure.
Conclusion
If you’ve only dipped your toes in the online marketing waters, or if you’ve avoided it entirely, it’s time to embrace this form of marketing head-on. Invest your time, effort, and resources in online marketing, and you will see results in due time. Indeed, online content has the potential to bring in new clients long after it has been posted to your website, social media platforms, blog, or other components of your online footprint. However, patience is essential.
Your digital marketing efforts will take some time to bear fruit. Maintain your current course of action and strive to improve your digital marketing efforts over time. This way, you’ll make a lot more inroads with clients in need of accounting services.
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By SEO
- Apr 7, 2023
By SEO
