5 Digital Marketing Imperatives for Accountants

Whether you provide accounting services to individuals or multinationals, your prospective clients research their options online. If you want to reach them and convince them to choose you over your competitors, you need a digital marketing strategy for accountants / professional services businesses.

Unlike traditional marketing for accountants, which often involves interrupting consumers’ daily lives with one-way messages, online accountant marketing develops relationships between you and your clients. It requires fewer sales pitches and a more of a consultative approach. This helps establish you and your firm as an authoritative and knowledgeable resource in your field. If you are able to accomplish an authoritative posture, you will not have to spend as much time actively seeking out clients. The purpose of a digital marketing strategy for accountants and other professional services providers is to drive leads to YOU rather than having to engage in an aggressive outbound sales and marketing strategy to achieve growth.

If you’re an accountant new to internet marketing, establishing yourself as a valuable source of information may seem like a tough task. It will certainly involve investments of time and energy, but the payoff can be huge, if you do it well.

Digital marketing is a cost-effective and proven way for your business to promote itself to users in your target market. When you use online marketing, you use a range of digital marketing strategies and channels, like paid, social, and search, to connect with your target audience.

What does a digital marketing strategy for accountants ‘look like’?

A digital marketing strategy for accountants is a blueprint for how your accounting firm will market and advertise itself to your target audience. Your plan will outline who you want to reach, how you will reach them and how much you will invest to reach them.

While you can get started marketing without a plan, creating a strategy beforehand will help maximize your success. You will have a map for what you want to achieve and how you plan to accomplish it, which will help when managing your campaign. It will also help you gain support from those in your company.

5 Digital Marketing Imperatives for Accountants

1. Create an Informative Website that is simple to navigate

Individuals and businesses both want to know as much as possible about an accountant before trusting him or her with their finances, and many of them turn to the internet for that information. A well-organized, attractive website will tell them what they need to know about your firm.

Your website should have details about your education, certifications, experience and areas of expertise. It should also include interactive tools that allow current and potential clients to get in touch with you via email or social media. Most importantly, it should include content that demonstrates your ability to assist them with taxes and other accounting issues.

What have you done for previous clients? How do you approach tax season and other situations? How would you answer the most common questions people ask accountants? Include sections on your site that contain this information. Testimonials from prior and current clients is always a good idea.

2. Write Useful Blog Posts & Articles

Clients want to know that the professionals they hire know what they’re doing. They can get a sense of this based on your credentials, but providing useful information is even more effective. If you write blog posts and articles on your site, you not only have a chance to help potential clients, but you also have a chance to show off your expertise.

Write about topics that you know are relevant to prospective clients and reflect your areas of expertise. If you host your own blog, update it frequently to keep people coming back. If you choose to write guest blogs, select sites that you know attract the types of prospects you want to reach. Corporate prospects, for instance, don’t visit the same sites as small businesses or high net worth individuals.

3. Host Webinars

Individuals and businesses need accounting services, but they often turn to the internet for information on what they can do on their own. Blogs and articles can go a long way towards answering their questions, but webinars add another dimension to their relationships with potential service providers. An hour-long webinar presents a great opportunity to engage with potential clients, establish your firm’s credibility, and generate leads. However, they only work if you choose your topic and target audience carefully.

A webinar on taxes, for example, would perform great between January and the middle of April, and an estate planning webinar could generate interest year-round.

Unlike in-person seminars, which happen only once, webinars can be replayed over and over, continuing to generate leads long after they’ve finished. You may want to make your webinar available for replay for a short period. Just because someone didn’t attend the live webinar doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in the content. Allowing for replays lets you maximize the value and impact of the accountant’s marketing strategy.

4. Offer Premium Content

In a survey of CPA firms last year, content marketing was ranked as the third most effective lead generation tool for accountants, surpassed only by industry organizations and networking. While we certainly recommend that you maintain a blog and post useful articles on your site, you may also want to start offering premium content. This should have a long shelf life and cater specifically to the market you’re trying to reach.

For example, you may consider writing an eBook on one of your areas of expertise, or offer a downloadable workbook that will help clients with their accounting as one of your firm’s marketing strategies. This content will take longer to produce, but it can also present you with the opportunity to ask for something in return. One email address might not seem like much in exchange for a resource that takes days to put together, but once you’ve written and published the resource it can stay on your site for as long as you want. If it becomes popular enough, it can continue to attract downloads (and build your list of email subscribers) without any additional work.

5. Be Active on Social Media

Many “serious” businesses mistakenly think that social media is only for companies who want to seem lighthearted and fun to their customers. And while it’s certainly possible to do that, platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be used for a variety of purposes. Accounting firms in particular can use them to:

Raise awareness among potential customers
Generate new leads and revenues
Increase customer loyalty
Reinforce their brand positions
Boost the reach of other marketing tactics

Your accounting practice can do the same!

Digital marketing for accountants comes with many strategies.
You must manage multiple social media channels, tasks, and team members, which is impossible if you’re playing all the parts in marketing your accounting firm.

A digital marketing agency, however, can take advantage of these marketing strategies for accounting firms and accountants.