A few decades ago, people would turn to newspaper ads or a professional referral to find an accounting firm. The way consumers and business owners find their next accountant has changed a lot since, so advertising through traditional channels like print and radio is no longer considered a good marketing strategy.
Navigating the tax system is a complex challenge at best. So, the ideal marketing strategy should allow your firm to connect with companies and individuals that are actively looking for your accounting services, and slowly move them down your sales funnel until they become paying customers.
The good news is that your accounting firm can rely on digital marketing to reach potential clients at the right time.
Developing and deploying a digital accountants marketing plan is a gradual process that requires deep understanding of your audience as well as the different techniques at your disposal. It’s a full-time job, which is among the reasons many accountants shy away from it altogether.
At Fannit, we’ve spent the last decade developing a unique approach to accountant digital marketing. We understand that getting organic rankings for the most relevant keywords is the most effective and profitable way to get leads on a daily basis, so the marketing strategies we develop aim to do exactly that.
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What is Accountant Digital Marketing?
Accountant digital marketing refers to all the actions accounting firms take to attract customers through online channels, like their websites and social media pages. Instead of relying on outdated concepts, online marketing can help attract people who are interested in your services to your site.
Companies that are looking for accounting services are now turning to the internet for help, so accounting firms that want to stand out need to make sure their site can be easily found online. A comprehensive online marketing strategy should include a variety of channels that all aim to drive more leads primarily through your website.
While there are many techniques that make up your accountant firm’s digital promotion plan, search engine optimization (accountant SEO) will be at the heart of your marketing efforts.
The Importance of CPA and Accounting Firm SEO
accountant SEO is the practice of improving your firm’s website and managing other variants in order to get better rankings on search engine results pages.
When business owners need to find an accounting firm, they pull out their phones or laptop and run a few searches on Google and other search engines. Every time a query is performed, Google takes thousands of factors into consideration when deciding how to rank the results.
Through a top search engine optimization company, you can improve your site’s chances of getting the best rankings. This is important because up to 75% of all organic clicks go to the first page of Google’s search results, so accounting firms that don’t have a good position will have a hard time generating leads online.
If done correctly, accountant SEO can also bring a lot of benefits to your firm, increasing efficiency of your marketing, sales, and even operations departments.
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Set and Follow Achievable Objectives
The first step of your marketing plan is always to determine what goals you want to achieve. However, one of the biggest mistakes that accounting businesses make is setting unrealistic objectives, which sets them up for success. The key is to develop a list of achievable short and long-term objectives.
Remember that your goals will guide your decision-making process, so they need to be as specific as possible. Your firm should always be in a position to foster growth if the conditions are perfect, but you should also come up with exact objectives, like bringing in 50% more leads through your site or increasing traffic volume by the end of the quarter.
If you don’t know how to develop these goals, our team of accounting marketing specialists will guide you through the process and tell you everything you need to know to make the best decisions.
Develop a Concise Marketing Plan
To succeed, accountant digital marketing requires a blueprint. Instead of relying on outdated concepts or making decisions on the fly, online channels work best when they are monitored and updated regularly. While traditional advertising is static, the content on your digital channels can and should be optimized to reel in more leads.
But, when is the best time to optimize your firm’s ads? How will you go about the process? What tools will you use? These questions can all be answered with a good online marketing plan that details the steps you have to take depending on the performance of your campaign.
Produce a Predictable Model
A part of your accounting marketing efforts, you should develop a sales pipeline that allows you to visualize where leads are in the decision-making process. In addition to nurturing your leads, developing a sales pipeline can also result in a more predictable business model, so you’ll get an accurate estimate of your workload and profits for the foreseeable future.
While your accounting firm may not rely on deliveries that need to be ordered in advance, most companies have a finite amount of resources. Knowing what work is potentially coming up will give you the ability to prepare your team and seek external assistance, so you’ll deliver quality service to your clients when they need it most.
Get Better Search Engine Rankings
Search engines are used by everyone who needs to find a product or service, including companies looking for a new accounting firm. Having better rankings can exponentially increase the number of visitors that come to your site, giving you an opportunity to show the value of your services to a wide audience.
Good search engine rankings can do much more than increase traffic to your website. Customers trust Google to place the best companies close to the top of the rankings. So, if your accounting firm is close to the top of the results, you automatically become more credible to potential customers.
There are many elements that affect your Google rankings, but all of these can be categorized as either on-page SEO or off-page SEO.
Accountant On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the content, architecture, and other parts of your website that your accounting firm has control over. Not only this, but the variants that are taken into consideration and the weight they carry is constantly being updated by search engines, so you have to monitor the different trends in order to identify new changes.
Accountant Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO emcompasses all of the external variants that affect your ranking, for example social media presence, review sites ratings, and backlink profile. Although you influence these variants, your firm doesn’t have full control over off-page SEO. By working with a reliable marketing firm, you can get a grip of your off-page efforts and increase traffic from organic sources.
Improve Brand Awareness
Clients prefer to do business with a firm that has clear branding, but standing out in a competitive industry like accounting can be challenging. The good news is that SEO, content development, and online marketing as a whole can boost your branding strategy.
As part of your Accounting Firm’s SEO plan, our team will survey all of your online channels and ensure that your branding remains consistent across all platforms. This will help your clients identify the different profiles you have online and get updated contact information as well.
Manage Your Online Reputation
People trust online reviews almost as much as personal recommendations, especially when it comes to B2B companies. Having a bad online review about your firm can cost you a significant amount of business, especially if it’s in one of the more popular rating sites.
A good accounting marketing plan can help make sure that you have a good reputation by monitoring, updating, and managing your profiles across different directories and listing platforms.
By asking happy customers to leave reviews on firm’s Yelp and similar review sites, you can guarantee that your clients find accurate information online. This also includes local directories like Google My Business profiles and rating sites that focus on your service area or to the accounting industry.
Craft Valuable Content for Customers
As part of your accountant SEO strategy, you should consistently develop valuable content that your potential customers find useful. Good content will help showcase your knowledge while also giving search engines a better idea of what your site is about. Additionally, the better the content you create, the easier it will be to get valuable backlinks from quality websites.
Not only this, but taking the time to produce top-notch content for search engines like Google will also get you better rankings. This includes segmenting your content with headers, implementing the right keywords, and ensuring that your posts are long enough to compete with existing resources.
Gain Insights About Your Audiences
Digital marketing does much more than get you more business. Firm owners can take advantage of tracking technology to study their target audiences and identify patterns that they can use in their accountant marketing strategy. This new information can help you develop more relevant content and enable you to distribute it through the most effective channels.
For example, which social media platforms are business owners more likely to use? What are the best times to target these users? And what type of devices are they using? These are all questions that you can answer by carefully analyzing the information collected from your audience.
Establish Better Internal and External Communication Channels
In addition to improving content quality and SEO rankings, online marketing for accounting firms can also help you establish better communication lines between sales, marketing, and other internal departments.
Your accountant marketing team is in charge of attracting interested prospects, qualifying them as leads, and sending their information to your sales team after a thorough vetting process. If this information transfer between departments is not flawless, your sales team may not have everything they require to transform leads into sales.
This means that your accounting business has to develop communication mechanisms that are efficient, accurate, and accessible to whoever needs them.
By using social media and other channels, you can also enhance the way you communicate with your clients. Even if you don’t have the resource to offer a full support team around the clock, having a functional social media profile that allows clients to ask questions and get updates will greatly improve the way they perceive your firm.
Create a Functional and Attractive Website
Your firm’s business website is your online practice, so potential clients will judge the quality of your services based on the appearance and performance of your site. In most cases, building a new, responsive version of your site is the best way to prepare it for digital success and let customers know you offer quality services.
To create a good impression, your website must look professional, present a harmonious color scheme, and have good contrast so that visitors can read your content.
Moreover, all the features on your business site have to work as intended. Your clients expect all functional elements to work, so having broken links, pages that don’t load, and inaccurate contact information will reduce your chances of getting new leads online. Not only this, but clients will also want to access your site from different devices, so make sure your pages are visible on screen of all sizes.
Improve Social Media Presence and Cultivate a Loyal Following
There are many tools that can be used when advertising for accountants. Social media channels are a valuable resource because it allows you to reach consumers as well as other companies that are looking to hire an accounting firm.
That said, opening an account on LinkedIn is not enough. Your firm also has to craft and distribute valuable content, comment on relevant posts, and maintain an active profile to let customers know you’re available.
Lower Marketing Costs
Any owner running an accounting firm knows that conventional advertising is expensive. Accounting marketing costs are hard to control in an unpredictable and untrackable model. Accountant digital marketing poses a great alternative as it can be tracked and monitored, so know exactly how much money you generate from your promotion efforts.
Even better, most firms end up realizing that online marketing is much more affordable than traditional channels, which pushes them to produce more content and keep feeding their CPA firm’s marketing machine.
Stay Ahead of the Competition
Building a successful accounting firm marketing campaign is tough partially because of the competition. There are countless firms to choose from, so you must find creative ways to stay ahead of competitors. By investing resources into digital marketing, you’ll have time to learn about your audience and develop new, attractive content that gives you a competitive advantage in the form of engaged visitors.
Generate More Leads, Referrals, and Recurring Customers
The main objective of most accounting firms’ marketing campaigns is to reel in more leads on a daily basis. Accountant SEO and CPA digital marketing may take some time to generate results, but these techniques can transform your website into a valuable source of paying customers.
Besides acquiring new customers, accountant SEO focuses on delighting customers after the sale is complete. This increases your firm’s chances of getting new customers via referrals as well as recurring business from old clients.
Track and Optimizing Your Campaign
Unlike other forms of advertising, accountant digital marketing can be tracked, monitored, and optimized for better performance. As a matter of fact, all firms that launch an online marketing campaign should implement tracking from the very beginning, take the time to analyze the results, and make adjustments based on their findings.
Strategies that Support a Solid Accountant SEO Plan
A good CPA Firm’s digital marketing should not only include accountant SEO, but a combination of techniques that boost your firm’s online efforts. However, sometimes it’s hard to know which combination will produce the best results.
There are many online marketing tactics that can help support your accountant SEO plan, but three of the most common techniques used are:
Accountant Focused PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can jumpstart your accounting marketing strategy and produce results right away.
Social Media Marketing
Running new ad campaigns and being active on specific social media channels can give your CPA firm advertising strategy a nice boost and bring more traffic to your business site.
Directory and Reputation Management
Local directories have been around for a while, but some firm owners don’t know that they can have profiles on these platforms that have to be claimed and managed by their rightful owners. Agencies that specialize in marketing for accounting firms can monitor popular directories and new review sites to guarantee you always have a good reputation.
Set Up a Robust CPA Firm Marketing Machine with Fannit
Creating and implementing an online marketing plan for your accounting firm takes time, but this practice allows you to reach consumers at critical points. If you are looking for an agency that specializes in marketing for accounting firms, Fannit can help you take your business to the next level.
Get in touch with us to learn more about our accounting marketing services today, we’re always happy to have a chat.