Six Steps to Better Accounting Firm Marketing

While you may feel that the quality of your accounting work speaks for itself, 85% of consumers research online before making a purchase. And consumers aren’t doing this just for cars and refrigerators—they’re researching service providers before committing to a relationship.   

In short: potential clients look to the internet to see which accounting firm they should use for their business, so if you’re looking to book new clients, you need to have a digital marketing strategy in place.  

Here are six key strategies accounting firms can use to get their accounting firm in front of potential clients—and those clients in the door. 

1. Get on social media

Social media marketing should serve as a crucial part of your accounting firm’s marketing strategy—a whopping 93% of business buyers expect companies to be on social media. And there’s little to lose for your firm because social media is one of the best ways to grow your business organically for free. 

To get started, consider creating a business account on at least two of the main social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you have the bandwidth to post to each of them, that’s great, but it’s better to excel at one or two than to spread yourself thin.  

Each one of these platforms offers unique and exciting opportunities to share about your brand, but you should choose your social media platforms wisely. For example, Facebook is more likely to snag the eyes of older users and LinkedIn is a great place to target working professionals.  

Pro tip: Consumers think of social media as a constant dialogue, so make sure you’re posting consistently.  

2. Create shareable videos

Videos posted on social media or YouTube can catch the attention of potential clients when they’re looking for an answer to a simple accounting problem. And by creating videos that others want to share, an accounting firm can build trust with its audience by positioning itself as an expert source. 

To create a shareable video for social media marketing, first make sure you offer a unique idea. Think about valuable information your CPAs can share or things your firm does differently (or better) than anyone else. If you have enough of those, then you can make short videos that both help people and market your firm.

3. Optimize your website for SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means that you optimize the words and phrases on your website to gain the maximum number of visitors. The more visitors you have, the higher you rank in Google’s search results. This means CPA firms can rank higher if the words people are looking for can be found on their page. 

However, SEO isn’t a magical answer that will let you immediately rank on the front page. If you just share the same content everyone else does, Google will read your site as spam and your SEO will go down. You need to create content that people find helpful or that other companies and blogs will link to on their sites. To do that, it’s helpful to set up an accounting blog.

4. Set up an accounting blog

An accounting blog can help your firm drive increased traffic to your website. When you write a blog post that answers a question your audience is commonly asking on Google, consumers will be more likely to find and visit your site. And if the blog post answers their question well, they may even share that blog post with their friends or family on social media. This helps you become a “thought leader” in the accounting field and also gives you a steady stream of useful content to share on your business’s social media accounts. 

But a blog is a lot of work, and you don’t have to do it alone. If you find yourself strapped for time, you can also consider hiring a freelance writer or agency to help your CPA firm create informative blog content.

5. Start marketing with email

If you don’t have an email newsletter, the best time to start is now. This newsletter should provide value for your audience and contain a call to action that links back to your website. 

When you start your email marketing campaign, begin with an introductory email for any new subscribers. This introduces them to your brand and what they can expect in the newsletter. Then, you can do an “indoctrination sequence” which involves five to ten automated emails in a row including content that your clients will find the most interesting. This hooks people to your email content. 

Another form of continuous email marketing is the email drip campaign. This is a sequence of five to ten emails (like an indoctrination sequence) that automatically goes out to your subscribers around a certain topic or action. 

A good email campaign always includes a call to action and creates shareable content that your clients can forward to others. This kind of helpful content makes you the type of firm that people would feel comfortable referring to their friends, giving you more opportunities to bring new leads to your firm.

6. Focus on what works for your company

Depending on your marketing budget and how much time you have, you could pursue all of the marketing strategies above. However, if one strategy works better for your firm than others, don’t be afraid to hone in it. What’s most important is marketing your company to your ideal customers. So if you find that LinkedIn is the perfect platform for you, focus on that over other social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram. 

You can also use the reporting tools in your accounting software to hone in on your most profitable clients. Then, think about where those clients spend their time on the Internet (for example, if they’re business professionals, they’re probably on LinkedIn) and focus your marketing efforts there. 

Mango helps you fine-tune your accounting firm marketing strategy 

With any accounting firm marketing strategy, you need to know what audience to market to. Mango Practice Management’s reporting features can help you break down which clients are the most profitable for you, so you can focus on tailoring your marketing efforts to those types of individuals. These metrics also measure your firm’s performance, so you can see trends year over year about where your firm excels and needs to improve. 

And because Mango was made by accountants, for accountants, it can handle nearly every aspect of your business, including time and billing, project management, file sharing + e-signature, document management, and more. This means you no longer have to patchwork together several different types of software in order to manage the daily workflows of your firm. With Mango, all of your important documents and software tools are in one place. 

Schedule a demo today to see how Mango manages the heavy lifting of running an accounting firm, so you can focus on what’s really important: your clients.