Digital marketing has replaced more traditional marketing channels like radio, television, and print ads. Although some companies still use traditional marketing, most small businesses have found that digital marketing offers a cost-effective solution with tangible benefits. If you own an accounting firm, you may be wondering how digital marketing for accountants can help your business. What benefits can your accounting practice gain by adopting digital marketing methods?
Benefits Of Accountant Digital Marketing
If you are looking to grow your business by finding new clients, digital marketing is a valuable way to do so. Here’s why:
1. Brand Promotion
It’s tough to promote your brand when you’re auditing a client’s accounting. While you know that your firm is reliable, credible, knowledgeable in your field, and experienced at working with small businesses, that’s great. You like your clients, they like you. Everything is hunky-dory.
You have an established brand, perceived well by your clientele.
Ok, but how does that help you gain new clients?
You get referrals from time to time which often turn into accounting work. But you lose clients through attrition and referrals don’t bring in enough new business to make up for it.
This is where digital marketing is the perfect complement to your current marketing (or lack thereof). Digital marketing can promote your brand in a targeted fashion, so people get to know and trust you long before you ever talk to them.
You decide what you want to promote about your brand, then create campaigns to target your ideal customer. Marketing probably isn’t your area of expertise, and even if it was, you don’t have time for marketing. You’re way too busy with accounting work. That’s fine. It’s best to hire an accountant marketing service, one that has lots of experience working with accountants.
This service will promote your brand through digital channels and analyze the results in an effective and efficient manner. Your result will be to build trust in your brand, especially with new connections.
2. Increasing Your Credibility and Authority
Accountants need to gather trust before a brand-new client is willing to share their private financials. The same is true for accounting firms that work strictly with businesses. Digital marketing for accountants can be an immense help in this area.
How Can You Increase Credibility?
One of the best ways to increase credibility and authority is to offer informative content to people who are searching for an accountant. The content can be delivered in a range of ways.
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Whitepapers
- Infographics
- Images
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
Every piece of content you produce is one more way you are proving to be knowledgeable and well-practiced in your area of specialty. You can start this process by putting together a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) that you hear over and over from prospects and existing clients.
In fact, you can create a page on your website that has short answers to all of these questions. Then, you can flesh out the answers with longer posts and other media. This work is much easier when you work with an agency. They can write some or all of the content, and do the research for keywords that will drive the right searchers to that content. They can spend the bulk of the time creating and producing content with your approval, then track the results that content produces.
3. Qualifying New Leads
We’ve already mentioned how wonderful referrals work for generating new business. But most of the people searching online for an accountant don’t know you or your work. It’s very possible that they’ve never heard of you. Conversely, you don’t know them or if your accounting firm is the right fit for what they need.
Digital marketing is an effective way to qualify these new leads. It begins with their search for an accountant. First, they enter their keywords into Google to find the right accountant. If their search results in a visit to your website or landing page, they begin to qualify themselves.
If they convert on your landing page, they take the next step in the marketing funnel. You can track their behavior, and when they are ready, you can contact them. Or they may contact you. By the time you speak with them, they are a qualified new lead.
4. Budget-Friendly Marketing
Traditional marketing channels are expensive. So expensive that many small businesses can’t afford to use them. Digital marketing is cost-effective. You can work with a small budget to start and raise it when you can. Digital marketing channels may even start out free of charge so you can try them before shelling out any money. Some advertising methods only charge when a link is clicked instead of charging a fee for placing the ad.
You can also track behavior to make sure the right people are landing on your website, people that need your type of accounting services. Tracking makes it easy to separate successful campaigns from unsuccessful ones and helps you run A/B tests to learn which combination of elements gets the most conversions.
5. Educating New Leads
When people land on your website or other content, they are searching for a solution to a problem, even if that problem is just answering a question. Digital marketing for accountants is a good way to educate new leads before they are ready to discuss their accounting issues with you. Before they ever contact you, they are qualifying themselves by reading, listening, or watching your content. This is part of the marketing funnel.
6. Creating a Community
Digital marketing also helps you establish and grow a community if you engage in social media marketing. Through promoting your blog posts and the jumble of other content you post on social media, you get to know your audience and can have some fun with them. This is one way to personalize your service, show that accounting isn’t so cut and dried. There are real people involved with lives that you can share through digital marketing.