Ok, we know. That headache you have at the moment is called content marketing. You know it’s important to attract prospective clients, but frankly, it’s stealing the focus from your existing clients.
Search engines, SEO, social media posts, target audience, content marketing strategy, digital marketing, target audience and social media channels – it’s enough to reach for a painkiller.
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How can you make this work without whittling your days away creating blogs, posts, and tweeting, or twitting or whatever it’s called now? All this while backlinks are causing you backlogs.
We have the answer, and it will work better than medicine. The painkiller will take away your headache, but we will take away your content marketing problem.
Keep reading and we will tell you the things you need to know about content marketing for accountants.
Simple really. Or you can click here right now and then go back to your paying clients.
Why You Shouldn’t Give Up on a Marketing Strategy Too Quickly
Everything has a cost. Not reaching potential clients where they are looking for information is a cost you can’t afford.
Growing your accounting firm requires providing your clients with helpful information by creating the content they want.
The immediate return is securing your reputation as an expert in the accounting industry and generating leads that will bring new clients to your door. Here are some facts for you to consider:
- 80% of potential clients appreciate learning about your business from a blog post
- 70% of clients would rather learn about your company from quality content than ads
- 67% more leads are generated by a business with a blog [1]
Furthermore, social media platforms provide a unique opportunity to build relationships online by bringing customers into your space.
Who are the Clients you Want to Attract?
Take the time to define your services and who will use these services. Drawing up client personas will stop you from spending valuable time and money on content that is not your core business.
A client persona is a fictional representation of an ideal client. Defining these personas helps you to direct your marketing efforts to people who are looking for the services you provide.
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Why is this Important? Speak to any SEO agency and they will ask you to clearly define a target market.
Prospective clients looking for accountancy services are typing certain keywords into search engines. They want to find what they need in 3-5 seconds. They are about as patient as you are with clients that keep losing their cash slips, I’m guessing.
Great Content is Only Great if Paying Clients can Find It
To generate leads clients, you must increase your visibility. Not paying attention to this would be the equivalent of having a designer office space with the latest technology built in an underground bunker.
A bunker might sound like a good idea, but it defeats the purpose of having a swanky office. Bats may thrive in caves, but it’s not a good idea for you.
A good idea for you is to be seen by as many clients as possible. Here’s how you can do it.
Have Your Own Website
Accounting firms that want to reach current and potential clients should start with a website. This acts as the central point for information (like an office) and will house your services, blog posts, video content, links to social media accounts, free tools, news articles, and a client portal where your clients can securely submit financial documentation.
Example of Accounting Website Home Page: Tax Consultancy Group
Content marketing strategies always include a website for a good reason. Google search results favor a well structured website filled with relevant content. This is where search engine optimization comes in.
Search engine optimization is simply the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in search engines such as Google and other search engines. A tool like Google Analytics gives you pretty useful information about how much traffic is coming to your website, from where the traffic is coming and how long clients are spending there. This takes the guesswork out of whether your content is impacting the target market.
There are many paid and free options for creating websites. The most popular options are:
- Wix (Free and Paid options)
- Canva (Free and Paid options)
- GoDaddy (Free and Paid options)
- Hostinger (Paid option)
- WordPress (Paid option)
You will need a good understanding of technology to use these website builders. However, freelance services such as Upwork and Fiver are also good options for hiring a web designer to get you up and running.
Professional web design agencies will cost more, but if you have the money, you will benefit from using an agency.
Is the headache coming on again? Wait. It’s ok. We’ve put a content strategy in place for accountants – in fact, we’ve dedicated an entire agency to your needs.
Click here to learn more and take advantage of our free website audit.
This is the easy route, but if you want to do it the hard way, please continue reading about blog posts. We’ll stick with you to the end because we like accountants and want to help you get more clients.
Blog Posts
Articles are a powerful way of providing your clients with valuable information that will instill confidence in them about your firm and engage with them about topics that matter to them.
The important point here is that it must matter to THEM.
Any person who searches a topic and clicks on a link does so because the article’s or webpage’s title catches their attention. It promised to solve a problem for them, arm them with information or give them a way to navigate through a process – much like this article.
Article titles appear in search rankings because they rank highly for a keyword that your client is searching for. However, articles that rank for keywords are not necessarily high-conversion articles. What do we mean?
Well, let’s say you have an article about how to complete a personal tax return. Ideally, this article should give your client the information they desire but also provide them with an opportunity to use your services instead.
Let’s say you don’t know how to do this. So you write an educational article. The reader’s personal tax return is completed, but you don’t have a new client. You’ve given your services away for free.
But what if you could write an engaging article to educate but also convince them to let you do it because it will take the effort away from them and put their personal tax into the hands of an expert? Now that’s ROI.
The truth is to get this right, you must invest in keyword optimization tools and also a sales copywriting course.
How many of these articles do you have to write, you ask? Good question.
An average of 5 keyword targeted articles per month is the minimum for small businesses to build up their online presence.
Video Content/Webinars
YouTube
People want to see the people that they are dealing with, especially in the accounting industry. Embedding high-quality content such as videos into your website will bring more traffic, especially if the source of the video is a trusted platform like YouTube.
Building relationships with your customers is key. Listening to you present professional content gives your customers an idea of your expertise and allows you to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Business-related videos where you show your customer how to troubleshoot problems with their accounting process or demonstrate how they can use an automated accounting system is invaluable to establish trust.
People are much less critical than you think, so don’t be afraid to use a high quality smartphone to film and edit your videos. Platforms such as Canva help you to make videos into a quality product.
Top Tip: Use a tool such as ChatGPT to write a script for your video or at least plan it out on paper. This will help to keep you focused on the message. People rarely watch videos longer than 5-8 minutes unless they really need the information provided. Make videos of various lengths and include some ‘shorts’ which are 30 seconds to 1 minute long.
Social Media Marketing for Accountants
Lead generation from social media platforms forms an integral part of a content marketing strategy. A post on social media can direct clients to a landing page on your website. This can be achieved by offering a free resource to customers, a special package or a service.
Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok provide different methods of interaction with your clients, but you will have to decide whether they add value to your brand’s reputation or diminish it.
– LinkedIn for Professional Business
LinkedIn is one platform recognized for linking professionals with one another. We have provided a resources section later in this article where you can learn more about setting up a LinkedIn business page.
Having provided you with content marketing ideas that give the biggest ROI, we’re pausing to see how you’re coming along. If you feel that you’re just getting started, keep reading to get more ideas.
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– Free E-Guide
Create valuable content and put it into an e-guide that you can offer to your clients on your website.
The purpose of creating such a guide is to educate and inform but also to get something from the prospective client, namely, their contact details (mainly their email address).
Using the principle of influence, and reciprocation, the idea is that your client gives you something if they know they are getting something in return that is no or low risk.
– Podcasts
Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular because people listen to people they respect and who speak about topics that matter to them. If you specialize in a niche within the industry, this is the ideal opportunity to turn this specialized information into a podcast.
Interview other professionals in the same industry or experts in a related field, such as taxation, forensic auditing, investments and accounting automation, to name a few.
This also helps you to build your professional network.
Other Content Ideas for Accountants
Maybe you’re looking for what else you can do to engage with your customers and we’re happy to oblige. Like we said, we like accountants. So here’s the grande finale of other content ideas:
Infographics – a visual representation of data. Canva.com allows you to make an infographic without much fuss.
Live chats – a chat function where clients can speak with an expert directly
Photo Galleries – a photo often says more than many words. Photos of you and your team give credibility to your business
Case Studies or Customer Stories – provide potential clients with confidence that you can provide what you say you can.
FAQ Section – Gives your customers a place to search for burning questions they have without using email or making a phone call. An FAQ section empowers the client, which they will appreciate.
Customer Reviews – give honest feedback to customers that have left bad reviews and thank customers that have left good reviews. This shows your approach to service delivery and builds trust.
Guest Blogging – provides an opportunity to be seen on websites related to your work. The more clients find you online as a credible source of valuable information, the more likely they are to become a new client.
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Conclusion
In this article, we’ve provided you with the most powerful ways to create content to increase your online presence.
We feel confident that if you implement these ideas, you will see results.
Some of our customers have already seen their businesses grow as a result of these strategies. You can click here to read their stories or here to read trustpilot reviews of our parent company, which is where we birthed the idea of accountant seo.
Leave us a comment and let us know how these strategies worked for you too.
Resource Section
Here are some free resources that we took the time to gather for you. These resources will help you implement the ideas in the article.
Use LinkedIn for Business:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/linkedin-for-business/
How to record a podcast:
https://www.thepodcasthost.com/recording-skills/how-to-record-a-podcast/
How to design an e-book:
https://www.canva.com/create/ebooks/
How to host a Webinar:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/are-webinars-dead-how-to-make-a-webinar
Andrey Popov/Canva
Footnotes: