Running an accounting firm is complex. You might be selling accounting services to individuals or corporations; one thing is constant – your customers will research their options online. This makes online marketing for accountants essential.

Accounting tasks such as bookkeeping, payroll, taxation, accounts receivable, and accounts payable can be quite cumbersome by themselves. Finding the space to do online marketing for your firm is equally important.

Let’s look into some expert tips for online marketing for accountants.

Online Marketing for Accountants Starts With Content

Positioning yourself as a thought leader to potential customers is a great advantage. Prospective customers are evaluating different accounting firms online and their first point of evaluation is the content they see on your website.

Create content that would be relevant to your prospective clients. This content can be in the form of blogs, long-form articles, infographics, or even bite-sized social media posts (that lead to a longer article on your website).

Prospects are interested in learning about your expertise. They can find this out through your credentials but providing useful content is a better way to display expertise.

You can post this content on your website or you can even post it on online forums that are frequented by your customers.

Small businesses might visit different websites than corporate customers or high net worth individuals, so make sure you post relevant content at the place your audience visits the most!

Build a Social Media Presence

A lot of serious accounting firms do not take social media seriously. Social media might seem like a frivolous channel to sell your services on but you’d be surprised at how much time your target audience spends on social media.

Social media marketing is a great way to not only spread awareness but also to generate leads.

Creating an online social media presence ensures that your customers and prospects can “follow” you on a channel to get the latest updates and content from your business.

Your clients are anyways spending more time on social media than on your website, so it makes sense to have a presence on channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

If you have a healthy content marketing engine, social media also becomes a great place to cross-promote your content on.

Driven by valuable content, social media is a great channel to direct more traffic to your website.

Each social media platform brings with it its own nuances that you’ll need to master (or hire an agency for help). But once mastered, it offers one of the best ROI in digital marketing.

Measure Your Marketing Efforts

Being an accounting firm, measuring your efforts should be second nature for your online marketing as well.

The better you know how well your marketing budget is being spent, the better you can optimize your campaigns for great performance. This becomes even more important if you have an agency that runs digital marketing for you.

The accounting niche you operate in might influence the metrics you should track but generally speaking the following are the metrics you should closely track –

• Reach – or the number of people who can see your content online
• Engagement – or the number of people who engage (share, like, retweet) with your content online
• Conversion rate – or the number of people who click on your call to action (download collateral, etc.)
• Bounce rate – or the number of people who leave your website after visiting just one page

The above metrics will give you a quick overview of the health of your digital marketing activities.

Moreover, most social media platforms already offer ready access to these metrics. Specialized social media analytics tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Buzzsumo can give you a lot more detailed analysis as well.

These tools allow you to track everything from trends to hashtags and are especially useful when it comes to comparing performance across networks.

For example, Buzzsumo can help you track content pieces that are competing for relevant keywords, which can then help you to see how your content marketing campaigns are performing against competitors.

HubSpot is a great all-in-one inbound marketing software, which allows you to have insights into the entire customer journey. You can track audience session lengths, impressions, and clicks across the funnel and also see how that’s impacting your bottom line.

Google Analytics is the most popular tool, and you are most likely already using it to track your website performance. More than just measuring web traffic it can also use UTM parameters to see how much of that traffic is coming from your digital marketing campaigns.

Keep in mind that every business is unique with its own targeting, positioning, and audience segments, which will determine the online marketing strategies most suited for your business.

Online marketing for accountants needs to ensure that it follows the same rigor and consistency as you would normally do in your practice.