Not all accountants are marketers, but that doesn’t mean you should skip marketing altogether. Your clients rely on you for advice, so you should improve your relationship with them through marketing. According to a study by global information services company Wolters Kluwer, less than a third (29.9%) of firms have dedicated marketing or business development staff, but only 31.2% outsource some promotion responsibilities. However preoccupied you are with juggling financials, you should allot adequate resources for marketing. With these techniques and marketing automation tools for accountants, there is no excuse for your firm to fall short in your marketing activities:
- Reinforce Email Marketing
One way to directly market you firm is to reach out to your target audience through sending emails. Yes, emails. With the volume of email marketing messages being exchanged every day, this measure still proves to be relevant. Email marketing helps acquire new clients and nurture existing ones. It lets you be highly personal, yet communicates your brand and services. Recommended Tools: Infusionsoft, MailChimp
- Generate Content Ideas
Know which topics and trends your target audience are likely to read in order to catch their interests and make them want to share your posts. However, we often experience feeling stuck and running out of ideas, and without a great topic idea, there would be no great content. Good thing there are tools that generate ideas that can help you come up with your next content. You just type your keywords and voila!An interesting topic. Recommended Tools: Title Tool, Buzzsumo
- Schedule posts
Social media is meant for real-time updates, but it also aims to maintain your visibility online. Therefore, you must have a constant stream of updates on your followers’ feed. Having a tool that lets you schedule posts across multiple social networking sites and automatically publish them at a specific date and time saves you all the hassle of keeping your posts consistent. Recommended Tools: Buffer, Hootsuite
- Optimise your Website
Your website will perform best when its web pages are optimised for search, traffic, and conversions. This means it will have greater chances of getting seen, searched, and clicked. If you’re using WordPress for your site, there is a dedicated search engine optimisation (SEO) plugin by Yoast team which will guide you in writing your content better. Recommended Tools: Hemingway App, HubSpot Marketing Grader
- Monitor Analytics
Most importantly, you need to have an analytics dashboard to monitor you website’s and social media’s performance so that you will understand the needs of your clients better and improve your services when needed. There are different tools available that are highly customised, depending on your business objectives (e.g., managing campaign, improving reach and engagement, monitoring keywords, etc.). Recommended Tools: Google Analytics, Mention.
The Outsourced Accountant supports Australian and New Zealand accounting firms by helping them understand and implement outsourcing solutions to help them become more proactive and truly add value to their clients. If you want to know more about outsourcing, call us at 1300 896 522.
REFERENCES http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/8396143/Accountants-dont-understand-marketing.html http://www.accountancyage.com/aa/news/2351932/accountants-continue-to-fail-in-marketing-activities