With many accounting firms adapting to working remotely and conducting meetings virtually, now that lockdown is easing with some offices reopening for skeleton staff, it’s time to get on board with the ‘new normal’ and get your marketing focus back on track.
What’s key is ensuring that you continue to maintain the quality level of service for your existing clients as you start to ramp up your marketing activity. While looking for quality leads is important, maintaining a high level of service for your existing clients can reap rewards with additional service requests to help navigate the raft of grants available allows for cross sell opportunity.
So, how do you maintain your quality level of service for existing clients as you look to attract new clients?
Here’s our top 3 online marketing tips for accountants for ongoing engaging client liaison to keep customers and prospects well informed providing you with the opportunity for increasing revenue and growing your business.
1. Marketing automation
Is it time to consider implementing marketing automation into your accountancy practice? This can help free up valuable time as marketing automation can take on those vital but time-consuming and repetitive tasks.
You may be forgiven for one moment in thinking: ‘But does this not take the personal touch out of the equation when the aim is to offer a high level of client service?’
In short, no. One aspect of marketing automation is the ability to pre-set email sequences that cover a range of scenarios such as meeting a contact at a virtual networking session. You can then schedule to send the pre-written email when you’re back at your desk.
But by creating a sequence of let’s say three emails, you can plan to send the second one after a few days with some pertinent insight and then if you do not hear back after the second email, then a third is sent. If there is engagement at any point then this triggers a halt on the email chain so you can jump in to make the next response totally personal.
You can also automate your social media marketing so messages go out in a timely manner.
If you’ve managed with webinars and Zoom meetings, perhaps now is the time to delve a little deeper into the technology available to enhance your business and your client’s experience. This could be a game-changer for your accounting firm.
2. What’s your content marketing plan?
We’ve been through a roller coaster of government announcements these past few months. One thing that’s key with an accountancy practice is your knowledge and insight to navigate the financial landscape.
Let clients and prospects know about your expertise and your guidance. Your accountancy firm is not just about payroll, bookkeeping, corporate finance or VAT returns, you are an advisory service. Therefore, your expertise in understanding all the implications and potential benefits available is a huge help for businesses trying to simply get by, keep their customers and pay their staff. So, communicate this with your client base with updates on your website about the latest news and government announcements. You can also share this content via email marketing or social media with links back to the full blog on your website.
We recommend that you compile a content marketing plan adding key dates in so you know when you can write a blog post about a particular topic and send out timely communication that will help your clients.
For prospects, this continued sharing of information helps to build trust with your accounting practice over other firms. If you’re offering advice that is helping, then you have more chance of getting a call for a consultation.
Regular and new content on your website with keywords that you want to be found forms part of a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Including this in your plan will really help give your website a boost in search results pages.
3. Review your target audience
Over this period have you discovered that you’ve been working in one or two sectors of industry more than others? Or perhaps you have had more enquiries about a certain service or from similar sized businesses. Now is the time to review these frequent enquiries and really understand who your target audience is. This will help so much with engagement and attracting quality leads because you can tailor your marketing communication specifically to their concerns. This positions you as the thought leaders in your area of expertise.
Here’s our advice on creating up an online persona (an imaginary person that is your typical target audience).
Digital marketing for accountants
We don’t know what the landscape will be in a few months-time but as it is, with your expertise and a little time exploring your marketing options, you can be a step ahead of the game.
We are a digital marketing agency in Croydon offering a specialism in digital marketing for accounting businesses. Why not take advantage of our free website audit so you can understand whether you need to make any updates to your website so that it is optimised for lead generation.