Here are five opportunities that all accounting firms should be thinking of with their marketing:

1. Communicate their sector expertise – surveys with decisions makers have shown that one of the key drivers behind their selection of their accountant was the accountant’s understanding of their world. If the accountant does not have experience of the customer’s sector, and understand the opportunities and potential pitfalls within that market, then it immediately puts them at a disadvantage. This is why it’s so important to categorise your navigation by sector, so that you can construct pages that detail your experience within each market. You should include customer testimonials specific to that market on each of these pages, along with details of the individual accountants that specialise in the area.
2. Communicate your commercialism – the other trait that decision makers so often look for in their accountant is commercialism. This will vary depending on the nature of the service being provided, but for full service accountancy most clients want their chosen professional to look beyond the tasks being delivered and towards their commercial impact. Business owners, in particular, are not interested in excessive technical detail. All they want to know is what it will mean for them in pounds and pence.
3. Don’t neglect local SEO – keep in mind that most businesses will want their accountant to be relatively close, geographically. Therefore, having well constructed local landing pages is hugely important for driving that targeted traffic that’s going to convert. When building these pages, you need to consider the broad array of things going through the user’s mind when they make the related search query. For example, if someone searches for “Accountants in London” what do you think they are hoping to find – service details, a map of your location, FAQ’s, testimonials of existing customers that are also based in London, an 020 telephone number perhaps? The more of this rich information that is contained within the page, the better for the user and the better for your search engine ranking.
4. Design your content around your customer’s interests, not your own – one of the most common mistakes made by accountancy companies is that they create content (on their, blog, social media, email, etc) that interests them, rather than that which interests their audience. Of course at some point you have to bring it back to your services and expertise, but you must begin the conversation on their terms, talking about the things that most interest them. For example, if they are a business owner then that is likely to be topics like sales, marketing, business trends, culture and leadership.
5. Don’t be afraid of advertising – accountants are often a little on the cautious side when it comes to investing in advertising. However (and this should appeal to you number bods), there is really no need to be worried as long as you are in control of your figures. For example, if a typical customer is worth £1000 in profit to you, then you know that as long as you spend less (hopefully a lot less) than £1000, you are in profit. This is what we call a cost per accession model and it is how you can scale your lead generation quickly whilst maintaining profitability. It is something that every professional service organisation should have in place, even if they don’t always need to use it.

For more information on digital marketing services for the accounting sector contact hello@boss-digital.co.uk.