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It is time for Part 2 of our Pain Points Heart-icle 💛 for how to overcome marketing challenges – where we will discuss five more pain points that we come across when it comes to marketing for accounting firms!

In this blog, we will discuss the significance of lead generation, the steps to enhance your website design, strategies to capitalize on social media marketing, methods to assess the ROI of your marketing endeavors, and the utilization of marketing automation tools to optimize your processes.

Let's embark on this journey to elevate your accounting firm's marketing and achieve remarkable results!

How Can you Create an Effective Lead Generating Machine for your Accounting Firm?

Lead generation is critical for any business, it's especially important for accounting firms. It's important to create an effective lead generation machine that will continually bring in potential clients.

The most successful way to do this is through content marketing.

You'll need five things to create a lead machine for your accounting firm:

1: Create a Valuable Digital Asset.

This can be an e-book, white paper, video course, exclusive podcast, webinar, or anything that speaks to a specific problem that your prospective clients may have and tells them how to solve that problem.

2: A Lead Capture Solution

You need a way to capture the information from your prospective clients through some kind of form. You'll need, at minimum, their email, but some additional information, like their first name, can be really helpful with the rest of the campaign.

3: You Need an Automated Email Sequence.

Once you capture their email, you should have an automated email sequence that is sent to the lead, delivering them their free asset, sharing relevant information about the topic that they're interested in, and roughly five to seven other emails should do the trick. They all need to be relevant to the downloadable resource that they requested.

4: A Direct Call to Action

If a lead is interested in learning more about what you do - what do they do next?

Book a call? Schedule an appointment? Attend a workshop?

Be clear and consistent and let them know exactly what they need to do to get started, to get to the paid level of your service.

A Calendly link is a great example, which allows a lead to book a time directly within your calendar.

5: A Structure for that Discovery Call

If somebody books a discovery call, you need to have a defined agenda and goals for that meeting, with a clear next step for the lead moving forward.

How Can you Improve your Website Design for your Accounting Firm?

A website is one of the most important pieces of marketing for any business.

To be honest, one of the biggest areas of improvement I see for most accounting firms is in their website design, layout, and copy.

The key to improving your website design for your accounting firm is to focus on usability, clarity, and engagement.

Here are the top three things that you can do to improve your website design:

1. Be sure that your Website Builds Trust with your Visitors

To do this your website should empathize with your target clients. Let them know you understand the problems that they're facing right now, and that you know how to solve them. Then, how their lives are going to be transformed for the better after doing business with you.

2. Clear Call to Action

Your site needs to have a clear call for what somebody needs to do in order to do work with you.

Is it completing a form? Booking a call through a Calendly link?

Being clear and concise as to what a prospective client needs to do in order to start doing business with you is critical to a successful website.

3. Optimize your Website for Mobile

On average 50 percent of the visitors to your site are likely accessing your site on their phones. So, make sure that your site looks great and is truly legible, no matter what device somebody's using.

How Can you Leverage Social Media Marketing for your Accounting Firm?

Social media can be a powerful tool for marketing your accounting firm and raising awareness about the services that you provide to prospective clients.

Here are three tips for leveraging social media for your accounting firm:

Tip 1: Understand Which Platforms your Target Clients are Using

LinkedIn is my first recommendation for any accounting firm.

Consider the other popular platforms as well, such as, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok if you'd like. But if your target audience is business owners, a lot of them will be on LinkedIn and when they're on LinkedIn they're in a business headspace.

Tip 2: Engage with Relevant Content to your Clients

Make sure that you're sharing timely, relevant content, on social media. This should be interesting and actually useful to your audience.

Tip 3: Have a Plan for Response Time

Your audience expects you to reply within a certain manner and within a certain amount of time. So, make sure that you are prepared to reply within 24 hours if anybody asks questions or comments on any of your posts.

How do you Measure the ROI of Marketing for your Accounting Firm?

Measuring the return on investment for your accounting firm's marketing efforts is key to understanding if you're actually getting an ROI and your strategies are paying off.

Here are three tips for measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts:

Tip 1: Set Clear Goals and Objectives

Determine exactly what it is that you want to achieve with your campaigns. Then set measurable goals and objectives that you can actually track.

Tip 2: Track your Success Metrics (or your Key Performance Indicators)

Use the data available to measure how successful your efforts were in meeting those pre-set goals.

A couple KPIs that you can consider are:

Website visits
Calls received
Number of leads generated, or
Sales made as a measure of success

Tip 3: Monitor Performance Over Time

Marketing is an ongoing effort, and you should monitor your progress as time goes on. Track if things are trending in a positive, or negative direction, and make changes needed to ensure that your marketing is effective.

Unfortunately, unlike being an accountant, marketing isn't a 100% game. There's no proven strategy in order to get 100 results. I know your mindset as an accountant is likely focused on getting a hundred percent, because if you get anything wrong you are liable and your clients are in trouble, you need to make sure that you’re on your A-game when you're delivering to your clients. With marketing it is not as black and white.

So, you need to make sure that you test strategies, measure their effectiveness, and tweak as you go.

What are Some Marketing Automation Tool that you Should Use for your Accounting Firm?

Automation and AI is what everybody's talking about right now. Marketing automation tools are becoming increasingly popular for businesses of all sizes. Accounting firms should certainly consider using them to increase their efficiency as it relates to their marketing campaigns.

Here are three marketing automation tools that we would recommend:

1. A Customer Relationship Management Software

A system like a CRM is a great way to track leads from beginning to close, but also manage those customer relationships while they're clients of yours.

2. Email Marketing

This is another great way to make sure that you are creating a great relationship with your clients.

Think of tax season. If there are certain reminders that you need to send out, you can create an automated email campaign. This can start with one email that goes “Hey, tax season's coming up, here are things you need to consider” or “Here are potential tax changes that have happened within the tax code” and “Here's your final day reminders”.

You can lay those out in an automated sequence, hit the button once, and those can be automatically sent out on your specified dates.

3. Social Media Management Tool

Automating social media posts, on various platforms, and making sure that you can schedule those, can save you an immense amount of time and stress – not having to worry about coming up with posts, and content, and captions in the moment.

Wrap Up

In conclusion, building an effective lead generating machine for your accounting firm requires a multi-faceted approach that includes creating valuable digital assets, capturing leads, engaging with automated email sequences, having clear calls to action, and leveraging marketing automation tools.

By focusing on these areas, you'll be well on your way to creating a successful marketing strategy that will not only bring in potential clients but also keep them engaged and coming back for more.

Remember, in the world of marketing, it's essential to continuously test, measure, and adapt your strategies to ensure maximum effectiveness.

So, take what you've learned in this Heart-icle 💛 (and part 1!) and start implementing these strategies today to elevate your accounting firm's marketing game.

If you’re ready to get started or have more questions, book your FREE discovery meeting with us today, here, We can’t wait to chat with you about your new business venture!

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this blog helpful!

I'll see you next time!

About the Author

Bryton Udy is the Founder and CMO of atHeart Creative, and host of the Accountant Marketing Mentor YouTube Channel. Dedicated to helping accountants simplify their marketing and communications so they can grow their accounting, bookkeeping, and financial planning businesses, he is passionate about harnessing creative marketing to support the independent accountant.

5️⃣ Pain Points Accounting Firms Face: Overcome Challenges with These Marketing Strategies (Part 2)