Marketing for CPAs, Accountants, and Tax Professionals November 21, 2018
Are you looking for solutions for marketing and growing your tax and accounting firm? Read on.
We live in a digital era. Did you know 30% of mobile searches are related to a location?
If someone searches for “cpa firms near me” on Google and you are not in the top results, you just lost a potential customer.
For example, when I search for that keyword, Google shows me 12.7 Million results.
Massive competition, isn’t it?
I am sure you will agree that positioning yourself online is perhaps imperative for your business growth.
In this article, I will talk about the most important things you can do to be visible online.
And I promise I will save you the marketing jargon that can haunt you!
I will try to help you understand the concept of marketing for cpas accountants and tax professionals.CPA Marketing: Who, Why, What
Start with asking yourself the following questions:
- Who is my target audience?
- How can I help them?
Once you have these answers, you will be able to craft an effective strategy to market your CPA business on the World Wide Web, aka, the Internet.
Get a clear picture of your end user- persona is important.
More and more businesses are gearing towards persona-based Marketing for a reason.
I have seen multiple companies, small and big alike, investing thousands of dollars into marketing without defining their persona and their problems.
For example, you could have your potential clients in a certain age-range, income-group, region, and gender. Define those to the best of your ability.
Once, you are ready, it is time to move to the next step.Create a Website
Yeah, you need a website, regardless of the size of your business. A website is your identity on the WWW. When people search for things online and do not see your website, they are mot likely to move on to the next business that offers a well-designed website.
What does it take to create a website?
Here are the important phases in creating a website:
- Use data from “Who, Why, What” above to define the goals of your business and the requirements of your end user. At this stage, you will be researching, sketching and writing a bunch of ideas. Be patient!
- Decide on home-page and menu navigation. Ideally, here you should have a sitemap in your project plan.
- Get a domain name and a host.
- Choose a design theme/template for your website, This will also depend on the choice of your web development platform. You can either go for an open-source CMS such as WordPress or have a website developed in PHP, ASP.Net or other programming languages. It depends on your budget, and level of comfort to use the website (backend).
- The next step is adding content: copy, images, videos and more.
- At this stage, you will start seeing your website take shape. Test thoroughly to ensure the website renders well across different browsers and different devices. With users using a variety of devices, you want to look good everywhere.
- Launch your website.
CPA Marketing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Alright, so you have a well-designed website, ready with the information your prospects want.
But is your website on the first page of Google search results?
A website on Google’s Page 1 gets around 20 times more traffic than a site on the second page.
SEO takes time and commitment. It takes months to rank on Google’s first page. Hence, patience is the key here.
Keyword optimization is the most important aspect of SEO. Does your website rank on Google’s top results for the keywords your users are searching for?
While SEO is a science and involves dozens of tweaks, the one thing you should focus on is- Are you providing value to your persona?
Aim for value, and with a little technicality, search engine rankings will follow suit.Content Marketing
I love this quote from MarketingProfs: Make your customers the hero of your stories.
Content Marketing is “the” most important aspect of online marketing. Without storytelling, your brand will cease to grow.
People love stories. Thanks to digital marketing, you have the amazing opportunity to share your story through different channels such as your website blog, social media platforms, third-party blogs, and more.
Not to forget, content marketing requires consistency. Like SEO, this is a vast subject to cover in a few sentences.Marketing for CPAs, Accountants, and Tax Professionals: Social Media Marketing
Nowadays, everyone uses Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social media platforms.
Moreover, 91% of social media users are accessing social channels via mobile devices.
Take a look at this chart from PEW Research Center:
You have to identify the platforms where your prospects hang out and then engage them through stories. Post regularly, but it all boils down to quality over quantity.
Do not dismiss a platform (say Instagram) without looking into its usage among your target audience.Email marketing
Did you know that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect a return of $38?
In the digital age, email is a primary communication channel.
You can reap the benefits of email marketing using a smart strategy.
The biggest issue- abusing this channel. Not following the CAN-SPAM Act can lead to email-abuse, or even blacklisting.
Respect your email lists. Do not purchase email-lists. Let users give you their email in exchange for a valuable piece of information- article, webinar, podcast or others.
Email Marketing requires consistency, and segmentation.Online Ads
Why do businesses spend thousands of dollars on online ads?
Because the results are often quicker than those from organic channels.
Going back to our “cpa firms near me” search,
You can see that the top three results are paid ads. (i have highlighted them for better understanding).
It is important to stay on top of results. And that is why you should invest in online advertisements.
Search Engine Marketing is a technical process. Do some homework before jumping into this arena though.
There you go, you now know the steps involved in going online with your CPA business.Questions?
Reach out to us with your questions.