Beat the Overwhelm: Efficient Marketing for Accounting Firms

Plagued by the need to create attention-grabbing content that pulls in new prospects but limited on time, many accounting firm owners don’t know where to turn. Marketing for accounting firms is often like that chore you know needs to be done and is staring you right in the face but seems too time consuming to tackle. That’s why we wanted to make this guide to help CPA firm owners (or their marketing team) zero in on the most important marketing tasks and ways that they can automate or at least streamline the process.

Keep reading to find out how you can create a comprehensive, yet efficient marketing plan.

Determine the Channels Your Target Market Uses

We are all victims of using every marketing platform imaginable for our marketing efforts. If you’ve been a victim of the “be on every social media platform known to man” movement, raise your hand. But here’s the deal: your prospective clients aren’t likely on every marketing channel.

Here’s an example. Let’s say your firm was trying to reach law firm partners. Likely TikTok and Instagram will not be the right platform to reach your target audience. Instead, you’d be more likely to reach law firm partners via industry publications like Attorney at Law or the American Bar Association. So, you might invest your time into writing a blog post for one of these platforms to publish on their website rather than making a TikTok video.

On the other hand, if you are targeting lifestyle brands, you might find that TikTok and Instagram are the perfect platforms to post attention-grabbing video content. It’s all about knowing your audience and the platforms they are most likely to engage with.

Posting on platforms that aren’t used by your target audience will be a waste of effort. You’ll notice that the performance metrics for these platforms will be less than ideal and that growth is hard to come by. Furthermore, you won’t see a tangible payback (leads generated) from these platforms. The time you spent creating content for these platforms could have been invested in one of your better performing platforms.

Focus on what is working or what is likely to work rather than a “trendy” channel that isn’t getting you results. We officially give you permission to jump off the “every platform” bandwagon.

Identify the Channels That Give the Most Leverage

Similar to what we just mentioned, it’s important to identify the channels that are providing the most ROI and leverage.

Let’s say that your ideal customer reads content posted by both the American Bar Association and Attorney at Law. However, you’ve noticed that you receive more clicks or website visits coming from the American Bar Association. It may be time to post the content you would normally place on Attorney at Law on the American Bar Association’s site. Using this technique, you may find your website visits trending up. Not only that, but you have more touchpoints with ideal customers, and it takes on average 8 touchpoints for a lead to become a client.

It's also possible that one platform charges you money to post content while a more effective one is free. If you are seeing more traffic coming from LinkedIn posts than Google ads, you may decide to have your team focus on developing social posts on LinkedIn or experimenting with LinkedIn ads.

Find Technology That Streamlines or Automates Your Strategy

There are many new forms of technology changing the way firms like yours create content. Using these technologies streamlines your marketing strategy and frees up time for your team to work on other tasks. Listed below are a few marketing tools we use to enhance our marketing strategy.

ChatGPT

While it is important to note that using AI like ChatGPT could land you in copyright jail, it can be helpful to use ChatGPT to brainstorm or assist in content creation. Just be sure not to take content produced by AI word for word. If you use ChatGPT to create an 800 word blog post for example, make sure you add your own insights, tone, and messaging to the piece. You can also run copy produced by AI through a copyright checker.

I’d suggest using ChatGPT to help you discover pain points your target audience experiences. You could also ask ChatGPT to create an outline for your blog post that you can fill in with your own words.

Here are a few more uses for ChatGPT:

• Generate social media captions based on an article

• Create meta descriptions for new articles

• Change the tone of a piece of content to match the way your prospective clients speak

• Provide attention-grabbing article titles based on specific keywords

• Optimize current content for SEO

Answer The Public

Answer The Public is another software that can be helpful to streamline content creation. Answer The Public will provide you with questions people are searching related to a specific keyword. Just plug in your keyword that you’d like to write about and find specific questions you should answer in your blog post.

Canva

You may know that Canva has a library of graphic design templates and stock images, but did you know Canva can also use AI to generate custom images? Use Canva’s AI tool to create images that perfectly represent your latest blog post, social media post, or email marketing content.

Vidyo.AI

The last tool we’d like to cover in this article is Vidyo.AI. This tool can generate clips that can be used on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. Dynamic captions can also be added to serve the 69% of content consumers that view video with the sound off.

Focus on Quality over Quantity

Often, humans are prone to the mindset of “more is better”. But as many of us know, more is not always better. The same applies to your digital marketing strategy. Quality, relevant content is far better than quantity.

Your target audience is naturally inclined to consume content that is note-worthy, helpful, interesting, or amusing. If your firm puts out content with topics they have read about time and time again, they will start to associate your firm with unhelpful content which may lead them to unfairly judge your service offerings as the same.

Focus on serving content that may take a bit more legwork but is attention grabbing in some way. Putting more time into a piece of content that is novel in some way will get you more traction than ten pieces of content that are easily forgotten.

We hope this article has helped you beat some of the overwhelm of crafting strategic, effective marketing initiatives. If you’d like to learn more about accounting firm marketing, check out our Virtual CFO Playbook.