Digital marketing for accountants and bookkeepers

If you’ve got your accreditation, decided on your style of service and launched your accounting or bookkeeping business in earnest, it’s time to attract some attention – and some clients.

In 2023, it’s safe to say that many forms of traditional marketing are now dead. To make a splash these days, you need to embrace online or digital marketing.

Why is digital marketing important for accounting firms?

The business model of an accountant or bookkeeper is, of course, the collection and retention of clients. If you don’t bring in enough cash from new and existing clientele, you may not last long.

So how does one attract potential clients and retain them? By deploying a solid combination of digital marketing strategies and activities. If you can’t be found online, don’t have a solid social media presence, have a non-existent website, or don’t reach new audiences with digital ads or promotional activity, you may as well be invisible. Let’s run through some online marketing strategies you can deploy to sell your accounting services.

Build a strong online presence

The whole gist behind your digital marketing strategy is your online presence. Your online presence dictates how well you can be found, and the perceived quality of your services when prospective clients find you. To truly attract clients for accountant services or bookkeeping services, your online presence is key.

To build out your online presence start with the following marketing efforts:

• Cement your basic branding including logo, brand colours and taglines – this will populate much of your digital marketing.
• Complete your Google my Business profile.
• Build a solid website.
• Create several relevant social media channels.

Professionally design your accounting firm’s website

First things first – you need to design and maintain a professional website for your accounting firm or bookkeeping service.

Your website reflects your professionalism and will act as your online ‘home base’. If your website is subpar, that makes your business subpar. It will also be the lynchpin behind almost all your digital marketing activities, as this is where people will be forwarded to.

So, make sure your website includes the following:

• A top-notch appointment booking form or contact form for clients to obtain your services or have a chat.
• A clean and uncluttered layout.
• Well-branded design.
• An accessible list and description of your services.
• A blog.
• Easy to see contact details
• Links to your social media channels.
• Testimonials if you have any.
• A landing page that you can link to when undertaking other digital marketing such as social media posts ads or sending email blasts.
• Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Social media for accounting, bookkeeping & advisory firms

Social media has become essential to most businesses – including accounting and bookkeeping firms. These social media platforms offer a way to directly communicate with prospective clients as well as your existing clients to keep them loyal. Being active on socials also helps immensely with your ‘findability’ online and cements you as a serious business.

The key to fruitful and successful social media marketing is of course quality content but also links back to your landing page or website to feed your sales funnel. (These should direct people to book a session or get in touch to ask a question about your services.)

For accountants and bookkeepers, being a thought leader is a great avenue for content.

Think about writing a blog about compliance issues or business management techniques, host a webinar on a common topic, do some quick tips in an image and caption post or record a quick video.

Once you have some social content, pick and choose your platforms and try not to stretch yourself too thin – you may just want to focus on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for example.

Content marketing

Content marketing does what is said on the tin: it uses different content formats and tools to attract prospects. This content will be used in your marketing campaigns to attract potential clients as well as to keep your base engaged and affirm your brand.

Content can come in many forms:

• Blogs or written articles.
• Various styles of social media posts.
• Videos.
• Infographics.
• Podcasts.

Essentially, this content is what will populate your social channels, newsletters, blogs and even ads. It doesn’t have to be polished and perfect; frequency is often more important.

It’s a good idea to lay out a basic content calendar to keep on top of your planning and posting. When you do so, be realistic about how much you can do in a week or month.

SEO as a marketing strategy for accountants

SEO or search engine optimisation, is a tricky beast and there are no simple answers or quick wins – however, you can set yourself up well for success with a bit of attention.

SEO of course is a methodology to become findable online through organic search. Here are a few ways accounting firms can improve your chances of being found in a search engine:

• Fill out your Google My Business Profile in full.
• Refresh your website content. (You can achieve this by writing regular blogs.)
• Use free and cheap SEO tools to set your website up with relevant keywords that people would search for.

Why it’s important to improve your marketing incrementally?

For busy accounting and bookkeeping professionals, successful marketing is an incremental process that relies on continually building out your marketing plan. Marketing your accounting or bookkeeping firm is not about doing things all at once. If you start by creating your online presence, concentrate on creating quality content, and nail your website, you’re on your way.

From there you can look at marketing emails, a content calendar, advertising, and continual improvement of your SEO and social media presence.