The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your CPA Firm Online
In a competitive industry like accounting, it’s important to understand how to make your CPA firm stand out from your competitors. Online marketing is the ultimate way to gain new prospects and maintain a successful business for all types of businesses. Having a strong digital strategy in place is especially important for your accounting firm, because the internet is the first place new potential clients go to research businesses like yours.
If you want to win new clients while increasing loyalty and supporting growth from existing ones, it’s important to make sure that your company is visible, online. Use this simple guide to learn the important steps that you should be taking today to grow your CPA firm online, and build a solid foundation for acquiring more business.
Know Your Clients
In order for your CPA firm to successfully sell its services to new clients, online, you need to fully understand what the needs of your customers are. Don’t guess at what you think they might be. Verify it by listening to what your current and prospective new customers are telling you. Do your research and learn how people are finding CPAs online and the specific services they are inquiring about. This can be done using a combination of internal web analytics, SEO software like SEM Rush and Wordstream, and/or free tools on Google.
Use this information to determine the services you really need to focus on, the key words and phrases you should be using, and the smartest ways to deliver information about your service offerings in the digital realm. Taking these simple first steps can really help you target your digital efforts, use your time and resources most efficiently, and grow revenue while maximizing ROI.
Create A Digital Marketing Plan
There are a variety of digital marketing channels that play a role in the overall success of a website. Each of these practices involves technical and strategic components that could significantly change the outcome of your marketing campaigns.
Popular Effective Digital Marketing Channels Include:
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click is a paid advertising channel that delivers highly targeted traffic of potential clients within a short span of time. The success for PPC ads varies from business-to-business. Much of it depends on how much you are willing to invest in placing advertisements and how much you are willing to pay for acquiring new customers. That said, one of the great benefits of PPC is that your advertising budget is always in your control. With PPC ads, you are given the ability to set exactly how much you wish to spend for a day, week or month of running your ads, and you can start and stop at any time. Success from PPC also depends on how well you have researched targeted keywords and the optimization of the context and visuals of your ads.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Just about everyone who uses the internet relies on search engines to find certain products or services that they may need. Your effective use of SEO will ultimately help determine your CPA firm’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPS). Search engine optimization (SEO) is an unpaid process that works to improve the quality and quantity of organic website traffic to a specific website or web page. This process includes several different activities such as keyword research, on-page and off-page optimization, link-building and more.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies that allows you to connect with your audience, promote your brand and increase sales. It involves sending emails to prospects and customers (with permission) that can include promotions, product / service updates, news, and other useful information. Monthly email newsletters are a great way to keep customers engaged with your accounting firm throughout the year.
- Social Media
The number of social media users continues to grow every day. Embracing the power of social media can allow you to engage with the right audiences, as well as create and amplify brand awareness for your accounting services. Many people use social media to check the reputation of companies before they decide to work with them.
A few examples of the most popular social media platforms include:
- YouTube
Content Marketing
Even though marketing strategies are constantly evolving, content marketing is something that has always been essential. Today, more than ever, content marketing is at the core of every successful digital marketing campaign. Content marketing involves all of the text, graphics, videos and other information that you create and distribute, that people associate with your CPA firm. Your website is typically the hub of your content marketing wheel, but your content also includes emails, ads, social posts, etc. The better your content, the higher your conversion rates will typically be. Great content showcases your expertise, authority and credibility to both customers and search engines. it allows you to educate, inform and engage with your existing clients, and prospective new ones. By providing both sets of people with the information they want and need, you build relationships, earn trust and grow your business.
Maintain Your Website
Your website is your most important online marketing tool. Creating a great website for your business is only the first step, you must also actively maintain it, so that you continue to see your desired results. Regularly updating your website with useful and relevant content leads to two major benefits:
- It boosts your incoming traffic
Google raises rankings for websites that are regularly updated and well-maintained because they want to provide their users with the latest, most relevant, high quality content. The higher your rankings are, the more likely that new customers will find your website at or near the top of search engine result pages.
- Provides a better user-experience
Creating a website that is fast, responsive, well-organized, intuitive-to-navigate, informative and visually compelling are all part of creating great user-experience on a website. When it comes to content, creating rich, useful content and incorporating features and elements such as blogs, image galleries, charts, videos all help improve visitor experience. Instead of simply reading about your services on your website, this type of rich content gives your audiences the chance to engage, and stay interested. The better their experience, the more likely you will keep them coming back while continuing to attract new customers.
Why Choose Beson4 As Your Digital Marketing Partner?
Digital marketing is something that can help CPA firms like yours reach your target audience consistently and productively. By its easily-trackable, data-centric nature, it enables you to analyze various methods and practices to understand which are working well and reveal those that may not be as effective.
Beson4 is a full-service advertising agency and digital marketing company that can help you design and implement a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, and plan. For over twenty years, we have been helping businesses and start-ups grow strong brands using a forward-thinking mix of branding, digital marketing, technology, and design.