A GREAT Marketing Strategy for Accounting Firms

If you’re like most accounting firms, your greatest opportunity to grow revenue rests with your existing clients.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to educate your clients, generate more intelligent conversations, uncover additional needs and grow revenue for your firm, all automatically.

I’m a big believer in sales through education. As an accountant, you have a wealth of information on tax and financial planning that can help all of your clients. And each time you communicate a valuable nugget of information, there’s a high probability that it will lead to demand for additional services. For example, if you educate me on research and development tax credits, and I have a software company, I’m probably going to ask for your help in applying for the credits.

Unfortunately, most of that information you have gets communicated during infrequent one on one meetings, and there is only so much you can cover in just one meeting. Ideally, you should be educating each one of your clients on a regular basis, all year round. And by educating clients on different topics all year round, you’re able to avoid turning on the firehose of information in one client meeting.

So let’s talk strategy. You already have the email addresses for each one of your clients. I suggest sending one or two emails a month to each of your clients. Each of those emails needs to cover a specific financial topic and be relevant to needs, interests, stage in life or situation of your client. If your emails are not relevant, they won’t read it. But if they are relevant, your client will open and read it.

At Marketing by Numbers, we send emails on behalf of our accounting firm clients and here’s a typical email.

First, the email is about one topic and is clear and concise. Within 2 seconds, you can understand what the email’s about. This particular email is about the 20% Pass-Through Deduction, so if I’m a business owner, this email will resonate with me.

The email has a short introduction about the pass-through deduction with a button to learn more. When sending emails, you want to measure engagement by tracking click-throughs. If we put all of the information about the pass-through deduction in the email, we would never know who was truly interested in the topic. But by giving a short introduction with a button to learn more, we can track who is interested in this specific topic.

This is really powerful for contact segmentation. If John Smith clicks to learn more about the pass-through deduction, we might want to automatically mark his contact record in our sales and marketing CRM with the term business owner or pass-through deduction. It helps to better segment your clients for future emails or to simply identify clients with specific interests in the future.

Notice that we use the words short 3-minute video in the introduction. Well, the introduction is a teaser. You want to pique their interest while minimizing the time and effort required to consume the information. 3 minutes is a short amount of time to invest and videos are generally more interesting than straight text.

The Learn More button should take the recipient to a landing page or a blog. So here is an example landing page.

First, notice that we are using video to educate the recipient. I’m a big believer in using video because it’s an engaging and easy way to convey complex topics. And with video, you’re able to keep somebody’s attention for a much longer period of time.

Typically, our videos are no longer than three to five minutes and each covers just one specific topic. They are meant to provide enough information for the recipient to clearly understand the topic and how it might apply to them, but not provide a full dissertation or replace a call with you, their accountant.

You want to provide readers with a path to learning more. Below the video, we offer a white paper with more information, but what you really want is for the recipient to contact you. You’re the true path to learning more.

So below the video is a “let’s talk” section. The recipient can call you or they can reply to the email you sent or they can fill out the form which immediately gets sent to you.

And that’s how we generate intelligent conversations.

With this strategy, you’re sending an email to your clients about specific topics that can add value to their lives. You’re sending one or two emails a month and staying top of mind. Your clients can read your blog or watch your video and get a solid overview of a topic. Your client can then decide whether or not it’s a fit for them and whether or not they want to engage with you on that topic. And then it’s super easy for them to get in touch with you.

That’s really the easiest way to stay in touch with your clients, stay top of mind, educate them and generate more conversations, which leads to better serving in your clients while generating more revenue for your firm.

If you would like help with marketing for your accounting firm, be sure to check out Marketing by Numbers. If you have any questions, just post them in the comments section below and I’ll answer them. If you liked this video, please be sure to share it with your friends and colleagues.