Every accountancy firm wants to grow. To do that with any business (like yours), growth means a commitment to lead generation. When it comes to lead generation for accountants, let’s be real - it’s a difficult task that you may think you don't have much time for.
In reality, perfecting lead generation for accountants is easier than you think. To start you off, here are nine content marketing suggestions from our experts which can help you to generate more leads for your business.
3. Don’t Ignore Email Marketing
5. Correctly Position Your Calls-to-Action
Bonus Tip: Get SEO Direction via Directories
#1. Banish Corporate Jargon
Here’s a fun game to illustrate a larger point. It’s called ‘Would You Ever Actually Perform That Metaphor?’ Just think of jargon that’s been overused and say Yes or No as to whether you would actually do it. For example:
- Have you ever thrown something against a wall in order to see what stuck to said wall? (Other than the last time you painted the dining room, that is)
- Did you ever roll an actual ball during a kickoff meeting? Seriously?
- Would you conduct an important phone call from a football match, just so you could physically move the goalposts to enhance a witty metaphor?
We’re kidding with all of this, but you can see what we’re getting at here: corporate jargon isn’t leading your firm anywhere. Whilst projecting a professional image is necessary for your brand, overuse of commonly used corporate jargon is a turnoff that needs to be subdued, if not completely eradicated. The terms and phrases in the game example mentioned above are overused to the point that they become pointless and create less engagement with customers. You often find them in the ‘tech’ industry, but any sector - including accountancy - could be guilty of this practice. In your current or previous marketing, business, or content practices, marketing data has revealed that you’ll hear corporate jargon in more than three out of five (64%) offices.
Could one of these offices and websites be yours? If so (to turn one metaphor on its head), then it’s time to throw that jargon baby out with the bathwater. I just couldn’t resist.
#2. Lead with Blogging
On the micro and macro level, it’s crucial to be regularly producing original content with potential clients via a sound blogging strategy.
The return on investment from compounding blogs is realised on both a short and long-term basis. If a blog post you publish is compounding, that means your organic search traffic via that post has increased over time. HubSpot research indicates a compounding post creates the same amount of traffic to your website as six posts that decay, or don’t compound. Do it well and regularly, and you have a web traffic godsend on your hands.
Renowned blogger and marketer Neil Patel mentioned the importance of getting help with content creation. Truth is, there’s more that goes into a good post (micro) and the overall blogging strategy (macro) than a single content guru.
Creating a winning blog strategy is not a one-person job. Here are just a few experts or business departments your blog strategy needs help from:
- Development: Placement and exposure on the website lie with this lot. They could make or break the performance of a given post.
- Design: What does your post template look like? Does it need a revamp?
- Graphics: How about custom imagery? Do you employ someone to do this in an eye-catching manner?
- Social media: For both paid and organic targeting, blog posts require considered, dedicated, remit and thorough social media strategies to ensure the strategy is aligned and the content promoted
- SEO: Did you hire your content person as a writer only? If so, they might only have blogging and content under their remit, as opposed to an understanding of a thorough keyword strategy.
These are just a few stakeholders in your strategy. So it’s important to consider who really benefits most from your blog so that you can turn it into a sea of clients.
Need more lead generation tips in accounting (30, to be specific)? Download our free Greatest Lead Tips for Professionals Guide.
#3. Don't Ignore Email Marketing
📥 Different types of email perform different functions in #EmailMarketing. Some are more for awareness, and some are more for conversion. pic.twitter.com/ZmIVuvzcpV
— Larry Kim (@larrykim) June 5, 2018
You ignore email marketing at your own peril.
In all honesty, you likely have been given reason to doubt email marketing strategies. There still exists a misconception that email marketing is only to be used when communicating with existing prospects and customers. According to MarketingProfs, two out of every five marketers (42%) admit they don’t have a targeted email strategy.
Not so. Email can be a great channel for new lead generation, too, particularly if you take the time to segment audiences, align to mobile (Movable Ink found that half of all email opens come via smartphone), and personalise the greetings.
Some great tactics in which you can utilise email for lead generation include:
- Broadcasting valuable content offers
- Sharing relevant news
- Aligning tailored emails within a considered buyer’s journey
- Using social sharing buttons
#4. Converse on Social Media to Convert
You’ve heard it mentioned already in prior points, but social media is also its own set of strategies.
Here at Digital Media Stream, we're always inclined to ask: does your accountancy have any buyer’s personas mapped out? According to HubSpot:
“A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
Social media played a part in creating these useful marketing tools, and social media also plays a part in how you carry it out. That’s because a marketing effort that uses social media helps you broaden the reach of your brand.
Increasingly in our industry, marketers use the phrase H2H instead of just B2B or B2C to describe their marketing outreach structure. If you don’t know, H2H means “human-to-human”.
It doesn’t get much more human-to-human than in social media. On LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter especially, accountants like you can successfully use social media to build trust and loyalty with both current and potential clients through stronger organic and paid targeting capabilities.
Through sound inbound marketing practice, social media connections can’t be treated simply on some sort of grand company-to-individual basis. Leads via social media happen when you utilise them to learn about your audience, communicate, and share relevant information.
#5. Correctly Position Your Calls-to-Action
Are you really encouraging your reader to do something? With inbound marketing, the main idea is to develop a clear conversion path. You know what you want them to do next: great. But if you haven’t communicated it, how on Earth will they know?
With clickable buttons featuring a good Call-to-Action (CTA) strategy in your content, you can effectively turn prospects into more qualified leads.
Some things to remember with CTAs:
- Use actionable language: Words in a CTA button such as “Learn”, “Explore” or “Download” constitute actions and clear-cut invitations. Extend that invite!
- Calls-to-action do best above the fold on your website or blog, i.e. space where your web page is viewable to the user without having to scroll down. Anything below the fold will only be viewed by 50% of people who visit your page.
- Work with your design team to ensure the CTA is set-up in a way that contrasts well visually and makes the button stand out clearly.
#6. Nice Down
You can’t please all of the people all of the time but you can please some of the people some of the time.
It might be tempting to cast a wide net and try to generate as many leads as possible but this will leave you trying to generate leads that you really shouldn’t be. By narrowing your efforts you can look to aim your lead generation at a specific sect so that the leads you end up with are all designed specifically for your business.
Here are some specifications to niche down on:
- Location: Narrowing the net that you cast to a specific location rather than nationwide or even worldwide can be a much more lucrative strategy and present your business to be the local experts.
- Problem: By targeting a specific problem that your leads might be experiencing, you can be sure that the ones you generate will be more likely to engage with your business and the solution you can provide.
- Profession: If your leads think that you specialise in accountancy for a certain type of profession, you’ll have much more of a chance of generating leads in that area. Become experts in that field and dominate the market.
There are, of course, many more specifications to niche down on when looking to generate leads for accountants. Niching down with your content is the perfect way to display your local expertise. Create content around specific local knowledge and you’ll capture more leads in your area.
#7. Get Involved in Video
When was the last time you read a blog post or an article and wished it was in a quicker, more easily digestible form? We’re guessing it was quite recently. In this digital age, your leads don’t have the time or the patience to read your long-form content but video has been proven to grab people’s attention like blog posts seldom can. Creating video content can seem like a daunting task but, if you find yourself looking for a way to increase your reader’s engagement, video content might just be the way forward for your accountancy firm.
If you're cautious about the cost or time resources involved in making video content, you needn't worry. Video content is so accessible these days, both for the viewer and for the content creator. You can scale videos in terms of cost and time to whatever suit you. There are no set parameters for video content. Get creating!
Creating video content is also great SEO practice. If you want to learn more about how video can contribute to your SEO, among other tips, Download our Ultimate 10 Tips to Get Your SEO Strategy in Place.
#8. Testimonials
Why should someone engage with your business and become a lead? Because you tell them to? Because you create great content that demonstrates your expertise? For some, this isn’t enough. It’s the reason people read reviews of hotels before they book and why they won’t go to a restaurant when they’ve heard bad things about it - people want to hear from current and past customers to determine how their experience might go. A referral from a happy customer can make the difference between successfully generating a lead and not.
If someone has received a brilliant experience through your accounting, they should be more than happy to provide a testimonial for you to display on your website or anywhere else you see fit to boast about how well you do what you do.
Don’t be afraid to get in contact with your past customers to see if they would be willing. You’ll seem more trustworthy in the eyes of your potential leads and be able to then demonstrate your expertise once they trust your opinion.
#9. Stand Out from the Crowd
If you look at your website, honestly, could you say, if you switched out the branding, that your visitors would be able to tell it was your site?
It’s vitally important that, in order to capture leads, you stand out from the crowd and display your unique qualities to your potential leads. If they see that you’re the same old accountancy firm, offering the same old services, why would they ever engage with you?
Look at what genuinely make you and your company unique and work to that. If you offer something totally different to your competitors, make sure that information is displayed clearly on your website and your visitors will easily be able to see the difference in the value you provide from the rest of the pack.
#BONUS TIP: Get SEO Direction via Directories
You’ll have to do some of the legwork on this one, folks. Click to go to the Digital Media Stream blog and read more about the SEO benefits of business directories in our Best Free Marketing Ideas post.
