Doing Content Marketing for Your Accountancy Firm
You’ve blogged, you’ve sent out a few emails and you’ve posted to social media a couple of times – but engagement is nil and the leads aren’t coming in. So what are you doing wrong? Well, content marketing for your accountancy firm isn’t easy unless you have a detailed strategy and know exactly what you need to be doing. Here are some of the mistakes you could be making and how to shape up going forward.
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Your Blogs Aren’t Useful or Relevant
Firstly, ask yourself a question or two. When was the last time you wrote and posted a blog? If it was more than a month ago, you’re not posting frequently enough, and this can mean your brand slips from consumers’ minds. It also means that Google’s robots aren’t being prompted to crawl your website frequently, which can affect your rankings in the search results. SEO and content marketing are not quick wins, so you really need to invest time into both strategies to ensure traction is created and maintained.
If you have been posting more often, that’s great. But what sort of content have you been sharing with your viewers? If you’re simply rehashing information that’s been out there for a long time, then people may have seen it all before. Instead, try giving your content a fresher, more exciting angle. Being useful is a great way to get people coming back for more, so think about what questions people ask to find your brand and what pain points keep occurring. From there, you can start to sculpt helpful content that consumers can learn from.
The awesome thing about blogging is that it also provides plenty of useful keyword opportunities. Aim to create content around short and long-tail keywords. While short keywords tell Google what your content is about and help it to appear relevant for specific searches, long-tail keywords offer high conversion rates as they’re more niche. Essentially, you want to provide blog matches for the searches people make and show people how your accountancy brand can be of value. Once you’ve drafted a host of core ideas, you can start to branch off with more detailed sub-topics to ensure you’ve covered all bases.
Top Tip: Create a mixture of seasonal and evergreen content to keep the hits coming in regularly.
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You Don’t Know Your Audience
When it comes to digital marketing for accounting firms, knowing your audience is a must, as this will, quite literally, shape everything you do. So make sure you understand the age, gender, location and interests of your target audience. You should even go one step further and start to create digital personas that you can use to enhance your marketing communication.
From the details, you gather you can literally develop someone to represent your audience. For example, Lucy, aged 34. She has no kids, works full time and has around £1000 a month to spend on luxury services and goods. Lucy is a Millennial who still uses Facebook but has branched out to Instagram and TikTok in recent years. She’s most active online during the evenings, typically between 20:00 and 22:00.
From here, you know the social channels you should be targeting to avoid wasting ad spend. You also know Lucy’s disposable income, which can help you to price your accounting consultations and services. It’s also important to note when your audience is online, as this will help you to post content, including ads, when they’re most likely to be seen.
As you can see, without this very detailed consumer profile, it’s difficult to take your marketing to the next level.
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It’s All About You, You, You
If you’ve ever had to endure someone blabbing on for hours about their life and their interests, without them asking a single question about you, you’ll know how boring one-sided conversations can be. So don’t make the same mistake when marketing your accounting firm. Sure, you need to create an About Us section on your website which tells people more about your brand and helps to build trust. You also need to communicate your products and services. But you do need to think about helping the consumer and encouraging engagement.
So as well as writing helpful blogs that address pain points and frequently asked questions, think about how to create a community online that’s active and responsive. Polls are a great idea as they allow people to give feedback or vote for something they might prefer. You could also host competitions and giveaways. Sharing relevant industry news is also a good idea, as it shows you have a deeper interest in the accountancy sector as a whole. You can create useful content that people can download, share and keep such as a newsletter or e-book, too. This is a great way to build your contact list, as you could ask for a name and email address in return for some valuable, high-quality content.
Also, to make sure you’re not always talking about yourself, consider curating content and sharing useful information from relevant brands. Tagging them in your post will help you to tap into a wider community and is good for networking. You could also take a corporate responsibility angle and share information about those you support.
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You’ve Completely Forgotten About Local SEO
Online marketing for accountants can be tricky. But there are a few things you simply must get right, including local SEO. This is all about ranking for local searches and if you’ve not optimised your content correctly, you could be missing out on essential ‘near me’ searches.
The first thing you should do if you’ve totally forgotten about local SEO until now is to claim your Google My Business profile. This makes it much easier for people to find you in your local area. Update all essential information such as your telephone number and address, so that you’ll be pulled into Google Maps for relevant searches. Another thing you can do is to create location-specific service pages. So if you offer bookkeeping or payroll in Kent, make sure this is clear by creating a landing page for those specific terms.
When it comes to local SEO, your citations should be on point. Make sure you’re listed in multiple but relevant directories. You should also share reviews as this will help to build your local profile. From a content writing perspective, don’t be afraid to create press releases for your accountancy firm with a location-specific angle. Something like “Kent-Based Accountancy Firm Launches Tax Calendar 2022” will work well as it has regional keywords and makes your content relevant.
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You’re Not Sharing Your Content
There might be nothing wrong with your content. In fact, it might be spot on. But if it’s sitting on your blog doing nothing then you’re going to rely on direct blog hits with very little marketing support. So make sure you share your best work on social media. You can hook people in with a few statistics or a great quote, followed by a link to the full article. As well as the commonly used social media platforms, don’t forget about channels such as LinkedIn. This is great for detailed, long-form articles and will attract a high-end professional audience. You can also post to sites like Medium for increased brand awareness.
Marketing for accounting firms isn’t always easy, but with the right strategy you should start to develop more meaningful leads.
