Digital Marketing Agency for Accountants
What We Can Achieve Together
Acquire More Clients
We use methods such as thought leadership content, campaign optimization, lead management automation and brand promotion to help you acquire more clients.
Increase Client Share
We apply best practices such as nurture marketing campaigns to stay top of mind with your clients, increase customer share and improve customer lifetime value.
Improve Client Retention
Engagement methods such as social media marketing and content marketing keep clients informed and keep customer retention high.
Marketing for Accountants
Marketing for accounting services is different than other industries. It must support relationship-based selling. It must focus on the brand, people and services in ways that convey assurance and confidence. And it must demonstrate differentiation and competitive advantage.
The top 3 goals when marketing for accountants are to promote the brand’s unique value proposition, present the executives as thought leaders, and position the services as methods that solve important problems.
A Best Practices Approach
To help our clients acquire more clients, increase customer share and improve retention, we apply a mix of 9 professional services marketing best practices.
Marketing program recommendations without supporting data are just opinions. The Pandesix Growth Framework is built on evidence-based best practices and backed by industry specific benchmark data.
Rather than generic programs, we deploy programs optimized for buyers of accounting services.
Some programs that work particularly well when aided with best practices are shown below.
A Marketing Program Portfolio
Marketing can feel overwhelming. It can be difficult to know where to start. So, we start by measuring and ranking programs based on their revenue and profit contributions. Below are some of the programs we assess and implement with our clients.
- A Standout Website
An effective website design and user experience will increase visitor engagement and online conversions. The first best practice is to ensure the website design focuses on the client first, the brand second and services third.
It must deliver compelling content that communicates your firm’s brand, expertise, and customer-centric philosophy. It should include clear calls-to-action (CTA) that entice buyers to contact you and begin a dialogue.
The website must be easy to navigate and visually appealing. It must be intuitive, responsive, mobile-friendly, and optimized for search engines.
When working with clients we find some have websites that will benefit from minor refinements, others that need simple redesign and a few that need makeovers.
Building an effective website need not be a daunting task. If you know what it should do, an experienced website professional can usually complete the effort in a relatively short period.
And here’s the upside. Most accounting firm websites achieve less than a one percent visitor to lead conversion rate. Websites that include the above best practices often achieve a 3 percent or higher conversion rate. When you consider the volume of website visitors, this 3-fold increase results in a steady pipeline of new sale opportunities.
- Brand Development
When needed, we help clients create or reinforce a strong brand identity. That’s essential to show differentiation and stand out in a crowded marketplace. When done pursuant to a brand strategy, it also positions the firm’s executives as thought leaders and crafts messaging that provides confidence to buyers.
This is another exercise that can be performed quickly if you apply a proven process and best practices. And afterward it improves all marketing programs and artifacts.
The upside here is that if done well, over time, your brand becomes your most valuable company asset.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of enhancing your website so that clients find you online when searching for services that you deliver. It improves your website position in Google and other search engine results pages.
It’s an organic growth strategy, meaning that once set up and nurtured, you don’t need to procure search ads or paid media to attract visitors to your website.
There are many SEO best practices. But when focused on accounting firms, it’s important to optimize website pages that describe your services and include a local SEO or geo-focus for buyers in your general proximity.
When done right, the firm will be discovered by significantly more high-fit buyers.
- Content Marketing
This method uses content, such as web pages and blog posts, to educate and inform prospects and customers. This is a top method to position the firm’s staff as thought leaders and attract new visitors to the website.
The first best practice for this type of program is to design content that reflects the company’s unique value proposition (UVP), core competencies and competitive advantages.
The UVP is essential because it answers every prospect’s first question: What makes you different from the competition? It's powerful because it appeals to the customer's strongest decision-making criteria. It should be a bold but succinct statement that drives contrast and positions the company as the best choice.
Other best practices include creating content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience. That may include creative solutions, proven processes, unique methods, case studies or professional advice.
These programs work best when content is aligned with the buyer’s purchase cycle. But the buyer’s interests change as they make progress toward selecting a firm. That’s why content must be designed for each stage of the purchase process.
When creating content for clients, we include additional best practices such as incorporating story telling techniques and embedding multimedia elements. We also focus on creating evergreen content, which is information that remains relevant for long periods of time.
- Marketing Campaigns
There are many types of campaigns. Inbound, outbound, email, pay per click and digital ads to name a few. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Each delivers different results.
But executives and partners don't want to experiment over extended periods to figure out what works. They want to quickly know the shortest route to revenue maximization.
So, to do that, we apply our industry benchmarks to prioritize those that drive the biggest financial uplift.
Best practices include look-alike campaigns and precision campaigns targeted to the ideal customer profile (ICP). The messaging must integrate the client’s challenges with the firm’s services. The offers must be highly specific and demonstrate compelling benefits. When correctly done, the firm will acquire more qualified leads at a reduced cost per lead.
- Nurture Campaigns
This is a special type of campaign used to maintain top of mind awareness with prospects and customers. It should be developed pursuant to a theme. It should sequence email distributions that build upon each other and reach a crescendo effect. When done well, it will increase conversions and customer share. Even better, it will help grow customer relationships. That’s important because customer affinity is one of only four sustainable competitive advantages.
- Social Media Marketing
Social networks are a growing information source for many buyers of accounting services. They are also an ideal channel to s engage with your target audience in a one-to-many scenario.
Some best practices for social network posts include non-promotional content such as behind-the-scenes back stories, glimpses of your staff, and industry updates.
Well done well, your accounting firm will expand your brand, boost engagement with your target audience, stay top of mind with your existing clients, and acquire new leads and new projects.
Any program selected for our clients uses our marketing best practices to achieve top quartile performance results. Our programs are validated by field research, implemented with a prescriptive framework, measured with purpose-built analytics, and fully leverage technology automation. And because they are data-driven, they can be modeled to show investment, cash flow impact, time to value, and payback.
Here’s How our Process Works
Every client and project are unique. But most benefit from a prescriptive framework that delivers predictable results. Below is a summary of our marketing framework that we adapt for each client engagement.
01. Rapid Diagnostic
Any strategic project starts with an assessment to learn what's holding the company back. That's important because a full and accurate diagnosis gets past symptoms, surfaces the root causes and gets to an accurate prescription.
If you fail to accurately and fully identify the biggest obstacles, it’s likely you will then fail to pursue the most efficient path to achieve your goals. You wouldn’t want your doctor to prescribe medicine before a diagnosis. The same applies to your business.
02. A Marketing Strategy
We identify and prioritize your goals in SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timebound) terms. That allows us to craft a marketing strategy that meets your goals in the least time, cost and risk.
A marketing strategy creates focus and prioritization. It's a precursor to everything that comes after. Great execution won't get you very far if your strategy is wrong.
03. A Go-to-Market Plan
This is the plan that identifies the best programs to meet your goals.
Most companies will benefit from an optimized mix of programs. We create an execution Blueprint to clearly show the highest impact programs and how they will collectively deliver the company’s goal.
04. Agile Execution
We apply agile sprint-based execution for speed and results.
Agile execution accelerates time to value, applies systemic execution that delivers predictable results, and reduces risk.
It’s also business outcomes focused. For example, the first agile principle is to ‘begin with clarity of outcome and let it guide every step of the journey.’
05. Technology Automation
We apply software technology to bring information, automation and scale to operations. The right MarTech is the facilitator of consistent delivery, the replacement for manual labor, the process automation for faster results, and the top tool to realize cost savings.
06. Performance Analytics
Clear objectives set the vision and create the roadmap, but rigorous execution as measured by the right key performance indicators (KPIs) direct the path to success and the realization of results.
That’s why we instrument our programs with real-time KPIs. This allows us to know what’s working, what’s not and intervene with timely course corrections to remedy deviations.
A Unique Digital Marketing Agency for Accountants
Three things make us a different type of digital marketing agency for accountants.
- We are accounting industry experts. Our staff have been CPAs and financial executives. They have worked in small firms and the Big 4. We don’t incur up front time to learn about the industry. We don’t need to perform experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t. We have developed buyer insights and customer intelligence for accounting service buyers.
- We are a revenue-focused marketing agency for professional services. Our efforts target measurable business outcomes. That includes things like increasing client acquisitions, customer lifetime value and customer retention. We don’t dilute our focus by getting sidetracked with activity and vanity metrics. The results we deliver are shown in top line revenue and bottom-line profit.
- We take a data-driven approach to all of our services. We use industry data, performance benchmarks and best practices that collectively forecast reliable results. It's a science-based process that transforms measurable objectives into results. Marketing is cool but business outcomes rule.
Lets Get Growing
If you want to step up the growth of your accounting services company, we have some options.
Consider our one-day Professional Services Marketing Workshop. At the end of this day, you will have data-driven insights, industry benchmarks, a proven framework and templates to accelerate your journey.
Or for professional help from a digital marketing agency for accountants, contact us to schedule an introductory call with one of our marketing consultants.