6 Strategies for Accounting Firms to Grow their Client Base

1. Blogging

 

Blogging is one of the most smart and affordable forms of online marketing. If you’ve built a website with forms that solicit contact information of potential clients, your next goal is to capture leads by bringing traffic to your website. Blogging is a customer- centric approach to achieving this goal. Rather than advertising what your company has to offer, write posts with information that would benefit potential clients.

Your goal here is to make entrepreneurs trust your opinion. If they believe in what you have to say, they will be more willing to work with you.

♦ Remember to strategically place call-to-action buttons on each blog post so your audience is prompted to reach out through a form on your website.

 

2. Email Marketing – Newsletters

 

Clients are mostly communicating with businesses they work with through emails and so it’s important to build a connection with them here. Email marketing is a proven way to generate sales by building a personal communications channel with your potential clients. Keep in mind that personalization can play a significant role in lead generation. Use their name in emails and special offers you sent to them as part of an email marketing campaign.

Because email marketing is a very lucrative growth strategy, your clients’ inboxes are cluttered with many businesses trying to reach them. It is key that through your Newsletter you establish authority and expertise in your industry so you stand out and your clients are intrigued by what you have to say. There’s only one must-have here: relevant content!

♦ Start working on building your email list today and remember to encourage subscribers to share and forward your emails!

 

3. Client Reviews

 

There is no better way to showcase your credibility to potential clients than having existing clients talk about how they benefited from working with you. Providing social proof to entrepreneurs who are searching for accounting firms to work with is an invaluable and costless way of growing your business.

Online reviews can make or break your business. Here’re 3 things to remember:

♦ Post client testimonials on your website with call-to-action buttons next to them so potential clients can’t help but click.

♦ Pick out clients you have great relationships with and request them to leave you a positive testimonial on Google, Facebook or Yelp.

♦ Use reviews for social media posts or advertisements.

 

4. Referrals

 

Referrals are one of the most bankable yet underutilized strategies to grow a firm’s client base. Here’s what we recommend: develop a systemized way of finding individuals, organizations or institutes that can refer clients to you and incentivize them to do so. Your existing clients, employees and institutions you/your business is affiliated with is a great source of referrals.

Here’re 3 things to remember:

♦ Build a communications strategy to inform your clients of your referral scheme.

♦ Reward the client for referring someone in the form of money or discounts.

♦ Test and measure the results to fine-tune the referral system.

 

5. Research to find out who’s likely to work with you

 

Learn as much as possible about your current client base. Define them in terms of their demographics, characteristics, paint points, behaviours etc. Once you’ve built a deep understanding of the kind of clients that want to work with you, you’ll be best prepared to look for more people like them.

Three things to research for:

♦ Online communities, webinars, networking events your clients participate in. Others like them will be there too.

♦ Speaking arrangements and seminars you can use to grow your presence.

♦ How did your clients find you? You may learn of a channel that is bringing clients to you that you need to leverage more.

 

6. Online Advertising

 

For B2B lead generation, there are 3 main channels to focus on:

Facebook Advertising

Facebook is a cheaper platform for advertising than the other two on this list. Here’re the steps you need to learn to master your Facebook Advertising:

♦ Defining your potential clients in three phases of the sales funnel : Awareness, Interest and Conversion.

♦ Setting up a campaign, ads account, ad sets for their audience you want to target.

♦ Targeting the right audience

♦ Creating the ads: Many firms are developing creative in-house as there are many software like ‘Canva’ that make it easy to make ads with the right dimensions for any platform.

LinkedIn Advertising

For B2B, LinkedIn Advertising works. This is because its a social media platform built for professional activity. The platform has professional information on users like no other and so targeting potential leads is seamless when it comes to creating a target audience. In addition to display, text or sponsored content, you can also send inmail to your potential clients. So if you want to send direct messages, this platform is right for you.

Remember to setup A/B testing to identify ads, copy, audience targeting and creative that is working for you!

Google PPC

If you want faster results than what Search Engine Optimization can deliver, Google Search Advertising can be a great tool to bring traffic and potential leads to your website. What makes this form of advertising unique is that it comes wrapped in search intent from potential clients. This means, your advertising is showing up for people who are already searching for ‘keywords’ you have chosen in your campaign. Nothing better than your information popping up in front of a small business owner searching for an accounting firm nearby right? But you what you should consider. To be at the top of the search results, you have to bid on what you want to ‘pay-per-click’ and compete with the competition. This is more expensive in any service industry. Make sure you have a proper sales journey in place so if you get

Here’s what to remember:

♦ Make sure there’s a proper sales process in place (lead page, phone number, sales team)

♦ This ad learns from the successful leads it generates over time, it may be weeks or months before you to see results.