Technology isn't just a helpful tool for accountants to streamline their day-to-day workloads — it's also a secret weapon for attracting clients and growing their businesses. From powerful email marketing platforms to intuitive AI-powered chatbots, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff out there making life easier for accounting firms.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at some marketing platforms you can explore to improve your accounting firm’s marketing efforts and gain some competitive advantage in the accounting industry.Â
5 tools accounting firms can use to market their accounting services
1. Referral marketing platforms
Consider this stat: a single happy customer can yield 9 referrals.
Rather than waiting for client referrals to happen organically, you can use specific referral marketing platforms that incentivize your clients to connect you with potential clients.
Platforms like Ambassador nudge your satisfied clients to make client referrals and offer them rewards and discounts (like gift cards, coupons, and even cash) when a referral is a success.
What’s great about Ambassador is that you can customize it to match your accounting firm’s branding and it also integrates with your website, CRM, and other tools seamlessly so you can track referral timelines.
2. Chatbots
Chatbots like Chat CPA are commonly used as a customer service tool, but they can also be fantastic for lead generation. You can set them up to help you schedule more consultations or demos and routine inquiries to your sales team.
For instance, a chatbot could initiate conversations with website visitors by asking if they need help with tax preparation or bookkeeping services. If the visitor expresses interest, the chatbot can collect their contact information and automatically schedule a follow-up call with a representative from the firm.
Employing chatbots can ultimately help accounting firms increase engagement with potential clients and drive more profitability by catching that low-hanging fruit!
Related: AI in accounting
3. Email marketing platforms
Platforms like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Active Campaign help accounting firms create and automate email campaigns for existing clients or nurture new business with potential clients. They offer features like email templates for monthly newsletters or the ability to set up drip campaigns designed for conversion.
Here are two examples of email marketing strategies an accounting firm could explore for business development:
Promotional offers
Offer special promotions or discounts for new clients to incentivize them to engage with the accounting firm's services. This could include discounted tax preparation services for first-time clients or a free consultation for small business owners.
Re-engagement campaign
Accounting firms can also use email marketing to warm things up again with contacts who have become inactive or who stopped engaging with the firm. A re-engagement email series can help rekindle their interest when they give special offers or can successfully remind potential customers about the services and value the accounting firm provides.
4. Social media scheduling tools
No surprise here that social media marketing is an essential part of any accounting firm’s marketing strategy. Having a social media presence and a strong social media following helps establish trust with prospective clients, share valuable and relevant content, and communicate a firm’s reputation.
Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok are the most popular social media sites many accounting firms rely on for content marketing. Each of these tools makes publishing content easy and comes with several analytical features to help you track the effectiveness of your social media posts.
We’ll use this post to talk about a supplementary social media tool you can use in sync with the social media platforms your firm is using for heightened social media engagement.
Later
Later is a popular social media scheduling platform that helps business owners plan, schedule, and manage posts on multiple social media networks. A few of its features make it an asset for any accounting firm that wants to enhance its social media marketing efforts.
For instance, Later lets you schedule Instagram stories to be published automatically, which you can’t do on the Instagram platform itself.
The platform also offers handy collaboration features to allow multiple users on your marketing team to be involved in content creation and publishing. This is incredibly useful if multiple people on your marketing team need access.
Another handy feature Later offers is its AI caption generator which generates copy for your posts based on your prompts. This can be a huge time saver and a handy feature to have if you don’t have a skilled copywriter on your marketing team.
5. Market research questionnaires
Content Snare isn’t a marketing tool per se but it can certainly help you conduct market research to inform your content marketing strategy.
It’s essentially a form-builder tool you can use to collect feedback from your target audience. For example, once you have a contact list of potential clients (or a list of existing clients), you can use Content Snare to send them a market research survey. You can ask your target audience about their most common pain points, what they’d like to learn about through your content, and what topics they want to learn about in the accounting industry.
This can help you understand your target market better directly from their answers. From there, you’ll know how to allocate your marketing budget, whether that’s on video marketing, value-added content, or a whole new marketing tactic you haven’t thought of yet!
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