The process of starting a CPA firm from scratch is stimulating. It is also great fun. For a robust start, you want to ensure your firm can get new clients. Above all, you want adequate clients to maintain your firm through the busy season of tax filing. And of course, you will need to maintain your firm even further. The following season is just as significant for sustained development. You need to evolve your business into a stream of revenue. This stream must be steady, and that leaves you little time for marketing. You must successfully market your business in order to ensure long-term success.
Using the tired, outdated combination of interrupt marketing and outbound marketing techniques is both costly and ineffective, producing less than 5% effectiveness. Shifting your marketing funds to use more modern inbound marketing techniques is a much more solid strategy. This can have a large impact on your firm’s growth. Most inbound marketing techniques are free to implement. Your only cost is the expense of labor it takes to create them. This strategy offers you both more time to concentrate on your core competence of accounting, as well as more financial resources to dedicate to the long-term growth of your firm.
The most effective strategy for inbound marketing includes a well balanced mix of the following elements:
Creating a Blog
Make yourself known as a thought leader by starting an accountant website blog. This is an excellent way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in the field of accounting. Show people what you know! But don’t sound like a know-it-all. Your blog is a great place to demonstrate your accounting expertise. Prospects will notice.
Make Sure You are Visible to Search Engines
Increase your rankings with search engines and domain authority by optimizing your website. This will increase the visibility of your site online. Optimize your content for your desired keywords. This makes sure you are found on the search result pages where you want to rank.
Make it Social
Use social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to establish and engage a community around your business. This builds trust as it allows your prospects to see the people behind the business. Additionally, links from authoritative sources such as social media outlets have great search engine authority which can dramatically boost your rankings. One added benefit of using Facebook is its feature-rich marketing toolset. Facebook has powerful advertising features for targeting. This allows you to offer specials to your Facebook fans such as coupons and discounts. Promotions such as these can take off on their own. They require very little work.
Video Distribution
Producing and distributing great website videos are an excellent way to educate and in some cases, entertain your community. Use videos to show your prospects how to prep their documents for tax season, or create a client testimonial where your firm helped a client maximize their return. Videos are favored by search engines. They help boost the authority of your domain.
Article Sharing Sites
In addition to all of the benefits obtained by blogging, distributing articles creates a web channel that drives qualified traffic to expertly designed websites for accountants, and boosts your search engine rankings via link building as well.
Inbound marketing is amusing. It is far easier to create a successful inbound marketing campaign than a marketing campaign that uses traditional outbound techniques. The expense of outbound marketing campaigns can be high. This is not true with inbound marketing campaigns. Inbound marketing techniques bring excellent results. You will find that these results are uniform with time.
