How Accountants Can Engage Clients Through Online Marketing

How can accountants use the latest digital marketing tools and techniques to engage their clients and foster meaningful, ongoing dialogue and customer loyalty?

The answer lies in understanding just how vastly marketing has changed in recent years.

The Internet has not just galvanized marketing by making it more efficient, more seamless, more automated; it has completely flipped the script. No longer is marketing all about promotion and advertising—brands touting their own virtues and forcing their way into consumer lives. Today, marketing is more about two-way communication and relationship-building. It’s about companies understanding what customers need, and offering them real solutions that hit on common pain points.

Implications for Accountants

In some ways, this has actually made marketing more difficult. It’s not enough to log onto Facebook and post something about how great your business is, nor is taking out a big PPC ad campaign sufficient for fostering an engaged clientele. Effective marketing means putting forth daily effort to deliver value to clients—to actually help them and inform them in a meaningful way.

This is no easy thing, yet accountants are actually in a pretty good position to succeed within the new marketing paradigm. Simply put, accounting is something that people have a lot of questions about, and a lot of uncertainties. Most consumers—whether small business owners or individuals—will freely admit to needing all the help they can get with their bookkeeping, their tax preparation, and so forth.

Accountants can offer that help, to an extent, for free, and over online marketing channels—building trust and forging relationships by actually advising consumers on the topics they’re unclear about.

A Matter of Thought Leadership

We’re not suggesting that you start doing client tax returns for free over Facebook Messenger—but we are saying that, now more than ever, thought leadership matters.

Hopefully, your accounting firm has a platform in place to offer exactly that. It may be a blog, and in fact blogging is something we recommend. Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter can be valuable platforms as well. Through these platforms, accountants can engage their clients not through self-promotion, but through answering common questions and providing useful overviews of common accounting concerns.

The task that faces accountants is not insignificant: Effective marketing requires a new way of thinking, a belief in the ultimate power of delivering real information and assistance, not empty corporate boasts; it also requires a commitment to consistent content updates. For many firms, this will require training and the implementation of a whole new marketing strategy—but the results, in the end, can more than justify this investment.