Your brand includes your name, logo, vision, story, and client experience. It's all of these things and will help you attract and retain clients on factors other than price. Your brand positions your services to clients based on what they get, not what you do.
Start with why
Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, depicted above, makes it clear that you need to understand your 'why' before your ‘how’ and your ‘what’.
Before you consider your brand or a brand refresh, question your purpose. Why do you do what you do? Why does your business exist for your clients?
Next, develop your purpose statement
In as few words as possible (preferably 7 or less), define your why.
For example, Tesla’s why is ‘To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy’ and Zoom's is 'To make video communications frictionless and secure'.
Your purpose statement is crucial to attracting the right clients who will become advocates.
Now, define your ideal client
In marketing, we talk about defining your buyer personas. For example, you may decide that one of your personas is ‘Early-stage construction businesses’. Defining this persona helps you visualise a single person to represent that group of clients.
This becomes a strategy for connecting with your target audience. When you understand who you're talking to, you will be more targeted, persuasive and effective in your marketing.
For example, what are their typical challenges and how can you provide solutions in the form of services to overcome these? What are their interests and how can you engage with them and show that you ‘get’ them?
Lastly, build up your brand assets
These include:
Before you create content or engage a content writer, it’s important to establish your ‘digital voice’. Your digital voice needs to represent your brand, in both look and tone, so that your marketing messages are consistent.
To establish your digital voice, describe it in three words. For example, here at The Gap, we describe our digital voice as ‘fun, frank and modern'.
Your website is the virtual (or digital) door to your business. Marketing is about driving leads to your website, serving them up content of value, and engaging with them in a way that they simply want to do business with you.
Research suggests that 89% of customers begin their buying journey with an internet search. Here are some key elements to build and maintain an effective website.
Choose the right platform
Your website developer can help you decide on the right platform; having regard to cost, customisation, template options, and plugin needs (e.g. an event booking app).
Your web platform needs to enable your firm to edit and update content, so a simple content management system is important.
Your home page is important
Your welcome page is the welcome mat for your front door (your website). This is where you persuade future clients that they've come to the right place, through simple text that explains your ‘why’, an introduction to your people and services, and clever use of your logo and supporting imagery.
Keep your menu simple
Make your menu bar easy to navigate. More pages are great for SEO; however, it's a good idea to limit menu options to five key areas.
Make sure key messages are ‘above the fold’
According to some research, the average time spent on a website is just 15 seconds!
Your future clients need to be able to engage with your main messages straight away, without scrolling down for ages. This is even more important if they're viewing on a mobile device.
Include testimonials or case studies
Testimonials can be short or long. They should be written in your client’s own voice, not rewritten in yours. This ensures they remain unscripted and authentic. One technique to use when creating a testimonial is the ‘reverse testimonial’ process. Start by asking about the challenges or obstacles they overcame in deciding to sign up for your service. There will always be obstacles to overcome, e.g., price or energy and time needed to implement.
For more information on building great testimonials, download our Guide to Utilising Client Feedback for Testimonials.
Make sure calls to action are clear
Do you want them to download a guide, sign up for your monthly newsletter, sign up for a free trial, or register for an educational webinar? Make it super clear!
Be mobile responsive
A mobile responsive site adjusts to the size of the window it's viewed on, so your content looks good on mobile as well as desktop. Google ranks your mobile version first, so optimising for mobile is essential.
Content marketing is simply the strategy of providing future clients with regular, informative, educational, and sometimes entertaining, content for free. Examples deployed in the accounting industry include:
Some of this content can be ‘gated’ (visitors must provide their details before they can access the content). Don’t gate all of your content. For example, it doesn’t make sense to gate blogs and articles.
Content marketing works because it:
Content marketing is an important tool to attract, engage and delight future clients because it works on the basis of providing value before you try to extract value. This is well depicted in HubSpot’s Marketing Flywheel.
Developing content ‘pathways’
Creating a series of articles under one topic, and driving readers to an event, can be an effective way of taking future clients on a content journey, engaging them at a deeper level.
For example, your lead article might be ‘Seven Causes of Poor Cashflow’. Your next seven articles drill into each of those seven causes, creating a pathway to unlock content of value and allowing them to choose the content most relevant to their business. These articles could drive readers to attend an upcoming cashflow management webinar or seminar.
Repurposing your content
Publish your content in multiple places - on your website, in social posts, in online community groups, or as additional links in blogs and articles.
Subscribing to ‘stock’ content solutions
Writing blogs and articles from scratch takes time. One solution is to subscribe to a quality content provider, such as The Gap’s Premium Content Library.
The great thing about subscribing to great stock content is that the content tends to be evergreen in nature, so it won’t date.
You can mix stock content up with your original ‘in the moment’ pieces. If you’re worried about being in a ‘sea of content sameness’ when using stock content, customise the content to reflect your brand and voice.
You can take the time, cost and complexity out of customising and posting content by subscribing to a fit for purpose marketing platform, enabling you to change images and tweak titles and text.
We recommend the BOMA marketing platform. Check out the BOMA ROI Calculator here to work out how much time and money you could save by using a digital marketing solution.
2020 and the impacts of Covid-19 created an ideal platform for accountants to deliver meaningful webinars to clients. In fact, there has been a Sudden Shift to Education Marketing via the webinar.
Educational webinars are one of the smartest marketing strategies for accountants today because they:
Your webinar content
The education possibilities are endless. Consider developing or subscribing to webinar content within the following business categories:
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Mastering the call to action
To increase your ROI from education marketing, ensure the content links to services you offer. Then, present a call to action that makes it easy for clients to buy those services.
You don’t want to come across as being salesy, so offer three options: a complimentary option, e.g., a guide, so they can self-serve; a low-cost option, e.g., a worksheet they complete with a short review meeting; and a full-service option, e.g., a Business Planning session.
Plenty of clients will take the complimentary service option. That’s good marketing. They’ll think highly of you, they’ll keep consuming your content, and they're likely to refer new business.
Repurposing your webinar content
Every time you create an education piece you also create a marketing asset. The key is to repurpose those assets so you get maximum outcome for minimum effort.
Here are six examples:
Always add lead capture forms to downloadable content to maximise lead generation.
And remember - the best marketing is education.
For comprehensive advice on managing webinars, download our FREE Webinar Management Process Guide below.
Social media marketing is a must-have for all businesses these days. That includes accounting firms. In fact, most accounting firms today have a dedicated in-house resource to manage their social platforms, even if it’s just one hour per week.
There are a number of platforms to consider, including:
Which platforms you use depends very much on the profile of your clients and where they hang out.
Social media platforms are more immediate and therefore less static than your website, so the key is to keep posting, constantly and consistently. You can share an expert advisory piece on LinkedIn, an industry comment on Twitter, and more of your firm’s personality and team news on Facebook.
If your posts are liked and shared, they are amplified, and you benefit from the word of mouth.
