4 minute read.
Digital marketing covers any form of marketing that uses electronic devices. In this blog we list some simple and free digital marketing for accountants strategies that you might not have thought of but are easy to implement to increase your reach online without having to dedicate too much of your time to.
Check that your site is mobile friendly
It’s important that your website is mobile friendly if it’s not already, as mobile usage among the business market has grown rapidly. Not having a mobile friendly site will seriously affect your presence in search results and can put off potential customers. Use Google’s free test to see if your website is optimised for mobile use: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. If it shows issues with your site, make sure you fix them to improve your site ranking, traffic, bounce rate, and customer engagement opportunities.
Google My Business
When you search for businesses on Google, if they have been submitted to Google My Business they will appear at the top right of the search results. Your firm might be there already, but did you know you can claim your listing and edit it for free? All you need is a Google account, and to be able to verify your address, normally through a posted verification code. Once your business is verified, you can optimise your listing by filling in your profile, operating hours, contact details and add photos and respond to reviews. Google My Business is especially important for targeting local customers – Google will display the 3 most popular listings at the top of search results for location-based searches, for example “accountants Didsbury”.
Being active on tax and accounting forums
Answering questions online has major benefits: it gives you access to a wide pool of potential customers who are searching for answers, enables you to demonstrate your expertise to an influential audience, gives you insight into the market, and enables your answers to appear high up in general search results. TaxationWeb is a great forum for tax advisers to interact with taxpayers with questions, as well as Money Saving Expert’s tax forums. If you’re looking for a more adviser focused forum, try AccountingWeb’s Any Answers section, building links within your industry can earn you opportunities for partnerships and referrals from other advisers. Make sure your forum name reflects your business, that your profile and your replies are professional and accurate, and don’t get into any arguments – you can easily negatively affect your brand if you get these wrong!
Start a blog
Blogs are an effective way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise, set you apart from the competition, give your company a personal voice, and improve your site’s SEO ranking. Accountants and tax advisers have access to a wealth of content due to their specialist nature, and can create content including explanations of tax changes, best practice guides, checklists, interviews and client case studies. Posting just once a week will provide visitors a good amount of content, show that you are pro-active and engaged, and also gives you a built-in marketing strategy to share the content to an email list and on social media.
Collect email addresses
Collecting email addresses on your website is an essential digital marketing strategy for accountants to implement and automate. Email marketing isn’t subject to changes in algorithms and has the best longevity of any digital marketing strategy. Using an email marketing solution like Mailchimp, which is free for a small list size, lets you create professional looking branded emails, which you can schedule in advance and easily analyse to see how effective they are. Even if you only have a small email list, getting insight into your customer engagement will help you to understand how to improve and grow your firm.
