Content Marketing for Accounting Firms — Understanding the Basics of Content Marketing

Every business actively participates in content marketing, whether it's a planned strategy or simply sharing social posts around the holidays. However, content marketing for accounting firms is vital to the overall marketing strategy and should be a focal point for every organization.

What is Content Marketing for Accounting Firms?

Content marketing for accounting firms can be simplified down to a single thought — engaging your target audience through content. However, the type of content and channel you use to communicate with prospective clients will vary greatly on several factors, including:

• Audience demographics
• Geographical locations
• Service offerings

Given the complexity of managing several channels and content marketing strategies, it can be necessary to seek assistance from a content marketing agency like DDS Creative. 

The expertise of an agency partner can help you navigate the nuances of content marketing, ensuring your efforts are effective and efficient.

How is Marketing Used in Accounting?

Accounting firms use marketing to drive business growth and acquire new clients like any other industry. Although the types of content and marketing strategies that an organization uses could vary, many accounting practices choose to focus on the following areas of marketing:

• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Paid advertising

While each channel has its benefits, content marketing often offers the largest upside for companies when considering long-term client acquisition strategies.

What Kind of Content Should Accounting Firms Create?

Generally, before diving into the content creation process, a firm should take a step back and consider the audience it's after. For instance, accounting firms looking to acquire small business clients should spend time creating content such as e-books or guides on topics like:

• Accounting best practices for small businesses
• Payroll tips for small businesses
• Bookkeeping for small businesses
• Maintaining healthy accounting books as a small business

However, to attract clients looking for tax assistance or estate planning services, you'll want to tailor the messages to questions and pain points affecting that specific audience. 

Regardless of whether the accounting firm is targeting business clients or personal accounts, it's beneficial to transform the website and blog into a comprehensive resource center. This approach allows potential clients to explore and learn while positioning the firm as a trusted source of information.

What are the Steps to Developing a Content Marketing Strategy?

As you work through your CPA firm's marketing plan, you'll want to set aside time to explore and develop the content marketing strategy. While many people assume content marketing is simply writing a few blogs, there is actually a lot more planning that goes into creating a lead-generating content funnel. 

The following seven-step guide should help you establish the content marketing strategy for your accounting services and drive high-quality leads. 

1. Identify Goals and Metrics

Before you start thinking about the content you want to create, it's important to identify your goals and objectives for executing content marketing tactics. For many accounting businesses, the most common goals are:

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate new leads
• Improve customer engagement

Regardless of your chosen goal, you should ensure that the content your team produces aligns with the organization's overarching goal. 

2. Establish Ideal Audience Persona

Once you've identified the overarching goal for your content marketing plan, it's time to establish the ideal audience. To properly create an audience persona, you'll need to research your current client base and target accounts. 

From there, you should find similarities between the two groups and can quickly parse out defining characteristics, such as:

• Demographic information
• Interests
• Pain points
• Content preferences
• Purchasing behaviors

Having access to this information will guide your content and help you generate ideas for promoting it through targeted channels. 

3. Perform a Content Audit

Reviewing your current content is one of the best places to start your content marketing journey. Most of the time there are opportunities to increase your organic search results simply by improving existing blog posts or website pages. 

Utilizing a content audit tool like Clearscope can make the process even easier. The platform allows you to run reports on existing content to see how it performs against competitors and its ranking on Google. 

4. Commit to Content Types and Channels

The content types and channels you use will fluctuate depending on where your potential customers are active. However, what's most important is to agree as a team on the medium and stick with it. 

If you know the majority of the small business owners you want to target are on LinkedIn, you should commit to at least six months of continuous posting on the platform. Likewise, if you're after personal accounts, you may want to test multiple social media channels and various forms of content to see which resonates the most with future clients.

5. Start the Content Creation Process

After identifying your goal, audience, and channels, it's time to execute your plan by starting the content creation process. 

Many accounting firms find it challenging to manage the content creation timeline and struggle to push through the ideation, drafting, reviewing, and publishing process. One easy way to simplify this process is to use a content calendar.

6. Routinely Measure KPIs

While creating content is important in driving prospective clients to your website, you also need to routinely measure KPIs to ensure that the quality of content your team is pushing out provides valuable information to visitors.

A few of the best KPIs to use to track quality content include:

• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Time on page
• Clicks

7. Continuous Optimization

As time passes, some accounting content topics will grow outdated and need to be optimized. One way to stay on top of this is to establish a content checklist outlining specific dates for your team to audit a blog or landing page. This process will ensure that the information on your website is fresh and within regulation. '

What are the Best Content Marketing Tactics for Accounting Firms to Attract New Clients?

Companies in the accounting industry can use many strategies to attract new clients to the firm. For instance, consistent social media posts focused on a target market can effectively drive brand awareness. Likewise, a gated piece of content is a great approach to collecting information about potential leads.

The following eight tactics should be part of your overall content marketing plan:

• Social media
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Case studies
• White papers
• Video content
  
  

How Can Accounting Firms Measure the Success of Their Content Marketing Efforts?

The best way to determine the effectiveness of relevant content is through consistent KPI tracking. While some metrics, like views, are more for vanity, others can provide key insight into how your content is performing.

Let's look at the most essential content marketing KPIs.

Engagement

Engagement is a standard KPI used across various digital marketing verticals. For content marketing, engagement typically includes metrics such as time on page or number of visits and tracks the depth of engagement with your audience.

If your firm recently released a batch of blog posts and one of the pieces of content has higher read times, then it's a good indicator that your target audience is engaged with the topic. A further in-depth analysis of the content could provide additional insights into other potential topics to write about in the future.

Sharing

Similar to engagement, sharing is another important content marketing metric that indicates how well your content is performing. Many potential customers share content when interested in a service or product and want others to know about it. They may also share your content if they've had a good experience with your company in the past. 

Conversions

The ultimate indicator of how effective your content marketing efforts are is conversions. While having a steady stream of views and people engaging with your brand across social media platforms is nice, it doesn't mean it's driving new leads through the sales funnel. 

It's important to frequently examine the customer journey to determine whether blog readers are converting to leads or, at the very least, becoming subscribers to your email newsletters.

Utilizing a Content Marketing Agency to Elevate Your Lead Generation Strategy

You'll need to decide to keep your content marketing in-house vs. outsourcing to an agency early in the planning process. 

While both options have benefits, having a dedicated marketing team to help strategize and execute your content marketing plan can be the difference between missing or hitting your quarterly new business goals.

If you're looking for guidance on executing the right content marketing strategy for your accounting firm, contact DDS Creative today.