Marketing your Accountancy Firm in 2023 for new clients

Marketing your Accountancy Firm in 2023 for new clients.

“Business has only two basic functions – marketing and innovation” – Peter Drucker

Ok I have been doing this a long time. In fact, over 20 years.

When I started out, the first bit of marketing I did was to put a series of adverts in a Dental magazine (my firm Samera at that time was targeting dentists).

I thought it would be easy - I was young, naïve and arrogant.

Ever since that moment of realising that the tens of thousands I had spent yielded diddly squat, I realised marketing was going to be really hard.

However, after 20 years of experimenting, I have to say I love building marketing machines to get new business across my business.

So, what am I up to in 2023?

Creating and double downing in a niche

When I started my firm, Samera, it was focusing on UK dentists, and it has been that for many years. However, as we have grown very strongly in that sector, we now operate across healthcare, dealing with doctors, pharmacists, vets, etc.

Focusing on building on the niche you are in, is critical, don’t try and be everything to everyone, find a market and focus heavily on it.

Making the Website Fast and Mobile First 

I cannot stress how important a fast-loading user friendly mobile first website is, with great information and content. I see so many slow sites, which Google hates and ultimately penalises.

The website is the shop front to my firm, and every effort goes into making this as attractive, and friendly for any visitor.

Naturally, this is a constant work in progress.

Google domination

Twenty years back my initial foray into Google was an important one, and one that I have used continuously for the last 20 years.

Creating optimised content has been at the heart of being found by Google, but this has always been coupled with Google pay per click (PPC) campaigns too.

My view is, I want to dominate Google – either through search, or via PPC.

This strategy is not changing, in fact with all the recent announcements by Google, my marketing team and I will be double downing on this.

Content generation and SEO

Even before the advent of Chat GPT, our focus has been on content creation. The written word, and some video too. This has and will continue to yield great results and with AI, the speed of delivery of content is already rapidly increasing.

But the key has to be to ensure quality is maintained, so Google and ultimately the readers find the content useful.

Social media

For many years, I have dabbled in various social media platforms, with mixed results. But for 2023, I felt I needed to get this done right, and realised that I only have the headspace to do it right on one platform. Hence, I took the decision to focus on Linkedin, with support from Youtube where I host some longer videos.

Social media can take over your lives, but I have many better things to do, however, it’s key we put out quality content that prospects and readers find adds value to their requirements.

What about offline events?

Over the years, we have done many events including having large exhibition stands at many large shows.

Personally, I have found the ROI on such events has diminished in the sectors we operate within, finding if we increase our budgets online, we always get better quality clients and ultimately results than having an exhibition stands.

The beauty of something like Google PPC, is you can literally turn it on and off when you want to reduce costs or feel you have too many leads coming in, whilst our focus on content and SEO is a long term investment which we know pays us in huge dividends.

Exhibitions are not just the cost of the stands, it’s the time out of the office, hotel costs….you get the drift.

But surely you must meet people face to face too? 

Absolutely, one area, we have done a lot of is hosting our own paid events – through webinars, but also through live bootcamps and courses. This has been extremely positive, as this is usually the first-time people get to know a little bit about us, and then eventually turn into a longer-term client. 

Marketing is a team effort

I certainly cannot do all of the above on my own, I have to run an accountancy firm after all!!

I have a great in-house team of digital markers, content writers, developers, social media experts who challenge and guide the marketing forward.

However, when I started out, I did it all, and it was a great learning curve for me, which enabled me to understand what skill sets I needed.

If you need help with marketing, come and join my next webinar.