Accountants and Tax Preparation Pros Need A Digital Marketing Plan To Succeed
Standing out from the crowd in the financial services and tax prep online space has become increasingly difficult. The plethora of low cost website builders and social media platforms has allowed businesses of all sizes to throw their hats into the ring. The competition is after the same clients as you, so what are you going to do about it?
We asked dozens of financial marketing experts at firms such as Berdon, LLP as well as digital marketing experts with experience in the tax prep field and 10 of their quotes stood out. Use the below snippets as inspiration for laying out your own online marketing plan or speak to a professional to help create a customized marketing plan to take you to the top.
1. Set Up A Recurring Email Marketing Plan
“Don’t forget about recurring email marketing. If there’s any best practice to keep an ongoing schedule of reaching out, it’s here. Just make sure emails are optimized for mobile screens. Through emails, you can also pass on valuable tax tips to established clients. They’ll stay subscribed to your emails if you can give them exclusive tips they can’t find anywhere else.”
By Mike Khorev of Nine Peaks Media
2. Put The Focus on Local SEO
“Focus on Local SEO (the map search results) for your location(s). It is the fastest, easiest, least expensive way to organically get to the top of the Google search results. Start by claiming and optimizing your Google My Business account and locations if you haven’t already. Look into adding Structured Data Markup to your website that specifies to search engines your official company name, address, and phone number. If you have a WordPress website, you can add the Yoast Local SEO plugin to make getting the Structured Data Markup in place easy.”
By Rod Holmes of Chicago Style SEO
3. And Be Sure To Set Up Your Google My Business Profile
“One thing any tax professional with a brick-and-mortar location needs is a Google My Business (GMB) Page. When individuals do a Google search, the first listings are generally paid listings. But, right under that is a map that highlights three local businesses, and gives searchers easy access to visit those businesses’ websites. These listings only appear when you have a GMB page and are Google’s way way of helping users find businesses that are located close to them. Since tax professionals don’t have to pay for a GMB page, it’s an affordable way to appear at the top of a Google search.”
By Laura Troyani of PlanBeyond
4. Leverage The Incredible Reach of LinkedIn
“LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of businesses B2B social media leads. You cannot afford to have a half filled in profile, a blurry profile photo, no background image, or not create a LinkedIn Company page. Complete the basics. When you attract someone’s interest, expect them to do a google search of your name. LinkedIn is basically guaranteed to come up. You must perfect each of the links that show up on on the 1st page of a cursory google search of your name, and your business name.”
By Tyler Clark of ADcountants
5. Ask For Reviews
“Request reviews and/or testimonials from happy customers. Reviews will help you stand out in local search listings and provide social proof for any individual or business that is considering leveraging your services. Create unique and useful content. Many clients will visit a firm’s website, so it is important that the website has useful content, is mobile friendly, and is aesthetically pleasing. These factors all play a role in establishing credibility. Last but not least, ensure your google profile is completed in entirety. If you do not have one, it is easy to create one or claim an existing listing of your business. That includes uploading pictures of the office or location, detailing the services you provide, updating operating hours, and so forth.”
By Charlie Corsello of TaxDebtHelp
6. Make Sure Your Website Offers Real Value
“Provide valuable tax preparation content and links to online tools on your website. Anything from allowing your clients see an estimated tax refund with a simple tax calculator, tips and info on what deductible expenses are legal, or how to collect and ask for all your tax documents ahead of time. Finally, create a solid paid advertising strategy on search and social media platforms – remarketing is by far your highest return on investment if you want to capture individual and businesses that are already looking for you.”
By Taylor Janszen of Janszen Media
7. Give Back To The Community
“Everyone and their mother that is preparing tax is already spending money on ads in social, search and banner ads. The key to scale in digital marketing without sending a lot of money is to focus on giving back to the community. If I was a tax pro I would do the following game plan to brand myself, first: create a program that impacts your community – for example offer Free tax preparations for workers affected in the government shutdown. Consider sending out a press release about it and contact the local schools. This could help in brining in a lot of earned media that can help you brand yourself locally. Why would this work? There is 2 big reasons, First is branding! Branding has the potential to ignite word of mouth in a local community especially if it is from a trusted published media outlet, and second is link building in which is an important factor in search engine optimization.”
By Jonathan Alonso of CNC Machines
8. Optimize for Voice and Mobile Searches
“Optimize your website for mobile and voice searches by creating a fast, mobile-friendly website. Create an FAQ section with short and simple answers to most common questions, and content that targets long tail and LSI keywords.”
By Sadi Khan of RunRepeat.com
9. Blogging for the Long Haul
“Take a long-term view on creating blogging content. Keep a list of questions your clients ask about taxes, personal and business and throughout the year write the answers and publish them as blog posts on a regular schedule. Then use the blog content to create smaller tips that you can share and reshare on social media. Do it throughout the year to earn attention so that when tax season comes around people know you and can contact you.”
By Dayne Shuda of Ghost Blog Writers
10. YouTube Can Be a Huge Source of Traffic
“In short, instead of relying on saturated, ultra-competitive platforms like Instagram and Facebook, we create helpful, genuine YouTube videos to get in front new viewers. In our opinion, YouTube is preferable over the other major platforms since YouTube is owned by Google. Given this, Google increasingly tends to promote videos on the first page in search results. As such, we’ve found that if you create a video that is relevant to your audience, you can get in front of a lot of potential customers that are searching related topics.
For example, tax professionals could produce a video about the most underrated deductions to reduce your tax bill. That way when people are searching about deductions they’ll watch the video and then hopefully click over to the tax professional’s website for more information.
Overall, we’ve found this be an extremely effective marketing method. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that creating YouTube videos is extremely cost effective compared to other digital marketing strategies.”
By Matt Ross of RIZKNOWS LLC
