Marketing Strategies For Getting Ideal Clients For Your Accounting Firm
Passive Organic Marketing Strategies For Accounting Firms
Building Your Brand Around Your Ideal Clients
Building a brand can be difficult and take a long time to become synonymous with your ideal clients. The upside is once you have become the specialist or expert in the minds of your ideal clients – you will experience more respect, wealth and freedom than ever before.
In order to create a clear picture in the minds of your ideal clients, everything you do should aim in the same direction. If you want to become the go to accountant for physiotherapists, you cannot be talking about the construction industry.
Every piece of your online real-estate like your website and social media platforms should showcase your in-depth understanding of your ideal clients. It should be extremely clear that you specialize and have a competitive advantage dealing with your ideal clients.
The small details really do matter so pay attention that you don’t miss a step by showcasing all your reviews/testimonials from contractors if you try to target physiotherapists.
You should be building trust and credibility in every way possible.
Align your brand with everything that relates to your ideal clients like: working with suppliers and service providers, getting promoted by influencers, hosting or participating in online discussions, joining masterminds, working with governing bodies, being visible at specific events, creating platform or groups, hosting or joining workshops, doing sponsorships etc.
Basically participating wherever you can with everything relating to your ideal clients. This might seem like a lot and it is so don’t try and do everything at once. Decide and analyze which options will give you the maximum exposure for the least amount of effort and start from there.
This is a long term strategy so take your time to analyze the best way forward for your specific ideal clients. Below are a few good places to start building your brand on top of the foundations you laid down.
Create A Space For Your Ideal Clients To Communicate And Receive Value
The idea with this strategy is to become part of your ideal client community, to be seen as one of the tribe will increase your trust and credibility within the community.
What better way to be part of a community than creating it yourself?
Most people don’t want the responsibility of the leadership role so at the moment there is a massive demand for strong leadership. This spills over to smaller groups or communities, so don’t wait for someone else to create the perfect space for your ideal clients where you can add value and show your worth – do it yourself and be seen as a leader that demands respect.
If you have your own community space where people can communicate and share value without the interruption of ads and spammers, the community will respect you for it. This community can then serve for multiple purposes above and beyond just being part of the tribe.
You can use this community to increase your understanding of your ideal clients – what are on their minds on a daily basis, how do they communicate what do they value more etc.
Just remember to keep the community clean and pure from marketing and spam – nobody feels comfortable or wants to hang out in a community where every second message is spam.
Create A Business Alliance Between Everybody That Works With Your Ideal Clients
All businesses are interconnected to other businesses in some way or another, you won’t find a business that exists that don’t depend on other businesses.
Analyze your ideal clients to figure out who are the major role players and with what other businesses they do business. You can ask simple questions like: What software do they use, who supplies them with goods, who are their service providers, who does their contract work, to whom do they outsource, who uses their products or services etc.
This should give you a clear picture of everybody they do business with. Now you want to analyze which of them would most likely want to partner with you or join a joint venture. Start with the low hanging fruit and work yourself up.
You want to build long lasting relationship on mutual interest with these businesses. We call this a business alliance to improve the value offered to your ideal clients while benefiting all parties involved – this is not a place to see how you can screw someone else over, it must be mutually beneficial.
Build Relationships With People That Can Promote Your Brand To Your Ideal Clients (Influencers)
Every group of ideal clients have people they look up to, people they admire, people who entertain them, books they read, news/blogs they consume, influencers etc.
If you can start building relationships with these various types of influencers, you can use them to get in front of your ideal clients while benefiting from the credibility the influencer provides just by introducing you.
In a lot of these cases it will be difficult to find mutual benefit between you and the influencers but this should not discourage you since most are motivated by money.
The exposure you can get with influencer marketing can be very rewarding at a reasonable price. We would still recommend that you find an expert that specifically brokers deals like this between influencers and businesses – you don’t want to be taken advantage of on your first try.
Active Organic Marketing Strategies For Accounting Firms
Becoming A Thought Leader For Your Ideal Clients
If you don’t want to pull out the money for existing influencers, you can always become one yourself by putting in the time and effort.
This is definitely not in everybody’s wheel house but can be a very effective strategy if you have to personality for it. All ideal clients are always looking for leaders they can admire and be inspired by. Entertainment is also an option for those less serious and have a knack for entertaining people.
We believe the simplest way to start is by publicly (or online) speaking your mind and sharing ideas. People are naturally drawn to people not afraid to take chances in order to improve the overall situation or people not afraid to speak the truth.
This takes a lot of courage since there are always backlash from a bunch of negative people that only want to bring other people down. If you can whether the storm of the useless and unmotivated people with no future – the rewards are endless!
Start small and work yourself up as your audience grows – this is a long term strategy.
Content Marketing For Accounting Firms
Content marketing for ideal clients are basically the same as for just attracting client, see other page here.
The major difference is that every piece of content you put out there should be aimed specifically toward your ideal clients.
Common practice is to write down all the problems/pains/challenges they are currently facing and create content for each.
Same goes for your ideal clients wants/needs/desires.
Direct Outreach Marketing For Accounting Firms
Reaching out to people with the intent to win their business or sign them up as new clients is an ongoing process that takes time and effort.
There is no way around it, if you want a highly effective strategy for direct outreach - you need to personalize the outreach, have a great message and a very appealing offer. Those are the 3 main factors for outreach success, not the platform or the volume.
Doing direct outreach is a personal endeavor because you are communicating with a real human being directly – people online sometimes tend to forget this fact. Treat them like real humans and your success rate will skyrocket.
There is no need to over complicate the process or message. The process is simple – start a conversation with someone and try to get them on the phone/zoom where you can make the sale.
I will only give the structure for the first message as back and forth messages depend on the reply of your prospect.
Message structure:
1 sentence personalized with a compliment (this is to show you did your research and you are a real person not some spam bot)
Sentence 2-3 is your marketing message (how you help your ideal clients from their current situation to their desired situation with you as the bridge between them)
4-5 Your offer or success story (showcasing someone just like them you have helped, will drastically improve your credibility, if you don't have this use a no-brainer offer)
6 Call to action (asking them to get on a quick call or if they would be interested)
This is only one example of a structure we have used with great success. Keep in mind the goal here is to get them on the phone where you can turn them into a client.
Paid Marketing Strategies For Accounting Firms
Running Targeted Ads For Accounting Firms
Knowing how to target your ideal clients using paid ads should be seen as a superpower. The massive results we have seen with paid advertising to a group of ideal clients while your actually understand them is incredible!
With all our strategies we try to use value as the center piece and the defining factor and targeted ads are no different.
Targeting your ideal clients with something they find valuable is a great way to create a lot of interested prospects that turn into leads.
The 3 most popular platform people run targeted ads on is Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Which one should you choose? Well it depends on where your ideal clients hang out – so go and ask them.
We love to advertise on Facebook since most people are using the platform so the chances of find your ideal clients are quite high. With a lot of experience and knowledge about how the entire system work we can be very effective getting great ROI for our ads.
If you do not have this level of expertise there is a chance that you can lose a lot of money – so rather get yourself a professional that know what they are doing.
Keep in mind that the success of your ads depends more on your level of understanding of your ideal clients than anything else! Your ads should resonate with your ideal clients and give them something of value.
Paid Marketing Systems For Accounting Firms
As a business owner you don’t want everything to run smoothly with as little human intervention as possible, same goes for running ads.
We don’t want you wasting your time struggling to get the leads you pay for or to see how your ads are doing.
You should have a system in place that immediately sends the leads directly to your phone that you can give them a follow-up call. It creates a big impression when you fill in an ad and within 5 min the business calls you to follow-up.
Giving the leads the value you promised them should also be automated. You should have a funnel and nurture process in place that give the value plus the opportunity to work with you.
Make it as easy as possible to work with you.
We explain the systems in more detail in our pdf you can claim here: 5 Secrets On How To Optimize Your Business Operations That You Stop Wasting Time, Signup More Clients & Keep Them Longer.