We’ve probably all spent too much time on Facebook, scrolling down and down and looking at content that pops up on our feed. There’s a lot to look at on there, and that’s just one social media platform, among many that you could be on as an accountant. When you see so much content, it’s hard to look at all that and think about how you can stand out and catch the attention of your target market.
Well, we’re here to help with our social media tips for accountants.
Why do you need social media marketing as an accountant?
Social media marketing is about consistently creating and posting the right content for your target market on the platforms where they hang out. You want to guide your audience through your sales funnel from being strangers who have never heard of you to warm leads who are ready to buy your services.
Why do that? Well, you’ve heard of word-of-mouth marketing, and social media marketing isn’t a complete replacement for that. You’ll still get clients because some current or past clients told someone about how good you were or because someone you know mentioned that you provide a particular service to a friend or acquaintance. But social media marketing can amplify that and give you leads from a much bigger audience.
People, these days, expect to find services online. They expect to be able to post on social media and ask if anyone knows of a good accountant, just like they might at a face-to-face networking event. Only, when they do it on LinkedIn or Facebook, their post might be seen by hundreds of people, and if your accountancy business is recommended by someone in the comments on that post, that comment could also be seen by hundreds of people.
Sounds great! But if you’re not on social media yourself, the person who is recommending you can’t easily link to your page or your profile. They’d have to find your phone number or look up your website or email address. And if it’s not easy, if it’s not right at their fingertips, chances are they won’t post, and your chance to get that lead is gone.
In addition, as well as simply having a presence on social media, people expect you to interact with them and reply to comments, mentions, and direct messages. They want to know that you are a real person, that you’re responsive and genuine, and that they can trust you with their business.
Social media marketing allows you to build that bond and establish trust with potential customers, who might then turn into buyers.
Key elements of a social media strategy
You can’t just start posting and hope for the best. You need to have a plan and to work out your strategy for your social media marketing. Here’s how to get started with that:
1) Set Your Goals
If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you can’t aim for that and you’re far less likely to hit that target. Start with what you want to achieve. Do you want to get new clients, build your brand awareness, establish yourself as an expert, build trust, reach out to your local community, or all of the above?
Once you know what you want, you can then make a plan to get yourself there.
Before you begin with social media marketing for your accountancy practice, look at your current statistics and metrics so you can measure what impact your social strategy is having. Keep measuring and checking your results as you go, so that you can adjust and improve for better results.
2) What Platforms Are Your Ideal Clients Using?
You need to post where your clients are. There’s no point in creating the most stunning campaign in the history of Instagram if all your potential clients are on LinkedIn. Do your research and find out which platforms your ideal clients use. Of course, many businesses use LinkedIn, so that’s probably a safe bet, but you could find that other platforms are also worth your time.
Choose a primary platform and a secondary platform to target based on your research. Don’t try to be on all the social media platforms or you could be wasting your efforts and spreading yourself too thin. On the other hand, don’t just pick one platform either. The thing to remember about social media is that, unlike your website, it’s not your platform. If Facebook shuts down tomorrow, has an outage that lasts for days, or decides that they don’t want to provide their service to your country anymore, you’ll be starting from scratch on another platform. If you spread your posts over a couple of platforms, you’ll have an alternative should there be a problem.
3) Content
The question that comes up every time anyone starts a social media campaign is “What should we post?”
This is where your expertise can really shine. You know so much about accountancy and how to do everything from balancing your books to sorting out payroll, so why not help your audience out and give them some great content? Not only will you educate your audience, but you’ll also prove your expertise and build trust.
Talk to your audience and do your research. Find out what types of content they prefer and what topics they are interested in. You might find that they love to read your blog posts when you share them on LinkedIn and that they also like to see you talking on live video and answering questions, but they really don’t respond to infographics. While you can find out through trial and error, and by looking at your stats, you can also simply ask your audience what they want.
You could host a Facebook Live Q&A when it’s tax time, create an ebook on how to run payroll, create a blog post with useful calendar dates, do a case study about how you helped a client save money, and so much more.
And once you’ve created your content, don’t file it away never to be seen again. Why not repurpose it and make the most out of your hard work? You could collect a series of articles on a particular topic into an ebook, either to give away or use as a lead magnet in exchange for an email address. Why not use some of your blog posts as the starter for a video script or a podcast? You could turn your live Q&A into a series of more in-depth written articles or add the relevant ones to your website FAQ. You could pull quotes from your blog posts and add them to memes or attractive images to share on your social platforms. There really is no limit but your imagination.
Whatever you’re going to do, get yourself a calendar and plan your content out in advance at least for a few months. That way, you’ll have a clear idea of what to post, you can pick up on particular events on the calendar and create content to suit those, and you’ll never find yourself looking at a blank page and wondering what to write next.
4) Messaging
When you create content on social media, including when you write your bio and your About page, you’re creating a particular impression and you’re making your audience feel something if you’re doing it right. Your messaging is about more than just your content; it’s about how you’re communicating, too, and how you make people feel.
Think about how you want to present your accountancy business on social media. What emotions do you want to evoke? You need to connect with your audience and make them want to stick around. Are you the cool and trendy, modern accountancy firm aiming for up-and-coming businesses? Do you want to convey the length of time you’ve been in business and all those years of experience you have just waiting to help long-standing businesses who need someone they can trust to support them as they grow?
Whatever it is, decide on your messaging and be consistent with it every time you post.
5) Engagement
Not only is it encouraging and really pleasant to get lots of comments and likes on your posts, but your posts will get shown to a wider audience. You’ll also find that people want to see great responsiveness. They want to see you liking and replying to comments and having proper conversations with your audience. It feels genuine and real and builds trust. You need to do everything you can to encourage engagement.
Keep an eye on how much engagement you’re getting and look at how often you are posting, the style and tone of your content, and how much of a response you’re getting. If people aren’t engaging with you, go back to basics and make sure you know what your audience wants.
How to easily create compelling social media content for your accountancy business
No matter what type of content you’re creating, always start with your audience in mind. Is this something they want to see? Have you had success posting on a similar topic before? Is it genuinely useful for your ideal clients?
1) Do Your Research
When creating content, you can get ideas on what to write about by looking at your website statistics. You can see what keywords and phrases people are searching for and which pieces of content are the most popular.
Take a look at your social media platform statistics too and find out which are your most popular types of posts and pieces of content.
Then do more of what works!
You can also look at your competitors and see what they’re posting about to get ideas.
2) Brainstorm topic ideas
We’ve given you some ideas above, but accountancy is a complex subject with updates and new laws that affect what you do and what your clients need to know. Take the time to brainstorm as many ideas as possible and jot down a list of all the possible topics and post ideas you can think of. What can you create that is valuable to your clients and potential clients?
Create the type of content that gets you known for being the helpful, up-to-date expert that you are.
3) Craft impactful campaigns
At this stage, you’ll have had some experience of creating the right sort of content and generating engagement. Start to put together highly impactful campaigns to attract your ideal clients and guide them through the buyer’s journey. Keep your messaging in mind throughout and be consistent to create the right impression.
4) Schedule your social media
You can’t be present on social media twenty-four hours a day, every day. It’s simply not possible and quickly leads to burnout if you try. But you can schedule your posts so that it appears you’re all over social media and always ready with great content to help your audience, no matter what time of day or night it is.
With a content calendar, as we mentioned above, you can start to create your content in advance and you can schedule it too, saving you time, while still getting your content out there doing its job of promoting your accountancy business and attracting new leads.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still post live and engage with your audience. Automation is great but you do also need the personal touch.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
With Surefire Local’s all-in-one marketing software, you can run all your digital marketing, including your social media marketing, all from one place.
With one simple single log-in, you can get a full overview of your marketing, and dig down into the metrics and statistics that really matter to see what impact your social media campaigns are having on your bottom line.
Take back control with all your marketing in one place and manage everything from your paid ads and email marketing to your social media marketing and requesting reviews. You can update your details on Google Business Profile and 80 business directories by typing in your information once, manage your whole content flow from generating ideas to posting the finished product and so much more.
Book a demo with our friendly team and let us show you how our marketing platform can keep your social media marketing on track and getting results.
