Follow along with our blueprint for marketing success in 2023!
Part 1 – Setting the Stage for Success
Let’s start this year by gathering a little data and using it to craft the best accounting online marketing plan. What marketing did your accounting firm do in 2022? What worked, what didn’t, and why? Out of what worked, are there any areas you could build on? Now look for new ways to take your previous successful marketing campaigns and not only layer those efforts but broaden their reach by taking what worked and branching out to new strategies and platforms you haven’t used before.
Next, take the data you just compiled and develop your goals and marketing campaigns for 2023.
Avenues for Your 2023 Goals
Here are some avenues you could explore to develop your goals and accounting online marketing plan for 2023. These are potential marketing options for you to consider. We’ll go over these, then we’ll talk about crafting your marketing plan.
Leads
Take your current leads and find new strategies to build on them. Then use those new strategies to broaden your reach to find even more new leads.
Reputation
When was the last time you scoured the internet to see how your brand’s reputation was doing? The way people view your brand could make or break you. Therefore, you must monitor your brand’s online reputation and work to maintain it or mediate the negative issues the moment they occur.
Yes, we know monitoring and managing your online reputation is time-consuming and it’s sometimes like trying to find a needle in a haystack. However, we have some major time-savers for tracking and managing your online reputation. More about that in a moment.
Revenue
Now is the time to find new ways to make more money. Brainstorming with your marketing team is a good place to start. But chances are you’ve already done that. Therefore, you still need to find new avenues for making money—ways you haven’t tried before.
So how do you go about doing that? Well, you ask everyone on your team to observe what other companies are doing and what’s working for them. Then you try to find a way to incorporate that idea into your marketing campaigns.
Have your team watch commercials, walk around town to see what retailers are doing, browse social media platforms and forums, browse YouTube and other video sites, then look at the advertising that pops up. You would be surprised at how easy it is to take someone else’s ideas and twist them in unique ways to fit your industry and your marketing campaigns.
Profitability
How profitable is your accounting firm? Take some time to find any areas of waste. That could be office supplies, unnecessary subscriptions, marketing tools, etc., and cut them from your budget or reduce the monthly expense.
Employee Growth
Consider implementing an employee growth program beyond what you already have in place. Encouraging and enabling employee growth will not only help your employees grow in the industry, but it will also help you build your brand.
You could start a mentoring program, pay for advanced online courses, allow for cross-department training, and send your employees to industry events, tradeshows, and seminars. Then reward each employee for every new milestone they achieve.
New Location
For some, growing the business means opening a new office or adding a second office. If location is a critical component of your accounting firm, it might be time to assess your current location. Then, after assessing your location, if you feel it has been a detriment to your firm or is holding you back in some way, then it’s time to look for a new location.
What Resources and Budget Can You Allocate to Marketing?
Now that you have some new marketing avenues to explore, how are you going to pay to implement them? Do you have the resources and budget available for your new marketing ideas? If not, look for other areas you can cut and paste, so to speak. Are any of your current marketing materials, tools, or resources not giving you the return on investment you’d hoped for? If not, cut them and use that money for your new marketing avenues.
Now let’s talk about which online marketing activities are essential to include in your marketing plan.
Part 2 – Crafting Your 2023 Accounting Online Marketing Plan
To begin, decide what online marketing activities you want to include in your marketing plan for 2023.
Here are 11 must-have tactics to include in your marketing plan.
- Website – build a new website or make significant changes to your current one, such as redesigning the home page, adding new pages, or reworking the layout to allow easier navigation.
- SEO – search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to build your brand and boost your income without breaking the bank. SEO requires skill and patience, however.
- Digital Advertising – digital advertising is a great way to get more traffic and increase your income as fast as possible. This is because digital advertising can bring immediate results if you set up your ad campaigns properly.
- Reputation Management – review your brand’s online reputation and dedicate a team member to engage with all comments, questions, and reviews—good and bad. This will help build your brand’s authority in the industry and address any negative comments to help neutralize them before they damage your reputation.
- Directory Listings Management – adding your accounting firm to as many business directories as possible will help with brand exposure and reputation.
- Social Media Marketing – social media marketing is a great way to broaden your reach and get your name in front of demographics that don’t typically pay attention to other forms of advertising.
- Content Marketing – content marketing is the best way to proactively build your brand recognition, authority, and reputation. Additionally, content marketing is far less costly than other types of advertising and could potentially provide you with brand exposure for years to come.
- Email Marketing – email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach your audience and provide them with your accounting firm’s news, specials, and any other information you want to share.
- Lead Nurturing – another great way to boost your income is through lead nurturing. When you have leads, you have a built-in audience that you can engage with to solicit services, ask for referrals, etc.
- Text Message Marketing – people are more likely to read a text message immediately than any other form of solicitation. Therefore, it’s worth your while to add text message marketing to your campaigns.
- Analytics – if you don’t track, analyze, and act on the results of your current marketing campaigns, how will you know what’s working and what’s not? Your analytics will tell you everything you need to know about your current marketing campaigns so you can change what’s not working.
Now let’s move on to executing your 2023 accounting online marketing plan.
Part 3 – Executing Your Marketing Plan
Now that you have your new marketing strategies and have developed your accounting online marketing plan, it’s time to execute those plans. And the best way to do that is by using a monthly calendar and marketing software to help maintain consistency, which, in turn, will make things faster and easier to do. More about that in a moment. But first, let’s talk about setting the stage for growth.
Part 4 – Setting the Stage for Growth
The one thing you’ll want to include as part of your marketing plan is tracking and analyzing your data. If you aren’t currently tracking and analyzing your data, you are wasting your time and marketing spend. You must analyze and test everything to know what’s working, what’s not, and why, so you can make any necessary changes.
To begin, you will need to identify where your clients are coming from. Then you can reallocate your budget to optimize conversions and new client growth. Once you have analyzed your data and know where your clients are coming from, you can develop new online marketing activities you can add to your 2023 accounting online marketing plan.
Now that you have come up with new marketing avenues and developed your marketing campaigns, you will need to roll out those campaigns.
If you are like most people, you are probably thinking that all this is going to take a lot of work and that you might even need to hire more people to get all this done. And you might be right if you don’t have the proper tools and resources in place to make all these tasks quick and easy to do.
So let’s talk about how you can implement your 2023 accounting online marketing plan and more without spending all your time on it or having to hire more people.
How is that you ask? Using the Surefire Local Marketing Platform, that’s how.
Get ready to be amazed! Here is what Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software can do for you.
Part 5 – Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
The Surefire Local Marketing Platform will make it easy to get higher Google rankings by increasing your online traffic by 34%, helping you get more online reviews, and providing placements in 70+ local business directories such as Google, Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, BBB, Foursquare, Angi, and more.
Surefire Local’s marketing software is only a fraction of the cost of other tools and it’s much less expensive than using an agency. In fact, Surefire Local enables you to perform many of your most time-consuming digital marketing tasks all from a single platform. That means you can stop paying for all those marketing tools and having to access each of them individually just to get one task done.
But that’s not all…look at what else the Surefire Local Marketing Platform can help you do.
- Generate more online ratings and reviews.
- Improve your search visibility by listing your accounting firm in 70+ business directories.
- Generate, schedule, and distribute your online content across multiple media channels all from a single dashboard.
- Track, manage, and follow up on all your leads.
- Advertise on any search engine using the Surefire pre-built, location-based ad campaigns.
- Track your calls, web traffic, paid ads, and social media campaigns all from one place and provide you with reports on the results.
- Learn which keywords and local search terms your competitors are using so you can benchmark your results.
- Geo-location check-ins provide your clients with whatever information you want to give them and anything else you’re up to.
- Text message marketing so you can immediately answer your clients’ questions, instantly engage with them, and convert more leads via chatting or texting in real-time.