Many accountants and CPAs work with local businesses in their area, and it’s these people they need to reach when marketing. It’s no use marketing to the whole internet when you only work with businesses within, for example, a thirty-mile area of where your premises are.
So, clearly, general marketing that doesn’t target local businesses isn’t going to work as well. It would be the equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping at least some of it hits the people you want to talk to.
Instead, localizing your online marketing tactics as a local business is the way to go. You can more closely target your ideal customers and avoid spending on marketing that will never reach them.
Read on to find out more about our local search marketing tactics for accountants.
Know Your Local Community
Before you start to market to your local area, it’s time to get to know your local community, including your own customers and the competition.
1. Conduct a thorough demographic analysis of who your “best” customers are
Dig out any buyer personas you already have and take a look at the information you already have on your customers. If you don’t already have those, then it’s time to create them from scratch.
Start with a thorough dig into your available analytics and data. You should have website analytics and social media analytics available, and you may also have data from paid ads. All of these have excellent reports you can look at to give you a good understanding of your current audiences and who your main, happy customers are. You can see demographics, which areas customers are in, what they are asking, the keywords they use, how they found your site, and so much more.
Start taking notes and building up a picture of your current and potential clients.
Next, it’s time to talk. Chat to your regular clients, the ones who come back every year, and who you know believe in you and your business. Ask them what they like about what you offer and if there’s anything else you could provide that you currently don’t. Get to know them as people.
You can also send out short surveys every so often to find out how people feel about your business and who they are. Keep them short. Don’t ask hundreds of questions or anything too complicated, or people simply won’t fill them in.
Once you’ve done all that, you should have a very good idea of who your best customers are.
2. Identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your customers
Every town is different and every county and state. People’s priorities are different, what they want to hear about is different. So, you can’t market in one city the same way you would anywhere else. You’ve got to tailor it and show people you understand them and where they are from. You’re so much more likely to build up great relationships with them if you do that.
The way to do that is to understand your local area thoroughly and more importantly, what matters to your customers and potential customers. Learn about local news and events, trends, interests, and customer preferences. You’re then more likely to sound like the local, caring business that you are than a stranger trying to get their business.
3. Understand your local competition and their online marketing efforts
The final piece of the local marketing puzzle is to understand your competitors. You need to know them really well and see how they are marketing themselves before you can find ways to beat what they are doing.
Look at their website, social media, Google Business Profile, and their online presence as a whole. What are they doing well? What could be better? Why do people come to them and not you? How do they present themselves? What do they post about, and what is the tone of their posts? Are they serious all the time or do they let some natural humor creep in? What keywords and local keywords do they use? Who are their customers?
Look at their reviews and their blog and social media comments. What are people saying about them?
Once you have all that information, you should have a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration for your own marketing, along with ways you can tackle their marketing and do even better.
Localized Online Marketing Tactics
1. Optimize your Google Business Profile
If you don’t already have a Google Business Profile or GBP, claim it now. Go to Google Maps and search for your company name. If there’s already a listing then claim it, and if not, create the listing first and then claim it.
You will have to verify your business to Google before they will give you your profile, but it’s easy to do by video, email, phone, or text.
Your GBP is a huge part of your local marketing and Google does take note of your profile, how complete it is, the quality of your content, and how many reviews you have and your star rating. Your reviews and star rating can show up on paid Google Ads and attract more customers to look at your page. The other advantage is that your GBP will more than likely appear higher than your website in the search results, giving you greater visibility. Your GBP is also the only way you can appear in the Local Map Pack results at the top of Google Maps, so don’t skip this part.
You must optimize your profile and fill in every section as fully and accurately as you can. Use quality copy that includes keywords and local keywords to help you appear in local search. Think, from what you know about them now, what would your potential clients really like to know? That’s what needs to go on this profile.
Talk about your services, add your business hours, your address, and contact information, and fill in the questions and answers section too. If you add your business hours, you can then be found by voice search if they search for “accountant, your local area, open now.” It’s also important to add quality images and videos to make your profile look attractive. You will also need to keep your GBP updated regularly with your latest news, blog posts, images, updates, and useful information.
Finally, you will need to encourage customers to leave reviews that call attention to the local areas you service. Ideally, you want every review to have local keywords if possible. It all helps to gain visibility for your business.
2. Localized Content Marketing
Content is needed at every stage of your marketing funnel, but it shouldn’t just be specific to the stage of the funnel your customers are at. It should also have location-specific content that resonates with your potential clients. This is where your earlier research comes in handy, as you know what your people are interested in and what local information and news they might want to hear about. Also, include any local events and trends in your content, where appropriate, and use the right hashtags to join in the conversation.
As we’re talking local marketing here, of course, you’re going to need to include local keywords in your content as well as your usual keywords, though do keep your writing natural and written first for real people and then for the search engines.
3. Local SEO Strategies
Local SEO is a must if you want to appear in local search. You’ll need to implement on-page SEO tactics with a focus on the locations you want to rank highly in. Write using local keywords everywhere you have content. Create separate pages for different areas if you have more than one office for your firm. However, you can also do this even if you don’t. Include local information, events, news, and your full address and contact information on these pages.
You can also add local keywords to page URLs, your top headline and at least one subheading, images, meta title, meta description, and at least once in the body of your copy, preferably in the first paragraph.
Backlinks are also important for SEO, and it’s important to acquire high-quality backlinks from other local businesses, directories, and community websites. This works especially well if the businesses are complementary to yours. You may want to swap backlinks with pension advisers, financial advisers, mortgage brokers, and similar businesses.
None of this will matter, however, if your site is slow to load and isn’t optimized for mobile. No one has the patience to wait any longer than a few seconds for your website to appear, and they will vanish to the competition if your site is too slow. You will also be losing many potentially interested people if your site doesn’t work on mobile. Google also lists mobile-friendly sites first in the search results and will penalize any sites that aren’t optimized for mobile.
4. Local Online Advertising
You can set up targeted online ads through platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads to run ads at people in your local area or within a certain radius of your location. If you have multiple locations, you can still do this. You’ll just have to set up ads for each area.
You can also tailor your ads to particular demographics, preferences, and more to be sure you are targeting the right audience for your business.
Once your ads have been up and running for a couple of months, start to monitor and analyze your ad performance. By then, you’ll have enough data to see which ads are working and which are not. You can then switch off badly performing ads and copy the successful ones to continually optimize for better results.
5. Local Branding
Get involved in your local area for networking opportunities and to find out about local resources and help for businesses. But it’s also a great way to find businesses to partner with for cross-promotion opportunities. You could team up with a bookkeeper and a pension adviser, for example, to offer a packaged service at a lower price for a limited period. You could all advertise this to your newsletters and to your social sites. What will then happen is that you all gain new subscribers and new followers, all of whom are seriously interested in what you offer.
Connecting with local charities and community leaders can also be a great opportunity. While it is a nice thing to do, and it will enhance your local reputation, it can also do wonders for your online visibility, particularly if you participate in events that have a strong online presence.
6. Monitor and Analyze Performance
Hopefully, you set some goals for your marketing at the beginning and the way to know if you’ve hit those goals is, of course, to track your results. Track your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as website traffic, conversion rates, cost per click, customer lifetime value, and local search rankings.
Tracking is best done each month, each quarter, and with a look back at the full year compared to the previous year. If you track each month, you can ensure that things are moving in the right direction, and if they aren’t, you can more quickly do something about it.
You can also use tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into your local customer behavior. These, along with your website statistics, paid ad statistics, and social media statistics, will show you how they found your business, what they searched for to find it, what keywords they used, what content they interacted with, what questions they have, what actions they took, and more.
All of that information can then be used to continually tweak and adjust your local marketing efforts based on real performance rather than guesswork.
All of these steps are important if you want to make your local marketing work for your business and improve online visibility. You have to focus on localizing your online marketing to attract the right local customers. But the advantages are clear. You can gain visibility in specific zip codes, increase your overall engagement, keep pulling in targeted leads, increase your bottom line, and grow your business.
Localize Your Online Presence with Surefire Local
Surefire Local helps small businesses with localized online marketing by creating local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easier for new customers to find them. We are the all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses, and we’d love to help you with your marketing. With our platform, you can save time, effort and money by more quickly and efficiently getting things done and by spending time and money on the right things.
- Website / Local SEO optimizations – creating geo-tagged content that is published on your website, blog, and social media profiles
- Online review management – send review requests, write responses to reviews, and analyze your brand sentiment to learn what customers think about your business
- Directories management – claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer for your business across 80+ online directory listings platforms
- Content marketing – tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, and social media profiles
- Social media management – tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments
- Local online advertising – Ads designed to attract only the attention of customers within your service area
- Analytics and reporting – Transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating, with AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see improvements
- Educational resources – webinars and blogs designed to help small businesses learn all things local online marketing
Why not attend a Surefire Local demo and see how we can help?