5 Marketing Tips for Small Accounting Firms

When it comes to marketing your accounting practice, the common complaint is that I don't really know where to focus my efforts or I don't have time.

During crunch time in an accounting practice, we become challenged serving the needs of existing clients, managing the office work flow, encouraging clients to get their work in early, managing staff, meeting with clients, and reviewing the quality of the work. As a result, making time for marketing to new clients is like a step child to the needs of existing clients.

For those practitioners that want to continuously improve the quality of their clientele and improve the practice, marketing is and must become a habitual activity in the practice. Otherwise, the practitioner is constantly applying grease to the squeaky wheel in a knee jerk, reactive mode.

Here are five proven marketing tips that require very little lead-time to implement:

• Local Listings – All accounting firms should have a profile set up in Google and Yelp. After both profiles are set up and validated, then Moz Local should be used to ensure your contact information is consistent everywhere. Moz Local costs $99 per year and is well worth the investment.

• Reputation Management – In today's electronic age, business decisions are made by looking online to see what others are saying about your firm. Or said another way, you need online reviews posted about your firm in Google and Yelp. The online reviews give prospects the confidence to hire you over local competitors.
• Take full advantage of website marketing – The internet is a wonderful opportunity to market your firm services to total strangers and educate your existing clients about the range of services you provide. If you have a website that is well constructed so it can be found on the search engines (e.g., search engine optimized), this is a wonderful way to attract new business.

• Email newsletter – To keep your firm top-of-mind year-around, we strongly recommend sending out an email newsletter that drives readers to your website. With integrated email newsletter solutions that leading website providers offer, this can be set up once to go out monthly or bi-monthly.
• Develop a top twenty hit list – Over the past year or so, you probably met with tons of prospects for your firm services. Develop a list of the twenty best prospects who considered your services over the past year. Personally reach out to them and persuade them to re-consider your firm. Send them a letter, then an email, and a phone call to meet briefly for coffee. Seek to close a couple of these over the next sixty days.

Marketing and improving the quality of your practice should be job one during busy season. Incorporate these five proven tips into your marketing plans and you will be pleasantly surprised.