Lead Generation for Accountants: 8 Proven Tips to Generate More Accounting Leads
You need long-term clients to grow your accounting firm and make it a sustainable business. Short-term clients may help you maintain your cash flow, but the clients that stay with you for long help you become a stable brand.
But it doesn’t happen automatically.
You need a robust lead generation strategy to continue attracting new bookkeeping leads and show them that you are the best option for their business needs.
But before that, you need to understand what a lead is.
What's a Lead?
A lead is an inquiry or interest expressed by a prospective customer into your business. Interest can be shown through various means, such as a form submission on your website, an email, a phone call, a social media message, or a comment. People asking for a visiting card at a networking event can also be considered a lead.
You can use a combination of organic, paid, and email marketing strategies to attract high-quality leads. Consistent lead generation is a must to arrest and neutralize client churn. Now, let’s discuss how to get accounting clients.
Lead Generation for Accountants
Create a Professional Website
To make your website work as a lead generation magnet first you should have a professionally created website with a good web design and U/I. It should also have engaging content to hook the client. The ultimate objective of a professional website is to convert a visitor into a lead for your business.
Secondly, it should have relevant keywords to target your ideal customers. The more specific keywords you use, the higher would be the number of quality leads. It will also boost your sales profit ratio.
Businesses use their websites to generate interest in their services. When visitors click an ad and come to your website, they look for the answers to their questions. They would also like to see if your website can address their pain points. If you can hook your visitors, they will sign up for your newsletter or follow your blog. The very moment they take any such action on your website, they become leads.The next step is to capture their data and contact details. It is also crucial to record their behavior on your website for Analytics purposes. This data tells us what a visitor needs.
Apart from that, you would also need relevant landing pages on your website to convert your leads. You should also have optimized images, graphics, videos, and testimonials.If it sounds overwhelming, we at Organic Search Consultants will create a professional WordPress website for you to attract qualified leads. We specialize in developing websites for accounting firms to ensure a steady stream of sales leads for them.
Do SEO of Your Website
Search engine optimization offers various options to generate CPA leads through search engines. Therefore, you should optimize your website to attract relevant leads. Organic search is extremely powerful as it provides you with tons of traffic free of cost.
Once your site is optimized for relevant keywords, you can drastically cut your paid advertising budget. SEO involves improving your website so that search engines understand it and send relevant traffic through different keywords.
It involves targeting the popular search terms people use in your industry and improving your authority by building quality links from other trusted websites in your niche. It will help you generate bookkeeping leads organically. Once it happens, search engines direct ultra-specific CPA leads. Most of the ultra-specific traffic comes from local search queries such as "accountants near me" or "best accounting firms in [your town/area]."
Apart from the target landing pages, you can also optimize the blog posts and other informative content on your website, such as an FAQ page. It will help your clients find relevant, informative pages on your website through search engines.
SEO is not a cakewalk as it involves consistent long-term action that includes both on-page and off-page optimization. You should also implement mobile SEO and voice search optimization for your website.
If this is not your cup of tea, hire affordable SEO services from Organic Search Consultants. Our SEO experts will make life easy for you.
Try Paid Advertising
SEO optimization takes a long time, and you might have to wait more than six months to see some relevant organic traffic on your website. You can successfully try paid advertising for your website, which brings quick results. It is crucial to maintain your cash flow to keep the ball rolling. However, paid advertising is easier said than done because you can soon exhaust your funds without achieving concrete results. It can deal a big blow to your business, especially if it is in its nascent stages.
If achieving results from paid advertising on Google or Facebook is your chief concern, hire affordable paid advertising services from us and generate qualified leads regularly.
Ramp-Up Your Social Media Presence
Social media is extremely powerful. It is where the people are found. So, you should increase your presence on social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Marketing on social media can be a boon for companies that don't have the budget for paid advertising. LinkedIn is the best option for businesses offering B2B services.
You don't need a big budget to increase your presence on social media. All you need to do is to post regularly, share your blogs, and answer queries from prospects.
You should ask your loyal customers to share and review your business as it increases your visibility.
Try Networking
With pandemic restrictions fast ending, communities have again started organizing business networking events. These networking events offer unmatched business and marketing opportunities without investing in paid ads. You can use Google search, social media, and Eventbrite to look for local events in your niche.
To make the most of these events, you should be ready with a killer elevator pitch and business card. Also, you should focus more on listening than speaking. Note your prospect's pain points and find ways to resolve them through your services. If you cannot address their pain points with your services, you should provide them with a contact who can do that. This way, you will expand your network, and your contacts will also recommend you. So, it is a win-win game.
Answer Your Customers' Common Queries
People don't straightaway start looking for accountants on the Internet. The procedure is a bit different. Most of the searches rotate around initial queries when people need accounting services. If your website can answer these queries to their satisfaction, they are more likely to consider hiring your services.
You can do it through content marketing, i.e., creating a section on your website where visitors can find answers to their basic queries and information on how you can solve their problems. These can be the common issues people face and their regular queries. You can list such issues and questions and preemptively provide in-depth and comprehensive answers on your website.
You can create a blog section on your website with informative articles, downloadable e-books, how-to guides, infographics, and FAQ sections. This is the first step you can take to help your clients move forward and choose you as their accounting partner. And if they are not seriously looking for any services right now, they will at least remember you when they need your services.
Implement Conversion Rate Optimization
Attracting a visitor to your website is an accomplishment, but it isn't the end goal of online marketing. The actual game begins when you learn to convert those visitors into leads.
You can achieve it by conversion rate optimization or CRO. The prerequisite for CRO is to have a call to action on your web page and a clear objective prompting your visitor to achieve it. The goals can vary from signing up for a newsletter to filling up the inquiry form. Whatever it is, it will help you push your visitor down the funnel closer to conversion.
You can apply A/B testing to your CTAs (calls to action) and choose the version that produces the best results. When you see its impact fading, you can brainstorm new ideas and do the A/B testing again.
You may not realize this, but several other elements impact your website's conversion. You can try CRO on these elements too. These elements include your website structure, site navigation, and images.
CRO is extremely effective and adds value beyond your imagination. It helps you convert visitors into qualified leads and get more accounting clients.
Implement Email Marketing
You can keep in touch with your site visitors by capturing their email addresses. There are different methods you can try to build email lists, some of which are as follows.
A. Using contact forms
B. eBook download in exchange for visitor's email address
C. Sign up forms for newsletters
You can start with a weekly or monthly newsletter to stay in touch. You can choose from the following topics to include in your newsletter.
- Share news and updates about your company
- Interview inspiring people and influencers
- Interview industry experts
- Share industry trends
- Provide useful tips for your clients
- Host a poll
- Share what you've published
- Start conversations
- Share a case study
A newsletter is the best way to assert your presence in your prospects’ inboxes. Keep sharing interesting and useful information to engage your prospects and create brand awareness.
Apart from the regular newsletters, you can also send personalized emails with targeted marketing messages to push your prospect down a funnel. These messages can be crafted based on visitors’ actions on your website and can be triggered using automation. These actions may include visiting a product page, a specific service page, downloading an ebook, etc.
These custom emails often contain additional information that addresses their prospects’ needs.
That is why emails are considered a powerful weapon for marketers. You can achieve many objectives with your emails.
Final Thoughts
Accounting services is a competitive business and generating a steady stream of relevant accounting leads is not a cakewalk. There are various proven methods to generate leads for your firm. You can try the tips given above, and you will drastically improve your lead generation game.
Apart from that, you can also hire the services of an SEO consultant, who will optimize your website and implement various organic methods to attract qualified leads for accountants. They will also implement Conversion Rate Optimization on your website to increase conversions.
Generate Leads for your Accounting Firm
