“Accountants often dismiss social media as something to do when there is room in the budget…”

…according to Accountex’s review on the popularity among professionals in the sector of social media for accountants.

Not in our experience though.

The accountants we work with regard social media as a particularly effective platform to:

• demonstrate their commercial knowledge & experience and the value they deliver to clients and
• be seen as an expert on particular subjects – for example, IR35, R&D tax credits, inheritance tax, and more.

What stops many from taking social media seriously, other than the budgetary issue mentioned by Accountex, is that:

• it takes a lot of time to plan and create the substantial amount of linguistic and visual material required to make it a success and
• you don’t have a lot of time to plan because you’re very busy anyway and linguistic and visual creativity really isn’t your thing (as many of you tell us!)

Let us do it for you instead.

Social media digital marketing for accountants – our services

We offer two social media marketing services for accountants – social media profile creation and social media management.

For the social media profile service, we create your personal and company profiles for each of the social media platforms you want to be on.

With your profiles, we present you and your company’s areas of expertise in a compelling, benefits-led, and engaging way with your target audience.

We want your profiles to encourage interaction from the people who see them – whether that’s messaging you directly or simply following you on the platform.

With this service, we focus particularly on the copy we use in your profiles, the photo and banner designs we create, and privacy settings to make your profiles as easy to find as possible.

Our social media management service is intended to:

• develop you and your company’s online branding (visual and linguistic),
• promote you as an expert in the fields you wish to highlight to your target audience through the creation and sharing of high-quality, subject-specific content,
• increase the number of existing and prospective clients following you online through paid for and organic marketing campaigns, and
• convert as many of your online followers as possible into high-interest enquiries.

We also create downloadable and shareable content for your practice so that you can capture more decision maker contact details for follow-up.

Find out more

Take advantage of the opportunities to engage with and persuade existing and potential clients on social media.

To find out more about our social media for accountants service, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or click here to email us.

Understanding how social media for accountants works is key to achieving the highest return on investment

Despite what you might think, social media is not a new sales channel – it’s actually a sophisticated and evolving marketing channel.

The most successful social media marketing for accountants doesn’t consist of post after post pitching your services.

Think about your own social media use – let’s say that you decided to follow a company or individual on LinkedIn.

If, nearly every day after you subscribed, you saw nothing other than advert after advert from that company in your newsfeed, you would be much likely to unsubscribe from or unfollow that company.

Social media marketing for accountants is about getting the right balance between telling and selling

Social media is difficult to get right.

If you’re doing it yourself, it requires a lot of your creative time and effort.

To achieve a return on investment, you not only have to create posts – you have to create supporting material for those posts.

And you have to create lots of content before your social media account gains momentum.

Only then will it start delivering you lots of new followers who might want one, some, or all of your accountancy services.

The posts and supporting material you share must offer either relevant advice or something which was probably unknown to your followers to be considered valuable.

When you do this consistently, your followers come to greatly value your contributions.

And the more your contributions are valued, the higher the returns you’ll recieve from your promotional posts.

Social media for accountants – the benefits and opportunities

When you do get it right however, it’s a cheap, accessible way of sharing positive, useful, and constructive messages to a wide number of interested decision-makers.

These messages will begin to deliver a constant and steady flow or leads and enquiries to your practice.

These leads can then be turned into appointments at which there is a real opportunity to convert a prospect into your newest client.

Social media posts, adverts, and content for accountants

Ideally, the content you share with followers on social media should consist of a mixture of the following:

• short personal observations of value to a reader
• links to external business and tax news together with a short personal comment
• infographics (like this one from PR Daily)
• links to new blog articles on your website
• information about and invitations to company events
• white papers written in accessible language
• industry reports
• thought leadership pieces

For paid social media campaigns, each advert should contain the promise of useful information and a strong call to action – whether that’s asking prospects to visit your website, subscribe to an email newsletter, or to fill out a contact form.

The increasing effort you now need to make to make a meaningful contact with a prospect

Recent marketing statistics have shown that it can take up to 13 “exposures” to your company name before a prospect will leave their details so that you can get in touch with them.

You need to make sure that every advert they see – every exposure you accumulate – builds your practice’s credibility so that, when the time comes for a social media follower to make a decision, there’s a much greater chance of them getting in touch with you.

How social media marketing overcomes the fear of changing accountants

This is particularly important if you’re trying to convince a client to leave their existing practice to come over to yours.

Change is difficult for all companies because, in the minds of decision makers, a new accountant may not be as good as their current one, even if they are dissatisfied with the current accountant.

The “touches” you make through social media marketing must “de-risk” the idea of choosing your practice over their current one.

Building up your online following of existing and potential clients

To start, our accounting marketing team will suggest that you and your colleagues include links on your website and in all of your outbound emails so that readers and visitors can visit your social media profile with just one click or touch.

“Reaching out” on social media

Who should you then reach out to? Anyone you can offer real value to and anyone who can offer real value to you.

Ideally, you should also try to make 10-15 outbound connections a day with people and companies of value to you – prospective clients, your existing clients, people in the industries you’re targeting with a large number of connections, and more.

Returns on investment with paid advertising on social media

The quickest way to achieve growth in the number of your followers is to pay to be seen in their newsfeeds.

Compared with traditional direct marketing lead generation costs, successful social media advertising on LinkedIn can produce qualified leads for £20-£80.

With Facebook, the cost is lower (£10 to £50 a lead) however you may find closing leads from Facebook slightly more challenging than leads you get from LinkedIn.

However, the targeting on Facebook is more precise than the targeting on LinkedIn.

Of the three main social media platforms, Twitter is the least effective for lead generation but it offers real advantages for brand building.

Depending on the types of follower you want to connect with, you can reach 5,000 to 10,000 targets with your message on Twitter for as little as £20.

More Than Words carries out both organic and paid-for social media advertising for our accounting clients.

Gaining visibility, measuring results

Although more and more accountants are joining social media platforms individually and on behalf of their practices every month, it has always been difficult to precisely measure return on investment on social media platforms.

The social media platforms do not share a great deal of information with you on who exactly is interacting with you.

We will however provide you with progress reports for each platform each month showing you the number of decision makers interacting with you and the quality of those interactions.

Our two aims are to:

• steadily grow your follower base with the types of prospects you want to connect with and
• provide your followers with a stream of useful, actionable information and offers to build trust in your practice.

This means that, when they are in the market for one or more of your services, a follower is more likely to contact your practice than one of your competitors.

Social media for accountants – speak to our team

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form to work out how you can use social media for your practice to increase your visibility among your target audiences and to win new clients.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can email our marketing for accountants team by clicking here.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There’s lots of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk away from North Shields Metro station.