3 Marketing Tips to Increase Summer Billings

1. Non-Tax Service Focus

Think about the things your clients should to focus on during summer months, for example succession planning, bank loan preparation and financial statements, payroll updates, cash flow reporting, audits, and software upgrades. Create a landing page on your website for each service you plan to focus. Then:

• Send an email to clients with a service reminder and a link to schedule an appointment. There are several good scheduling apps (www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/21124539) you can add to your website to make this process even more efficient.
• Prepare several social media organic, non-paid posts over the course of four to five weeks that link back to each service page.
• Create social media ads for less than $1/day on Facebook and $10/day on LinkedIn that also point back to the service page.
• Spend less than $100 on Google Ads that link back to the service page.

2. Accounting Tip Video Campaign

Develop a video campaign focusing on accounting tips for your target market—those you most want to have as new clients. One tip per week for several weeks is all you need. Remember to include a call to action at the end and branding in the beginning to help drive traffic to your website. Also, post the videos on a free YouTube channel to keep the collection in one area. Then link to that channel from your website.

The videos should be less than 60 seconds in length each. Free or paid tools, like RawShorts, Biteable, Animaker, Promo, Pixabay, Pikwizard, or InShot (mobile only), help to reduce the amount of work on your plate.

Leveraging popular, social media weekday hashtags like #TipTuesday, #WednesdayWisdom, #FeatureFriday, or #SpotlightSunday, also increase your audience reach.

3. You’ve Got Mail

Old-school marketing techniques, like postcards, are a great way to get attention. People are so swamped with electronic mail, that receiving an actual piece of mail can be exciting. Consider an image that business owners will understand and better yet, think, “Yes! That’s me.”

Choose one topic for the postcard, such as payroll headaches getting you down, cash flow slowdown keeping you up at night, succession planning putting the brakes on retirement, sales tax confusion stressing you out, and more.

Then, add how you can help and include a unique URL or promotional code people can use to contact you.

How do you get the mailing addresses?

• You can use a service like Hoovers that provides mailing information based on your defined criteria.
• An advanced search on LinkedIn is also a great resource to find business names and a contact person.
• State government websites often have a search services for businesses, e.g., https://dat.maryland.gov/businesses/Pages/default.aspx.

Sending postcards at a bulk mail rate is also a good way to keep costs down.

Go ahead, put on your summer gear and think about a fun way to engage your target market.

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Becky Livingston has over twenty-five years’ experience in marketing and technology in financial services and engineering firms. She is the President and CEO of Penheel Marketing, a boutique marketing firm specializing in social media and digital marketing for CPAs. In addition to being a marketing practitioner, Becky is also an adjunct professor, author, and speaker. With a graduate degree from Pace University in Information Systems, Becky also holds undergraduate degrees from two other colleges and also has a Certificate in Corporate Training from NYU. She is also an active member of the Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM). Connect with Becky’s firm on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, and YouTube.