Many accounting firms are still doing marketing activities that made sense ten years ago but deliver very little value today.
The challenge is that buyer behavior has changed. Prospective clients don’t simply ask for a referral and make a phone call. They research online, compare firms, read reviews, visit websites, and increasingly use AI tools to help them evaluate service providers.
If your marketing approach hasn’t evolved, you may be investing time and resources into activities that no longer move the needle.
Stop and Do This Instead
Here are five marketing tactics you can stop relying on, plus what to do instead. Download the infographic for easy review.
1. Posting Information Everyone Else is Posting
Review the social media pages of ten accounting firms, and you’ll notice a pattern. Tax deadlines, IRS reminders, filing dates, and generic financial tips all start to look the same. Also, that content rarely gives a prospect a reason to choose your firm over another.
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What to Do Instead
Ask your partners or managers to identify the five questions clients most often ask. Those questions then become your next five LinkedIn posts or blog topics.
The firms that stand out today are publishing more useful content, like lessons learned, common mistakes, and practical advice that business owners can apply. Are you?
2. Update the Industry Pages
Many accounting firm websites talk about personalized service, trusted relationships, and helping clients achieve their goals. But they don’t tell a prospect why they should choose your firm.
Imagine a business owner comparing three accounting firms online. If every website sounds the same, the decision often comes down to price or convenience. Nobody wants that.
What to Do Instead
Review your service pages and ask yourself a simple question: Could this content appear on a competitor’s website without anyone noticing? If the answer is yes, it’s probably time for an update.
Help visitors understand exactly who you serve and how you help them with unique industry pages written for them. Make that expertise clear and create content that addresses the challenges those clients face.
3. Referral Sources Come in Many Sizes
Referrals are still one of the best ways to grow an accounting firm.
The problem arises when most of those referrals come from the same people year after year. If one of those changes, your pipeline could change with it.
What to Do Instead
Look at the last ten clients your firm acquired. Where did they originally come from? You may discover that your referral sources are less diversified than you thought. Maybe it’s time to think about referrals more broadly by building visibility across multiple channels, like:
- Encouraging reviews,
- Participating in industry organizations,
- Speaking at events,
- Publishing helpful content, and
- Building relationships with referral partners.
The goal is to create multiple paths for prospects to discover and trust your firm.
4. Repurpose Good Content
You might invest time writing a blog article, publishing it on your website, and never thinking about it again. That’s like preparing a presentation, delivering it to one small audience, and then throwing it away.
Creating content takes effort. Get as much value from it as possible.
What to Do Instead
When you publish content, look for ways to reuse it. For example, a single article can become social media posts, newsletter content, talking points for networking events, a video script, webinar material, or answers to client questions.
Tip! Find the most popular article on your website and create three LinkedIn posts from it this month.
5. Shiny Object Syndrome
Do you give your marketing enough time to work?
One month, the focus is on social media. The next month, it’s a new website project. Then someone suggests starting a podcast. A few weeks later, the conversation shifts to AI, video marketing, or paid advertising.
None of these tactics is necessarily bad. The problem is that the direction keeps changing before any single strategy has a chance to gain traction.
The firms that achieve the best results consistently do a handful of things well. They publish content regularly, keep their website updated, stay active on LinkedIn, and maintain visibility with prospects over time.
Marketing is a lot like investing, and results tend to come from steady, consistent effort.
What to Do Instead
Choose a few marketing activities that align with your firm’s goals and commit to them for at least six months. Consistency builds momentum, trust, and visibility in a way that short-term marketing experiments rarely do.
What You Can Do Today
If you’re not sure where to start, focus on three simple actions:
- Review your website and identify pages that sound generic or outdated.
- Make a list of the questions clients ask most often and use them to guide future content.
- Identify where your last ten new clients came from and determine whether you’re relying too heavily on one referral source.
These small exercises can reveal opportunities that have been hiding in plain sight.
The Takeaway
Most accounting firms don’t need to do more marketing. They need to do more of the marketing activities that influence buying decisions.
Sometimes the fastest way to improve your marketing isn’t by adding something new. It’s by stopping the things that no longer work.
What’s one thing you could stop doing today to improve your marketing tomorrow?
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