Picking the Perfect Marketing Partner: Insights For Accounting Firms

Accounting firms hit a growth ceiling for all sorts of reasons—often because they rely on referrals, partner with marketing agencies that promise the moon but don’t understand accounting, or simply get comfortable with “good enough” growth.

You can break through that ceiling. But to do it, you need a digital marketing partner who understands your industry-specific challenges and knows how to translate your expertise into tangible growth. As you begin your quest for the perfect marketing partner, look for an agency that has:

Industry-Specific Experience

Most accounting firms share a series of industry-specific challenges—navigating a complex regulatory environment, managing seasonal fluctuations, maintaining specialized expertise across multiple industries, and on the list goes.

Many digital marketing agencies understand these fundamental challenges on a macro level. But here’s what they miss: Despite sharing industry-specific obstacles, you cannot market all accounting firms the same way.

Every firm has its own brand identity and industry niche, not to mention an ideal client avatar (which can vary drastically from one firm to another). Uncovering these elements is critical to cutting through competitor noise. Beware of digital marketing partners that either:

• Lack industry experience altogether
• Have industry experience but reach for a playbook instead of building customized strategies around your brand identity, offering, and ideal client

We’ve helped dozens of accounting firms succeed, but not because we followed an industry-specific playbook. More often than not, it was because we didn’t.

Experience Beyond Your Industry

We’re seeing a growing number of accounting-focused digital marketing agencies pop up. Because these agencies focus solely on the accounting industry, they claim to hold the secret that will unlock your success. In theory, that narrow focus sounds like a strong value proposition. The downside is these agencies often have a limited view of digital marketing, meaning they:

• Miss out on strategies that work for other industries and can be applied to yours
• Struggle to differentiate your firm from competitors or their other clients
• Recycle website templates and content from other clients, damaging your brand identity and website ranking

Our best advice? Find a digital marketing partner with proven success across multiple industries, including accounting and other professional services industries.

Comprehensive Services

Many digital marketing agencies focus on a single service, whether it’s content, social media, websites, SEO, or paid media. Mastering a niche is valuable. The trouble is digital marketing requires all these elements to work together (WISE offers more than 18 products and services for example).

Strong copy on an accounting website that’s not optimized for SEO never gets found or read. Slick websites that look great but are difficult to navigate frustrate potential leads who prematurely abandon your site. Paid media campaigns without compelling landing pages waste your budget.

At WISE, we cover every aspect of your digital presence, from brand identity and design to SEO-optimized copy and paid media.

The Right Tools

Many accounting firms come to us after investing time and money in templated website builds that promise results but fail to deliver. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly may be user-friendly, but the issues we see with them are stark:

• Page loading lags that frustrate users
• Poor mobile performance that damages Google rankings
• Cookie-cutter designs that do not differentiate firms from competitors

To circumvent these issues, we developed NEST™—an all-in-one proprietary website platform specifically built for professional service businesses like accounting firms. The metrics behind these accounting websites speak for themselves:

• Typical professional services websites see bounce rates of 40-70%. Our NEST-powered sites see an average of just 6.2%, which means users are staying on our clients’ sites for much longer
• Lightning-fast website speed
• No known vulnerabilities (unlike WordPress, which is riddled with issues)

Far beyond the typical accounting website, we’ve also built custom tools for our accounting clients to run their businesses better. These include custom calculators that provide instant new client pricing estimates, reducing time spent on consultations while prequalifying leads before they reach your crowded inbox.

Dark Horse CPAs became one of the fastest-growing accounting firms in the United States over the last four years because tools like this helped them price new clients effortlessly and uniformly as they scaled from two to 45 locations across the country. Oh, and they also grew a whopping 1,500% in that time.

The moral of the story? Many agencies and underqualified freelancers rely on templated websites and tools that save money on the front end but inevitably cost you more in the long run. Partner with an agency that gets it right the first time.

WISE: The Marketing Partner That Just Adds Up

Are you...

• Not getting the leads you want from your current marketing partner
• Struggling to differentiate your firm from competitors?
• Frustrated by cookie-cutter marketing strategies that ignore your unique strengths?
• Ready to move beyond referrals to achieve sustainable growth?

Then you’re in the right place. WISE Digital Partners has the industry experience and proven success to help you break through your growth ceiling and soar to new heights. Contact us today!