Marketing is the most effective way to attract customers who want to purchase your services. If you do not promote your services or do not know how to do it, chances are you will not be able to sustain your business over time.
It is necessary to know how to market a bookkeeping business if you want to attract and retain clients and for this you must know who your ideal client is, how to expand your online presence, and how to connect with your public.
When you understand how to put all these aspects into practice, you are ready to take your bookkeeping business to the next level.
Steps to Market Your Bookkeeping Business
1. Know Your Audience
In the United States alone there are 30.7 million small businesses. With so many startups, you must find a way to stand out and one of those is by defining your ideal customer.
An ideal customer is a critical component in moving your business forward, and everything you learn about them will form the basis of all communications in your marketing plan.
Not knowing who they are trying to attract is a common problem among small business owners.
When you target the right people, you can fine-tune your message to communicate directly with them, focus your strategy, and consequently, subscriptions increase, the conversion rate improves and you get to sell more in your business.
When you understand your ideal customer and know what their wants and needs are, it is easier to develop marketing messages that are more relevant and have a greater reach.
Define Your Ideal Client
Imagine that you have a map, there you will see several destinations that look promising, but how do you know which one to choose?
That is what having an ideal client is about, knowing where to direct all your efforts. When you define who that ideal client is, you will know how to approach them, what to offer them, and what to expect from them.
Knowing the personality of your ideal customer means that you can appeal directly to the people who are looking for your product or service.
Therefore, an ideal customer will be the person who buys a certain product or service because they have found in it the perfect solution to their problem or need and, also, meet these 4 requirements:
- They are satisfied with the product or service that has solved their problem or need.
- Do not create inconveniences with the price if it is fair and adequate for the value it provides.
- Recommend the product/service if the result they have obtained is what they expected.
- It becomes a loyal and recurring buyer.
To be able to sell more in your business, you need to build relationships, and relationships are built with people.
Therefore, your marketing strategy must be planned around people and the ideal customer is a representation of the person you are trying to attract with your marketing strategy.
2. Identify Your Selling Point
Every business that stands out in the market has a strong point that differentiates it from other similar businesses.
You must identify what it is that you can contribute and that can make you stand out from all the other similar businesses out there.
For example, you can offer a package that includes several services at a special price, or a promotion that covers several months for a lower price than buying a service for a single occasion.
Once you find your selling point, you will know what to promote strong and your clients will know how to differentiate yourself from the rest.
By knowing your clients and what type of client you are targeting, you can shape your services to offer something that they really need.
Think about them and what they need and you will create a successful selling point that generates sales and positions you well in the market.
3. Market A Brand
The best thing you can do with your business is to make it a brand. That way you will give professionalism to your project. It will no longer be something you work on in your spare time but a real business
Your brand is a fundamental part of your identity and is defined as a name or a type of product manufactured by a particular company.
A brand identity is built from the messages of the brand, the values of the company, how it communicates its concepts, and the emotions that it wants to evoke in its customers when they interact with it.
A wrong opinion is that brands are only for large companies when even your personal project can become a brand.
For your brand, you must define the name (it can be yours or whatever you want), its purpose, and its goals.
Having a brand will also help you sell your services as it will generate more trust in people.
What to Consider When Creating Your Brand
Mission, Vision, and Values
The document containing your mission, vision, and values is one of the most important elements of your brand strategy. Thus, you will be able to transmit certain principles and build your own and distinctive culture.
Logo
Without a doubt, one of the most recognizable elements in any brand is its logo, and it acquires a life of its own as it is positioned in the public.
Color Selection
The tones you use on your website and in your advertising should be oriented to your audience and to the emotions you want to awaken in your clients: such as security, professionalism, trust.
4. Have a Website
Being on the internet is totally necessary to be discovered by new people. The design of your web page will greatly influence the final decision of the clients since 94% of first impressions are related to your site’s web design.
Through your website, you can transmit professionalism and confidence, which will make clients want to hire your services.
There you can describe the services you offer, prices, testimonials from previous clients, a brief description of who you are, and what you do.
In addition to the basic elements of web design that make a site beautiful and visually attractive, a website must also always consider the user.
It must guarantee a good experience and have a good UX and professional design, this is an aspect that you must pay close attention to it because 75% of website credibility comes from design.
You may have the best prices and services on the market and even the best quality, but if only your friends know about your brand, surely you will not get very far.
There are many ways to promote your brand, but first of all, it is important to check in which places people usually look for information to hire professional services.
Source: Hubstaff
In short, it is necessary to have an online presence so that people can find you even if they do not know you.
Even if a client suggests your services to others, the most likely thing is that a person wants to check your social networks or read some information about you and your services before contacting you.
If you want to have a website and increase your online presence, you can start by using Wix, a website builder easy to use.
You do not need to spend large amounts of money to get a professional and functional website. You can learn to do it yourself and in a simple way.
5. Establish an Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools to create direct communication with your client.
Despite having been present for many years, its formula continues to work if an effective strategy is followed and adapted to the objectives.
Through email marketing, you will be able to maintain contact with your clients even when they are not receiving any service from you at the moment.
You can send them informative emails with promotions, downloadable resources, remind them why it is important to hire a bookkeeper to keep their business in order, among others.
This way they will never forget you and will come to you when they need help.
For this you should get a professional email so you do not look like spam. You also need an application that helps you to ensure that the entire strategy and content design reaches its destination.
Constant Contact is a platform that you can use and is ideal for optimizing your email marketing strategy.
It is simple to use and with it you can optimize your campaigns, use default templates and automate emails, which will greatly facilitate all your tasks.
When you use an application that manages the sending of your emails, you can access a series of benefits and advantages that will help you manage your campaign, such as measuring the results of your campaign and having a well-organized contact list.
Source: Automotive Digital Marketing
Email marketing can work against you if you do not control the amount of information you send.
Remember that there is a second of difference between opening that interesting email and ignoring it among the mountain of pending emails.
Once a month is usually enough unless you have a lot of content to send. So you can increase it to once a week.
If you have doubts, feel like a subscriber again and then decide if you really need to send that content.
6. Utilize Content Marketing
Incredibly, 97% of people turn to the internet to buy a product or acquire a local service, for that reason it is necessary for people to also find you on the web.
The more online presence you have, the more likely you are to find new customers. There are several ways to expand your online presence and ideally, you can be in more than one.
Create a Blog
Nowadays, all businesses must have a website and some choose to create a blog but the idea is to inform the customer.
In your blog you can tell your success stories, that will give you credibility and increase trust in your customers.
Here you can also explain your products or services to your customers, highlighting how they differ from the competition and highlighting their strengths, experience, and price.
The idea is that it is a place that your customers can visit, know who the person behind the business is and see clearly what you offer and how to contact you.
For your blog, you can generate useful quality content, so that people will not only visit your website to hire you but because they know that you will provide them with information that will help them.
If you think you are not good at writing or do not have time for it, you can go to platforms like Writers Access to hire a writer to help you write articles for your blog.
Also, if your audience likes what they read, they will share it on social platforms and you will become their number one option when they decide to make the purchase.
Be Active on Social Media
Being present on social networks is essential to publicize what you do (and also to publicize your blog).
There are many platforms you can try, but LinkedIn will put you close to people and clients in your same niche, which is positive because you can get involved in a network.
On LinkedIn you can also post content of interest that other people will share if they like it, so your work will gain recognition and credibility.
Another very popular platform that can benefit you a lot is Facebook.
Creating a fan page on Facebook is free and a good way to spread your work, creating content that is attractive to share.
You can also take advantage of Facebook using a personal profile, so you can participate in groups related to your niche and promote your services to those who need it.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO (search engine optimization) are techniques that are used for a web page or blog to achieve a good position in search engines such as Google, with the aim to rank a website appear among the first search results, generating traffic and getting visits.
SEO techniques are an important part of marketing for any business as it is an efficient way to promote your website (and services) in front of many people, at all times of the day.
Having an SEO positioning is like going from having a small advertisement in a newspaper, to having a large billboard on a very busy avenue. If you manage to have that billboard, it is sure that many people will find out who you are.
If you manage to have good SEO on your blog or website, you will get benefits such as:
- Increase in the traffic of your target audience
- Long-term positioning
- Generate more sales or conversions
- Increase the visibility of your brand
8. Be Where Your Clients Are
By knowing who your ideal clients are, you can create an online presence specifically in those places where you can attract a wider audience.
Putting yourself in front of your ideal client means that you will invest publicity in those places where you know that they will see you and that they will appreciate the service you offer.
Paid Google Ads
Google Ads is Google’s ad platform and an effective way to reach new customers. The biggest advantage of AdWords is that your ads can be featured for a super-targeted audience.
That is, it is not simply paying to appear more times. It is investing in a qualified audience and therefore, that is related to your business.
For example, for you as a bookkeeper, it is more important that your campaign reaches 500 people who need to keep track of their business finances than it is to reach 3000 people with diverse and general interests.
Better to ensure you reach 500 people who genuinely need your service than 3000 people who may not even know what a bookkeeper is.
With Google Ads, the Paid Per Click modality is also available, which is a payment method for online ads in which you only pay when the user clicks on the ad or banner.
At Upwork, you can find many freelancers who can take care of making this adjustment for you.
This is an important advantage for the advertiser because they will not have to pay anything for ads that appear on a certain website until the user browses the link, which is ideal if you want to put your budget to good use.
To make ads you do not need to spend large sums of money, you can start with a small budget and see how your ads progress and what results you get, so you can invest more in the future.
List on Directories
You can also go directly to directories where you will find lists of potential clients or businesses related to your niche.
Being present on the Internet is key for any business that wants to be competitive.
However, due to the number of web pages that exist, it can be difficult to make customers find your business on the web or that of all the options they see, they click yours.
Taking this into account, Google My Business is positioned as a very useful tool. Here commercial businesses can include information about them, such as their website, phone number, and geolocation. You can also include a short review to explain who you are.
There are also other platforms such as Yellow Pages and Yelp that work similarly. It not only serves to find potential clients but also for people to know of your business.
9. Leverage Your Existing Clients
Your customers are an asset to your business and you must keep them happy if you want your business to continue growing.
Keep in touch with your customers and give them ways to remember you. For example, a business card where you include your email and website address.
To make sales, the most important thing is to build trust with the customer, so it is very important to increase that trust day by day. You do not want one-time sales, you want loyal customers and be able to serve them with services suited to their needs.
If you are not willing to talk to your clients, it will be difficult for you to interpret their needs and therefore solve them.
You want to ensure that every client has a positive experience when you offer a service, even if they only intend to hire you for a single occasion.
In this way, you will be able to generate a very positive impact since 77% of customers usually recommend a service to their friends if they have had a positive experience.
Another advantage of being in contact with the client is that it improves the image of the company and you can anticipate future needs since you will know which services are usually essential for their business.
10. Monitor
Once you start your strategies to promote your bookkeeping business you should not neglect them. Everything is a process that requires time, perseverance, and dedication.
You probably will not see the results of your work immediately after implementing techniques or changes, but you have to persevere for a while to see the first rewards.
The key to all these tips is to implement them, see what works best for you and what you should change.
You must monitor the results you are getting to see what changes you should implement or what things you should include.
Keep learning and reading about the latest market techniques and that will help you be at the forefront of how to promote your brand.
Market Your Bookkeeping Business and Start Growing
All the ways to market your bookkeeping business consist of understanding the client as the fundamental piece of everything.
Without clients, there are no results and that is why you must make an effort to implement various techniques to reach them and improve their experience.
Having a website and increasing your online presence help more people know about your services, and guaranteeing them a good experience is key to turning them into loyal customers that will recommend your work to other people.