In the ever-evolving arena of content marketing for accounting firms, it’s easy to get swayed by the latest trends and feel the pressure to adopt every new type of media that comes your way. However, true marketing prowess lies not in following the crowd but in developing a bespoke strategy that resonates with your firm’s identity and connects deeply with your audience, fostering growth and establishing trust.
Listen to the full podcast: What Kinds of Content Should You Be Making?
1. Cutting Through the Marketing Clamor
The temptation to emulate every successful tactic you observe in the market can be overwhelming. Yet, this approach often leads to a diluted and fragmented marketing effort for accounting firms.
Before you jump into content creation, take a step back and evaluate what aligns with your firm’s values and goals. Effective accounting marketing is about authenticity and relevance, not just visibility. Discerning the right channels and content types that reflect your firm’s ethos will set you apart and create a more substantial impact.
2. Unearthing Your Firm’s Core Characteristics
Each firm has a unique heartbeat, a core set of values and attributes that define its culture and approach. (This is why we preach this Inside-Out approach to all your marketing efforts.)
Delve into these characteristics to uncover what sets your firm apart.
Are you data-driven, relishing in the nitty-gritty of financial analytics, or do you excel in crafting compelling narratives around tax and audit insights? By identifying and embracing these innate strengths, you can produce content that genuinely reflects your firm’s personality, making it more relatable and engaging for your audience.
3. The Art of Keystone Content Creation
Envision your firm’s marketing strategy as a well-architected building, with your keystone content being the central support. This pivotal content piece should be substantial, offering deep insights and valuable information that can be repurposed and echoed across various platforms.
Whether it’s a comprehensive industry report, a series of expert interviews, or a compelling case study, this keystone piece of content should encapsulate your firm’s expertise and values, serving as a reference point for all subsequent content pieces – in various forms of media.
4. Attuning to Your Audience’s Preferences
Understanding your audience goes beyond demographic data; it’s about grasping their behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Conduct surveys, engage in social listening, and analyze engagement metrics to get a clearer picture of what your audience values.
This insight allows you to tailor your media strategy, ensuring that the types of media you use not only reach your audience but also fully engage them with their media preferences in mind. All of this ultimately leads to strengthening their relationship with your firm.
5. Harnessing Your Team’s Expertise
Your firm’s professionals are not just employees; they’re a repository of knowledge and insights. However, it’s crucial to align your media types with their strengths and comfort zones. Some may excel in written communication, while others might shine in verbal exchanges, while others might be great at showing off their spreadsheet wizardry.
Facilitate media creation in ways that they can most naturally express their expertise, be it through blog posts, podcasts, videos, or even illustration or data-reporting. Leverage their strengths to enhance the authenticity and impact of your content.
6. Zeroing in on Strategic Growth Areas
Scattered efforts yield scattered results. Concentrate your media strategy on the sectors where your firm seeks to expand. By aligning your content – and the types of media you produce said content in – with your strategic growth areas, you ensure that your marketing efforts are cohesive, targeted, and impactful, driving awareness and engagement in the industries and verticals that matter most to your firm’s future–not simply the ones that you’ve been targeting in the past.
7. The Power of Collaborative Content
Collaboration amplifies your content’s reach and depth. By partnering with industry peers, clients, and thought leaders to co-create content, you bring in fresh perspectives and reinforce your firm’s standing in the industry. This collaborative approach not only diversifies your content but also enhances its credibility, making it more compelling and shareable. And consider media types that best showcase their expertise and stories. How can you best engage with them as you produce content? For some firms, their clients do best in front of a camera while for others, their industry thought-leaders thrive on podcasts. Pick the media that will allow them to most naturally tell their story and build your keystone content to maximize their story-telling abilities.
8. Embracing Media Diversity
Once you’ve built your keystone content – that central pillar of your strategy, it’s time to diversify your media types.
Different audience segments prefer consuming content in different formats. While some may favor in-depth written analyses, others might lean towards visual infographics or dynamic videos. Diversifying your content types ensures broader engagement, catering to various preferences and learning styles, and broadening your content’s appeal and accessibility.
But don’t freak out. This doesn’t mean that you now need to create original content for every type of media (or every platform)…
9. Mastering the Art of Repurposing
Transform your keystone content into multiple, differentiated pieces in different types of media to extend its lifespan, relevance, and reach. A single, highly detailed, deeply-researched report can become a series of blog posts, an infographic, and even a webinar. This strategy not only maximizes your content’s value (and the effort you put into creating it) but also ensures a consistent narrative across all your marketing channels, reinforcing your key messages and enhancing brand recall.
Use quotes from a book for some engaging social image posts. Take snippets of a long-form video case study to drip out in reels and emails. Republish graphs and charts from a deep research report to create a series of articles on each of your insights.
And now that enormous, heavy lifting you did up front to create a richly valuable piece of content, is maximized over and over and over. With the right keystone content, you can keep retelling that same story bit by bit, over and over, with fresh new media types for months and months – perhaps even years.
10. Striking the Right Balance
No matter what type of media you produce, your content should educate, inform, and also engage. While the primary goal is to provide value, integrating elements of storytelling, humor, or relatable anecdotes can make your content more engaging and memorable. Strive to create content that strikes a balance between being authoritative and approachable, to make the complex topics of accounting, audits, valuation, and financial advisement accessible and interesting. At the end of the day, you’re marketing to humans–with feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, goals, and aspirations. So create content for humans – and engage them, entertain them, and teach them.
11. Intentional Distribution
Creating stellar content is just one side of the coin; the other is ensuring it reaches and engages your target audience. Craft a distribution strategy that places your content on the platforms where your audience is most active and receptive. Whether it’s industry forums, social media, or email newsletters, choose the channels that align with your audience’s habits and preferences to maximize your content’s reach and impact.
By adopting a strategic, insightful approach to content marketing, your accounting firm can build a strong, authentic connection with your audience, showcasing your expertise and reinforcing your market position. Remember, effective content marketing is not about being omnipresent; it’s about being present where it counts, in a manner that’s true to your firm’s identity and resonant with your audience’s needs.
Resound is certainly here to help you refine your content strategy and ensure your marketing efforts are as effective and impactful as possible. If you want some assistance to elevate your firm’s marketing from haphazard to harmonious, please reach out. Let’s make your content a beacon of clarity in the accounting industry.
And remember: you are remarkable.
