When done poorly, blogs do little more than boost your website’s credibility by establishing backlinks and optimizing your SEO for greater visibility. Wait, even that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Now, imagine how powerful a well-executed blog can be to build trust with your client base and potential networks; demonstrating your knowledge of accounting and finance and creating excellent content with which you can extend your reach to new markets. The point we’d like to make here is as follows. Blogs. They’re truly great for everyone—but especially firms in accounting and finance.
Accounting and Finance Is Complicated. Spell it Out With a Blog.
When trying to reach new markets and new clients through powerful platforms like social media and search engines, accountants, like many businesses, generally have an extremely limited window in which to make an impression. In recent years, apps like WealthSimple,¹ Cleo,² and Wave³ have resonated with younger audiences through their sleek and minimal ads. But “sleek and minimal” necessarily means presenting little information up front. Explaining why “bad debts” should have a line item in small business or why small business owners must charge GST after earning $30,000 per year will not fit into those neat little squares; but your ability to explain those very concepts are what will draw new clients to you and create a sense of trust and reliability around your brand.
What else do WealthSimple, Cleo, and Wave have in common? They all have blogs.
For many years, blogs were considered detrimental to the marketing strategies of “serious” companies, largely due to the associations created by the quick uptake of leisure and social blogs and the corresponding rise of the “blogger”. But the power of hosting organic, purpose-built content as part of your firm’s brand and digital identity has proven immensely beneficial in recent years. Online shopping, for example, is projected to reach a value of $44 billion dollars in 2020 and the products being purchased are the ones found most easily.⁴ After all, they say page 2 of Google Search results is the best place to hide a dead body.⁵ Why? Because no one ever goes there. So the challenge accounting and finance firms are facing in the quest to reach new client bases online is twofold: first, you need to reach the market; second, you need to keep the market interested by offering value.
SEO Loves Organic Content
To succeed in both driving traffic and converting leads, your blog needs to offer real content. Why? Because SEO algorithms may be fooled by the inclusion of 100 consecutive keywords strung together in an incoherent jumble, but clients won’t be. Your blog content should be purpose-built and well-informed, designed to answer the questions your clients ask while also making use of specific SEO strategies to increase your website’s rankings.
This is crucial for businesses seeking to expand their reach because people under 50 are far more likely to use search engines to find solutions to their problems.
55% of millennials will ignore brands that don’t show up in their searches.⁶
Preparing excellent organic content serves a dual purpose to not only drive traffic and increase the likelihood of conversions, but also establishing your firm as an industry leader willing to demonstrate expertise on an ongoing basis.
This is why accounting and finance blogs are so very different from those of the early aughts. On a great accounting blog, you’d not be sharing recipes or vacation photos and makeup tips—you'd be sharing high quality information designed to make the lives of your clients and potential clients easier. Ideally, so easy that they’ll bring, and continue to bring, their business to your firm. By extension of populating this kind of information, search engines that crawl and grade webpages as they index them will rate your firm highly, making it more likely that your business will pop up at the top of Google’s results for your chosen keywords.
But those two major benefits aren’t all.
Blogs Are Ads Waiting to Happen
In writing excellent copy for your blog on a regular basis, you are also preparing marketing materials that are perfect for wide circulation on social media platforms. Using LinkedIn, for example, many of our clients in the food production and equipment processing realm share organic content to create connections with possible industry partners. Our clients in accounting and finance might share their blog content on LinkedIn but also on Instagram, for example, to reach the owners of small businesses most likely to be taking the next step by hiring an accounting firm as their project grows. Blog content is a real triple threat, especially for firms in accounting and finance spheres, for specifically this reason: the skills and expertise upon which such firms are built is extremely valuable niche knowledge. Building your marketing strategy out from your blog content communicates your position as someone with those rare, sought after skills, and it gets your firm in front of the people that need your services.
We recommend a regular blog of up to two or three posts per week; but, ultimately, any blog content published is better than no blog content at all. For many accounting and finance firms, balancing another aspect of marketing (especially during tax season!) seems impossible. Those firms could hire an in-house copywriter or, better yet, bring on a marketing agency with industry-specific knowledge to take this task off your plate entirely. Doing so guarantees a cohesive brand, extensive brand reach, and the regular offer of top shelf information and content for your firm’s top priority: your clients.
Cited
1 “Wealthsimple: Get Rich Slow | Invest, Save, Spend & File Taxes.” Accessed September 11, 2020. https://www.wealthsimple.com.
2 “Cleo, an Intelligent Assistant for Your Money.” Accessed September 11, 2020. https://www.meetcleo.com/.
3 Wave. “Wave Financial: Financial Software for Small Businesses.” Wave. Accessed September 11, 2020. https://www.waveapps.com/.
4 OptinMonster. “Online Shopping Statistics You Need to Know in 2020,” November 6, 2019. https://optinmonster.com/online-shopping-statistics/.
5 Digital Synopsis. “Why Page 2 Of Google Search Results Is The Best Place To Hide A Dead Body.” Accessed September 11, 2020. https://digitalsynopsis.com/tools/google-serp-design/.
6 Think with Google. “Millennial Advertising Statistics.” Accessed September 11, 2020. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/millennials-advertising-statistics/.