7 Tricks to Attract Clients to Your CPA Firms

According to the Statistics Portal, “The revenue of the accounting, tax preparation, and payroll services industry in the United States is forecasted to generate around 156 billion U.S. dollars by 2018. Accounting services, specifically, accounted for 94 billion U.S. dollars in 2014.”

The accounting services market growth in the USA is being driven by a number of factors – the emergence of new accounting firms, accelerated economic growth, and rising equity markets.

However, the accounting service market in the USA is still dominated by the Big Four – Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG. With their continued dominance and the emergence of new accounting firms, it is essential for your CPA firm to improve the number and quality of its client list.

The strategy will focus on finding new clients and persuading existing businesses to switch to your CPA firm. Your firm must adopt the emerging accounting trends and leverage the latest technologies to remain relevant in a highly competitive and continually changing landscape.

While making the strategy, you must focus on marketing your account service by targeting businesses from varied regions and sectors. You also need to explore ways not only to attract new clients a regular basis but also to retain the existing ones.

Let’s see the top seven ways your CPA firm can find new clients and retain existing clients.

1. Choose Digital Places to Find New Accounting Clients

Your firm must look for prospective B2B and B2C clients via multiple digital channels. You can easily reach out to potential accounting clients by enhancing your website’s searchability, setting up a Facebook business page, optimizing your professional profile on LinkedIn, sharing time-sensitive financial news through Twitter, and obtaining Better Business Bureau (BBB) accreditation.

It is also essential to implement an elaborated digital marketing strategy to reach out to more prospects and attract them to your accounting firm. The digital marketing strategy will help you promote your accounting services by targeting relevant clients. You can further customize the digital marketing campaign based on client information collected via multiple sources.

2. Form Partnership with Other Professionals and Firms

Various professionals and businesses utilize the services from multiple entities. For instance, a company may employ services of individual firms to get technological support, recruit new employees, handle their legal issues, and receive investment advice. As your accounting firm does not provide non-financial services, you can always form a partnership with other firms.

The partnership will help you to acquire new clients through mutual promotion, where you can promote their service while they do the same for you. It is also important to form a business alliance with trusted lawyers, investment advisors, recruiters, and technology consultants to find new clients through mutual referral.

3. Ask Your Existing Client for Referrals

You can promote your accounting services effectively through the word-of-mouth referral of existing clients. Your clients must be interacting with businesses of varied types and scales. You can always request your existing clients to recommend your CPA firm to other business owners and decision makers.

It would help if you approached your clients proactively to promote your accounting services through referrals. It is also important to impress prospective clients by posting testimonials on your websites, and some social media channels. You can even request satisfied clients to recommend and endorse your accounting services on various professional networking services.

4. Attend Conferences, Seminars, and Networking Events

You can easily impress and engage new clients by speaking at various accounting seminars and conferences. Your presentation will leave a lasting impression on the mind of other attendees.

However, you must attend the right conferences and optimize the presentation to impress and attract new clients. Also, you have to explore ways to attend conferences and seminars on a regular basis without letting it affect your work schedule.

Conferences and networking events also help CPA firms to reach out to new prospects. The latest communication technologies enable you to attend networking events regularly. The events allow you to interact with other attendees and promote your accounting services.

However, you must gather information about other attendees in advance to personalize the conversation and leave a lasting impression.

5. Generate and Publish Original Content

You can promote your accounting firm as a brand by creating and distributing original content on accounting concepts, best practices, and trends. Often entrepreneurs and managers read blogs and articles to understand the right way to maintain their books of accounts.

When you write informative blogs and provide relevant information, it will become easier for your firm to attract more clients. It also adds to your authorization, expertise, and branding in the market.

You can even use a single blog or article to reach out to many prospective clients. However, you need to focus extensively on the quality of the content.

Also, the content needs to be posted on multiple social networking platforms and optimized for search engines to reach out to more clients online. You can reach out to the relevant prospects by implementing an elaborate content marketing strategy.

6. Take Advantage of Cloud Computing

You must leverage cloud computing to optimize and transform your accounting firm. The cloud-based technologies will help you to run and expand your accounting firm smoothly without setting up an expensive IT infrastructure. Productivity and saving are top benefits of adopting cloud computing.

Along with that, you can use the cloud-based accounting solutions to automate common tasks and make your accountants provide financial advice to clients. As your clients and staff members can collaborate on the same files and applications remotely, you raise the bar of client servicing and also attract clients from locations that are not close to your area.

7. Track and Adopt Emerging Accounting Trends

In addition to persuading clients to use your accounting services, you need to explore ways to keep your firm competitive and relevant in the long run. You cannot beat competition without identifying and adopting accounting trends early.

For instance, your firm must be prepared to cater to the digitization of tax systems and the impact of new legislation. Likewise, you need to optimize your accounting services via the automation of everyday tasks and improving data security.

Your firm must leverage disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain to meet the needs and expectations of next-generation clients. These technologies will help your accounting firm to respond to inquiries proactively, form a better relationship with existing clients, and deliver positive client experience.

Conclusion

Overall, you should promote your accounting services aggressively to acquire new accounting clients and retain existing accounting clients. However, remember that the trends in accounting service industry keep changing from time to time.

You need to keep the client acquisition plan flexible enough to adopt the emerging accounting trends and leverage the latest accounting technology early. Also, you must review and fine-tune the strategy periodically to maintain the length and quality of the accounting client list.