There are over 85,000 accounting firms across the United States. To a lot of these businesses, the only customer acquisition channel that works is word-of-mouth referrals.
A primary reason for this is that to succeed in this industry, you need to establish trust with your clients. After all, you are responsible for handling their money. Even seemingly minor oversights could cause your clients thousands of dollars in additional tax dollars, or penalties.
Not surprisingly then, business owners seek the advice of fellow entrepreneurs and business owners for accountant recommendations.
But with a large number of people turning to online recommendations for their business needs, there exists a massive opportunity to build trust and credibility outside of your client network. A solid PR strategy could establish your accounting firm as an authority on the subject, and therefore drive a steady stream of new clients to your business.
Why PR works for accounting firms
Businesses are constantly on the hunt to find smart ways to save costs. A good accounting firm can find legal ways to execute such money-saving strategies.
Unfortunately though, a lot of these strategies are not common knowledge. This is primarily driven by the fact that as human beings, we tend to shy away from speaking freely about money with others.
PR is thus a great opportunity for accounting firms to disseminate this knowledge through popular media channels, and in return gain the trust of their potential clients.
A PR strategy also helps accounting firms carve a niche for themselves in a crowded market. For example, a firm that specializes in handling accounting for eCommerce businesses could set the narrative by crafting PR campaigns that target this specific segment.
Not only does this help you reach the specific kind of audience you want to target, but also helps set yourself apart from other competitors in this space.
Core PR strategies that work for accounting businesses
When it comes to public relations, not all strategies work for all industries. For accounting businesses, here are a few core strategies that work really well.
Thought leadership content
News events that impact the economy happen every single day. Fed interest rate cuts, tariff changes, industry-related announcements, etc. are some examples of topics that impact the fortunes of businesses.
Thought leadership content that gives business owners insight into how these specific events impact their business can drive eyeballs as well as brand awareness of your accounting firm.
Digital PR
On average, people spend 42% of their waking hours looking at screens. This includes social media, live streaming, and internet.
Digital PR, which includes social media, blogs, email marketing, and even podcasts are effective channels in disseminating content that can help establish authority in your industry.
According to Jonathan Bird from Delivered Social, a UK-based social media marketing agency, a successful digital PR campaign brings multiple distribution channels together to project a single narrative. When target customers read about you and your ideas from different channels, brand awareness and recall grows, and this translates directly into sales.
Case Studies
This is by far one of the most effective ways to demonstrate your authority in the industry. Accounting firms can share stories of specific challenges they navigated for their clients as a demonstration of their technical prowess.
While updates on your own business processes may not scale equally well, digital transformation projects in the accounting industry typically see good visibility. Such case studies see high engagement rates among business leaders and owners and are thus effective in driving value from your PR campaigns.
Distribution is a big challenge when it comes to case studies though. If you have built an email list through other engagements, then you could make use of tools to set up a bi-monthly campaign to share such case studies. You could also distribute it over your other marketing assets like social media and as a press release.
Community engagement
Trade fairs and industry events attract hundreds of businesses from specific industries and this presents a great opportunity to be seen and showcase your offering. Securing speaking opportunities or sponsorships can drive a lot of brand visibility that translates into new customer acquisition.
Crisis management
While accounting firms are less susceptible to workplace accidents or product liabilities compared to manufacturing companies, they still carry risks like any other organization. The most common cases pertain to data leaks or sharing of sensitive client information. But other less likely cases include slip-and-fall, workplace injuries, or service liability.
First off, legal issues need to be handled by experienced attorneys you can find from popular platforms like ConsumerShield. Beyond that, digital reputation management is a key PR area that accounting firms may require to rebuild and re-own their digital brand.
Getting Started with Accounting PR
If you are a small accounting firm that has not engaged in PR before, here is a short guide on how to go about it.
Understand your offering
The first step in setting up a PR campaign for your accounting firm is to understand your offering. As a business, you may be open to a diverse clientele and be agnostic to their size or the industry.
However, this does not work well for PR campaigns. This is because the success of such campaigns relies heavily on how well you set the narrative. Pick an Ideal Client Profile (ICP) that is defined by the industry, and the size of the organization. For instance, you could pick cybersecurity companies that have under 100 employees.
If you are a small accounting firm, then it is a good idea to pick an ICP based on your existing clientele. This is important because using the profile of your existing clients makes it easy to build PR campaigns, especially case studies, targeting new clients from the same industry.
Build a six month plan
The easiest way to lose money on a PR campaign is by going in without a plan. PR is all about setting a narrative, and driving steadily in that direction. For this to happen, you will need to set a plan for the next 6-12 month period.
So, what do you have in this plan? According to business launch platform ZenBusiness, you need to start with a measurable target. Assuming all your existing clients have come from word of mouth references, your target could be as simple as the number of clients acquired outside of ‘word of mouth’ publicity.
From here, you could work backwards to build a plan for the number of ‘eyeballs’ to reach, or how many brand mentions to seek.
If you are a large-ish accounting firm, you may also consider conducting a public survey for brand awareness. Conducting such a survey before the start of a PR campaign, and six months after could give you a good idea of how much your campaign has helped.
Track & measure
There are dozens of PR strategies that could get the word out. But there are only so many things you can do. Intently tracking your campaigns will help you measure what strategies are working, and what’s not performing as well as it should.
This way, you could bring down the resources for campaigns that don’t work, and increase the budget for those that translate into higher brand awareness, and sales.
Accounting firm PR campaign examples
Now that you have a good idea of how to go about your PR campaign, here are some practical examples of strategies you could deploy for your accounting business.
Signing up a new client
In the world of business, trust is established in two ways. Building a brand from the ground up is the most common and sustainable way to do it. Another less common, but equally effective way to build trust is through association.
When you sign up a client who enjoys a high reputation, then your brand could also receive a lift in trustworthiness simply through association. A Press Release is the most effective way to go about it.
Newsjacking
Newsjacking is a PR strategy where a business could latch on to a pop trend and ride the wave. Although newsjacking is generally associated with funny trends, this could also be deployed as a serious PR strategy.
From an accounting firm’s perspective, a good example would be the recent case of tariffs imposed by the US government on its trading partners. As an accounting firm, you could launch an AMA on Reddit or your YouTube channel where you answer questions related to the tariff implications on American businesses.
You could also consider publishing a comprehensive blog post related to this topic before an AMA that you could link out to. This helps drive a lot of traffic and generates leads in the process.
This enables you to ‘ride the wave’ of popular news stories of the day, and build brand visibility in the process.
Lead generation
Generating top quality leads is a priority for any business, and accounting firms are no different. In order to build a steady stream of inbound leads, you need to be more “discoverable”.
Trade fairs offer a great platform in this regard. Sponsoring such events, or securing a guest speaker position in such conferences could help position yourself as an authority in front of decision makers. This directly contributes to new leads for your business.
Although such platforms can help accounting firms to build a large leads database, it is important to verify the leads in order to ensure that your leads are accurate, compliant, and high-quality.
Partnerships
As an accounting firm, you have marketable skills that are in demand. You could trade these services in return for publicity or marketing. One way to do this would be to offer free accounting services to a coworking space provider, and in return, be introduced as the formal accounting partner to all startups that are signed up to this office space.
Getting creative with PR
Traditional PR still works—be introduced to reporters, get interviewed, launch press releases, and participate in trade conferences. However, the cool thing about PR is that there are creative ways to run a campaign that can be more effective and even cost little to nothing.
As a business, it is a good idea to build a PR budget and allocate a small chunk of it to innovative campaigns that may or may not work. Going in with an openness to experiment is a good way to scale up successfully while also ensuring that you are still building brand awareness the traditional way.
