How CPA and Consulting Firms Can Develop Stellar Content for Marketing

Content Marketing is a “Must Have”

Over the past year or so, we’ve been developing white papers, seminars, webinars, checklists, ebooks, web pages blog posts and other types of content for our CPA, consulting and financial services clients. The topics we’ve helped them cover range from the new repair vs capitalization regulations, to changes on Form 990, to guidance on selecting a vendor for ERP software and systems.

The one common denominator for all of these different types of subjects and delivery vehicles? Lead generation.

It can be a daunting task, but content marketing is a must have strategy for professional services firms. It delivers leads, personal branding, corporate branding, and SEO benefits in addition to lead generation.

Constantly coming up with new content ideas can be overwhelming. Inbound marketers in accounting, consulting and professional services firms must have a detailed picture of their target audience in order to create optimal content for them. Who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them – on search engines, social media, or blogs – and what kinds of content do they prefer? These questions will help you develop buyer personas so you can create and provide content that gives visitors to your website a rich user experience, and motivation to request more information – and thus become a lead!

Here are a few insights and ideas for your consideration relative to content marketing:

Focus on the Right Stage of Marketing: Content plays a critical role in every stage of the inbound marketing process, from generating awareness about your company to helping convert leads into customers. These stages are:

Awareness: The prospect gets acquainted with your brand or realizes they have a need for your product/service. A tweet would be a way for prospects to learn about what you do and who you serve, for example.
Research/Education: The prospect identifies the problem and researches potential solutions, including your product/service. Here, you can write a blog post about a scenario and the way you would help to solve the issue at hand.
Comparison/Validation: The prospect examines the options and begins narrowing the list of vendors. You can assert your expertise here with your whitepapers or ebooks, where you’ve poured your knowledge onto the pages.
Purchase: The prospect decides from whom to buy. At this stage, the content on your “Contact Us” page may make the difference between getting/not getting the sale.

Use Content to Attract Traffic & Leads: For the purposes of launching a powerful marketing campaign, you will focus on the first stage--creating awareness through your marketing content. This means your marketing offer needs to attract a ton of traffic and generate new leads for your business.

Finding the Right Content: In order to find what content topics capture the attention of your target audience, you should look at website metrics. For instance, what are the most popular blog articles you have published? What are some of the most viewed pages on your website? Your historical performance should dictate your direction for new marketing content. If you don’t have access to marketing analytics that give you this type of intelligence, look in the public domain (Google news, Google trends, twitter trending topics) for popular and newsworthy industry stories. Piggyback on this information by adding a personal spin, your expertise and comments.

Finding the Right Format: You can create content in different formats, from text-based content like whitepapers, reports and eBooks to media content like webinars, videos and audio interviews. While you can host an internal brainstorm session and come up with creative ideas for different content formats that you can produce, it’s important that this new content matches the needs and preferences of your target persona.