Key Wins Within Two Years of Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency:
- 2,400% boost in organic search traffic.
- Monthly website users from 621 to 3,099 in two years; a total increase of 964%.
- Blogs comprise 70% of web traffic compared with 12% initially.
- Approximately half of the leads are coming from the website vs. primarily referrals.
- Best billing month in company history.
Established in 1975, CRS CPAs (formerly Cowart Reese Sargent Certified Public Accountants, P.C.) comprises more than 40 accounting professionals in the Mid-South, serving business owners, farmers, non-profit organizations, and local governments across the country. In addition to expert accounting and tax services, CRS CPAs partners with businesses to provide bookkeeping, payroll, and CFO consulting services.
Building a Business One Relationship at a Time
For years, CRS CPAs built their business one relationship at a time through word-of-mouth referrals. And while there are few greater compliments than your clients trusting you with their friends, families, and associates, CRS CPAs wanted to grow their business beyond those circles. Proactively marketing their accounting firm was something that needed more attention.
So how do you reach the right prospects if they don’t even know you exist and may not even live within 30 miles of you? Could a strategic marketing plan convert more website visitors to leads?
Let’s look at how the accounting firm marketing strategy we produced through our partnership with CRS CPAs not only generated more leads but blew their previous stats out of the water, increasing their organic traffic by 2,405% (and climbing) during the pandemic, nonetheless. (In case you’re wondering if those leads translated into closed deals, CRS also had their most epic month in company history: $1M in billing.)
Pain Points: Getting the Right Client, Not Just Any Client
While many businesses were taking a cautious approach to marketing during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Principal Fancher Sargent says the team at CRS CPAs saw an opportunity to ramp up and serve more people.
“It dawned on us that we needed to find a way to have a consistent presence in front of folks—our own clients, as well as our prospective clients—and knew we didn’t have the time to do that ourselves in-house.”
When it came to marketing, Fancher truthfully wanted it “off his plate.”
Before bringing us on board, the firm used a marketing subscription service for accountants that provided canned content to share on their blog and social media channels; however, it wasn’t custom fit to their business. Fancher admitted their use of the materials was “haphazard” as the team was busy juggling other aspects of their business.
As their business grew over the years, CRS CPAs had a paradigm shift from “waiting on clients” to “pursuing new clients” in specific industries.
“We wanted to attract more clients that we were ideally suited to set up for success.”
—Fancher Sargent, Principal at CRS CPAs
“We’re not the utility company. We don’t have to service everyone. We should focus on serving those that we can best add value to.”
After quietly following our President Steve Phipps on LinkedIn, Fancher approached Wayfind in the spring of 2020 to start a conversation and ultimately hire a marketing agency.
Read More: Website Not Getting Results? This 3-Part Website Assessment Can Help Boost Your Marketing
Specialized Accounting Firm Marketing Builds Better Brand Awareness
When Fancher would share the name of the firm in conversation, it wasn’t uncommon for people to confuse CRS CPAs with one of their competitors. He cited, “creating better brand awareness in our marketplace,” as their top goal for our partnership.
They also wanted to position themselves as “more than accountants.” While tax prep may be the on-ramp for many of their clients, it’s just the beginning of their services.
This led Fancher to sit down with us to build a comprehensive marketing strategy to help them reach their business’s potential. This plan included guiding their messaging, developing personas, rebuilding and optimizing their website for search, and posting consistent content targeted to their ideal clients.
Content Marketing for Accountants: Getting Your Business Heard Above the Online Noise
If you Google “accounting firms in the Mid-South,” you’ll find 62-plus million accounting firm websites in the search results. And while there clearly aren’t that many accounting firms in West Tennessee, those numbers tell us a couple of things about accounting firm marketing. One, in today’s business landscape, your biggest competition may not be officed in a building down the road. They could be located anywhere around the globe. And secondly, having a website isn’t enough. With websites being added to the world wide web every second, business owners need to find a way to cut through the clutter of not only brick-and-mortar competition but also virtual marketplaces or risk being relegated to the sidelines.
Our team set out to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to help them stand out among their competitors.
1. An Optimized Website
CRS CPAs’ original website was sluggish and visually confusing. And it wasn’t serving as an effective marketing tool that drummed up new business.
Our team put our heads together to design a new site that wasn’t merely dynamic and pleasing to the eye. We built a site with both the end user and internet browsers in mind. CRS CPA’s new website is both easier to navigate for current and potential clients and is optimized to rank higher in internet searches. No longer a passive source of information, this site is working to help convert traffic to leads.
2. Custom Content Marketing and SEO Strategies
In 2021, custom blog content was added to their site weekly based on keywords our content marketing strategist identified as ranking opportunities for CRS. Our writers produced helpful and actionable blog posts that answered questions their customers were searching for online. Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies helped connect the content with specific audiences, eg. service industry, agriculture, nonprofit, and local government.
Fancher says this customized approach to content marketing is “a key point in helping us establish our brand identity and authority in this area.”
A boost in brand identity wasn’t their only win. Now blogs make up more than 70% of their web traffic. For perspective, it was just over 12% in 2020. As you can see, these content marketing best practices made a significant impact in growth for this small business.
3. Social Media Ads
To support all of the awesome new website content, social media ads were deployed on Facebook and Instagram, reaching 139,082 people through 814,144 impressions with 7,279 click-throughs.
Record-Breaking Web Traffic From Around the Country
Building brand awareness and generating online traffic doesn’t happen overnight but this CPA firm’s marketing investment and patience are yielding mindblowing results. Monthly traffic more than doubled in the first year, increasing from 291 to 621, which was a great start. But just a year later, their monthly visits skyrocketed to 3,099 for nearly a 1,000% increase in traffic over two years.
Monthly Traffic
What is perhaps more interesting is that, of the increased monthly traffic, a significant portion is organic traffic. These are visitors who are finding the website through online searches, a hat tip to the new site that was optimized for keywords that would drive the right traffic CRS CPA’s way. In two years, organic traffic has been boosted by more than 2,400%
Now, this accounting firm’s marketing strategy is not only generating new clients from around the corner. Their optimized site is attracting clients from places like western Tennessee, Georgia, Colorado, and California.
“We get more inquiries and prospects calling or emailing us, wanting to sit down and see how they can work with us. I would have never gotten them before,” says Fancher, who estimates that at least 50% of these new leads are finding them from the web.
In Q1 of this year, CRS CPA landed more than 400 new clients and had their best month ever with $1M in billing.
This tidal wave of fresh leads also means that CRS can be selective with their clients.
“We feel like we have the freedom to say ‘no’ when it doesn’t feel like the right fit,” adds Fancher.
Less Confusion, More Brand Recognition
While numbers tell a story, they don’t tell the entire story. Remember how people used to mix up CRS CPAs with their competitors? At a recent tournament, Fancher was wearing his company polo when a fellow golfer pointed out that he not only recognized their logo but had read some of their content online. That told him, “Hey, this is working. People actually know who we are.”
As one company with five offices, another unexpected benefit of their accounting firm marketing efforts has been internal clarity around their purpose and cohesion within their team.
“We are more focused on who we are and who we serve.”
—Fancher Sargent, Principal at CRS CPAs, on working with Wayfind Marketing
“I think a lot of that is because when we brought Wayfind on board, they forced us to talk through that, put it in writing, and figure it out. That has been a real win for our team.”
Read More: An Effective B2B Marketing Strategy: Why Messaging and Audience Matter
Looking to Make a Name For Your Business?
If you landed here today from searching for a CPA content strategy company, we hope you’ve found this information helpful and inspiring. We’d love to share more with you about our services. Please get in touch.
If you’re searching for marketing advice outside of this vertical, we want you to know that this tailor-made accounting firm marketing strategy can be modified and applied to any business. Whether it’s brand awareness or building an optimized website that cuts through the crowd and gets noticed, custom-made creative digital marketing for accountants will help your business get results. Don’t sit around and hope business comes to you, go after it. We won’t just help you get leads. We’ll help you get the right ones. Schedule a marketing strategy discovery call today.
