Your accounting business needs customers year-round, not just a glut of clients at tax time as April approaches. To draw those customers plus the leads for tax season, you have to market your business. It would help if you had someone who understands the business of accounting and its facets, such as day-to-day ledger keeping and financial planning. Do you hire an employee — a publicist or a marketer — or do you contract with a marketing agency specializing in digital marketing for accountants?

The bottom line decides your choice in two ways. You need to obtain the best return on investment (ROI) possible. This happens when you effectively grow your business while you invest the least possible for quality work in a timely manner. If that sounds like a lot of convergence, it is.

Both an employee and a marketing agency produce marketing materials your business needs. Both specialize in an accounting business. Both can develop collateral for you — business cards, letterhead, advertising including tax season ads, email and letter campaigns, etc. They can research your competitors, target audience, search engine optimization (SEO) needs, build or add to your website, and much more. They both develop a marketing plan with strategies and execute them to grow your business. They generate sales leads that move through your sales funnel and become your customers. The question is, which does it for less money, so you earn a greater return to the manner of new customers while retaining existing customers

You can no longer rely on simple Yellow Pages ads or word-of-mouth. It would be best if you combined the once tried and true with modern options for effective marketing. Below is a list of items that make up the essential digital marketing strategy:

• Content development specialists,
• Email campaigns aimed for conversion,
• Lead generation funnels,
• Assets creation (e-books, white papers, case studies, etc.),
• Landing pages for lead capture,
• Metrics/data analysts,
• Mobile marketing specialists,
• Pay-per-click (PPC) such as AdWords and Facebook,
• Remarketing,
• SEO/keyword research,
• Blog creation,
• Local ad geo-fencing,
• Google My Business optimization,
• Google Reviews,
• Social media specialists,
• Website development/re-engineering.

The Wild Idea of Doing It Yourself

Your entrepreneurial nature might lead you to think you can save money by doing it yourself. You work as an accountant, though, or you own a financial firm. That means you did not study marketing in college, nor have you likely kept abreast of the developments in marketing. However, if you work as a certified public accountant (CPA), you have completed continuing education in that field.

Besides needing to know SEO, search engine marketing (SEM), graphic design, copywriting, ad placement, and more, you must take time away from running your business to market it if you attempt to do-it-yourself. That defeats your purpose since you need to grow your business while taking care of your existing customers. It would help if you had someone who specializes in finding leads for accounting firm growth.

Marketing Employee vs. Marketing Agency?

On the surface, people may consider hiring an employee superior. They can have them take on other duties — a boon to small accounting businesses, plus the employee only concentrates on your business. A marketing agency only works on your marketing projects, and they also work on them for other businesses, perhaps including your competitors.

Economically though, the real cost of an employee includes more than their salary. You also pay for workers’ compensation insurance, benefits such as health insurance, local, state, and federal taxes, retirement plans such as individual retirement accounts (IRAs), vacation time, sick days, plus you pay for recruiting and training the person. This can mean the cost increases to up to 1.4 times the position’s salary.

So, what is the base salary cost of a marketing manager?

All the salary data is based on the average salary for digital marketing managers in Toronto, as taken from Payscale.com.

According to Payscale, hiring a digital marketing manager in Toronto who has some familiarity with PPC and SEO ONLY with one year of experience costs a $36K salary on the lowest end of the scale. That equals a cost of $3250 per month.

Your employee has to have the appropriate tools to do their job — computer, software, databases, books, courses to learn emerging methods, etc. By comparison, the digital marketing firm of Jalalio’s — marketing experts who focus on digital marketing for accountants across Canada — cost just $999. We provide the experts, the continuing education for them, the appropriate tools, plus we specialize in the area of accounting and accountants.

While we take on other accounting clients, we provide each client with the best possible strategies to market their business and ensure we do not overlap territories. Jalalio Digital Marketing will only accept a few clients within specific geographical areas. Once our small threshold is met, we no longer accept competitors within the same radius from the same industry.

For example, if two accounting firms are next to each other in Richmond Hill and accounting firm A focuses on personal taxes only, and accounting firm B focuses solely on corporate taxes, this would not be a conflict of interest. As the specific clientele differs, the strategy, campaign, content, ads and keywords would be completely different.

We understand that plenty of customers exist for each of our clients, and we help you draw the appropriate audience for your business. Accountants specializing in individuals do not compete with those serving corporations who do not compete with small businesses.

Using the digital marketing firm Jalalio’s makes better sense for your bottom line. We provide a much better return on investment. Contact us today to get started building your marketing niche and growing your customer base.