During the last six months, we’ve been very fortunate to receive many referrals from firms who were very pleased with our work. Some referred us fellow accountants; others recommended us to their own clients. Each referral has been a great recognition of our team’s efforts throughout the past year – and now it’s our turn to say “thank you!”

We are excited to introduce a new Your Firm Online Loyalty Program, which will reward you for referring business to us and helping us grow. The Loyalty Program works on two levels, so both the firm referring and the firm to whom we’ve been referred will be rewarded. Gifts include either a US$50.00 or US$75.00 Amazon gift-card.

To find out more or send through a referral, see Refer Us.

Some key features include:

• Manage your own content
• A custom firm website premium design to match your firm’s image
• Choice of two or three column website
• Icon or image based internal navigation
• Premium content and online forms
• Ongoing search engine marketing
• A comprehensive and secure firm email system

Adding value. Show your existing clients that you really care about their business by adding value wherever possible. When things are slow, clients look for greater value from all of their service providers. Do not give them a reason to find a new accounting firm because you are reluctant to bend a bit on your fees or services.

Repackage your services. Look at your service offerings and see how they could be changed or repackaged to make them more attractive in this situation.
Upgrade or develop a website. If your firm has a website, spend time thinking about how it can be made more effective and take steps to upgrade it. If you don’t have a website, set one up and be sure to add your website address to your letterhead and business cards.

Renew your marketing efforts. Marketing during difficult economic times is always tough. But cutting back on your marketing efforts is the opposite of what you should be doing. When things are slow, use the time to review and re-energize your marketing efforts. While the suggestions above may require some creative thought, effort and money, they will help ensure the future growth of your firm.
Keep in touch with former clients. Send your clients something of value such as a report, survey results, an article of interest or other information, and then follow up to discuss it.

Attend to your prospect list. A down economy is no time to forget about your prospective clients. Just don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell and persuade. Instead, spend most of your time providing information — hands-on material that your prospects can really use. These types of activities will keep your name in front of the prospect and also help communicate the value that you offer.

Broadcast Your Message. When business is slow, you need to get your name, your message, and your ideas out there for prospects and clients to see and hear. Send out a newsletter, or give a talk at a conference at least twice a year. This will spread your name around and generate new leads shortly.

Follow the rules. Google and other search engines make it very clear what they are looking for. This includes real content that is useful, descriptive url’s, user friendly internal links, clear and easy navigation, descriptive key words within content and sitemaps that help index your site. Basically, anything that makes the visitor (and search engine) experience easy and useful.  That means no frames (which have no content), making content difficult to access, flash and other things that slow down indexing and page loading.

News and other feeds. News feeds typically provide information that most clients can get in hundreds of other places. So don’t place too much emphasis on feeds making your site look current. The technology used to place feeds of your site also do nothing to help you in the eyes of Google and chances are clients wont read it anyway.

Update your landing page. Probably the most important page of your site. This is a great place to help visitors get a clear picture about your firm. I have spoken to many people about defining their firms “personality” and here is the place. One of the things that we suggest here is a brief note about typical issues that your firm has faced that week or month - even a brief review about where you have help a client. (Incidentally, the technology we use automatically tells the search engines when you have added a note).

Be easy to contact. You would be suprised to see how many firms do not have a phone number on their site - they mask ALL enquiries behins a contact form. I am in favour of contact forms, particularly when contacts are automatically added to a database for easy contact at a later date, but to make your firm unreachable is crazy.

Nic Gadaleta

I am sure you agree when you review our site that accounting firms now have options that have never been provided before. Our new offering includes a new range of design choices for firms, greater emphasis on website optimisation, a comprehensive website analytics package, an upgraded client document storage system, and a new website marketing offering.

With the team at Your Firm Online and Practice Advantage I plan to lift the bar even further and you will see some extensions to these products over the next six months. Our plan is to upgrade or extend each of our products at least every six months, and our next update will be with our email marketing system. The upgrade to that system will occur within the next month.

In addition, our firm marketing resource centre will be avaiable shortly. Our online library will provide accounting firms with a range of marketing tools that they can use to promote their firm. We have over 500 pages of material, from checklists, information sheets, scripts and promotional material that will be progressively uploaded and made available.

I welcome your input and feedback and look forward to speaking with your personally about some of our new developments.

Nic Gadaleta