CPAs Australia’s report on Leveraging Social Media for Accountants (September 2018) highlights many of the challenges faced by professional services organisations in marketing their business. With digital marketing for accountants no different.
The CPA report highlights several challenges that many accounting owners and professionals face in marketing their area of expertise.
In a highly skilled profession like accounting, with strong industry bodies like CPA and CIMA, (our Head of Marketing Nicole Shelley is a member of both associations and AICD) having a solid marketing plan that links to your overarching business plan of often overlooked priority.
Further compacted is the fact that a typical small business owner takes on an average of 4.2 roles in their business. While Accountants are one of the most time-poor professions, perhaps the number of roles accountants take on maybe even higher?

Digital marketing for accountants – what is the key takeaways?
The CPA Australia report on leveraging social media for accountants highlights a few key takeaways
- Accountants find marketing their business a challenge.
- Creating good quality marketing content and constantly creating the content on a regular basis is a challenge.
- Knowing where to spend their marketing budget or what they should be budgeting.
- How to link marketing to their overarching business strategy.
How are Accountants marketing their practice online?
With the majority of Accountants operating in the Business to Consumer space (B2C). Therefore Facebook is the preferred platform, with 40% choosing to have a presence on Facebook.
Twitter and Instagram are challenging for many Accountants, with 91% saying they did not have an Instagram presence for business and 89% reporting they did not have a Twitter presence.
Instagram does pose a visual content challenge for Accountants. There are only so many times one can get creative with images of accounting standards and software. As a result, Instagram may be best saved for larger accounting practices where you share images of your team, events, and your accounting firms culture.
Were there any surprises?
A major surprise to the team at pepperit was the lower than expected levels of activity around email marketing. Surprisingly only 10% of accounting practices use email marketing to connect with their contact list on a regular basis. This is a substantial opportunity given the return on investment for email marketing.
Want to chat more about marketing and the accounting professions? Want to know more about our social media for accountants? Drop us a line, we would love to chat over coffee.