Marketing for Accountants: The Employee Connection

Brand Ambassadors: As “insiders,” your employees can and should know your company mission, vision, and goals in addition to its services. This understanding of who your firm serves and how is invaluable, and you can harness it to turn them into brand ambassadors. Encourage employees to discuss your firm with others, use branded swag like t-shirts and cups outside the office, and engage with your company blog and social accounts. They’ll even do all of this naturally when they feel like part of the effort.

Social Proof: Have a happy crew? Invite them to talk about the good your firm is doing, and how enjoyable the atmosphere and work are. This isn’t just good for prospects to see; when it’s time to hire, good news about you will come up as potential employees do their due diligence on your firm.

Content Creation: Your employees are experts in their field. Use this to encourage creation of reputation-building content like webcasts, blogs, or other resources. This doesn’t just position your firm as an authority. It also gives your employees a spotlight — 15 minutes of fame, if you will, that will make them not only feel even more engaged with your firm, but also provides them with something concrete to point to in their accomplishments.

Enhanced Credibility: When the people who work for you believe in what you do and are demonstrative about it, they provide a consistent, replicable experience for prospects and customers alike. Word gets out that your firm is one that gets things done in a transparent way.

Increased Reach: Each of your employees has individual circles of friends and family who could also be prospects. When they post about your firm on their personal social media, or even just discuss your firm over drinks at a party, these are nooks and crannies traditional marketing has trouble penetrating. Multiplied across an entire workforce, it can do quite a bit to boost your reach.

Improved Employee Engagement: As we discussed earlier, involving your employees in the marketing effort helps them to be more engaged, and engaged employees are more productive.

Cost-Effectiveness: Using existing employees in addition to (or instead of) external influencers or paid advertising can save money and provide a measurable return. 

Lay out the guidelines: Provide employees with easily accessed materials they can use to drive their conversations and posts. This can be an intranet page or just a handout or section of the employee handbook. Keep the points of your brand and services high-level, to encourage your employees to use their authentic voice. Discourage them from cut-and-paste to keep things feeling organic.

Develop Content Creation Programs: Lay out the tone and general language you’d like employees to use, then spur their creativity with contests. Offer fun, small prizes when employees develop usable posts or resources. You can also organize them into teams to develop content together, turning it into a team-building exercise as well.

Keep them in the loop: Don’t make your employees go looking for things to say about the firm. If you have developments or news you’re ready to share, be sure everyone in the company knows it. That can be disseminated in an internal newsletter, for example, or company announcement. Or you could have a regularly updated section of your intranet as discussed earlier.

Maintaining Consistency: In your quest to make sure your employees’ social posts sound organic, there could be a tendency to wander off-message. Make sure they understand the difference between a message they can free-form, and one they should stick close to prescribed messaging on. This also goes or blogs and resources, but both of those will presumably be reviewed prior to publication. Social is more spur-of-the-moment for your employees.

Protecting Privacy and Professionalism: Any mention of your firm needs to remain appropriate, and should be in an appropriate forum. For this reason, and depending on your workforce, it’s sometimes better to ask employees to keep their personal, firm-topical posts to professional settings such as LinkedIn, where they are less likely to be discussing controversial or inappropriate topics the rest of the time.

Training and Resources: Some employees just don’t write well, or maybe they don’t read well on camera. If they are genuinely interested in contributing, offer help in the form of an “editor,” or someone on staff who understands how to construct written resources. For videos, urge them to keep it organic and speak from the heart rather than a script. It makes all the difference.