How You Should Schedule Your Content for Your Accounting Firm

Are you losing followers? Do clients complain about not receiving updates from you? Just how good are you on the content scheduling front? Here are some lessons that might help.

If you’ve been keeping up with your content creation, you probably have a sizable collection ready. One of the problems I often encounter with accounting firms is content delivery.

So, you have a bank of content ready to go, maybe six weeks’ worth. How should you distribute it? You can’t put it up all at once or risk confusing your audience.

And it’s also easy for your readers to overlook great pieces as a result of information overload. Setting up a content delivery schedule may be one of the most important things you have to do.

Why Scheduling Is So Important

There are three very important reasons why you should schedule. A steady release of your valuable content provides three things for your business:

• Helps brand consistency
• Saves time
• Helps to reach your audience when it matters

Let’s tackle each benefit in order. First of all, you can’t grow your audience without consistency. Your followers and prospects need a reason to keep coming back for more. Being behind on content publishing doesn’t bode well.

Content marketing should be for both new and existing clients. If you consistently deliver value-loaded content, it’s easy to reinforce the idea that you’re a VITAL accounting firm.

Second, the scheduled content release is a time saver. It’s hard to maintain a successful business without good time management skills. By scheduling the release of the information, you can allocate more time on other aspects of your firm.

It’s easy to lose track of how much time your people waste on manually uploading every post and article. Even more so if you post content multiple times per week. Those minutes add up and can cost you your ability to hold an extra strategy meeting or several calls with prospects and clients every week.

Lastly, scheduling helps you to reach your audience at the right time. If you want to engage as many of your followers, you need to identify the peak hours. This is particularly important if you want to generate immediate engagement and feedback.

For example, many people prefer to reserve social media engagement in the evening. But do you also want to have your people stay back at the office at those hours to post content?

Getting a scheduled release system can really help you. You can post important information even when there’s nobody at the office. And, you can get the attention of your followers at the right hours. It gives your content a better chance to spark immediate interaction.

This won’t happen as much if they’re to read your posts early in the morning as they enjoy their coffee.

Our Basic Process

Let’s say that you want to schedule your content for the next six weeks. You have enough posts ready to deliver and you want to automate the process.

Understand that it’s quite simple to do and there are great tools you can use.

In the beginning, it’s essential to map out your content. You need to know precisely what you want to upload. After that, figure out how often you need to upload and at what hours.

You can use Excel to map everything out. It’s a simple tool that any accounting firm should be comfortable using.

If you do this, moving the schedule from Excel to a scheduling tool is very simple. We use Buffer.com, which is very stable and easy to use. You can simply copy-paste your spreadsheet info into it and schedule your content for automatic release.

You can also use the same app to upload content to multiple social media platforms. In our case, we use it to post on Facebook, two LinkedIn accounts, and five Twitter accounts.

Barring unforeseen issues with the app; the content goes out when it’s supposed to. It frees up time for our team members to deal with other problems and ensures that we deliver consistent content to our followers.

You can do the same thing for your firm. There are a few tips on how you can optimise your content scheduling to keep your followers happy.

There are some tips on how you can optimise your content scheduling to keep your followers happy.

Tip #1 – Put Everything Into an Excel Spreadsheet

Excel spreadsheets are compatible with a variety of scheduling apps. Please add your content to Excel first because it’s easier to upload it to the scheduling tool of your choice.

But there’s another reason why Excel can help you. The app makes it easy to map things out and filter your content.

The key to uploading great content is to know what your audience wants to read. By using Excel, you can keep an eye out for low-quality topics.

At the same time, spreadsheets are easy to share among team members and you can customise them to your liking.

Tip #2 – Make Sure You Have Content That Covers Your Ideal Client’s Fears and Aspirations

What is great content? What draws the attention of your followers? That depends on your ideal clients.

Content marketing is about engaging with your followers, of which a good percentage of them are clients and prospects. You can passively engage them and keep them interested in your services.

It’s also a great way to showcase your VITAL services and track record. But what should your accounting firm focus on the most?

On your client’s fears and aspirations.

To catch their interest, it’s crucial to understand your clients and prospects’ pain points. Identifying their problems helps you identify their fears. At the same time, it can help you create unique solutions to the benefit of your clients.

These are the best topics to cover and focus on when you release new content. You can also touch on their aspirations and goals. Your followers need to know that you understand where they want to get to and that you can help them on the journey.

Tip #3 – Decide How You’re Going to Post Your Content

There are two ways to look at this. First, you can look at how you can spread out your content. Second, you can look at the platforms for your posts.

In many accounting niches, it doesn’t matter where you post since your audience is likely to hang out on several platforms. Most accounting firms find success on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Of course, you should also factor in your budget. It may cost you more to post on a schedule to some platforms than others. So it’d help if you’re to find your comfort zone before you press forward.

Although this is just a small part of scheduling your content release, it’s almost as essential as using Excel to plan everything out.

Tip #4 – Outsource the Task to Somebody Else

My last tip is that you should seriously consider outsourcing this task. As a whole, scheduling content is not at all problematic. It takes more resources to create the content and find your audience, as you know.

Using Excel and a scheduling tool doesn’t take a lot of skill. It’s also one of the tasks that you can afford to outsource. There isn’t anything truly vital that someone can mess up and it’s a cheap task to outsource.

Why outsource? Because time is money. The more time you can free up with your content delivery scheduling, the better you can focus on projects and tasks that make up the bulk of your revenue.

Never Waste Time on Tasks That You Can Easily Automated

Content scheduling is something that too many accounting firms overlook. It’s always a nice touch to take a manual approach and show a personal connection.

It’s also true that these are things that you can leave for your content rather than delivering it manually. Uploading posts and articles are things that plenty of successful firms put on autopilot these days.

As menial as these jobs may seem, they can take up a lot of your time and you never want to run out of time for your important tasks.

You can make your life much easier with a scheduled delivery system. And remember that your content is a powerful tool for client retention and acquisition.