At MediaBooks we are dedicated to making sure both nerds and creatives feel welcome in our space. So when we started helping accountants tell their story, making sure the technology was easy to learn was essential.

Accountants do not have the time to learn the intricacies of Adobe Lightroom or how to create a marketing strategy for the upcoming year.

However, there are a few tools and tricks you can quickly pick up over lunch. This gives us just enough time to set an email campaign or create a graphic before we have to return to depreciation schedules and reconciling balance sheets.

These are a few marketing tools that are so easy to use - an accountant can learn them in a lunch break.

1. Grammarly

This is a must, not just for marketing but for anyone who writes. Grammarly is just like Microsoft Word editor in that it will point out missed spelled words, but much more advanced.

Not only are spelling errors eliminated, but their advanced technology will also find grammar mistakes - and that is just the free version!

The paid version will tell you if you have a run-on sentence, too wordy paragraph, or if you use a word too often throughout whatever you are writing. I run all my blog posts through grammarly and even have the plug-in on my browser so it checks - literally - everything I write.

2. Hubspot

Hubspot is the all in one marketing app. It honestly does so much, there is no way I can cover it all in this blog post. So I will just give you a quick bullet point list of everything I love about their FREE version. Keep in mind - you can take advantage of all of this with limited marketing knowledge.

• CRM - It keeps track of companies and people, linking to your email so you can quickly find all communication you have had with a single contact. 

• Templates - Create & store email templates that allow you to insert personalized tokens.

• Ads - Get analytics on all of your marketing ads, from Google to Facebook.

• Email Newsletters - Create e-mail newsletters with templates, a connection to your address book, and analytics.

• Forms - Similar to Google forms, except it is paired with analytics that help you easily review how a form is doing.

• Sales Pipeline - Track your offers / packages and how they are doing with a contact.

• Tickets - Create service tickets, much easier to manage than e-mails!

• Calendar - Sync your hubspot calendar with Google to generate a scheduling link. The link can be shared with colleagues or leads, who can view when you are free to schedule their meeting.

3. Hootsuite

Social media is a popular way to get in front of leads, but it can be time consuming to take advantage of everything each platform has to offer. Hootsuite helps remove a lot of the work by:

• Automated posting

• Analytics

• Team management

• Integration with 20+ platforms

When first planning your content for social media, posting during your availability or whenever you have time may seem like the easiest solution, but planning can ensure you stick to your marketing plan in addition to saving you time.

4. Unsplash

It is pretty easy to spot a stock photo. Everyone looks super clean, every board room has an inexplicable amount of sunshine, and everyone looks very neutral but expressive. So when you run a remote company or fail to get photos of the office party, it may be tempting to resort to stock images. 

I dislike using stock photos because they often come off cheap and insincere, but with Unsplash you can find quality stock photos that look genuine and stylish. Admittedly, they do not have the largest library but the unique photography that is worth taking advantage of!

5. Canva

This is probably my favorite marketing software and a big reason why I was able to make the switch from accounting to marketing. The tools are so user friendly, you do not need any sort of marketing background to master them. The free version offers everything you need to build some great marketing campaigns, but the pro version offers plenty of value as well. 

If you are beginning to explore design and building content around your firm, here is a great place to start. 

Whether you are picking up some marketing tasks between tax returns or you are an individual bookkeeper looking to promote your services, you will find that these 5 tools can be picked up by any accountant.

Want To Learn More About Our Favorite Tools?

Check out our App database for our take on marketing apps including, email campaign tools, scheduling tools, stock photo websites, and so much more!