Accounting business digital marketing tips

8 tips on why digital marketing is important for accounting firms

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Digital marketing offers a whole raft of marketing tools for small businesses to help you plan a campaign to target your specific niche and help your practice grow.

Here we cover digital marketing for accountants and give you an overview of some of the top points to consider and action to help you increase awareness of your firm, build your online presence and reach your target audience.

  1. Get your website seen: Firstly, take an audit of your website to see if it’s doing the job it should be. What are you accounting services? Are there succinct facts about what you do? Is the content relevant to your target audience? And, are there clear calls to action to get that prospect to click for more…? Really think about your businesses web design and how it will be seen by potential clients.
  2. Search Engine Optimisation will help you rank in search: Keywords within content on your website will help you rise in organic search rankings and can generate leads. But so is understanding your target audience so that content you write answers their specific questions. Although, it’s not all about keywords and phrases, look at our information on setting up and maintaining SEO for more detail.
  3. Google My Business: Populate Google’s own business library with your firm’s details.This is the box that pops up on the first page of Google search when the company name is typed in. It’s free to do and at the very least get the basic information up there about your company, such as website address, telephone number, contact email and opening times, as this all helps with SEO and it’s another place that you can be found.
  4. Pay Per Click (PPC): Increase traffic to your website through PPC ads (Google Ads or Social Media advertising for example). Create a dedicated landing page on your website so that when people click on an ad they land on a page with relevant content and, because it is relevant, this will help lower the cost of the ads. Look at our tips for setting up and running a PPC campaign.
  5. Build brand awareness: Regular and relevant content marketing through blogs on your website, email marketing, social media posts etc., will help position you as thought leaders and build your brand. Be factual with content. Offer your readers tips and advice, industry statistics gives great factual advice but remember to credit anything you use and add links to the original stats.
  6. Build trust through online networking: Social media marketing is key. The best channels for accounting firms are LinkedIn and Twitter. With LinkedIn it’s worth remembering that you’re networking. It’s not about selling it’s about creating that business relationship. You connect with people to then be able to engage in the future to talk about services. With a Twitter account your bio is a quick opportunity to showcase what services you offer. It’s worth having presence on this channel as your competitors will. It allows you the opportunity to share industry insight from accounting resources such as Accountancy Age. Also, having a Facebook page for your company that is up to date, even if you don’t post much from it, means that you have visibility on one of the largest search engines.
  7. Email marketing: This is another form of online marketing and with 86% of professionals preferring to use email when communicating for business purposes (Source: HubSpot, 2017), it makes sense to include email marketing into your inbound marketing strategy. Read our email marketing tips to help you create a great campaign.
  8. Marketing automation: To free up time and be efficient in your marketing, become targeted through automation. Marketing automation can link with your CRM system ensuring that automatic email responses or pop up chat boxes are tailored to what your website or social media visitor has viewed, downloaded or asked a question about. It helps you nurture leads from prospects through your lead generation funnel through to qualifying lead and ultimately customer. We’ve partnered with Hubspot, for top CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Automated Marketing software, find out more about this comprehensive inbound marketing option.

Get in touch

Smart Cow is a digital marketing agency for accountants. As you can probably make out, it’s not about one digital marketing action over another but rather a host of tools that help you tailor a targeted campaign. Get in touch with us today to create your digital marketing strategy.

Digital marketing resources:

Here’s some further information to help you create a digital marketing campaign for your accountancy practice, and other marketing services we offer.

Email marketing on laptop

11 tips on setting up and running email campaigns

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If you’re looking for a return on investment, email marketing is still a great option. To give you a better picture about how effective it is, think how you feel when you receive a letter at home. You look at the post every day, you clock what it is and open letters addressed personally to you. You pay attention – even if some of it is placed in recycling.

You do a similar process with your emails – you look at them every day. Access on your phone makes it so much easier whether that’s to read, file or delete.

But what makes a campaign effective? Well, in short, make it personal, have interesting content and use lots of images. Here’s a step by step email marketing strategy on setting up and running a successful email marketing campaign.

  1. Who is your email for? Before sending an email know your target audience when you start your email campaign so you know the best way to grab their attention and make a effective email campaign .
  2. What’s your email about? Be creative in the subject line. It can be the deciding factor in the recipient finding out about your business or not. Keep it short, sweet and to the point. Conducting AvB test on your subject line can show what engages best.
  3. Engaging content: Know your audience’s challenges. So, create content that helps solve their problems.
  4. Concise content: A great email is concise, this means readers are less likely to lose interest and move your email to the trash folder.
  5. Easy navigation: Make sure your email template is easy to navigate but most of all that you have enough pictures to make it interesting to look at.
  6. What do you want your recipient to do? Bold call to actions can really help the reader navigate and engage well with your content.
  7. Add links to your social media channels:  This gives the recipient the opportunity, to easily follow you on social media giving them, another touchpoint to stay informed about your business.
  8. Test on mobile devices: With 67% of emails read on either a smartphone or tablet, ensure your emails are responsive. It’s also worth noting that 65% of mobile readers who open an email are likely to click through (Sources: Campaign Monitor, 2019 via Hubspot).
  9. Analyse: Make a note of what works and what doesn’t. Avoid copying old formats which don’t get clicks, be innovative and creative.
  10. Email distribution list: Segmenting a list is so important in creating a targeted email campaign. Recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns (Source: MailChimp, 2017 via Hubspot)
  11. Fond farewell: You must always have an unsubscribe option in your email as well as a link to your privacy policy. If people aren’t interested, then by making it easy to unsubscribe, you’ve cleared someone from your list that wasn’t going to engage further. This leaves you to focus on those who are interested. Remember, you need to be GDPR compliant, so transparency is important.

Digital Marketing Resources

Here’s some further information to help you create email marketing campaigns. Also get in touch for email marketing in Croydon.

Social Media

8 tips on setting up and running social media

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With over 3.2 billion people using social media platforms globally (Source: awario), it’s not difficult to understand why incorporating it into your digital marketing strategy is another great way of reaching prospects.

Here’s our top tips to remember when setting up and running a social media channel for your business.

  1. One size does not fit all: Before you a start any social media for your business it’s worth remembering that not all platforms will be relevant to target the audience you want to reach. Conduct some research first and see what platforms your competitors are using. See how frequently they post and what they’re talking about.
  2. Know your audience: As with any digital marketing tool you adopt, you must know your target audience before you can even think about what you should be posting about or who you should be engaging with.
  3. Complete as much information as possible: Sounds obvious but ensuring you’ve populated as much as possible, helps build brand trust. So, check your bio and company details – do they need updating? What about your company details and services – are they all present and correct?
  4. Be a thought leader: Provide tips, advice and interesting comments that your target audience will be interested to hear about and would want to share themselves. When you post a blog to your website, if you have social channels you have the opportunity to share this news to your social audience with a link back to your website. This extends reach further and helps your search ranking.
  5. Quality not quantity: Make your content relevant and tailor it for each platform. And,nowadays the focus is on quality followers not quantity. Gone are the days when you would conduct a ‘follow / unfollow’ campaign.
  6. Images: They say a picture is worth a thousand words so use images and video in your social media. Tweets with video attract 10x more engagement (Source: Business Twitter)
  7. What’s the story? Instagram and Facebook both have a story function which scrolls across the top of the feed and so due to this prominent visibility helps with views and engagement. It’s a great way to post live from exhibitions or about things of interest to your business. Instagram Stories posted a 220% increase in year-on-year ad spend (Our Social Times, 2018 – Source: Hubspot) – Its popularity is certainly on the rise.
  8. Get Networking: 40% of LinkedIn members visit the social network platform each day (Source: Omnicore Agency, 2018 via Hubspot). As a B2B channel, networking is at its heart. LinkedIn helps boost your businesses brand and profile, which in turns help the company earn trust.

Digital Marketing Resources:

Here’s more blogs to help you with your social media marketing.

laptop screen showing email marketing

Comprehensive inbound marketing with Hubspot

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In order to provide the best service for our clients, existing and new, we’ve conducted many hours of research to find the best software available to enable your firm to gain the most from an investment in effective digital marketing campaigns. As a result, we’ve partnered with Hubspot, for top CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Automated Marketing software.

Why is this good for you? 

We realise that for an effective marketing campaign, you invest 10% of your turnover back into marketing such as inbound marketing strategies. So, you need to make sure that it works and that your spend is concentrated in the right area. We see Hubspot as the top Automated Marketing Software to deliver this.

Why Hubspot?  

HubSpot software uses inbound marketing methodology at its core. Allowing you to track activity and leads from your social media channels, website or email marketing campaigns, so ensure that your website design is easy to navigate and links are clear. As this is not readily available to all it is recommended to get in touch with an inbound marketing agency.

This product is key in helping create quality leads and ultimately increased revenue for you through the CRM system. You can reach target audiences and increase customer acquisition. You can organise and nurture relationships to help you convert a prospect to a customer in a timely manner suitable for them. The sales hub allows automation of repetitive tasks to help you concentrate on managing client relationships.

Are you serious about growing your business?

We’d really like to offer you a chance to discover the benefits this software will bring your business. We’d be delighted to arrange a free test drive of this great marketing and sales platform.

We’re so enthusiastic with our new partnership, because we know how much Hubspot will be able to help your business grow. Book a free consultation today.

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