7 Great Apps to help your accounting business

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Owning a business is time consuming and can be very hectic. You can easily find yourself drowning in the work load. Luckily there are many apps out there which cater to various parts of running a business. So, we’ve gathered together a few notes on some apps that could be of great help for SMEs in making for an efficient business to help ease undue stress.

Trello

Trello gives you a bird’s eye view of everything going on with your business, or at home. You can create ‘boards’ which is more visually appealing than a list of words in calendar. You can add to-do lists with deadlines and attach files. What is also useful is its function to invite co-workers; so, at the click of a button you can assign tasks or comment on any work being done. And the best thing; it’s free.

Xero

For many, the accounting side to running a business can be intimidating. Xero is an accounting app designed for small businesses and allows you to easily manage finances. You can manage salaries, purchase orders, quotes, and invoices. Xero will ease the stress of running finances and puts everything in order for you. To get a feel for the app and see if it works for you they offer 30 days free trial. Monthly payments vary depending what plan you choose.

Square Invoices

Square Invoices (or Square Point of Sale), helps to manage, create, send, and receive invoices. It can be linked to your bank account and you can see payments in a day. You can add names, photos and details so when you look back you know exactly what the invoice relates to. A Square Reader is available to purchase too which accepts chip and PIN and contactless cards. The app can also send digital receipts and receive feedback. When it comes to fees, it is free to send an invoice, then pay 2.5% of each invoice which is paid.

The Art of Content Planning

Content planning allows you to double check your content before you post on social media, manage various pages or platforms you have, and review data and analytics from a social media channel. Working with social media management platforms such as Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to manage and schedule content for all your social channels in one place. Once your set up on a specific platform here’s some apps that can also help you get the most out of your channels.

Planoly

Instagram’s visual planner – Themes are important and appealing to clients as they show a sense of brand identity, so with Planoly you can view what you grid page will look like before you post.

Facebook Page Manager App

With this you can easily manage all your Facebook pages (up to 50!). This means no more mixing up pages or neglecting others.

Twitonomy

A twitter analytics tool. It gives you insight into any twitter user, regarding tweets, retweets, hashtags, tags. Allowing you to see what content does or doesn’t work too well.

We hope you find the perfect app to suit your business and lifestyle and if you’re also looking to give your business a boost we at Smart Cow can create the perfect digital marketing package tailored for your business needs.

Resources

Small business apps you need to know

Thought provoking HeyGirls ad clever marketing

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This simple advert as featured in The Drum’s; ‘ad’s we like’* is extremely effective in getting a shocking fact across; that one in 10 girls in the UK can’t afford sanitary products. It leaves nothing to the imagination, it shows a template of a sanitary pad to cut out. Message is received simply and clearly that so many girls have to ‘make their own’ This alarming revelation for many will easily grasp attention and in doing so raise awareness of the brand aligning it with a thought provoking initiative by donating to the organisation ‘girls in poverty’.

This is an excellent marketing and brand awareness campaign for HeyGirls. It is a worthwhile Corporate Social Responsibly (CSR) initiative for the brand but it’s certainly not gimmicky. You can see the passion HeyGirls has for the campaign through this stark advertising. The newspaper advert doesn’t make the message underwhelming by covering it up with pretty, aesthetic pictures of women happily riding bikes to work. It aims to leave a strong impact for people reading their morning paper. The founder has clearly done a lot of research too stating that “The lack of appropriate menstrual protection has an impact on school attendance, participation in sports and self-esteem.”

It raises awareness of the issues of accessibility of sanitary products, makes people think about how they might feel if they were put in that situation; Embarrassed? Helpless? Unclean?

This campaign enlightens us that many girls across the UK must decide between sanitary products and survival. HeyGirls is carving a voice for those who struggle with the financial strain of buying these products. The founder herself has been a single mum on benefits and knows first-hand what it is like, therefore choosing to create HeyGirls to help others. So, not only is there a great story to help the brand break into the market, there’s real passion behind HeyGirls.

People are always led to believe that issues of poverty, unhygienic conditions, and hardships are far from home. But HeyGirls has broken this ideology and exposed the truth about deprivation experienced from those who are unable to afford sanitary products. So what HeyGirls has seemed to realise is that to help those elsewhere we need to help ourselves and understand that those around us are struggling too.

We need more ads like this that get to the point, stark and true, no messing. Ultimately it is about sales for Hey Girls but in this day and age there needs to be much more CSR like this for brands to enter the maelstrom and hopefully weather the storm. Women should never be denied access to sanitary products. Period.

Source: *The Drum

Digital marketing tips for accountants

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Here’s an overview of the various digital marketing tactics an accountancy firm needs to consider to help their business grow.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is all about getting high up on the search engine results page. This means making relevant, up to date and unique content for your website. Ensure key words relating to your business are used. Key words might be ‘accountancy’, ‘accountant’, ‘accounting’, ‘finance’, ‘tax return’, “economics”. Another good tip when growing a local business is to add a location of the areas you cover for example Surrey or Croydon. The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by a search engine meaning your website will make its way up the results pages. A good tip is to stay on top of your website and create fresh content.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

A PPC campaign can significantly improve SEO results. It involves some investment but is sure to pay off. Essentially it is paying to get noticed. PPC allows you to do geographic marketing, as well as tailoring the PPC to match the style of your business. However, accountancy is a competitive sector therefore to increase your chances of the best value for your cost per click, you must also invest a bit of time in reviewing the content on your website and creating a relevant landing page if necessary. The reason being is that these ads are specific, if someone actually clicks on it they want to know straight away the answers, it’s no point spending money on an ad and sending the person through to irrelevant content. We can help you kick start your campaign so that you get the best ROI.

Social Media Marketing

Not everything is down to SEO or PPC, social media channels are also a key communication tool. To ignore the impact of social media will severely limit the number of people you are able to reach out to. Although it can’t hurt to be present across all social media platforms, the two we usually suggest for accountancy firms is Twitter and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has a professional focus while Twitter can spread reach with relevant hashtags.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still an effective way of gaining and retaining customers. Not only is it a cost-effective but easy and efficient. We can create campaigns fit for accountancy firms and find the best way to get your message out there to the appropriate people. When sending out messages make sure you keep them short and to the point, images are also good at grabbing people’s attention.

Accountants Marketing

To find out more on how Smart Cow can get your accounting firm seen online, get in contact to go through the options for accountants’ marketing.

Social media growth is changing

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It’s likely that your organic reach is not as far reaching as it once was. Due to changes in the way that the likes of Facebook operate, content on a person’s social feed will be tailored much more to them, with less public content. But don’t fret, we’ve got a few tips here to help you maintain organic reach.

Content

We will always talk about how content is king, tailored content for your audience and making sure that you tailor content for a specific platform is no different. This includes fitting in with the parameters of the social channel. For example, avoid sharing Instagram pictures on twitter as it comes up as just a link on feeds. A tweet with just a link is unlikely to gain any activity as it doesn’t stand out to the average thumb-scroller, whereas making sure to post the actual picture would be a lot more eye catching! You need to make sure all your platforms suit the image you want to portray.

Other people’s content

Sometimes it’s worth showing and sharing other people’s content, after all social networks are all about socialising with many different people, and you may end up with other people sharing your posts too! This shows you want to appeal to your audience and have their best interests at heart rather than bombarding them purely with your own content.

The aim of providing quality content, even if it’s not your own, helps build trust with followers positioning you as a thought leader and knowledgeable about industry stories and ultimately improving your reputation. We think is highly important in social media reach.

Budget for growth

Although paying for ads isn’t necessarily an ‘organic’ form of social media growth, it can still be a great way of getting content out to your target audience that they empathise with, and so will help to increase your followers. Let’s face it, once you have new followers, they’ll be engaging with future posts that you don’t pay for.

This method is so effective that a recent study by Nielsen Brand Effect* found that people remembered an Instagram advert three times more than a regular advert, making it worth your time to invest in to help brand awareness.

Video

As we’ve said before in our blog, videos are becoming more important, with Facebook updating its algorithms to prioritise video over pictures or status, it means videos are the most likely form of content to be seen by target audiences. The live video feature helps mix content up and keep followers interested. If you want to learn more about video content and how to make your videos effective online read our tips for using video for social media for business.

Social media marketing agency

You can find plenty more tips about organic social media growth from Hootsuite. And if you want to chat more about how your digital marketing strategies incorporating social media management, get in touch with us at Smart Cow.

Sources: *Blog.hootsuite

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