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What can LinkedIn Sales Navigator offer my business?

08/19/202202/16/2021 by scmarketing

LinkedIn is the social media platform for business networking. It’s not about posting filtered images of lovely cups of coffee (unless that’s your business of course), it’s about networking with people to support and grow business. But how can you find the right prospects in a more efficient manner and in a way that’s not intrusive?

This is where using the Sales Navigator tool by LinkedIn can help.

What is LinkedIn?

Firstly, here’s a quick recap about what LinkedIn is. Think of LinkedIn like attending a local monthly business breakfast group, you go there to network find business opportunities and help connect suppliers. The difference is that LinkedIn is a social media platform. But the principle is the same, you engage, network, support, share updates and insight.

Whilst you would have your own individual profile, you can also set up a company page for your company. You can post updates and add links back to your blog post on your website. These provide quality links which in turn helps your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy and being found in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Over time you will build your network with followers through ongoing engagement with topical social media posts and the type of content relevant to your audience.

Lead generation campaign

There’s so many social media analytics to draw on from your LinkedIn company page including, seeing who has just followed you, the companies to track as well as engagement rates on posts so you can get a feel for what your audience likes to hear about most.

However, you can also ramp up your lead generation strategy with the adoption of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The professional features mean that you can get more targeted and reach a wider audience from LinkedIn’s network.

Key benefits include being able to see who has viewed your profile allowing you to engage with them as a warm lead.

You can add tags to your prospects enabling you to filter and then synch back to your CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

You can view job changes in real time, alerting you to new business opportunities.

The benefit of networking is connections and once you are aware of a mutual link then this makes it easier to engage with a prospect. The TeamLink connection filter allows you to reach prospects that match your search criteria and have a mutual connection. It taps into the networks of people in your company.

There are three levels of Sales Navigator package to explore from Professional for individuals, through to Team and Enterprise. Find out about LinkedIn Sales Navigator here.

Your social media marketing strategy should form part of your overall inbound marketing. Don’t look at social media in silo. Make sure your approach to reach your target audience is holistic and also right for your business. If you’re not already on LinkedIn but feel you should be, then get in touch. As one of Croydon’s top social media marketing companies we can discuss your social media marketing plan, the social media channels for your business and a tailored approach.

There’s no one size fits all which is why we provide a mix and match digital marketing solution for our clients so we can offer a proactive approach utilising different elements of digital marketing to suit requirements.

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CRM data: The good, the bad and the ugly

10/13/2020 by scmarketing

The quality of the data that you hold plays a vital role in the success of your marketing strategy.

It’s worth noting that lists used for email marketing decay between 20-30% each year so if it’s entered incorrectly into your CRM system in the first place then you’re not going to be off to a great start. You’ll experience a reduction in email delivery which will impact the success of any email marketing campaign going forward and your overall lead generation goals.

Quality data for your marketing campaigns

It’s key that your email addresses are validated. So, that would include people signing up to receive your email newsletters from an online form, as it’s something they have requested. This is a qualified lead.

What’s important is to review data on a regular basis and cleanse it.

The fact that we are required to include an unsubscribe link on email marketing communication is actually a good thing as this helps cleanse your list too. It’s not a bad thing that people unsubscribe when you send them an email. Let’s face it, if people aren’t interested in your products or services then it’s best, they aren’t on your list. It’s much better to have fewer, quality leads eager to hear from you than a mammoth list of contacts that are never going to engage with you or provide bounce backs as they are no longer valid email addresses.

A consistent CRM process

Go for consistency in your CRM process so ensuring email addresses, names, company detail, contact number are always added and they are added correctly.

Ultimately you want your firm to adopt the CRM system you deploy. But if the detail is incorrect when team members go to access data then very soon colleagues will become despondent and revert back to, what they think, is a trusted excel spreadsheet. This then creates the ongoing cycle of silos within a company. This way marketing will never sync with sales or business development teams and vital new business opportunities will be lost in the ether.

So, take time to get the process of inputting data instilled in your team in the first instance, that way you will reap rewards in the long-term as again and again the team will find success from the contacts entered into your system.

CRM data

The basics to include in your CRM for the benefit of your marketing strategy include the contacts first and last name. An email and physical address as well as phone number and web address. As well as any social handles whether their personal LinkedIn or company related.

It’s also useful to gather data about them about their life. Following your initial networking with your contact, these are great reminders to add to the CRM about what you discussed as this will help with ongoing client relationships, future meetings and give your colleagues insight.

Using a system like Hubspot CRM can help you access website activity so you can soon get an understanding of how often people visit the website, services viewed or eBooks downloaded.

CRM for accountants

As a Hubspot partner, we can help you with CRM for your business to help make a really effective lead generation campaign.

What’s important about any lead generation campaign is to continue to be insightful with your communication, providing answers to challenges that you know your clients face. With the insight you have as a result of your CRM, this can really help you tailor an ongoing content marketing plan tailored to your target audience.

We’re a digital marketing agency based in Croydon with a specialism in marketing for professional services firms including digital marketing for accountants.

Read our blog on lead generation strategies for your business.

Benefits of social media for business

11/08/202107/28/2020 by scmarketing

With constant change being the norm right now, businesses have a lot on their plate. Simply running your business from day to day, managing finances and keeping up to speed with government schemes to help out will certainly be taken up your time. That’s where marketing sometimes slips down the agenda, but it is a key activity to keep up so that you maintain your presence in the marketplace.

It’s worth remembering that social media is a way for you to reach your audience and build brand awareness. We know that time is of the essence and that you don’t want it impacting on your day. So, we’ve gathered together some top tips on what to do to refresh your social media profile and then some tips for 5-minute daily tasks to keep your presence out there.

Your profile

It may seem obvious but is your social media profile up to date and have you completed all sections available to you? Always makes sure you have your website address, email, telephone number visible. On many social channels such as Facebook you can add in your opening times.

Perhaps it’s also time to refresh the company bio. If you wrote it a while ago, does it still reflect the company you are today? Keep it simple and get across what you do.

If you’re revisiting social media for the first time in a while, then now is a good time to review whether you are on the right channels. You may already be on Facebook and Instagram but what about a LinkedIn company profile? Including this activity in your social media strategy will help you concentrate your efforts moving forward.

Conduct a little research with your customers to find out what channels are most popular and research which social media channels your competitors use.

Content marketing

With social media you are talking directly to your target audience so make sure that what you post is relevant to them. Ultimately, it’s about posting your own content. If you write blog posts for your website, then use this content in bite size chunks across a number of social posts. Re-purposing your content is a great time saver. But again, if you don’t have time right now then here’s some tips on some ways to start posting and encouraging engagement with your audience:

Re-sharing (retweet) articles of interest or social posts. Add a comment to it to place your own thoughts on the topic so you can be seen as a thought leader.
Is it a national or international day of interest relevant to your business and your audience? Adding the relevant hashtags will help extend reach.
Talk about company milestones.
Do you have any new products or services to talk about? And, remind people about what you do offer.
Run a special offer.
Tips, stats, insight – all great sources of information.

Whatever social platform or platforms your business is on you need to keep on sharing content on a regular basis to remind people about your business. Here’s our tips on daily activity to help keep your feed populated with interesting and varied types of content. It’s about letting your followers know you are thinking of them.

A one-off action is to create lists of favourite news feeds that you know always share interesting articles for your audience. Once you’ve done this, then each day dip into the lists and see if there is anything to share.
Check notifications, have you been mentioned, or any posts highlighted? This is another quick way to see if there is anything interesting to share. It’s also a time to make sure whether there is any comments you need to respond to.
A daily social media post about your services/products.
If you are involved in any virtual events or participating in the Eat Out To Help Out initiative then talk about it.

Marketing automation

For a small business, it can be difficult to manage with everything else you have to juggle. So, marketing automation tools such as Hubspot can help you manage when you send social media messages with its social media scheduling capability. It means you can spend a bulk of time scheduling a month of social posts in advance.

We’re a social media marketing agency and can help you formulate a social media campaign as part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

‘New normal’ – 3 marketing tips for accounting firms

04/07/202107/17/2020 by scmarketing

With many accounting firms adapting to working remotely and conducting meetings virtually, now that lockdown is easing with some offices reopening for skeleton staff, it’s time to get on board with the ‘new normal’ and get your marketing focus back on track.

What’s key is ensuring that you continue to maintain the quality level of service for your existing clients as you start to ramp up your marketing activity. While looking for quality leads is important, maintaining a high level of service for your existing clients can reap rewards with additional service requests to help navigate the raft of grants available allows for cross sell opportunity.

So, how do you maintain your quality level of service for existing clients as you look to attract new clients?

Here’s our top 3 online marketing tips for accountants for ongoing engaging client liaison to keep customers and prospects well informed providing you with the opportunity for increasing revenue and growing your business.

1. Marketing automation

Is it time to consider implementing marketing automation into your accountancy practice? This can help free up valuable time as marketing automation can take on those vital but time-consuming and repetitive tasks.

You may be forgiven for one moment in thinking: ‘But does this not take the personal touch out of the equation when the aim is to offer a high level of client service?’

In short, no. One aspect of marketing automation is the ability to pre-set email sequences that cover a range of scenarios such as meeting a contact at a virtual networking session. You can then schedule to send the pre-written email when you’re back at your desk.

But by creating a sequence of let’s say three emails, you can plan to send the second one after a few days with some pertinent insight and then if you do not hear back after the second email, then a third is sent. If there is engagement at any point then this triggers a halt on the email chain so you can jump in to make the next response totally personal.

You can also automate your social media marketing so messages go out in a timely manner.

If you’ve managed with webinars and Zoom meetings, perhaps now is the time to delve a little deeper into the technology available to enhance your business and your client’s experience. This could be a game-changer for your accounting firm.

2. What’s your content marketing plan?

We’ve been through a roller coaster of government announcements these past few months. One thing that’s key with an accountancy practice is your knowledge and insight to navigate the financial landscape.

Let clients and prospects know about your expertise and your guidance. Your accountancy firm is not just about payroll, bookkeeping, corporate finance or VAT returns, you are an advisory service. Therefore, your expertise in understanding all the implications and potential benefits available is a huge help for businesses trying to simply get by, keep their customers and pay their staff. So, communicate this with your client base with updates on your website about the latest news and government announcements. You can also share this content via email marketing or social media with links back to the full blog on your website.

We recommend that you compile a content marketing plan adding key dates in so you know when you can write a blog post about a particular topic and send out timely communication that will help your clients.

For prospects, this continued sharing of information helps to build trust with your accounting practice over other firms. If you’re offering advice that is helping, then you have more chance of getting a call for a consultation.

Regular and new content on your website with keywords that you want to be found forms part of a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Including this in your plan will really help give your website a boost in search results pages.

3. Review your target audience

Over this period have you discovered that you’ve been working in one or two sectors of industry more than others? Or perhaps you have had more enquiries about a certain service or from similar sized businesses. Now is the time to review these frequent enquiries and really understand who your target audience is. This will help so much with engagement and attracting quality leads because you can tailor your marketing communication specifically to their concerns. This positions you as the thought leaders in your area of expertise.

Here’s our advice on creating up an online persona (an imaginary person that is your typical target audience).

Digital marketing for accountants

We don’t know what the landscape will be in a few months-time but as it is, with your expertise and a little time exploring your marketing options, you can be a step ahead of the game.

We are a digital marketing agency in Croydon offering a specialism in digital marketing for accounting businesses. Why not take advantage of our free website audit so you can understand whether you need to make any updates to your website so that it is optimised for lead generation.