Name: Smart Cow Marketing
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Who do you think you are?

12/08/202007/16/2019 by scmarketing

Why understanding your brand identity is key for business growth

Clients and prospects will usually see your logo and marketing first before that crucial meeting is set up. They will likely check out your online footprint such as your website, the sign on your office door (if you have a physical location) or perhaps take a look at what you’re writing about on social media. People want to feel comfortable in who they choose to do business with, they want to feel like they know the company before they call for a meeting – ultimately, it’s about building rapport and trust.

Therefore, creating your brand identity is key for business growth as you provide consistent messaging and create a trusted brand.

If your business were a person…

One way to start building and understanding your brand identity is by thinking about your business as a person. What characteristics does it have? Is this person professional, an expert in their field, knowledgeable, creative – you get the idea.

Start to jot down your thoughts on this and you’ll start to build a profile for your business.

More than a logo

Logos are important for consistency, awareness and identify but your brand is so much more than just a logo. It is how you operate and consistently provide great service and products to your clients. Think of your brand being summed up as the set of instructions that you could create to replicate your business exactly.

To understand your brand identity is also about thinking how your business is perceived by your clients, potential clients and your employees and how you would like to be perceived.

While, your answers may be aspirational at the moment, this helps from a foundation for what your goals.

With just these few small steps of taking a moment to look at your business you can begin to see that by being targeted with your messaging that this can lead to brand awareness and trust, with increased customer loyalty and share of voice – the basis of growth.

Need further help with your brand identity?

Making notes about your brand identity is just the starting point but a crucial one to help navigate the digital marketing world and helping your website be Search Engine Optimised.

Our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in marketing to achieve these goals. We work with you to focus in on your brand identity and we’ll look at how to most effectively get your business to be competitive online and noticed by your potential clients.

You can book a session for £95, or if you are an accountancy firm, we are currently offering a FREE Practice Growth Session.

How our Practice Growth Sessions help your business

01/30/202307/11/2019 by scmarketing

Digital marketing is now essential to the success of almost any business. Our tailored Practice Growth Sessions look at how to most effectively get your business to be competitive online and noticed by your potential clients. We tailor our sessions for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in marketing to achieve their goals.

How we help

The purpose of this session is to provide you with a guide to the right foundation to start building a digital marketing campaign to grow your business. At the end, you will understand how to target your message and the tools available to help deliver the campaign.

Our Practice Growth Sessions are broken into three stages conducted in a 1-hour workshop. It’s these steps that will build your unique campaign:

We delve into why someone would choose to do business with you, getting to know your business and what makes you special. It’s all about understanding your brand identity and target audience to help create your marketing campaign.
We then look more closely at your potential clients, your competition and your target markets. This will help to build a strategy to grow your business.
We then focus on the digital marketing tools available and splinter off those that are right for you to deliver your goals.

Get in touch

You can book a session for £95, or if you are an accountancy practice, we are currently offering a FREE Practice Growth Session.

Let us use our experience, skills and knowledge to create and deliver a quality digital marketing campaign for your business. Any questions do get in touch.

Accountants – are you looking to grow your practice?

10/30/201905/21/2019 by scmarketing

If you’re looking for growth in your accountancy practice then considering investment in marketing could be the approach to bring prospects to your door. But, with the host of marketing tactics out there, where do you start and what’s the best approach?

Unfortunately, there’s no one answer. But there’s a whole host of tools at your disposal to get awareness of your practice out there. Here’s the lowdown on what you need to consider.

Website

First and foremost – is your website doing its job? What we mean by this is that you need to look at your website and question whether there are succinct facts about what you do? Is the content relevant to your target audience? And, are there clear calls to action to get that contact coming your way?

Google My Business

Then you need to make sure your website is seen. Make sure you’ve populated Google My Business with details of your firm. This is free to do and at the very least get the basic information up there about your company, such as website, telephone number, contact email and opening times, as this all helps with SEO and it’s another place that you can be seen. Once you have the basic company details uploaded, explore other options available such as adding offers, your news and imagery as well as asking for clients to leave reviews. Again, this all helps with your organic search rankings.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a great way to help increase traffic to your website. If you are trying PPC – of which Google Ads are the most popular – then getting your website up to date and populated with relevant content is so important. For a PPC campaign you will want a dedicated page on your website so that when people you are targeting 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.

Content

Regular and relevant content through blogs on your website, email marketing, social media posts etc., will help position you as thought leaders and build your brand. But don’t forget images and video content. Be factual with content offer tips, industry statistics and insight. Search engines also trawl through your website pages all the time looking for fresh and relevant content so this tells the search engines that you are the place to go to.

Social media

Then there’s social media. Do you have presence on any social channel? Now you may think that Facebook is just for seeing who ate and drank what but actually 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.

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 products and 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 and it allows you the opportunity to share industry insight from accounting resources such as Accountancy Age.

Read our blog on the different social media platforms and how to use them for more insight.

Practice growth sessions

If you’re an accountancy practice looking to grow then why not book a practice growth session with us at Smart Cow.

Get in touch today via our online form or call on 020 3137 1826 or via saymoo@smart-cow.com

7 Great Apps to help your accounting business

01/08/202009/17/2018 by scmarketing

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