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An accountant's guide to digital marketing

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27th Apr 2009
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Marketing and PR used to be low on the agenda for accountants, but increasing competition for work means practices are now looking for new and innovative ways to promote their services. Alex Hoye of Latitude explains the essentials of digital marketing and how accountants can use it to their competitive advantage.

One of the most persistent problems in advertising is that you just don’t know what you’re getting for your money, and many accountants are put off by the traditional ‘spray-and-pray’ approach. Received wisdom is that bean counters and creatives come from opposite ends of the business universe, but nowadays web savvy marketers are using data analysis and modelling techniques as tools of their trade.

Digital marketing strategies are based much more on robust data sets than creative flights of fancy. It’s a flexible platform that allows for experimentation, so if something isn’t getting results it can be changed before an entire budget is spent on it.

If digital marketing is new to you, here are three top tips to make your marketing spend work harder, whether you’re promoting your own practice or reviewing the marketing budget of another company.

Start with low-cost, no-costEveryone’s talking about social media these days and in particular a collection of digital tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or industry specific forums such as UK Business Forums, where most of the content is generated by users communicating via the service. It is incredibly cost efficient, scalable and can revolutionise the way you interact with your customers and potential customers, whilst getting great online PR.

It’s free, but there are clear rules of engagement. If you join a social network or forum for commercial benefit, ensure you’re adding value to the community by giving advice to people asking questions about your particular specialism, or offering discounts to people on specific networks to build loyalty. Anyone who simply plugs their business will get thrown out.

The beautiful part of social media, from a financial perspective, is that social media success is now measurable. Performance can be measured in various traditional ways, such as direct lead generation, customer retention or increases in number or length of website visits. However, alongside traditional methods consider using Google Alerts, Twitter Search and buzz monitoring tools such as Radian6, to check where and how often your company is being spoken about.

Use search engine marketing cleverly
Search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising are the biggest online marketing channels today, and simply can’t be ignored. As most people start their online purchase journey with search, you need to make optimal use of the natural results (SEO) and adverts (PPC) that appear on a search engine results page. Most companies could make their search spend a lot more effective by integrating the two channels.

As PPC prices are based on an auction system, there is a lot of competition for generic terms such as ‘accountants’, so they become very expensive. However, bidding on more specific phrases such as ‘accountancy advice Manchester’ would be a lot cheaper, and terms like this will also pick up much more targeted searchers who are more likely to become customers. For this reason, smart accountancy firms should use SEO as a longer term, lower cost option to target generic keywords, whilst using PPC to capture the more specific, cheaper keywords and phrases.

If you use an agency for search engine marketing, negotiate a performance-based deal where you only pay money when you make money. This way you can’t lose because you will always be generating business from your marketing spend.

Use analytics to find and fix problems
Conversion analytics is the element of online marketing that measures and increases the return on your spend. Not using conversion analytics is like trying to keep a bucket full of water without first patching the holes in the bottom. It can tell you which parts of your marketing spend are driving conversions and where the barriers and bottlenecks are, i.e. the holes in your marketing bucket.

There are four main approaches, which can be used separately or together.

  • Traditional web analytics technology tells you how many visitors came to your website, pages views and actions completed. Popular packages include Google Analytics and Yahoo Web analytics.
  • Usability research tells you what users do on a site, using tools like click tracking and session recordings. It can help you understand the user journey and where attention is focused on pages, thus identifying where users drop off the page and conversions are lost.
  • Landing page optimisation (the page users arrive at after they have clicked on an ad) identifies how to increase conversions. A/B testing and multi-variant testing (MVT) identify the optimum page layout and text elements by testing hundreds of different possibilities.
  • Conversion attribution helps you discover which channels, either on or offline, are the most successful at driving true return, meaning you know where to re-allocate or cut budget in future.

Alex Hoye is CEO of digital marketing agency Latitude.
Email: [email protected]
www.latitudegroup.com

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Replies (4)

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By nigel.legg
29th Apr 2009 09:27

Clear & Concise.
Good post - clear and concise. Tracking or monitoring, whether you use Radian6 or any other system, is an essential part of any social media activity, as without it you will not be able to make any measurements, and therefore will not be able to calculate the return on investment.

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By davidalston
28th Apr 2009 03:15

Thanks
Great summary post Alex. Not only does your advice talk to the accounting field but others as well. And we appreciate the Radian6 shout out as well.

Cheers
David

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By SumitAgarwal
15th May 2016 18:23

This is really informative post. but let us discuss with practicle solutions. I do read lot of similar posts. Please have a look at my website http://www.dnsaccountingservices.co.uk/ and suggest me practicle solution.

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By Nicassid
06th Jun 2016 18:46

Digital/inbound a "must have" in any marketing strategy today, plain and simple. Awesome points here- any accountant should be able to get loads of mileage out of this guide. Torchlite wrote a similar piece if you want to source more info. Check it out: http://torchlite.com/digital-marketing-for-accountants-where-to-start/

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