Brian O'Connell, President
It’s not easy running an accounting business. You need to manage a lot more than your clients’ books – from human resources to operations to IT.
Chief among these “extracurricular activities” is marketing. You really do need to pay attention to marketing. After all, if you don’t market your services, you won’t have many clients.
But marketing is a big field. There are lots of ways to promote your business, all of which take up plenty of your time. How do you manage them all when you also need to focus on client work?
The answer: Focus on your website, and just use the other marketing streams to pull prospects to your site.
Your CPA website should be your marketing hub, and all other forms of marketing – ads, referrals, direct mail, and so on – should be treated as spokes on the wheel.
It may seem like a small detail, but when you shift your thinking this way, you focus your time and energy and make the most of each marketing stream.
Which means more of what your marketing is all about: getting new clients.
5 Spokes of the Marketing Wheel
Your marketing wheel: your website is the hub, and the spokes are your additional marketing efforts.
Think of all your marketing efforts as a wheel. The wheel’s hub is your website, and it has 5 spokes, which represent the 5 main areas of marketing.
Social Media
It’s easy to get distracted by social media. But remember the end goal of marketing: to draw in new clients, not to make friends or post clever status updates.
Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts should serve to funnel people back to your website, where the work of “conversion” happens (converting them from a prospect to a client).
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a popular topic these days. Experts say that delivering messages straight to the inbox is the best way to get someone’s attention.
But don’t forget that an email message doesn’t contain a signup form – you still need folks to go to your site and actually become a new client. So emails need to pull the reader back to your website.
The emailed newsletter that sends automatically from your CPA Site Solutions website links readers back to your site. Custom email messages should do the same. To review how to send a custom message, with links to your site, see this Help file.
SEO/SEM
Search listings are called the “new Yellow Pages.” Put simply, if you want people to find you online, you MUST place well with the search engines.
If you search for an accountant in your area on Google and Bing and your URL doesn’t show up on the first page, you might need SEO (search engine optimization) services. Check out our Local SEO package.
SEM services – pay-per-click ads – are included in our Platinum service. If you want to focus your advertising dollars on targeted ads for folks who are actively looking for your service, take a look at our SEM package to see if it’s right for you.
Offline Marketing Streams
Offline marketing options include:
- Direct mail
- Print advertisements
- Radio and TV advertisements
Each of these areas should include a mention of your website. You may pique people’s interest with a postcard in the mail or a 30-second ad on the radio… but to actually “make the sale,” you need to give them a website address so they can visit your pages and get comfortable with you.
Referrals
Another very important offline stream is word-of-mouth referrals. Again, if a client recommends you to a friend, they’ll give your web address – not a memorized phone number. (As long as they give your name, the prospect will be able to find you in a Google search.)
Your Website Is the Hub
Your website is the heart of your marketing – the place where the conversion actually happens.
Why is that?
Quite simply, for someone to convert from a prospect to a client, they must become familiar with who you are – as a person, and as a professional. It’s just part of our psychological makeup – the need to gain a certain amount of trust before entering into a transaction with another individual.
Your website should answer these questions:
- How professional are you?
- What do you look like?
- What specific services do you offer?
- Are you an expert in your field?
If people get satisfactory answers, they become comfortable enough to take the plunge and sign up with you. And THAT is the ultimate goal of all your marketing.
Coordinate – Save Time and Effort
Don’t spread yourself too thin among every kind of marketing campaign.
Establish your website as the foundation of all your marketing efforts – use other marketing tactics to pull prospects to your site – and then enjoy the boost in your client base.
A professional, fully loaded website from CPA Site Solutions is designed to do the heavy lifting of turning prospects into clients. To get a 60-day free trial, sign up today.
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