Accountants & Bookkeepers - 3 Steps To Choosing Your Marketing Channels
Accountants and Bookkeepers don't have a lot of time for marketing.
That's exactly why you need to choose your marketing channels wisely and not dilly-dally about with marketing that doesn't add value to your business.
It comes down to ROI.
Nothing beats good solid return on investment. True marketing is setting goals, choosing the channels you want to focus on, measuring your ROI for each of your marketing efforts, and continuing to pursue the channels that are yielding results for your business.
1. Setting Goals
First up you need to decide what you want to achieve. Set a marketing goal. Realistic, but a slight stretch. These will normally fall under new client lead generation or up-selling to existing clients.
If you don't currently have any leads coming in from your online marketing efforts, then perhaps 3 leads per month is your first goal.
2. Choose your Channels
Where are these leads coming from? Your website contact page? From direct messages through social media channels? Radio campaigns that push traffic to your website/ landing page? Email marketing campaigns? Direct mail (letterbox) campaigns?
A few tips:
- To start with, we recommend choosing only 3 channels to focus on. Choose them based on where your customers are and how they like to be contacted. This means not committing to every social media channel under the sun!! Learn about your chosen channels, and start out by running low-cost campaigns to test your efforts.
- Start with channels that you and your team are passionate about and have the time/capacity to follow through on.
3. ROI
How do you know which channels worked? If you do marketing like most business owners, you don't. Taking shortcuts doesn't help in the long run. When creating your campaign, think of the questions that you need to answer. (e.g. at which page did my visitors leave my website? or, how many phone calls from new leads did my website generate?).
For each channel, you should know exactly how far along the conversion process each visitor got to becoming a lead. Once you know the numbers, you can fix the parts of your conversion process that aren't working (e.g. does everyone leave your website from your pricing page?).
If the results aren't where they should be you may need to cut your losses and focus on a different channel. Rinse and repeat until you are able to settle on a few channels which deliver results!
Be sure to plan your online marketing investment and strategy as part of your overall marketing budget and strategy.
When done right, online marketing has the potential to give you a great return on your investment. If you're not sure how your online marketing measures up, feel free to contact us for a chat.