Surefire Local can help your accounting firm grow by making it easier to market your firm online. Our next-level marketing platform is designed to help you attract more high value clients through data-driven marketing strategies that maximize your budget. Here are some ways to know if your marketing is working or not and how our full-scope marketing platform can help you streamline your digital marketing efforts.
ROI Made Simple
One of the most important figures to monitor and analyze in your digital marketing strategy is your Return On Investment (ROI). Your ROI is how much revenue you’re getting back for the amount of money you spend on marketing and advertising. If you’re not getting a good ROI out of a marketing initiative, you should dial it back and put those dollars somewhere else. But you can’t do this if you’re not tracking your investments and their returns.
Accounting firms should invest their marketing budget wisely to make the most out of every dollar, especially small firms or solo personal accountants. By tracking your returns, you can quickly determine which initiatives aren’t generating enough ROI. You can divert funds away from poorly performing campaigns to campaigns that generate a better response from your target audience in order to make a profit.
The Importance of Tracking Your Entire Digital Footprint
Effectively monitoring your ROI means you need to manage your online presence everywhere. A good digital marketing strategy includes multiple initiatives that give your brand a bigger reach across the most widely used platforms. These marketing strategies include but are not limited to:
- Social media marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Paid ads
- Referral and affiliate marketing
- Content marketing
- Mobile marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Video marketing
- User-Generated Content (UGC)
It’s critical to ensure that your brand is consistent across your entire digital footprint. You should have a strong understanding of which platforms your business appears and regularly monitor your visibility to identify poorly performing campaigns and correct erroneous information.
Accurately Tracking Accounting ROI Requires Skill and Software
Accurately tracking and analyzing your digital marketing ROI can be complex with multiple platforms, channels, and profiles for your accounting business. As you grow your digital footprint and cultivate a viable online presence, it will become increasingly difficult to oversee all of your marketing initiatives together.
Managing your campaigns requires you to have knowledge of high-value keywords, SEO best practices, social media marketing strategies, landing page formats, and much more. Few accountants have proficient enough digital marketing skills to make their firm successful online, but working with a marketing software company can make this much easier.
Challenges Accounting Marketers Face In Today’s Digital Landscape
With multiple marketing strategies and different channels, it can be difficult for small accounting firms to obtain a clear picture of their marketing ROI. The buyer’s journey has also become more complicated, from the way that people now search for information to the increase in customer service demands.
This puts accounting firms in a difficult position where they have more channels than they can effectively manage and don’t know what steps to take next. It can also be challenging to understand what a good return on your investments is considering your industry, the goals of your firm, and the marketing strategies you use.
How to Improve Your Accounting Marketing ROI
Step 1: Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are performance measurements that can be used to determine if a business has reached its marketing goals. KPIs are calculable points of reference that allow businesses to determine if a campaign has or has not reached its desired outcome. Examples of KPIs include new sales or leads, increased website traffic, and higher profits. Identify KPIs that correspond to your goals for each marketing initiative you launch.
Step 2: Utilize Multiple Marketing Channels
It’s difficult to successfully generate brand awareness online with just one or two profiles. Your accounting firm should have a presence on multiple platforms, particularly those that are the most widely used and those that are key for your industry.
For example, you don’t want just a Facebook business profile. Your brand should also have a presence on website directories, business listings, and customer review sites.
Step 3: Test and Monitor Everything
Split testing is the process of testing two or more versions of a marketing campaign to determine which version resonates better with your target audience. Split testing is most common in email marketing, digital ads, and landing page conversion, but the concept can also be utilized elsewhere in your marketing initiatives.
You should test everything about your campaigns from the headlines to the font styles to the imagery. This provides you with data about what users are and aren’t clicking on, which is critical when making decisions about your upcoming marketing endeavors.
Step 4: Take Accurate Measurements
Testing your marketing content doesn’t amount to much if you’re not measuring the results of your campaigns. Having the right tools on board can make collecting this data less stressful and more cost-effective for your accounting firm. This allows you to streamline the focus of your marketing efforts on the channels and ads that are generating the most revenue. You won’t have to pay as much attention to the metrics that aren’t doing anything measurable for your company.
Step 5: Develop a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy
In order to get meaningful data about whether or not a particular marketing strategy works, you need to employ the strategy for a sensible period of time before switching to something else. It can be tempting to give up on a marketing strategy that looks like it’s failing, but if you’re switching your marketing strategy at every obstacle, you’ll never be able to get enough data to know what actually does or doesn’t work.
Decide how long you’ll run a marketing campaign and commit to that time frame. You can pull campaigns that aren’t giving you much ROI but remember that even campaigns that don’t do as well as you’d hoped can still give you useful data about your target audience.
Tips For Effectively Tracking Your ROI
Use Surefire Local’s Innovative ROI Dashboard
The Surefire Local marketing platform offers a one-stop-shop for near-real-time data on your leads, customer reviews, brand visibility, and other performance indicators. The application also allows you to easily find the source of new leads from your ads or website, offering you more insight and control over your advertising budget.
The Home tab of the application provides you with clear, easy-to-understand insights about how many leads your content has generated in a specific time period and how that stacks up against your past performance. You can also monitor your email campaigns and track metrics like clicks and open rates without the need for additional tools.
Optimize Your Google Tools
The Surefire Local platform aggregates data from Google Analytics, Google Business profile, and Google Ads into a single tool that allows you to quickly view critical metrics about your business. You can see how easy it is for potential customers to find you using Google Search and learn how leads find your business through social media, paid ads, organic traffic, email, and other marketing initiatives.
Our tool allows you to analyze the behavior of leads after visiting your Google Business profile, which helps you identify opportunities for changes that can increase engagement and conversions. You can track the performance of all your ad campaigns in one place so you can make important decisions about your firm’s marketing strategies.
Manage Your Website and Social Media Content
The Surefire Local platform also allows accounting firms to manage the content creation process from the application from start to finish. Streamline your content marketing initiatives by writing and publishing relevant website content in-app. You can also manage your social media marketing efforts so you don’t have to log into each individual site to post to that channel.
Getting engagement updates and posting to your social profiles is easy to do right in the Surefire Local platform.
Keep Your Business Information Up-to-Date
Your accounting firm needs to cultivate a trustworthy online reputation with fresh customer reviews every month. It’s also important to respond meaningfully to each review, even if it’s bad. Our platform allows you to manage all of your user reviews from places like Facebook, Yelp, and Google all in one application. Use the Surefire Local marketing platform to keep your firm’s contact information updated so you can continue to attract new customers.
Surefire Local Makes Accounting Marketing ROI Simple
Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software offers accounting businesses an easy-to-use platform to monitor their ROI and grow their companies on Mac, PC, Androids, iPhones, and tablets. See for yourself how our software makes effective online marketing easier than ever before. Request a demo of our software today.
