Marketing can be expensive and frustrating but there are ways to boost your profile for free, with the investment of a little time.
For instance, is your firm present on social media? Does it have an up-to-date Google My Business listing? Are you soliciting client reviews?
Essential but often overlooked, these are important parts of your marketing strategy and they aren’t as stressful as you might think.
What are the benefits of digital networking?
Digital marketing is all about making your firm visible to the clients you want to connect with, whether that’s with email marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO) or pay-per-click advertising. Without such efforts, you’re theoretically invisible to your ideal clients.
Over the past decade, digital networking has become more and more important for businesses and their marketing.
The figures speak for themselves. An industry report by Social Media Examiner on the benefits of social media marketing found:
- 88% of marketing professionals say social media marketing increased their business exposure
- 79% say they experienced increased traffic
- 69% saw a significant uplift in lead generation
- 60% saw improved sales after social media marketing.
With a collection of completely free platforms offering such benefits, can you really afford to not take advantage of social media?
But why exactly can social media result in more exposure, leads and clients?
First, social media can be hugely beneficial for your brand awareness, especially if you’re consistently active on social media. Your firm will stand out from your competitors who aren’t on social media, grabbing the attention of potential leads.
Social media is also a great place to share any content that you might have created for your website, including your blog. These in turn can direct people back to your website.
Original social media posts are good for fostering a relationship between yourself and your followers. They don’t all have to be curt and professional discussions – genuine human interactions can be good for your brand too.
As you get more people viewing, liking and commenting on your posts, more and more people will be directed to your social media page.
Search engines take this into account when ranking search results, so a popular and active social media page can directly feed the growth of your website.
What platforms should I be on?
Careful selection of social media platforms is key. Not only does quality tend to be better than quantity in marketing, but you might end up looking unprofessional if you’ve got a bunch of inactive social media pages.
Luckily for businesses, certain platforms tend to be better suited to their needs than others.
Facebook, for instance, is the go-to platform for many businesses as one of the best-known social media websites out there. With a huge audience at your fingertips, it feels like it was designed for great customer interaction.
While ads can take up a larger-than-ideal portion of your budget, you can target them to a significant degree, by your ideal client’s age, location, interests and many more characteristics.
What’s more, once you get into the swing of consistently uploading quality content, you’ll start drawing in a crowd. Combine this with Facebook’s powerful analytics tools to see which areas you could improve on, and the free platform could become a valuable asset for your firm.
For us at Capium, though, LinkedIn is perfect for accountancy firms. Designed as a platform to cultivate professional links and relationships, it’s ideal to find those business owners who need your services, while offering many of the features platforms like Facebook include.
Unique to the platform, however, is how it’s perfect for networking with other accountants, trade bodies and associations that you can benefit from a partnership with.
You could guest blog for them, run workshops together or just keep each other as references for specialist tasks that your firms aren’t suited for. Whatever you do, partnerships are a great way to find new clients.
Top tip: get on Google My Business
We’ve mentioned SEO, which is all about getting you to the top of your local search engine results pages for keywords and phrases that your ideal client might be searching for. As Google is the most popular search engine, you need a tool that can boost your visibility.
Fortunately, Google offers its free-to-use Google My Business (GMB) feature to easily monitor your online presence.
You’ll have seen other businesses GMB listings if you’ve ever googled something like ‘Italian restaurant near me’ or ‘local gym’ – the businesses that appear at the top of the results with their address, phone number, customer reviews, location on Google Maps among a wealth of other information have a strong GMB rating.
This is how many people search for services that are local to them, offering a perfect way to network with the huge client base beyond your firm’s doors.
Reach out to us on 02033225578 or by sending us a message to discuss digital networking.
