INTERNET MARKETING BIBLE FOR ACCOUNTANTS
THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO USING SOCIAL MEDIA AND ONLINE ADVERTISING INCLUDING FACEBOOK, TWITTER, GOOGLE AND LINKEDIN FOR CPAS AND ACCOUNTING FIRMS
BY NICK PENDRELL
Copyright 2012 Nick Pendrell
Published by Nick Pendrell at Smashwords
Discover more titles by Nick Pendrell at Smashwords.com
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
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2. PREPARATIONS FOR STARTING YOUR CAMPAIGN
6. GOOGLE+ AND OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS
7. SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATION TOOLS
8. BUILDING OR IMPROVING YOUR WEBSITE
9. TESTING AND ANALYZING YOUR SITE
11. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
1. INTRODUCTION
Why do you need a book on internet marketing?
If your practice is currently doing just fine – you have enough existing clients and a regular pipeline coming through from referrals that you have no need of any more and you’re not currently advertising, then you don’t need one. Just because everyone else is jumping on the social media and internet marketing bandwagons doesn’t mean that you need to as well just to follow the crowd.
Creating and running an internet marketing and social media campaign is going to cost you a fair bit of time and effort, plus some money as well. So if you don’t need to make that investment – don’t make it.
But if you are currently spending good money each month on advertising and want to see a better return – you need to read a book on internet marketing. If you need to reach more prospects and turn those prospects into paying clients who stay with you longer – you need to read a book on internet marketing.
Already 50% of small and medium-sized businesses have a presence on social media such as Facebook and Twitter and a large proportion of the remaining 50% who don’t are planning on having one in the next 12 months. According to research group BIA/Kelsey, 25.4% of all local business marketing budgets in the US will be spent upon digital advertising and social media by 2015, worth $37.9 billion. As accounting is not the most marketing orientated from all the different categories of small and medium-sized businesses, maybe your local competitors are not actively using the Internet to market their businesses. Yet. But, if and when they do (and if the BIA/Kelsey figures are correct, it’s more a question of ‘when’) their campaigns will give them a tremendous advantage over those who are either not running any marketing activities or who are still spending their promotional budgets on ‘old media’ such as newspaper advertising, the Yellow Pages, local radio advertising, etc., where businesses get a much lower return on investment than they will see on even the most disastrous internet marketing campaign.
The Internet has changed the world of marketing forever. The large multinationals were the first types of business to harness its power. However, over the past few years, it is small and medium-sized businesses that have been most active in terms of taking more and more of their promotional activities online.
Why do you need this book on internet marketing?
When it comes to internet marketing, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. This book is not some generic internet marketing book that has simply had the word ‘accountant’ copied and pasted on every page to make it seem relevant. It has been written from the ground up with just accountants in mind, focusing on their unique requirements – their problems and their opportunities.
By way of example, let’s compare and contrast two small businesses:
John Smith, ACCA is a newly-qualified Chartered Accountant living in the small town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK.
Coats4Goats is a one-man-band company selling luxury fashion coats for pet goats, which is based in San Francisco, USA.
These two businesses’ internet marketing requirements are almost exact opposites.
In particular:
Location vs. Market Size
John Smith’s market is nearly everyone who owns a local business in a small geographical area – the town of Grantham and perhaps a twenty mile radius. Any effort or money he invests in attracting the attention of anyone outside his geographical area is probably wasted.
Coats4Goats’ market is a tiny proportion of clients in a vast geographical area (they ship all over the world). Any effort or money they invest in attracting the attention of anyone who is not passionate about their pet goats is probably wasted.
Needs vs. Wants
John Smith’s clients need his services, even if they may not want them. His potential clients know what accountants are, why they need them and so will need to go to the effort of hunting for one if they don’t know of any.
Coats4Goats’ clients don’t need their services, but they might want them. Their potential clients probably don’t even realize that someone in the world is making designer coats for their pet goats and so will not be actively searching for them. Therefore, Coats4Goats needs to look for websites that pet goat owners will visit and tell them why they should use the company’s services.
Required Results
John Smith’s desired result from his internet marketing is a phone call or an email from a potential client asking for a meeting or for more information on the services which he provides.
Coats4Goats desired result from their internet marketing is for a potential customer to come to their website and order a coat for their goat online.
Relationships vs. Quick Sales
John Smith realizes that not every business in his local area is in the market for his services today – most of them will already have accountants. His internet marketing activities need to be focused on the long term so that, one day, when a company is ready to change its accounting firm, he is the first person they think of.
Coats4Goats’ main customers will be impulse buyers. Their products are relatively inexpensive and not at all essential. They need to capture a client’s interest quickly and get them to buy. If a potential client is not ready to buy their products today, they are not much more likely to be interested in buying them three years from now.
Most books you will see on the subject of internet marketing for small businesses either can’t tell the difference between these two types of clients, or else they assume that they all have the same needs as Coats4Goats rather than John Smith. So these books will go on at great length about costly or time-consuming internet marketing methods which would just be a waste of time and money for John Smith.
Blogging, Vlogging, YouTube channels, Podcasts, etc. – these activities are all tricky to understand for beginners, time-consuming to master or expensive to hire someone else to do. For Coats4Goats, the investment will probably be worth it because they need to attract attention from a tiny percentage of the total internet audience (i.e. pet goat owners) who are unaware that their products exist at all. For John Smith though, even if he was to spend a lot of effort on such activities, 99.9% of his hard work would be wasted because those people who did see his marketing activities would be from outside his local area and so would be unable to use his services anyway.
This book is not a general internet marketing guide for all small businesses. It is specifically written for accountants so that you can spend the minimum amount of time, effort and money attracting targeted new clients in your local area and keeping existing ones happy. It avoids any talk of marketing methods which are going to be irrelevant to your needs or will require too much investment for too little reward.
Internet Marketing has been Evolving Rapidly
If you have a book on internet marketing which was written before 2008, then throw it away – it’s out of date and next to useless now.
Chances are that you have a website already. For a business of any size, not having a website a decade ago was tantamount to saying that you were clueless, a Luddite or that you’d just crawled out from under a rock.
“It’s the 21st Century – you’ve got to have a website,” was the common wisdom – especially from web designers who grew rich from building websites for butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, whether it brought their clients any benefit or not.
So a vast amount of local businesses paid up to get themselves a website – with as many bells and whistles as the web designer could convince them that they needed.
And then what happened once their all-singing, all-dancing websites were live? In many cases, hardly anyone stopped by to visit it. So maybe then they started to put their web addresses in all their advertising trying to get people to stop by.
For Coats4Goats, this would make sense. After all, Coats4Goats’ website is their shop front – so all of their marketing activity needs to be aimed at getting people to visit their site. But John Smith isn’t going to make any more money simply by having potential clients visit his website. He only makes money after meeting with a client. So all John Smith’s website is to him is a marketing tool. But now people are telling him that he has to spend more money or time and effort on marketing his marketing tools?
Something is definitely wrong with this picture.
In the past, too few local business owners have asked themselves the question, “But what do I actually need a website for?”
A major problem with most websites is that they are a ‘passive’ means of advertising as opposed to an ‘active’ means of advertising such as TV and radio. These ‘active’ means of advertising reach potential clients’ eyeballs and ears respectively whether they want to see or hear it or not. ‘Passive’ advertising like websites only work when people have chosen to track down this information in the first place.
If your website is simply somewhere online where people can find the basic information about your company – your contact details, your opening hours, your areas of expertise, etc., then your website will still be of use. But these days, there are plenty of ways of producing or maintaining a highly professional looking web presence either for free or at negligible cost.
While having a simple website is still a major element of any internet marketing campaign, more useful tools for reaching out and actively seeking new prospects are networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – collectively known as ‘social media’. Social media is not only a free promotional tool, but it is also a great leveler – in ten minutes, your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages can look as good as those of the huge multinational corporations. They also give you a place to put all the vital information about your business that potential clients might need to know. If used correctly, they can ‘actively’ advertise your practice as would be the case were you to use such methods as TV or radio advertising.
Social Media is Local Media
The stunning rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn over the past couple of years has dramatically changed the landscape for internet marketing. Ironically though, it seems as if those businesses who have the most to gain from using social media are the last ones to actively use these methods.
I have to smile when I see big brands for everyday objects such as fabric softeners or detergents desperately urging people to ‘Like’ them on Facebook. Do people actually ‘Like’ their detergent in a literal sense? Does anyone want to interact socially with a brand of fabric softener (or, more accurately, the intern whose job it is to post some random twaddle a couple of times each day because ‘everyone’s on Facebook these days’?) No, perhaps some people can be bribed into ‘Liking’ these brand names from faceless multinationals in return for receiving a benefit such as discounts or entry into sweepstakes, but no one’s going to be inviting their favorite brand of mouthwash to their birthday party any time soon.
If you have a small, local business, however, then you are your ‘brand’ – a living, breathing human being who all your clients are probably going to know personally. Your current clients really do ‘Like’ you in a literal way, and your future clients will need to do so as well because, if they actively ‘Dislike’ you, then they are going to take their business to one of your competitors who they ‘Like’ more.
Social networks were originally designed solely for the purpose of ‘Friends’ (or at least ‘Acquaintances’) to interact with one another – not for big brands to bore the pants off people. Maybe you already have a Facebook account. If so, you’re already social and you probably have many of your existing clients as ‘Friends’ there. Using social media for marketing purposes is not so different from using it just to keep in touch with your close friends. The basics are the same - just the focus of your activities there will be different.
Social Media is Cheap (or Even Free) Media
How much are you spending on advertising and marketing for your business at the moment? Chances are that it is a not insignificant amount when even the tiniest ad in the cheapest local newspapers will cost a minimum of $100/£60. And that’s for one tiny ad, for one week, surrounded by the clutter of all the other advertising in the newspaper. The high prices of local newspaper advertising continue despite the fact that less and less people are reading local newspapers as more and more people turn to the Internet to get their news. Advertising revenues for local newspapers across the world are nose-diving as more and more people realize that they are spending too much money there for too little return.
In comparison, how much money did it cost you to set up your Facebook account? Absolutely nothing, of course, and that’s how much it is going to cost you to employ most of the marketing techniques in this book. In the majority of cases, your only investment will be a little time and imagination.
Social Media is for creating Long-Term Relationships
Internet marketing expert, Seth Godin, had an enormous amount of impact on the field with his 1999 book, ‘Permission Marketing’, the subtitle of which is ‘Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers’. The main audience for this book was major brands who Seth Godin predicted would need to change the way they marketed their products to consumers. ‘Interruption marketing’ such as TV and radio, where the consumer has no choice but to be bludgeoned by advertising methods are becoming less important as changes in technology enable people to filter out these messages. Instead, he argued that marketers would need to start a relationship with customers so that they actually chose to receive promotional messages from them.
For accountants, this is not such a paradigm shift – after all it’s this softly, softly approach that sales people have been using since the early days of marketing in order to sell their services. Now accountants finally have a promotional vehicle which works in exactly the same way as their sales process. Facebook is all about making friends and getting closer to them. As a result, it is a perfect tool for taking these new friends just one more step towards becoming paying clients.
Who is this book for?
The title of the book is a major giveaway here – it’s for practicing accountants who would like to find new clients, retain their existing clients and increase the amount of business that they get from existing clients through the use of simple and effective internet marketing activities. These methods are all highly cost-efficient, so should see readers’ total marketing expenditure coming down as they use it to replace much of their current promotional activities.
Currently, around 75% of all working adults in the English-speaking world have a Facebook account. I am assuming here that you are one of these, or at least you are relatively computer literate. I am not going to waste your time and insult your intelligence by explaining what a ‘mouse’ is and how to connect to this wonderful new invention called ‘the Internet’. If you do need this explaining to you, then may I suggest that you read a more basic book first and then come back to this one after you’ve finished it!
At the same time though, I am going to assume that you are something of a novice when it comes to internet marketing. I am not going to try and show you how clever I am by trying to use every single buzzword and piece of jargon that I’ve heard. I will hold your hand through the whole process, taking you through each one in easy-to-follow steps. Most of the steps here are simple – no more complicated than setting up a personal Facebook page. Setting up a good website is not quite such a simple matter, however. You might find that you need a friend who knows a little about websites or to hire a professional to help you set one up to start with. Once it is up and running though, you should be able to handle everything yourself from there on.
All of the sites which I talk about in this book are from large companies whose sites have detailed ‘Help’ sections and often support forums where you can ask questions and receive answers from other users. So, if you get stuck anywhere, just ask. It’s also worth typing your question directly into Google’s search engine. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find that someone has asked the question before somewhere on the Internet and someone else has already answered it.
I am assuming that you are already working 40 hours a week or more on the day-to-day running of your practice a so you don’t have masses of spare time available to invest in your marketing. Instead, you just want simple and straightforward solutions that will get you the best results for the minimum amount of time and effort.
What is contained in this book?
Although this book comes bound in one volume, it’s more like a complete library of over a dozen different titles, each of them giving you a comprehensive guide to one particular aspect of internet marketing and social media. Think of it as ‘Facebook for Accountants Made Simple’, ‘Twitter for Accountants Made Simple’, ‘AdWords for Accountants Made Simple’, etc.
This book represents the sum of my knowledge gained over 15 years of being involved in internet marketing, plus reading well over 100 books on the subject. In order to keep the size down to a realistic number of pages, I have cut out all of the padding and everything that it not completely relevant to the needs of accountants. If the advice in any of the chapters is not sufficiently detailed for you, there is always the opportunity to buy a book dedicated to that particular subject to learn more about it. In most cases, however, you should find that, unless your practice is so large that it has its own dedicated marketing department, you only need to know the basics. You can save the highly advanced techniques for the Big 4 Accounting Firms who can afford to hire specialists in each different area.
How to use this book
Having bought this book, you’re probably ready to rush off and start your internet marketing campaign immediately. That’s great and, if you want to start putting your campaign together as you read the book one page at a time, there’s nothing that I can do to stop you.
However, my recommendation is that, instead of this approach, it will be better for you to have a quick read of the book from cover to cover first – just a quick scan through will do. Don’t worry about which click does what at this stage. Once you have gone through the book once, go back and follow each chapter, section by section, putting the theory into practice. Maybe you want to use the table of contents at the start of this book as your ‘To Do’ list. Take a highlighter and cross off each section as you finish it to keep track of your progress.
The reason why I suggest reading through the entire book first is because it provides a ‘holistic’ process to internet marketing – which is a pretentious way of saying that all of the pieces fit together like a jigsaw. Having an idea as to what the ‘big picture’ that you’re aiming for is going to look like will help you to understand how the individual elements fit together.
There are no pictures in this book. If there were, then it would be at least twice the size (and twice the price). Additionally, the major sites featured in this book make minor changes to their layouts so often that the pictures in the book would soon look different to those that you would be seeing on your computer. Therefore, the best way to work through each exercise is by having the book open next to your computer so that you can keep referring back to it as you proceed step-by-step.
Hopefully it shouldn’t take you long to have a quick scan through each of the chapters before you read each of them in detail. I hate writing padding as much as you hate reading it and so you will only find solid and practical advice in this book without the filler that a lot of writers add in to make just a little useful information seem more impressive.
2. PREPARATIONS FOR STARTING YOUR CAMPAIGN
As part of your promotional strategy, you’re going to be setting up accounts and profiles on a number of different social media sites. These profiles are all going to need the same type of materials in almost every case – logos, photos, a good description of your business, email addresses of your existing contacts, etc. Rather than having to keep stopping and restarting the process, which is going to ruin your train of thought, it will save a lot of time if you prepare all of the materials that you are going to need before you start work on the sites. Once you have everything prepared and filed away in a special ‘Marketing’ folder, you’ll be able to speed through setting up each of the required profiles in a flurry of copying, pasting and uploading.
So here’s what you need to prepare:
Get Your House in Order First
Social media is viral media, where messages spread through the Internet like a virus spreads through the population. Social media marketing is all about getting your satisfied clients to act as ambassadors or a sales force for your company. Used effectively, it can have phenomenal results (as can be seen from the meteoric growth of Facebook, which grew from one person to over 800 million in a period of seven years).
If you are offering an excellent service to your clients, they should be happy to start recommending you to their friends and contacts. This is incredibly powerful marketing because people have grown cynical of advertising hype. But they still trust their friends’ advice.
Let’s say you needed a plumber in a hurry. Whose recommendation would you trust more – a good friend of yours who says that the plumber they hired last year did an excellent job or an ad in the Yellow Pages where a plumber claimed to be reliable and inexpensive?
Reviews on the Internet have changed the way that many people choose which businesses to work with. Two decades ago, when booking a vacation, buyers had no choice but to go into a travel agency and trust that the hotel they were going to stay in offered a good service. Today, millions of people check sites such as tripadvisor.com in advance to ensure that they aren’t going to be getting any nasty surprises.
The ability to check on virtually any business on the Internet is leading to a paradigm shift in the relationship between client and service provider. The saying that ‘the customer is king’ has been around for generations, but today this really is the case. It means that scam artists like timeshare salesmen from the mid-nineties simply aren’t able to hoodwink potential clients in the same way anymore. This new ‘word of mouse’ as it is sometimes referred to today, rewards businesses which do offer a good service through their past customers acting as an unpaid team of evangelical salespeople.
Maybe you have seen signs in some restaurants saying, ‘If you had a good meal, tell your friends; if you had a bad meal, tell us’. It is important in the ‘Internet Age’ that every business adopts a similar pro-consumer attitude, because it is now easy for dissatisfied customers to air their grievances in public. As a look through the national newspapers will confirm, bad news sells more papers than good news.
The bottom line is that everything that you will read in this book could actually prove to be detrimental to your practice if you are not offering a good service to your clients. Your viral marketing campaign could end up being the virtual equivalent of Ebola in this case, killing it off rapidly as disgruntled former clients use the Internet to tell your potential new customers how they were unhappy with your service.
While you should never allow customers to blackmail you with the threat of bad reviews, if they do have genuine grievances, it is a wise investment to do whatever you can to resolve the issues to their satisfaction. Any expenses incurred in the process will usually end up being minor compared to the loss of business that you can expect if everyone checking you online reads their complaint. I cover the subject of unhappy clients and what to do about them in more detail in chapter 12.
So, before you embark on a social media campaign, ask yourself if your past and current clients are genuinely happy with you and your service. If not, then it will be better to put your marketing plans on hold for a while and first concentrate on improving the service you offer your existing clients.
Ready Your Database
Unless you are reading this book because you are just starting a new practice, you will have existing clients. Even if you already have a strong personal relationship with these clients, there are good reasons as to why you should add them to your online marketing activities:
(a) There is always the possibility of selling more of your services to existing clients. Research has shown that it costs a minimum of five times as much to find a new client as it does to sell more to existing clients.
(b) Email and other online marketing activities allow you to keep in better contact with your existing clients. It takes a lot less time to email 100 clients to inform them about your new activities in a newsletter than it would do to call each of them individually or to speak with them next time they stop at your office.
(c) Your existing clients can kick-start your marketing activities by joining your social networks where they can start the viral process of promoting your practice to a wider audience. As a highly hypothetical example, if you started off with just ten clients today who each referred two friends to you each quarter, and those friends also started referring two new clients to you each quarter and so on, after 12 months you would have 140 new clients. It’s the marketing equivalent of compound interest.
So don’t underestimate the potential of your existing clients in your rush to sign up some new ones. Your existing clients provide an excellent nucleus to kick off your social media campaign with a bang.
Hopefully you already have a computer database containing all of your clients’ contact information. Most email systems come with an inbuilt address book, whether this is one that resides on your computer, such as Outlook Express or Outlook, or the leading online services such as Gmail, Hotmail, etc. It’s well worth getting all of this information up-to-date and adding any other contacts which you may not have included in the past (e.g. from business cards, etc.) before you progress to the next stage. All of the important social media sites have the ability to automatically look through your contacts and invite all of them to join your networks. So, if your database is up-to-date, it is going to be a simple task to launch your online activities.
If you have not been making an effort to capture contact details in the past, then the time to start is now. Every person who emails you should automatically be added to your database. In addition, get into the habit of asking everyone you meet for a business card so that you can take down their email address, even if you normally only communicate by phone. If you meet a useful contact who doesn’t have a business card on them, add their contact information straight into your smartphone if you have one, or jot it down on a piece of paper otherwise.
Don’t be too selective about whose contact information you do and don’t record. When it comes to social media, every contact you make is a useful one. Even if someone who you just met is unlikely to ever have need of your services, they are likely to know someone who will.
Also don’t be too shy about asking everyone you meet to join your social networks or for permission to them a newsletter at some time in the future. If they really aren’t interested, they will just ignore your requests or politely decline.
So, before you race ahead with the rest of this book, take a little time out to make sure that your contact lists are as complete as possible. Also, set aside a little time each month to ensure that any new contacts you’ve made are added into your database and all of your different social networks.
Images at the Ready
As the expression says, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’. This is particularly relevant when it comes to social media where people are used to seeing a lot of images, but only bite-sized pieces of information. As you work your way through the stages of putting your internet marketing strategy into action, you will find that you use the same few images again and again on different sites. So it will save time to get them ready before you get started.
The images that you are going to need often are the following:
A copy of your logo
If you already have a website which features a logo that a designer created, you can copy it and save it to your computer. If you don’t have a website yet but have used a designer to make letterheads, business cards or signs, etc., they should be able to provide you with a copy in JPEG, GIF or PNG format.
If you haven’t already got a logo for your business, now is the time to get one. There are several different sites on the Web where you can make a logo for free, such as www.logomaker.com. The free version should be sufficient for using on the Internet. If you want a logo in high quality for printing though, you need to pay a little extra. Try and come up with a logo that is close to being square-shaped rather than a thin strip, as it will be possible to place this in larger sizes on most websites.
Pictures of yourself
Ideally you should have two different photos – a casual one that represents yourself as a private individual for sites such as Facebook, and a professional one to represent your practice on more professional sites such as LinkedIn. There’s no need to go to a professional photographer to get these photos taken as they will probably look too formal on the more laidback medium of the Web, Instead, just get a friend or family member to take a few shots on a digital camera and select the best ones.
Get into the habit of using the same professional photo on every site. In this way, the photo will become as much a part of your personal ‘brand’ as your logo and will become instantly recognizable to your clients.
Pictures of your office
Many of the location-based sites provide an option for you to upload pictures of your premises. If you have a decent looking office, it is worth uploading these pictures to show that you are a bona fide business with a physical location. It will also help potential clients to find your office. Conversely, if you work from home or your offices don’t look particularly impressive, skip this exercise or else it could do you more harm than good.
Choosing Keywords
As well as using a handful of images over and over again as you set up your internet marketing and social media campaigns, you’re also going to be reusing the same ‘keywords’ too.
‘Keywords’ are the words (or, more usually, phrases consisting of two or more words) that people would use to find your practice if they were searching for your practice online.
How would you find an accounting firm in your area if you were searching for it on Google? Probably the most obvious way to find it would be by searching for ‘accountant’ and ‘yourtown’ and so these should probably be your main keywords.
Without using keywords, much of your marketing efforts are going to be in vain. If you don’t have any of your major keywords in your profiles or descriptions, you will be practically invisible in most cases. Search technology is becoming increasingly clever all the time, but unless you put the fact that ‘John Smith is an accountant in [yourtown]’ into your profiles, the various search engines aren’t going to be able to figure it out.
A quick note at this stage - search engines completely ignore capitalization in search results. So a search for ‘CPA in Yourtown’ produces exactly the same results as ‘cpa in yourtown’. Therefore, whenever I mention keywords in the book, I always list them in lower case.
In chapter 13 on Google AdWords, I show you a tool from Google which you can use to find out accurate information on the best keywords for you to use based upon what users in your area are really searching for. So as not to bog you down at this stage, let me give you a summary here of what I have discovered to be the four most popular keywords for accountants so that you can start off by using these to save time:
accountant
cpa
accounting firm
tax
preparation
Put these four keywords together and maybe your profile could look something like:
Need an accountant in [yourtown] to help with your tax preparation? Contact John Smith, CPA, today for a free consultation.
Note that, for British readers, ‘CPA’ is not such popular search terms in the UK and so there is not much need to add these terms to your profiles. Instead the keyword ‘Chartered Accountant’ is more often searched for.
Once you have chance to use the Google AdWords tool to come up with a list of the actual keywords which are most commonly searched for in your area, you can go back and change the keywords in your profiles if you find they are slightly different. This is another of the great benefits of internet marketing – nothing you do is ever permanent. You can always make changes in a couple of clicks any time you want to make them.
Write Your Copy
So now you know the best keywords for attracting potential clients to your advertising and profiles on the Internet. However, simply attracting eyeballs to look at your messages alone is going to be worthless if there is nothing there to capture their attention when they read it.
The Internet might be the cutting edge of communication technology at the start of the 21st Century, but the basics really haven’t changed that much since Gutenberg invented movable type over 500 years ago. Despite all of the pictures, videos and flashy animations, people spend most of their time on the Internet simply reading – and acting upon what they have read if it captures their interest sufficiently.
This means that you are going to have to write some copy. And it is going to have to be some effective copy too if you want your visitors to take the action that you want them to take.
Effective copywriting is part art and part science. There have been hundreds of books published on the subject and, such is human psychology, even books written on the subject 40 years ago are still (mostly) relevant today. I’m guessing though that you don’t have the time (or the inclination) to read a book or two on the subject of copywriting right now though, so let me give you a quick primer based upon five simple acronyms:
KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid!
People read from screens differently than they do on paper. Despite advancements with screen resolutions, it’s still not as comfortable reading on a monitor (or worse, on the tiny screen of a smartphone) as it is on paper. As a result, people tend to rush through their reading on screen, scanning content rather than lingering on every word. A lot of people simply can’t be bothered to read through long pages of content and will simply click away if they find it looks too much like hard work.
For this reason, ‘less is more’ when it comes to writing online. The quicker you can get your point across, the better. As a result, once you have made your first attempt at writing some content, go through it again. Does every word of every sentence of every paragraph absolutely have to be there to get your point across? If you take some of it out, will it be any less effective in getting people to respond the way you want them to respond? If not, cut it out. Make sure that every single word of content is there for a reason.
Another point to remember is that, ‘White space is your friend’. It’s hard on the eye and difficult to scan dense paragraphs of text. The solution is to cut up your content into a succession of short and punchy paragraphs. Three or four simple sentences per paragraph are usually the maximum that you need to get your point across.
Wherever possible, use bullet points to list individual ideas rather than trying to explain each of them in long rambling literary paragraphs. Lists with bullet points are a lot easier for readers to scan.
AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action
Aida is not only a famous opera – it also describes the process of taking someone from casually coming across your information through to persuading them to do whatever it is that you want them to do:
Attention – With so much choice of alternative destinations on the Internet just a click away, you need to hook readers immediately, usually with a punchy headline.
Copy editors of tabloid newspapers are masters of this black art by coming up with headlines which arouse the readers’ curiosity - intriguing them so that they start reading the article to find out what it’s all about, e.g., “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster” or, “Headless Body in Topless Bar”. Although this might not be relevant for accountants in most circumstances, you will still have a lot more success if you come up with a punchy heading.
Compare the following two headlines:
Effective Tax Planning for Small Business Owners
You Can Reduce Your Next Tax Bill by up to 70%
Both of these articles could cover exactly the same subject, but which of them do you think is going to be most effective in getting people to read further?
Interest – The punchy headline will get readers to start reading (or scanning), but they will soon click away if it takes too long for you to get to the point. Because of this, you need to quickly show them that the article (or profile) is relevant to their interests. Once again, look at how newspaper articles are written. They don’t slowly build up to a climax like in a movie or book. Instead they give you a summary as to what the whole article is about first before then going into detail on the subject.
This is how your copy needs to be written as well. Now that you have excited your readers with the headline, don’t start to bore them with dull background information. Give them even more reasons as to why they are going to want to read right through to the end of the article.
Desire – The majority of your article or advertisement should be devoted to creating desire in the reader to have whatever it is that you are selling. In your case, it could be a reduction in taxes, saving them time, etc. As quickly and concisely as possible, explain to the readers exactly what you can do for them and why you are the best person or company for the job. By the end of your text, your prospects should be ready to do whatever it is that you want them to do.
Action – Too many people writing advertisements finish at the Desire stage, thinking that the prospects will automatically now do whatever you expect them to do now that you have them sufficiently excited. This can be a fatal mistake to make though. Your marketing copy also has to be its own salesman, and every salesman knows that he has to ‘close the deal’ or else all their hard work will have been for nothing.
Ask yourself the question, ‘What do I ideally want the reader to do now?’ Then simply ask them to do it.
Do you want the prospect to pick up the phone to set up a free consultation with you now? Then write:
Call me now on 555-555-5555 to set up your free, no obligation consultation
Or, if you want the readers to fill in a form on your website, give them the link to the relevant page right where the article or advertisement finishes, urging them to ‘Click here now’. Don’t make them hunt around your site to find the relevant contact form. You might know your way around your website like the back of your hand, but your prospect doesn’t. It would be a tragedy if, after all your hard work in selling them on your service, the prospects couldn’t find the right link and so simply gave up in frustration.
WII-FM – What’s In It For Me?
Are you listening to WII-FM? Or are you going ‘we-we’ all the time?
Human beings are naturally rather selfish creatures. Sad as it might be, they don’t care about your cashflow situation, your need to find new clients, or the fact that you promised your spouse a vacation in the Bahamas this winter and you have no idea how you’re going to pay for it. They care only about their problems, their cashflow and how to buy their spouse a winter holiday in the Bahamas.
Bear this vital difference in mind whenever you are writing copy. Always put yourself in the mindframe of the reader rather than staying in your mindframe as the writer. All sales basically boil down to one of two things, either, ‘Find a need and fill it’ or, ‘Find a problem and solve it’.
The magic word when writing copy is ‘You’. This is what the reader of your text wants to hear about – themselves. Not you, the writer – themselves.
This is why it’s a problem if you are going ‘we-we’ all the time.
I just made a random search for a random accounting firm in a random town and this is what I found on their home page:
[Redacted] offers tax, business consulting, accounting, assurance and exit and succession planning services. Our commitment is to help each client achieve their goals and ultimately peace of mind.
[Redacted] founded [Redacted] in 1985. He has extensive experience in partnership taxation, estate and gift tax planning, extensive financial planning and private foundation consulting and administration.
This is not a terrible website, but it’s still all about the writer – not one single mention of ‘you’ – the potential client - and what ‘your’ problem might be. As a rule of thumb, look for a ratio of around two ‘yous’ and yours’ for every one ‘we’, ‘I’, ‘us’, ‘our’, etc.
Don’t be afraid of being too obvious in this – consider asking the readers direct questions:
Are you looking for a larger tax rebate next year? Are you finding that there aren’t enough hours of the day to handle your own payroll? Etc.
For proof that I practice what I preach, take a look at the back cover of this book. Count how many times I used the word ‘you’ in just a few short sentences. Notice how I started off by asking the one question that I thought anyone browsing for this book would be asking themselves when they were reading the copy. Notice how I generated interest (and exclusivity) by turning convention on its head and telling potential buyers who this book was not for. Notice how I created desire with the promise of saving both time and money. All that’s missing is the ‘Action’ part (which the online book store where you probably found the book should have provided with their ‘Add to Basket’ or ‘Buy now with 1-Click’ buttons).
WMT – Which Means That
I remember a sketch from an old comedy show which had the Sales Manager for an electronics company demonstrating a new hi-fi system to his sales force. He proudly showed them the Dolby HX button, the graphic equalizer, the SCART sockets, etc., before asking for any questions. One of the sales guys shouts out, “But what do they all do?” The Sales Manager then struggles to answer the question. He obviously has no clue what they all do.
This is an excellent, if rather extreme, example of the difference between features and benefits. Just because something is blindingly obvious to you (because you work in the business) does not automatically mean that it’s obvious to the person you’re selling to.
This is why the phrase, ‘which means that’ is such a useful one. It’s a great bridge between listing features and benefits.
In the previous example, the Sales Manager should have said, “The hi-fi features Dolby HX, a graphic equalizer and a SCART socket, which means that you get to hear the best, crispest audio, no matter what you are listening to or where you are listening to it.”
To give a more relevant example, don’t just write on your website and in your newsletters that you offer a “complete bookkeeping service”. This doesn’t give your client any answer to WIIFM? Instead write, “We offer a complete bookkeeping service, which means that you just give us copies of all your purchase orders, receipts and invoices and we take care of everything for you so that you’re free to concentrate on running the rest of your business.”
Don’t use ‘which means that’ every time you mention benefits after features though or else your copy will look repetitive and dull. Alternate it with other words or phrases that achieve the same results, e.g. ‘so’, ‘therefore’, ‘as a result’, etc.
MWR – Most Wanted Response
Copywriting is not something that people do for fun – they do it for a purpose. Most people understand this, but they only have a vague idea as to what the purpose is. This can be a fatal mistake, yet probably the vast majority of websites are guilty of it. They write some copy on their home page, but then just leave the visitor to wander around the rest of their site aimlessly. Maybe the visitor will end up doing what you would like them to do; maybe they won’t.
Whenever you are writing copy for any purpose, you should ask yourself the question, “Exactly what do I want the reader to do once they have finished reading?”
The answer to this question is your ‘Most Wanted Response’ and it should also be the ‘A’ for ‘Action’ from the AIDA point. In chapter 8 about designing a website, I suggest that your ‘Most Wanted Response’ is probably going to be to get every new visitor to the site to contact you for a free consultation. Maybe this is the one that you choose as well, or it could be something completely different.
No matter what your Most Wanted Response is, you should always be asking visitors to make it. Ask for it at the bottom of every page. Your visitor might not be ready to sign up after reading just your home page – they might want to look around your site a little more. That’s OK too. No one is going to punish you for asking them to take a particular action.
It is for those visitors who do want to take time to read more about you before making your Most Wanted Response that you need to ask for it on the bottom of every page of your site. You will never know exactly when each of them will be ready to make that commitment for one reason. For another, not everyone coming to your website is going to arrive on the home page first of all.
Although the above is a highly condensed version of how to write effective copy, by following these five simple rules, it should still be enough for you to write better material than 95% of all your potential competitors.
Monthly Deals/Promotional Calendar
By using the methods in this book, you will be able to keep your practice in front of potential clients 365 days per year. When they are in need an accountant, many of those who are part of your social networks will definitely have you at the front of their minds. Your marketing will have much greater impact though if you are able to offer something special and time limited to give them a sense of urgency about getting in contact with you. In addition, an offer which changes regularly will keep your content from getting stale and dull.
So in order to make the most of your internet marketing and social media campaign, you need to come up with a promotional calendar, offering some new incentive, ideally on a monthly basis. This will be the cornerstone of all your online promotional activities.
It’s good to have the first few months of your promotional calendar worked out in advance so you can slot the first of them into your marketing efforts straight away.
So what are some kinds of promotions that you can incorporate into your marketing calendar? Here are just a few examples:
(a) Offer a free guide to potential clients, such as how they can cut their taxes. It doesn’t need to be a massive tome – even ten paragraphs would be sufficient providing that the information is of real benefit to the reader. In fact, they’ll probably prefer information which gets straight down to the nitty-gritty rather than something which requires them to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant rambling.
(b) Hold a free seminar one evening where you can host a question and answer session with potential clients. It doesn’t need to be anything too grandiose or large-scale. In fact, your potential clients will probably appreciate being able to chat in a smaller, more intimate environment.
(c) Offer a discount on your services during your quietest month to try and get people to avoid the last-minute rush.
(d) Offer a free consultation.
Maybe you are a little stumped as to what you can offer here. After all, accounting is mostly business-to-business and the services that you provide does not change by the season. Also, although your services might be very important to your clients, they aren’t going to be as ‘glamorous’ as many other businesses’ products and services are going to be.
In this case, rather than offering a promotion on your own services, consider partnering with other businesses that do have offers which are more ‘glamorous’ than your own. For these purposes, being the provider of business-to-business services is an advantage, because you already have a network of potential promotional partners in place. They’re your clients!
Go through your list of clients and write down all of those that are in the business-to-consumer sector. Restaurants are ideal because they live by their promotions. So are the majority of retailers, plus most other business in the service sector.
Contact all of your potential promotional partners and tell them that you want to run a promotion for a month as part of your online media and internet marketing activities. Ask them if they could provide you with something that you can offer to your network. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something really expensive (although that wouldn’t be bad!). A free meal for two from a restaurant client of yours would be great. But if that’s asking too much, then maybe they could just offer a free dessert with a meal for two, or a retailer could offer a special ‘buy one get one free’ offer on some selected merchandise.
You should make it clear to your potential promotional partner that you are not asking for this as an act of charity from them. Tell them that you will be promoting the offer heavily across all of your social networks and perhaps on your website too and so they will receive free advertising. If you follow all of the ideas in this book, you could be promoting their business to thousands of people – all of them in your local area. This means that they will all be valuable potential customers for your promotional partner too.
If your potential promotional partner is keen on the idea, you can ask for a little more from them as well. Ask them to mention the promotion on all their social media marketing for the month as well. Chances are that, if they are in a more ‘glamorous’ business than you and deal with hundreds or thousands of different consumers each month, their networks will be a lot larger than yours. This additional exposure to a much larger social network could be incredibly valuable for you.
If your potential partner figures this out and realizes how much of a benefit this is going to be to you, they might want more from you in return. In this case, you could offer to split the cost of the promotion between you - the additional exposure will almost certainly be worth it.
I am sure that you will find that most businesses will be glad to make a deal like this with you – it saves them the trouble of having to think of a new promotional idea, after all.
Another potential tool in your promotional toolkit is to obtain some low-cost branded promotional merchandise that you can afford to give away for free as opposed to constantly running sweepstakes where people can win something more valuable. This could be a T-shirt or, better still, something related to your profession, such as a branded calculator or something related to money. If you make a Google search under ‘promotional gifts accountants’, you will find that some companies offer tailor-made items, such as blocks of chocolate in the shape of a 1040 form.
The advantage of making such offers online is that the recipient will need to visit your office to collect them. This gives you the opportunity to try and sell to them in a much more personal way than simply sending them an email. These are the types of promotion that will set you apart from your competitors – putting a human face to a business which is not particularly known for its originality and personality when it comes to marketing activities.
Try to come up with a calendar of three to six months’ worth of promotions featuring as many different types of promotions as you can think of. After you have run at least one of each type of promotion, you will have a better idea as to what your potential clients will respond to best. You can then offer additional variations on this theme in future, and avoid those types of promotion which received little response.
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So, have you now got your email mailing list, your images, your keyword-rich profile copy and the start of a promotional calendar in place? If so, you should now have all of the basic elements that you need to start putting your internet marketing strategy together.
Let’s start off with the Big Daddy of all the social networking sites … Facebook.
3. FACEBOOK
Say the words ‘social media’ to anyone and the first website that they are likely to think of is Facebook, which has been a global phenomenon over the past five years and is continuing to grow rapidly. At the time of writing, it is well on course to reach over a billion members in the not too distant future.