One of the biggest complaints I hear from CPAs is a poor return on marketing dollars. The reason these CPA practitioners get poor results is because they don’t understand the difference between good and bad marketing. Following just one basic principle can help you start on the road to better marketing: Give up on bad advertising and invest your money in good advertising.
You might be thinking: I do the same kinds of advertising as all the other CPAs in my market-surely it must be the “good” kind of advertising. But the worst mistake accountants make in marketing their CPA practices is assuming that because a lot of other practices use a particular kind of advertising, that kind of advertising must produce results. So, like lemmings, they all keep wasting money on a traditional kind of advertising that really doesn’t produce results.
Are you throwing good advertising dollars into a black hole?
You are, if you spend your advertising budget on institutional ads (also known as image ads). You know what they look like: the name of your firm in a tasteful font, a few lines of text or bullet points listing the services you offer, your phone number and address. We are so surrounded by institutional ads that we might come to think of them as “standard” ads. They’re in the yellow pages, the newspaper, local newsletters and magazines, and even now on the internet.
Don’t be an advertising lemming!
Just because everyone else takes out institutional ads doesn’t mean you need to do the same. Sure, you probably want to be in the phone book. But any money you spend on institutional ads could probably be better spent on direct-response advertising. A quick comparison of these two kinds of ads should help you to understand why institutional ads are just plain bad marketing, and direct response is just plain good.
What Is an Institutional Ad?
Most common form of advertising (unfortunately)
Also known as Image Ads
Lots of blank white space
Ad talks about you and how great you are
Doesn’t direct the potential buyer to a buying decision
Hopes to build “brand awareness”
Most times it is a waste of money
What Is a Direct Response Ad?
Ads that asks the prospect to respond directly
Focuses on the customer and his or her needs
Purpose is to stimulate a phone call, letter or visit.
Can be tracked and made accountable
Direct response advertising makes a complete case for the practice and the services it provides. It overcomes sales objections. It answers all major questions. It promises results, backing up the promise with a risk-free, money-back guarantee. Direct response advertising is all about your customer and his or her needs. Its purpose is to stimulate a phone call, letter or a visit. Best of all, unlike an institutional ad, it can be tracked so you can make every dollar you spend on it accountable. This then helps to measure the effectiveness of each ad.
The bottom line is this: Direct response advertising turns prospects into clients, and institutional ads don’t. If you are going to spend money towards marketing your accounting practice, make sure you’ve taken the time to understand “good” marketing techniques. The results you will get from the latter will be dramatically different than following what most of your competitors do i.e. institutional advertising.
UK Internet Marketing likes to think that they are a little bit different from the other online advertising companies that are out there in www. land.
Why? Do we think we know more about SEO, PPC or the other methods used to promote businesses on the internet? No, well, more than some.
That is not what makes us different.
How we, at UKIM, differ from other internet marketers is that we listen, ask and learn, before we announce “You need…”
We listen
UKIM listen to what our clients have to say regarding existing online strategies. We listen when you tell us your business aspirations and what you expect UKIM to do for you.
We ask
What your business requires in order to meet your own aspirations. What you do, who your competitors are and in what way does your company differ from that of your competitors (what gives you an edge over them), who you are and how do you view your company, i.e. are you a large company wishing to expand into different markets, increase your share of an existing market or a new company trying to get your foot in the internet marketing door? What is your, overall, marketing budget and do you have a daily, weekly or monthly budget targets?
We learn
By listening, asking questions, taking notes or using independent research, UKIM hope to discover what makes your business tick and how best we can, together, formulate an internet marketing strategy that will allow your business to achieve its goals.
Once UK Internet Marketing has a clear picture of what your business objectives are, we are in a much stronger position to offer our advice and expertise on what areas of online advertising is the most suitable way forward.
Link building, PPC, Email marketing, content creation, SEO, web design and development, web copywriting and LSEO, are just some of the internet marketing strategies that UKIM can provide, but, before we can do our business, effectively, we need to know yours.
If you are really serious about internet marketing, there is a technique that can get you a top spot in a “sponsored” search results in just a matter of a few minutes! This technique is called pay-per-click advertising. Believe me any amount of money that you will spend for pay-per-click is well worth it.
Here are the reasons why PPC or pay-per-click is worth your money’s value. First, PPC ads appear immediately resulting in more traffic to your site. There is no need for your site to be indexed by any search engine, traffic just happens to go to your site because of PPC.
Another great thing with PPC is you don’t need to pay for any other fees except for the results. And no matter how many times your ad appears on somebody’s website, you only get to pay when someone clicks on your ads. If you observe and look closely at the results, you should be able to find out how well each of your ads is doing. This can also be your basis to continue that ad or not.
This unique internet marketing tool is so wonderful that you can run multiple ads all at the same time. You can even split test different ads, so that you can determine easily which ones work well which ones don’t. This way you can ditch the not-so-profitable ads. In addition, you can also try testing your keywords and use the very best of these to boost your site’s ranking in the search results.
Truth is, you can use the pay-per-click technique to check out everything from your products, price points as well as your ads and sales copy. These are excellent factors to make your ads more appealing to your target market.
And if you can do it properly, you will discover that PPC advertising can also become very affordable. Truth is by learning to do it right, you can even make profit while you are in the process of boosting your site’s traffic as well as visibility. A great deal indeed!
To really make sure that your target market can find your website, all you need is a combination of PPC and SEO. Now that’s what you call an effective internet marketing.
There is no other online technique or strategy that can offer you as much scope as pay-per-click. With PPC, you can improve your website’s search engine ranking and attract more traffic to your website dramatically without spending so much money.
There are so many techniques to do some great internet marketing online. And if you can really get those especially PPC to work right, you really get a competitive advantage. The only thing is some of these online strategies or techniques can disappear overnight. These may work magic for you but can disappear right before your very eyes. So it would also be to your advantage if you continue to look for other great internet marketing online advertising aside from PPC.
