If you’re anything like us (and if you’re accountant, chances are you will be in this respect), you will love data. Charts and graphs. Anything that concisely and effectively shows results.
The fantastic thing about digital marketing, is it allows accountants to actually measure the return they are getting on their investment. If, for instance, you put an advert for your firm in a local newspaper or radio station, you’re never really sure how effective that campaign is for your accountant marketing.
Sure, you can guess based on how your weekly enquiries volume is affected, but you can’t really measure conversion rates very accurately. Nor brand exposure (i.e. how many eyeballs your content is getting in front of). In addition, these campaigns tend to be time-limited, and fairly expensive.
In contrast, accountant marketing in the digital sphere is highly measurable. The internet leaves a footprint wherever you go, which allows you analyse your website visitor behaviour very powerfully.
Different KPIs In Digital Accountant Marketing
Impressions
One vital goal in any accountant’s marketing is to get their brand in front of their target audience. Brand exposure increases opportunities for social sharing (spreading the word further) and lead generation.
The key KPI that you need to be mindful of here is called “Impressions.” This, in simple terms, can be understood as the number of people who see your content or advert whilst browsing the internet.
Let’s take a common examples in accountant marketing: Facebook. If you run a Facebook advertising campaign, then you will likely be showing ads to users who are looking for an accountant. When you have set up your audience in your campaign, your “Potential Reach” might look like this:
You see where it says “Estimated Daily Results”? That refers to the number of daily impressions you can expect your adverts to receive. So you can hope to achieve between 3,300 and 18,300 impressions per month for your adverts (110 x 30 and 610 x 30 respectively). To measure your campaign success, therefore, you would look at your total impressions at the end of the month, and check to make sure you’ve hit your impression target.
Clicks & click through rate (CTR)
It’s all very well if your accountant marketing is producing lots of impressions. However, it isn’t much good if people aren’t engaging or interacting with your content once they see it. That’s where clicks and click through rate (CTR) come into focus as KPIs.
Let’s take the Facebook advertising campaign above as another example. You might get 600 or so impressions a day, but if that only produces 3 clicks a day, you might only get 90 clicks a month.
As a percentage of the impressions you’re getting each day, that only represents 0.5%. This figure refers to your click through rate (CTR), and you want it to be as high as possible.
At this point, you can probably see that whilst impressions are usually a good indicator of brand awareness, clicks and click through rate are a good sign of brand engagement.
Another important indicator of the latter is your “Bounce rate”, which refers to the percentage of visitors who click on more than one page on your website. You can find out your bounce rate by logging into your Google Analytics account, for instance, and checking the Audience Overview section.
So, somewhat confusingly, whilst you want your click through rate to be as high as possible, you want your bounce rate on your website to be as low as possible. Checking these KPIs each month with help you measure whether your accountant marketing is therefore producing strong brand awareness, as well as effective brand engagement.
Conversion rate
Brand awareness and engagement are hugely important factors in the success of your accountant marketing. However, at the end of the day most businesses are after conversions.
Perhaps sounds a bit funny to those with a particular upbringing! However, a conversion simply refers to someone who takes “meaningful engagement” with your content or brand.
Typically, this takes the form of a contact form submission on your website, to make an enquiry. Or, filling out an application form for an online service you offer. It can also refer to someone who makes a telephone enquiry after reading one of your blogs.
You can define a “conversion” however you like, but it’s important that the action you are defining as such is meaningful. For instance, it wouldn’t help your accountant marketing to define a “conversion” as “someone who clicks on my Facebook ad”, or “someone who visits my website”.
Those things are usually more to do with brand engagement. However, you might want to define a conversion as “someone who visits my Thank You page”, because the only way they could navigate to this page would be if they filled out your contact form to make an enquiry.
Or, you might want to define a “conversion” as “someone who downloads my free eBook from my website.” There are a wide range of things you can define as a conversion, but it’s important to distinguish them as well.
For instance, someone who downloads your eBook in exchange for their email address is still a conversion of sorts, but they’re probably not in the same place as the person who skips over your report and goes straight to your contact form to book an appointment. The latter is, therefore, somewhat “warmer” or “hotter” than the former.
In your Google Analytics, therefore, you might want to define different conversions in your reports. For instance, eBook downloads might count as “warm” conversions, whilst booking enquiries might be classed as “hot” conversions.
At the end of each week, fortnight or month, therefore, you can track your “conversion KPIs” by counting the number – and quality – of these conversions. For instance, are your “warm” and “hot” conversions increasing month by month, or are they declining? Why might that be? Is there a disparity in volume or quality between the two sets of conversions? And so on.
Hoepfully you have found this guide to accountant digital marketing helpful. If you’d like to discuss your campaign with us, please give us a call for a free, friendly chat with one of our specialists.
