Digital marketing is more complicated than just developing content and uploading it online. If you have been struggling to get the results you desire, we have some fantastic tips for you. Digital marketing provides an inexpensive, yet effective way to advertise. Yet, the struggle for most marketers is how to do it well.

They spend hours developing content. But they do not achieve engagement or conversions. The one thing they do not take into consideration is the customer journey.

Our article looks at five important things to take care of for an effective digital marketing strategy. Strap your seat belt for this ride. You are about to learn a lot. Here we go.

Five Important things for Effective Digital Marketing

1. Get Help If You Need Help

Does every marketer know how to do digital marketing? The short, and honest answer is no. Digital marketing is a concept that started in the 1990s. Any marketer who was operating before then needed to upgrade their skills.

For those who hoped to learn along the way, digital marketing can be a real struggle. If you do not have the in-house capacity, consider outsourcing.

Digital marketing agencies offer in-house marketing services. These include SEO, web design, PPC marketing, content, and email marketing. They develop customized plans that fit the organizations’ requirements.

2. Understand the Customer’s Buying Journey

The customer’s journey goes through three critical stages.

• The awareness stage is where they start to recognize that a problem exists.
• Consideration stage where they are looking for a solution.
• Decision stage where they decide on the solution provider.

Digital marketers must have clarity on each step in the journey. It allows for the development of specific targeted messaging. Talking about product USPs to someone in the third stage will not make sense. That would work well for those in the consideration stage.

It goes back to the quote above of stuffing leads into pipelines. You have all these potential customers lined up in the sales funnel. Yet, you do not understand their unique needs.

Digital marketers must walk the journey with their customers. Only then can they find success in their strategies.

3. Content Marketing Must Walk Hand In Hand with SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is any step to improve rankings on the search engines. One of the most powerful ways is through the use of content.

But, take one minute to think about how many companies are doing the same thing. Every single minute someone is posting something. There is fierce competition for a share of voice in the digital space.

So, here are some things you need to do.

• Post as often as you can. A good balance would be at least one article every single week.
• Ensure the content adds value to the audience. Remember to engage by keeping it entertaining and informative. That is why marketers use things like storytelling and case studies.
• Encourage interaction through comments, sharing, and calls for the audience to subscribe.

Content development should no longer be a nightmare for marketers. There are tons of ready-to-use templates available. It allows for easy creation and publishing of material. Teams can achieve higher productivity and better workflow efficiency.

When optimizing your video content for all social media platforms, one shall not forget to explore different types of video posts – Feed posts, Stories, and Live videos. Creating engaging videos for any social media platform is easier than ever with online video editing tools like.

The best way to stay on top of online engagement is to leverage the power of social media videos. Increase your reach by adding subtitles to your videos. Subtitles or captions on video make your content more accessible to thousands of more viewers and make your video content more discoverable.

Read more About SEO Click here.

4. Milk social media for All It’s Worth

To use or not to use social media. That is no longer a question for any modern marketer. It is imperative to take advantage of all platforms available in the digital space.

Are we saying you need to be on every single platform? Not at all, because you need to be where your audiences are. But have a strong presence whichever one you choose. You need to maintain high visibility all the time.

Social media platforms are also fantastic for running campaigns. Take the example of Apple’s UGC shot-on-iPhone campaign. they invited audiences to take photos with the iPhone.

The participants then uploaded them onto the Apple social media feeds. Some lucky few ended up on billboards. As of June 2021, there were over 20 million posts on the Instagram platform alone.

There are tons of other noteworthy social media campaigns to draw inspiration from.

5. Optimize For Mobile, and Use Available Tools

Optimizing your online platform for mobile has so many benefits. First, you provide convenience to millions of smart device users. They get quick access to your services, any time they need it.

Second, Google uses mobile-first indexing when ranking. That means they use the mobile version of your website for indexing.

It could explain why web designers are working with a mobile-first approach. They ensure the layout and elements fit on a small screen. It then becomes easy to scale it onto larger devices like laptops or PCs.

But, you must not compromise on certain aspects on both mobile and desktop devices. Ensure fast page loading speeds and easy navigation. The user experience must be excellent no matter what device the customer is using.

Digital marketers should embrace the use of available tools. These can help with the different tasks, resulting in higher efficiency. Such include:-

• Google Analytics is fantastic for measuring web performance. You get to know who visits the site, and the content they interact with the most.
• Google Search Console will help optimize traffic to your website
• MailChimp is excellent for email marketing
• Hootsuite centralizes social media management.
• BuzzSumo for keyword research, and so on.

Wrapping Up 

Digital marketing can be very effective but only if you do it well. That is why we have shared five of the most effective tips. Understand and develop a customer persona. Next, walk through the buying journey with them. It helps with the creation of targeted messaging.

Also, take advantage of best SEO practices. These include mobile optimization and content generation. For the latter, there are templates you can use to make the process easier.

When you are considering your marketing strategy for developing your client base. You may get all kinds of approaches thrown at you as the best way forward. 

Like accounting, marketing can be riddled with jargon which makes it hard for busy practice owners to engage. It’s a shame and not the fault of accountants, so we’ll cut through some of it for you.

We’ll look at two pieces of terminology, two marketing approaches, relating to getting traffic to your website – of course with the ultimate aim of winning new clients.

The terms are:

• SEO – which stands for search engine optimisation; and
• PPC – which stands for pay-per-click.

We’ll help you appraise which is better for building your brand in the long term.

What is SEO and how can it help my accountancy practice?

In one sense, SEO is not a conscious choice. If you have a website, the search engine spiders will be crawling over it. Their algorithms deciding where it should rank in any given search.

But deciding to pursue an SEO strategy to get your website found on relevant searches IS a conscious choice. So what does it involve and why do it?

Search engine optimisation means following a set of practices to persuade Google (or the search functionality of any other website) that you have the most relevant results when people search for certain keywords.

Although “keywords” such as “accountant” or “tax return” are important, optimising your site goes far beyond just words. It includes the technical quality of your website and how it links, or is linked, to other parts of the Internet. 

Its size, how often it is updated with content and how well-maintained it is will all play a part.

Technical quality encompasses just about every aspect of your website, from the copy to the coding: its architecture, how quickly it loads, imagery and alt text (image labels) and so on.

Search engines can see who is linking to your website, and if they themselves are a credible site (have good domain authority), that will boost your own credibility.

To put it simply, almost every aspect of your web presence will play a role in how easily you are found on search engines.

Take a professional approach to your website and over time you will carve out your rightful place in the rankings.

This will involve activities like:

• Ensuring your website is technically well built
• Researching what keywords you want to rank for
• Developing content around those keywords on a regular basis
• Encouraging good quality backlinks from reputable websites
• Maintaining your website so that it stays in good functional order

The good news is that all these activities are well-aligned with what it takes to build a good brand anyway. So by actively engaging with search engine optimisation you will naturally enhance your brand.

Therefore, pursuing a good SEO strategy cannot be anything other than good for business (we stress the word “good”, as trying to game the system – known as black hat SEO – will damage your rankings and brand in time). 

But it is important to remember that any search engine has only a limited number of spaces on page one of its search results, and a staggeringly high percentage of people don’t look any further than page one. 

In fact, latest research shows that 67.6% of all clicks happen on just the first five organic results on page one (organic being those results attained through SEO rather than PPC).

This means that in a crowded market, even with good SEO, you may not get onto page one. Enter PPC.

What is PPC?

PPC, short for pay-per-click, is a paid advertising model that can get you straight to page one. But it will cost you, compared to SEO. 

Instead of following a set of practices to build up your reputation with search engines You simply bid on the keywords you wish to be found for and go straight to page one amongst the listings which have “Ad” next to them at the top, side or bottom of the page. 

How much you pay for will depend on many variables, including your budget, the quality and relevance of your adverts and the track record of user engagement.

We say “simply bid”, but it is more involved than that.

For PPC to be a success you need to follow a proper process, so it is best to work with experts.

Therefore, you will be paying both a budget for clicks and for the expertise of managing the campaigns.

When you know what you are doing, it is a numbers game where you can directly trace expenditure all the way through to your return on investment. Which if you get it right should be considerable. Therefore, it is unhelpful to frame PPC activity around cost – yes you require additional budget. But it should accelerate growth compared to SEO alone.

It is also easy to mistakenly think of PPC just in terms of being found on Google searches, especially when you are comparing PPC to SEO. PPC is a much broader discipline which encompasses remarketing (using cookies to follow visitors to your site around the Internet, repeatedly showing your adverts). Google Display Network, Facebook, Amazon, video ads and the list goes on.

When might SEO and PPC be used together?

You do not need to think in terms of SEO and PPC being mutually exclusive. They can work well together if you want to grow quickly, or consolidate your position. You will probably find that they complement each other, with a professional approach to SEO helping PPC; and the rigour of PPC conversion rate optimisation (CRO) helping you refine your whole website and how it is found on the web.

Final thoughts

As you can see, both SEO and PPC are viable ways to grow your accountancy practice. 

We believe that developing your SEO should be ever-present for any business. As it underpins so much of your digital presence. Over the long term it will make a powerful impact on your practice. But if it is short-term results you need or you are already doing SEO and want more. You have the budget to do it properly, then PPC is a proven way to do this.

As specialists in helping accountancy practices grow through digital marketing, we can help you develop an SEO or PPC strategy. Please get in touch with us to find out more on how we can help your firm.