Give your rainmakers a helping hand with supportive marketing objectives
Busy season is just around the corner, which means your rainmakers are really starting to ramp up their sales efforts, so they can land some whales before 3/15 and 4/15, and you want to help by providing marketing support.
So, where should you be putting your marketing resources to make sure you are able to reach your sales objectives this year? PPC ads? Blogging? SEO? Tradeshows? The usual chotchke with your firm's logo?
Start with the right expectations:
The reality is that we're only 6 and 10 weeks away from two of your most important dates - the dates that put your firm in the black and set the stage for your entire year. With such a short amount of time in front of you, it would be more realstic to expect your marketing efforts today to pay off during the year's second busy season - 9/15 and 10/15.
This is actually a great thing though, because that's when your rainmakers need your support the most... when the large chunk of your clients aren't thinking about taxes for the most part (beyond quarterly installments), and when your advice and involvement can have a stronger impact. It's also good that we have this small little window between now and the storm, because it's as good of a time as any to get sales and marketing on the same page.
Now, let's peel it back to your actual marketing objectives, phase by phase, so you can set goals that will help you close the year out strong. When I was in BD tax advisory services, Q4 was when I blew past my colleagues and made management eat their words... and it all started with building the right pipe in Q1 and Q2.
1. More website traffic
Do you know how many visits you get to your website every month? A big part of your future success is determined by simple impressions. The more eyes there are on you, the more opportunities for customer conversions.
Of course, you want to have good eyes, not just volume, so it would be a good idea to invest in resources that do more than just contribute to traffic itself. You could accomplish this quickly with an Adwords campaign, but "more" by itself won't necessarily get you there either. Now, if you have an inbound marketing strategy in place, you could really accelerate your learning curve and growth by putting money in PPC.
(want to know more about attracting visitors to your site? Check out the playbook on SEO by Orange Pegs Media)
2. More home-grown leads
Where exactly are you getting your leads from that you're dishing to your rainmaker(s) anyway? Are you buying them? Are you recycling your old databases?
What about your website? Is it generating any leads for you? It should be, and it could be generating quite a bit more. Most of the businesses I talk to when assessing their marketing needs and opportunities (outside of SaaS) get very little return from their website investment, and most actually have no idea how many people are becoming leads through one of their two website conversion points (blog sign up and the "contact us" form).
But your website can and should pay for itself and then some. So, let's look at your existing numbers to determine what your marketing objectives should be. What's the visitors-to-contacts ratio? It's very likely less than 1%, but with an inbound marketing strategy in play, you could be doing 5% or more. If you don't know, it's because the number is likely inconsequential. So, let's change that. Make your goal 1 new client every month, then peel it back from there to determine how many leads you need every month to accomplish that. Then, move that bar up the first time you hit that goal. Maybe it's 30 leads, or maybe it's only 10, but we won't know until we have some coming in and customers converting.
(Get the playbook for executing inbound for accounting firms by Orange Pegs Media)
3. Higher % of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
If you're buying leads or recycling decades-old databases, I'm sure your rainmakers will agree - we'd like to see a higher percentage of contacts being qualified and closable.
However, if you followed the framework of this blog post, and focused on generating traffic and leads from your website as your first marketing obectives, you'll see that the calls being made by your sales team are received by much more willing participants.
In addition, having the inbound framework set up will help all of your other sales and advetorial efforts as well. To dovetail on the thought from before, what if you ran an Adwords campaign in hopes of generating interest in your servcie, and could send visitors to educational content rather than company propaganda? Which do you think is going to be more engaging to those who aren't actively looking to change their firm because they don't know why they should yet, your home page, or a blog post or content offer that provides answers to the questions posed by your ad?
(Want to see what a lead generated through inbound marketing looks like? More here)
CONCLUSION:
Building a case for marketing can sometimes be difficult to do, especially when the things you're accustomed to aren't working quite as well as they used to. However, with the right tools in place, you'll not only be able receive a return on your investment, but you'll be able to see it in black and white.
So, in addition to setting great goals, I suggest finding marketing tools (like Hubspot) to help you deliver.
Interested in a free inbound assessment, so we can scope out the marketing objectives you'd like to achieve? Schedule a call with Orange Pegs Media today!
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