If you were to ask an accountant, CPA, estate planner, or financial planner to list some of the most important resources they need to do their job, “time” would undoubtedly be right at the top.
When you’re in a professional services business like this, your long-term success depends on your ability to forge deep, organic relationships with your clients. To get to that point, you need to treat each one as unique and devote as much time as possible to meeting their needs and exceeding their expectations.
Of course, this is difficult to do when a lot of your attention is also focused on the ever-changing world of digital marketing. Between paid search, local SEO, and related ideas alone, marketing can quickly become a full-time job. This is a problem, since accountants and CPAs already have one of those they must be devoted to.
That, in essence, is why marketing software and marketing automation are so essential for these types of businesses. They free up as much valuable time as possible so the CPA, accountant, or other financial services professionals can focus more on their clients, creating a mutually beneficial situation for everyone involved.
What is Marketing Automation?
At its core, “marketing automation” is a term used to describe the many different software-based tools that are designed to handle routine, often administrative marketing tasks without the need for human participation.
The classic example of this would be an automated email marketing campaign. If you want to let your clients know that tax season is coming up so you’re expanding your hours, you don’t have to reach out to everyone individually. You can write a single message and allow marketing automation to personalize it with the names and contact information of each recipient and send those messages at a pre-determined time. With a minimal amount of effort an essential task is taken care of, all so that you can get back to focusing on matters that truly need human attention.
Although this is an admittedly simplified example, it also helps illustrate why marketing automation is so important. As a financial services professional, you’re increasingly faced with a complicated and challenging business environment. Labor management dictates that you need to pay attention to those working for and underneath you. Marketing channels and tools are constantly evolving. Customer demands are changing all the time. All this and you still have to provide the specific service that someone needs of you – be that financial planning, estate planning, or something else entirely.
These demands aren’t just frustrating – they can often be overwhelming to even seasoned professionals.
Therefore, any time (not to mention mental energy) that you can free up to devote to something more essential is an opportunity you need to take advantage of. Marketing automation goes a long way toward helping with precisely that.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
One of the great things about marketing automation in this context is that it is nothing if not malleable. Different businesses will inherently use it in different ways. A small CPA firm with two employees may benefit in different ways than a large financial planning business with 100 professionals and thousands of clients.
Having said that, the larger benefits of marketing automation for accountants include but are not limited to ones like the following.
Dramatically Improve Efficiency
For many accountants and CPAs, the number one reason to embrace marketing automation has to do with the newfound level of efficiency that comes with it.
Marketing automation by its nature helps to save a significant amount of time. But it’s important to maintain perspective. A lot of tasks that can be automated may not seem like much on their own – but once they’re all something you don’t have to worry about any longer, people are often shocked by how much time they require.
Automating tasks like email marketing, social media posting, lead generation, and others free up valuable hours and even days that could be better allocated elsewhere. It’s all about allowing you to work smarter, not harder, to the ultimate benefit of your clients.
Enhanced Targeting, Personalization, and More
According to another recent study, personalized marketing has an influence on roughly 85% of consumers. People want to feel a relationship with the service providers they do business with and that illusion is shattered when they receive an email addressed “Dear Sir or Madam.”
Of course, this level of personalization takes up a significant amount of time and effort. Marketing automation can help by allowing you to better understand your audience, thus making it easier to target them with the right messaging.
So it isn’t just that you’re using someone’s name at the top of an email. You’re recommending products and services that are very relevant to their specific lives. You’re helping them with the precise problems they have, and you’re not communicating with them in a cynical, general way. This creates a more effective marketing campaign overall. It’s also essential due to the personal nature of financial services. People trust you with an essential part of their lives, and they expect a certain level of personalization as a result of that.
Superior Measurement and Analytics
It must also be noted that especially when you’re talking about an accountant or CPA business, marketing is not something that you “do once and forget about.” You need to constantly stay at the front of your audience’s mind because your long-term success depends upon repeat business. That means you should always be working to not just make sure your campaigns are as effective as they can be but to meaningfully improve them moving forward.
That’s another area where marketing automation shines, as it allows for more detailed insight into the effectiveness of your various efforts.
Every marketing channel that you utilize costs money, but it doesn’t make sense to keep pouring portions of your budget into something that isn’t paying off. With the types of detailed analytics that marketing automation provides, you can see exactly what is working and what isn’t. That way, you can get rid of the latter and double down on the former as soon as you’re able to do so.
So every time your campaigns need a refresh, you’ll know which techniques to focus on. At the very least, you’ll know which marketing channels just don’t work given your audience – allowing you to focus your energy and your crucial budget on experimentation elsewhere.
Expanding Your Reach and Visibility
Any accountant, CPA, or other financial services professional will tell you that growth is a slow and steady process. Hopefully, one satisfied customer becomes two, becomes four, etc. But to get to that point, you need to be constantly expanding your reach. If your average client’s lifetime value tops out at a certain amount of money based on the services they need, the only way to truly expand involves bringing in as many new clients as consistently as you can.
Marketing automation is perfect for expanding both your reach and visibility, as it allows you to leverage the true power of various marketing channels to your advantage. You can target specific audiences as needed. If you want to get a certain message in front of only college graduates who make over $100,000 per year and live in a specific city, you can do it – that’s how precise you can get with marketing automation. Or, you could experiment with different messaging at different times of year – like one for tax season and a different one as parents are trying to figure out how to help kids pay for college.
Improved Integration and Collaboration
Finally, marketing automation not only offers improved integration with a lot of the tools you’re likely already using, but better collaboration as well.
Instead of trying to manage all of your marketing channels separately, everything is condensed into a single platform. This gives you a true “bird’s eye view” of how your campaigns are performing and where they could be doing better.
Having this centralized point of access also makes it easier for teams to share information with one another, allowing them to coordinate and collaborate more effectively than ever.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
At Surefire Local, we understand that one of the major hurdles that has prevented a wider adoption of marketing automation for accountants has to do with the often significant upfront investment. Business intelligence marketing software costs a great deal of money to make sure you’re getting a solution built with your needs in mind. Partnering directly with a marketing agency is often just as expensive. That’s not to say that either of these things is bad – it’s just that it’s often too much for smaller organizations in particular.
That’s why Surefire Local has developed business intelligence marketing software that is available at a fraction of the cost you would normally expect to spend. It’s a platform built with marketing automation for accountants in mind – one that allows you to effortlessly manage all the most important portions of your online marketing strategy from a single, sophisticated platform.
So if you’d like to find out more information about marketing automation for accountants, or if you’d like to see a demonstration of our platform in action, please don’t delay – contact Surefire Local today.