I first met Stephen Paul on a discovery call back in October 2020, he was seeking someone to help with social media. Our conversation quickly went from ‘can you handle social media for us in 10 hours a month?’ to ‘what are your approaches to marketing a business as a whole and how much availability do you have?’ That’s how I came to handle Valued Accountancy’s marketing practices.
I now work alongside Stephen to create everything from his marketing plan to his content delivery. This includes the three areas I think are key for any business with an online presence: blogging/webcopy improvement (including SEO), email marketing and social media.
It is interesting to sit back and look at what you have achieved in working with a client like this, because our relationship is open and easy, a partnership really. I have been very quickly made part of the team and I have access to everything and everyone I need to inspire my copy and create strong content.
My time with the company varies from month to month, depending on what is needed and I am always trusted to showcase my marketing skills in other areas. These have included; creating a branding playbook (currently in work), a new website, client comms, graphic skills for internal and client-facing forms.
Stephen’s brief for marketing was to bring a voice back to the business and to engage, inspire and help both existing and potential clients through outreach, SME owners being our demographic.
I broke that work down into distinct areas in order to increase engagement.
1. Website engagement
Let’s start by looking at my marketing efforts on Valued Accountancy’s website.
When I started working with Valued, their website had a very corporate look, with no clear call to action on many of the pages. This left them with a very low draw in SME traffic from Google and a high bounce rate (averaging 85% per month). The website felt a little flat, as I know Stephen would agree; it didn’t represent any of the values and voices I heard when dealing with the team. The remit, Stephen agreed, was clear: we needed to design something fresh and something that represented the approachability and caring nature of the business, most importantly speaking directly to SME owners.
Here’s the old website's first page: The home page banner gave no clear idea of what Valued is, or what users need to do next.
The service detail on the homepage gave a nondescript offer, causing confusion (in my opinion) about how this accountancy firm can service a potential client's needs.
Blog posts were very corporate looking, and sounded occasionally unapproachable. The clients we needed to be pitching to, were looking for quick answers on complicated topics that assisted them, or inspired them to make a change.
I set to work, drafting out ideas and creating graphics and page layouts based on the key areas of business services, important information to showcase and a more down-to-earth team feel. Stephen needed something that felt “more like us again”. My aim was to deliver this by bringing a much more simple user experience (UX as Google calls it), meaning visitors would spend much more time on site and take more clearly guided actions.
Here’s the banner area now, with a much clearer showcase of what Valued accountancy is.
And as it cycles through you have clear calls to action, based on simple service offers.
The services area is also tidied up by showcasing our services in the four key areas and being very clear about what these are.
Underneath this, I have given users another clear call to action - ‘how do you want us to serve you?’ Putting the customer first is important at Valued and speaking in those terms, I think, highlights the voice this business has and the relationships it breeds with clients.
I sourced better stock images for blog posts too, making it feel more like a blog that an average user might be interested in, from a business perspective. Imagery giving lots of focus to SMEs, rather than corporations and feeling much more approachable with smiling faces.
The new website went live in late April 2021 and a few months later in June I was able to record the bounce rate had decreased to 68.91%, from 78.32% in May and on average 85% before that on the old website. [If you need some help with bounce rate on your website, read this.]
The average time spent on site increased to 1 minute 26 seconds as a result of our new design, from an average of 30-40 seconds on the old site (62 seconds is classed as good, and over 2 minutes is impressive, according to Google and high profile marketers). We also saw an increase in ranking keywords to 1132, compared to 1055 in March 2021. This was all from laying out the website with UX in mind and guiding our traffic through more aligned calls to action.
All of this new engagement is from a website update, not a dive into huge amounts of new content, or huge amounts of traffic building strategies. Sometimes it really is just about creating a customer journey that fits your target audience!
I would like to decrease the bounce rate further to 40%, which would put us, in my experience, somewhere in the bracket of the market average for a B2B business.
Having said that the website has produced results based on our update, I also need to note here that I have been working on new content. Here are some blog posts I have written for Valued Accountancy, results of which will come into effect in 3-6 months time on our stats;
2. Social media engagement
When I started with Valued it was October 2020, partway through the Covid Pandemic, external comms were limited, partly due to the nature of being respectful during this time and mostly because Valued wanted to be of help as a financial guide. So content at that time was only put out if it was related to helping businesses understand their options whilst navigating lockdowns, furloughs, bounce back loans and the like. However, we were coming to a point where most businesses around us were starting back up again and we were beginning to get behind the curve in new content output.
I used this as an opportunity to update our social profiles and to create content categories that would fit the areas we most wanted to help clients in. The aim was to reach new people, increase our following, our brand reputation and to showcase our expertise.
For most channels this meant a new posting schedule from almost weekly, or every other week to daily and on Twitter up to six posts per day. As you can imagine this saw quick wins in statistics after we had gotten over the inevitable bump of dead followers* leaving us.
*By ‘dead following’ I am referring to the follower count that hasn’t engaged for some time and for reasons of disinterest, or a change of direction, decide to unfollow us as we become more active again. This is a good thing, but does take a few months to pass, before follower stats track upwards again.
Here are some examples of the graphics I have worked on since October 2020:
You can pop over to any one of Valued’s social accounts to see content in full.
You can see that my aim is to showcase our knowledge, to be helpful and to inspire action. This is a major part of our strategy.
We reached 101,001 content impressions in Q1, which was 69.3% up on Q4 2020, when I joined Valued. We also saw our engagement increase by 94.2% in Q1 and those all important link clicks reached an increase of 31.8%. As a result our audience grew by 291%!
From here we were able to set new targets. Q2 has tracked within our new targets, even during a new website launch and external factors (Covid restrictions being lifted, meaning less time online from Users, summer approaching, etc).
Part of my work is also about tracking the competition and with regards to our social media, I have been able to do that through implementation of a new (to us) social media partner, Sprout Social. Sprout Social gives me the tools at my fingertips to see exactly where we are compared to our main competitors, which not only helps us from a positioning point of view, but also from a content strategy standpoint.
3. Email marketing/client comms engagement
We have also become more regular with our client communications as a result of my being part of the team and this has led to campaigns like Capital Gains Tax Awareness, triggered by a client issue. This resulted in 28 clients coming forward with new service provision requests for their capital gains tax submissions.
I have also branded and designed a new newsletter template, which I hope will further increase client engagement each month, as well as attract new service order procurements and entirely new potential clients.
To increase sign ups I have devised landing pages and social content to help. It is also a call to action on most website blog posts.
I’m looking forward to recording stats in Q3 to show our results.
My overall approach with a client like Valued Accountancy
I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m no mathematician and so joining an accountancy firm was always going to be a new frontier I had to navigate. My best plan was to spend time with Stephen and the team, to get to understand their business and most importantly their clients. Once I could start to establish client struggles, I could start to envisage how we could solve those with marketing content to start our experiment - because that’s what content marketing is, an experiment to find a way to achieve the best engagement with your message, profiles and platforms.
From a new point of understanding, I then started on a marketing plan, which propelled us forward to website work, alongside content development, whether that’s blog posts, email marketing, or social media.
“Marketing is something that can mean so much to different people, depending on what you are looking for, however working with Sara has helped both me as the business owner and Valued move forward leaps and bounds.
During the last three months, since we started to work together, we have seen a real focus on our core message, heightened engagement, but most of all we have a trusted partner that we want to work with for years to come.
Sara is someone who takes her time to understand your business, what it is that you are trying to achieve and then helps you to come up with a strategic plan to move forward without any of the usual fluff and noise.
In simple terms, our social and other marketing posts have gone from weekly(ish) to daily, engagement is through the roof and we have a clear plan for the next 30 days, which will be extended to an annual plan.
If you are serious about wanting to get more from your marketing, without any of the fluffiness then I would highly recommend Sara.
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Can I just say here, working in a new-to-me industry has been enlightening, I am learning so much, daily, with Valued. That’s really important as a freelancer, to have the opportunity to learn about what clients do and how they in turn serve their clients. My understanding helps me to very quickly adapt my copy skills and create content that does what you need it to do. So please, if you are opening your doors to freelancers, make sure you open them all the way!
In conclusion
Valued Accountancy and Stephen Paul, it’s founder and Managing Director are enjoying a new found voice in their industry space. An opportunity to showcase the amazing skills and expertise this team already has. As a result of a focused content strategy I have been able to bring about a further reach and exposure, which is starting to filter through to sales.
If you need a copywriter to create compelling copy, someone who understands the customer journey, fill in the project brief form below!
