When things get busy in the office it’s easy to let things slide when it comes to marketing.
With busy season in full flow, and the January tax deadline fast approaching, we know there’s a lot of work to plough through and plenty of late submissions to chase with clients.
But don’t let this pressing workload distract you from the important task of focusing on your content marketing and social media presence – after all, you’ve put a lot of effort into raising your profile as a firm. You don’t want to lose that foothold on the way to the top of the content mountain, do you?
Good content = regular content
It’s vital to keep your content marketing going even when you’re super busy. We appreciate that can be difficult – client work and fee-earning time is always going to be a priority, after all – but there’s very good reason for keeping your posts regular.
The more regular your content is, the better your search engine optimisation (SEO) will be and the wider the impact and reach of your digital marketing will be.
- You’ll rank higher in Google when you post regular, fresh content
- You increase the number of key words in your content by posting more frequently
- You keep your followers more engaged and ready for your next post
- You improve your position as a trusted adviser, by staying topical
A constant presence in the right social and online channels is a brilliant way to build engagement. Whether it’s practical advice via your blog, topical updates in an email newsletter or helpful updates through your social media accounts, you’ve got to keep that profile high and underline your position as an expert in your field.
In a nutshell, the more visible you are, the better you’ll be at attracting and retaining the right kinds of business clients – it’s that simple.
Create content that’s topical and helpful
It might seem like a contradiction, but busy times can actually be the perfect moment to share a blog post, or create your next vlog.
Tax season may stretch the firm’s resources, but it also gives you something incredibly relevant to write about. For example, you could:
- Talk about how accounting technology has progressed and how moving to the cloud helps make tax season less hectic.
- Explain how regular, year-round bookkeeping and saving documents to the cloud makes the process of compiling clients’ tax returns faster and less of a hassle.
- Offer free trials of your latest online accounting package and underline the benefits of this move to clients and prospects.
The key is to tie your content into seasonal events and the dates that are most relevant to your niche audiences or specific industry sectors.
If a niche specialism is the hotel trade, write about ways to minimise costs and improve cash flow during the down time in winter. Or if retail is an industry focus, talk about the benefits of cashless payment methods in the run up to the Christmas busy season.
The aim is to make your content relevant, helpful and to position yourself as the expert in the field – whatever that specialism may be.
Be consistent with your content
One sure fire way to lose followers and engagement is to be inconsistent and ad-hoc with your content marketing activity.
If you post a highly successful and well-received blog in January, and then post nothing more until April, you’ll already have lost most of that engaged audience. When people find a person, brand or business that they resonate with, they expect to then find a regular, consistent pipeline of content to consume. If you suddenly disappear for weeks at a time, they’ll move on – people, to be blunt, are fickle.
The answer to this problem is to plan your content more effectively.
Creating a content plan for the year is a great way to keep your posts on track. Think about those seasonal themes and topics and jot down some ideas and titles for each month of the year. And make sure you tie these to some clear publication dates – giving yourself a deadline, and putting those dates into your diary, forces you to stick to a timeline and keeps the content pipeline flowing year-round.
Plan ahead and increase your content’s impact
As with most things in business, good planning is at the root of success.
By identifying the key dates in your industry or niche audience’s year, it’s a simple matter to create your 12-month content plan and plug in the topics, issues and advice that’s need at each point in the year.
With your content deadlines diarised and the enough prior warning to get your ideas down on paper, or recorded on video, there’s no excuse for letting your content marketing slip, even when you’re knee-deep in tax returns.
Make regular content one of your firm’s New Year resolutions – and start seeing the impact on your engagement levels.
You’ll find more tips on where to start when creating a content marketing plan here.