Why random acts of marketing won’t help your strategy

Short term solutions, long term problems: Why random acts of marketing won’t help your strategy

Why random acts of marketing won’t help your strategy

It’s easy for an accountant to get excited about marketing. Believe me, I’ve seen accountants who have got their budget ready and they’re ready to try all the things.

“Let’s try Facebook ads for 2 weeks.”

“Let’s blog about this topic and then leave it for a few weeks before another blog.”

“This month, let’s buy a PDF with our logo and put it on our website.”

Don’t get me wrong, your enthusiasm is great, but these random acts of marketing won’t help you in the long run, because there’s no cohesiveness.

 

Content marketing breeds cohesiveness

Your marketing should be all about the long term, the strategy, the uniformity. It’s about having that long term goal in place and achieving that with consistent marketing directed at your audience, whether that be through blogs, video, social media (or all of the above!)

Imagine you’re on a hill, ready for battle. You wouldn’t want to randomly run around fighting different battles. You won’t to be strategically moving towards one main area and fit your battle there.

That’s what you’re doing if you’ve got a random approach to your marketing. You’re putting out content irregularly. It won’t be targeted, it won’t be personable, it won’t be strategised, and your audience will see right through that.

 

Random acts of marketing will inevitably cost you more

It’s easy for accountants to think that putting out generic content and other random acts of marketing will save them money. Ironically, you’ve asked yourself “what will the ROI of this project be” before you’ve invested your cash, and then the content hasn’t produced results.

Because the content will undoubtedly be off-message or unfocused, it will most likely cost you more to go back and update it, fix errors or find a miracle way to integrate it with other parts of your marketing plan.

 

Random and generic content won’t help you in the long run

You might have the best intentions with your marketing strategy. You’ve probably bought a generic PDF, had your logo stamped on it, and uploaded it to your website with the intention of replacing it with custom content in the next few weeks.

Bam! That’s your short term solution nailed.

But whether you upload it to your website or  not, the problem is not how  many generic PDFs or ebooks you have: it’s the fact that the content is not truly yours. Your audience knows the difference between original and unoriginal content. It doesn’t appeal to them, because it’s made to suit everybody (and so it suits nobody).

 

How to fix your haphazard marketing approach

You’ve lost months of traction with your marketing. Your SEO is worse for wear and you’re stuck in a downward spiral with generic content littered across your site.

But fear not, there’s steps to take to fix it all and transform that generic content into something fresh and inviting. If random acts of marketing aren’t working for you, here’s where to begin:

  • Know who you’re targeting: When accountants come to us interested in a new website, they often have ideas about design, imagery, layouts, WordPress templates. We always push back a step – to your buyer. Who are they? What do they care about? Who and what influences them? How do they engage with you? The better you understand your audience, the better your website content is. That’s why our Content Marketer program starts with your audience before anything else, because if you get this nailed, everything else will inevitably fall into place.
  • Prepare a 12 month content plan: Random acts of marketing will have no purpose, no intent, no accountability, no campaign associated, and ultimately, will be of little-to-no success. But with a 12-month content strategy and plan, you’ll get a highly targeted and detailed action plan for your firm. It’s the first step in developing interesting and original content that your clients and prospects will want to read.
  • Use marketing credits to get your marketing done: Once you’ve gone through that process with us, you can begin the work yourself and start transforming your marketing, or you can look at outsourcing the work to us and ensuring your 12-month plan is consistently delivered on a continual basis. (You can also do the same thing with a social media plan.

With more and more firms recognising the value of content marketing, now is a great time to take a step back and evaluate your marketing: Research your audience, set your goals and align your marketing plan to address those goals.

For those desperate to make a change, wipe out those random acts of marketing and that generic content. Your marketing will be so much better for it, and you’ll find your audience are more trustworthy and keen to work with you.