We have all seen the sponsored adverts in our searches. Some of you may have already tried to run your own Adwords campaigns with little success. But what is it about Adwords that makes it work particularly well for accounting firms.
In a nutshell, Google Adwords allows you to attract and target qualified clients who are actually searching for your services. When used correctly, it can be a great source of leads directly to your website landing page or even to a phone call.
Gone are the days when you would pay a fortune to advertise in the local paper or yellow pages. It would be about waiting for a call, not knowing if your advert was actually reaching your target audience. Google Adwords works on a Cost Per Click (CPC) system. This allows you to bid a price for your selected search terms, and then only pay that price each time the advert is actually clicked on. In simplified terms, you are in a keyword auction against your competitors, to see who will appear higher in the search results.
It’s easy to set up daily, weekly or even monthly spend budgets. This allows you to make the ultimate choice of how much you are comfortable spending on each new lead. By calculating your return on investment, you remain in control.
The added bonus of CPC advertising is that you can monitor who is looking at and clicking on your advert. Besides, you can see exactly what they were searching for to find you. It’s exactly this kind of information that helps you fine-tune your search term bidding.
But even though Google is the chosen search platform for most people, appearing at the top of your clients’ search results in a sponsored advert is not just about quick conversions. Studies have shown that you can increase brand awareness by 46%, simply by showing up in the search advertising results. This is where Inbound Marketing works well, specifically when your client has more complex matters such as R&D grants, self-managed super funds, growth hacking for startups.
So as an accounting firm, you are more focussed on a click-through rate to your landing page instead of a quick sale as with retailers. This means that with highly targeted search terms and audience priorities, you might want to run several campaigns. These campaigns would have individual landing pages directed at the various different services you provide. After all, the self-managed super fund client would require a whole separate set of parameters for your business startup client.
If this is all too confusing, why not let the experts handle the job. Here at 4DP, we look after small and big Google Ads accounts – no job too small – no account too complex.