Because you want to grow your firm it’s worth hard-wiring two insights from a recent survey of 1,092 marketers from August 2011.

The Content Marketing Institute recently published a report called ‘B2B Content Marketing: 2012 benchmarks, budgets and trends’.

It is particularly relevant to accountancy firms as you’ll see…

What is content marketing?

Using articles, blogs, newsletters, white papers, webinars, events, videos, etc to help achieve the marketing goals of the firm.

The survey is from the USA but provides an interesting signpost about what we could and should be doing to improve our marketing. Here’s what the report suggests the most successful marketers (of the 1092 surveyed) are doing:

  1. Best-in-class marketers invest 31% of their marketing budget in content marketing, compared to the least effective marketers, who only allocate 18%
  2. They are also more likely to segment their content based on the BUYING CYCLE (45% of best in class versus 29% of laggards).

Invest in content marketing and time it with the buying cycle of your prospects and it will work.

ACCOUNTANTS:

For years we’ve been advocating the capture of year-end dates within your CRM databases so you can use them as a trigger for marketing activity.

Do you always add a year end date to your prospect database/ CRM?

Are you using these dates to prompt marketing activity?

Who uses content marketing the most?

You do, or at least professional service firms do.

Professional service firms – including accountants – have the highest rates of content marketing adoption…

…and higher than marketing agencies and higher than computer companies!!!

So are you making the most of content marketing in your firm?

Of the 1,092 marketers that contributed to the survey, here’s what they believe works best:

Top 3:

  1. Run your own events or at least present at other people’s events.
  2. Make webinars part of your marketing mix (we did one last year and are doing 4 this year).
  3. Make sure you use case studies to help you promote your firm.

Can I suggest you choose on of the 3 above and do more with it than you are at the moment?

Go on then!

Paul Shrimpling signature

 

 

 

 PS If you want the full report you’ll find it here