
As an accountant, bookkeeper or outsourced payroll professional who’s looking to attract new clients, you’re likely in the process of planning some marketing to get the word out.
But how do you get started? Why do you need to create content for your business? How can this help both your prospective and existing clients? Read on to find out some top tips for creating powerful and engaging resources to benefit your business.
Why is creating content so important for your business?
When it comes to marketing and selling a new payroll service, content should be at the forefront of your marketing strategy.
Creating content that is useful and relevant to your target audience provides a number of benefits for your business, as it allows them to engage with your service and learn more about your business (and offering) through a digestible format. Creating content helps to:
- Build credibility and authority
- Improve brand awareness
- Drive conversions
- Improve client retention
For more insights on competing in the payroll services market, check out our blog on how to compete in the growing payroll services market.
How do you create engaging content?
It’s one thing to understand the importance of creating content and resources for prospective and existing clients, but what are some of the steps you should take in order to kick off your content strategy?
Define your audience first
In order to create engaging content, you need to first understand who your audience is. Think about your product offering – are you reselling payroll software? Are you running payroll for clients? Are you providing compliance and payroll advice, or training? Think about who will likely take up your services, and think about their needs.
Consider your current customers (if you have any), or research your ideal prospective customers and find out more about their demographics and individual business needs. This will help to shape the different types of content that you create, as you implement your content strategy.
Identify key pillars of interest
Now that you’ve defined who you want to sell to and what their profile / needs are, you can start to think about shaping content around different topics or pillars of interest. This will vary, depending on your audience’s interests.
If you or your audience is interested in improving their online presence, our blog on SEO for payroll services: blog writing tips to boost organic traffic provides valuable tips on enhancing your blog’s reach and engagement.
Consider key topics to create content around, that you know that prospective and current clients will be interested in. Not only will this help with navigating around your website, it will also give you clear direction for future content. Always remember that you’re wanting to showcase how you can improve efficiency through your services, through subtle content that directly addresses this to prospective clients.
Keep it simple and concise
We’ve all been there before – you’ll take one look at a wall of text (whether that’s a blog post or a downloadable guide) and you’ll decide not to bother reading it. Too much content on one page will overwhelm and oversaturate your audience, and they’ll lose interest.
When writing up content, it’s best to:
- Make sure your topic is relevant to your target audience
- Create an outline with a title, headings and sub-headings before you start writing
- Avoid using too much jargon, and keep the language simple
- Use headings, sub-headings, bullet points and numerical lists where possible, to break up text and allow your reader to quickly identify what they’re looking for at a glance
- Get straight to the point as quickly as possible
- Edit and revise where necessary
Always keep the end goal in mind; what do you want the reader to gain from this content, and how can you convey this as succinctly as possible?
Switch up the formats
Valuable content comes in all different shapes and formats, especially as everyone has different preferences as to how they consume content. Some people may be more visual learners, whereas some prefer written content.
Consider creating content in formats such as blogs, guides, emails, infographics and social media posts. To improve your email marketing efforts, read our article about email marketing for accountants and outsourced payroll providers. As you gain confidence and create more content, you can even branch into webinars, podcasts and other visual formats.
Think back to your goals and objectives – what do you want to achieve with this content? To educate and inform? Or to convert?
Incorporate real-life examples and interactive elements
As you build up your client base, consider interviewing existing clients and using this in prospective client content (and across your website / social media channels). Interactive elements are also a great option for improving engagement.
Use tools like polls, feedback forms, Q&As and surveys to reach your audience and provide you with valuable insights – you could even ask what sort of content they’d like to see from you, and crowdsource inspiration for your content strategy.
Use clear call-to-actions
At every stage during content creation, whether it’s a social media post or a blog, you should always be asking yourself: what do I want my audience to do? Think about actionable takeaways and behaviour that you’d like them to follow. Again, this will depend on your strategy and your objectives.
If you’re wanting to collect lead information and drive conversions, how do you want to gain their information? If you’re just wanting to drive traffic to your website, where exactly do you want them to land? If you’re creating a resource for an existing client, what’s the end goal – is it just for ongoing nurturing, or do you want them to get in touch with you (or their account manager) to learn more about a new service you might be offering?
Every piece of content that you create, whether it’s for existing or prospective clients, should have a clear call-to-action and an actionable directive that aligns with your key objectives.
How much time should you invest in content creation?
There’s no clear answer as to how much time you should spend on creating content to market your business and offering. You likely have a variety of goals in mind, whether that’s to maximise profits by marketing payroll or increase visibility. It really depends on your business’s goals and your strategy; are you dedicating your time towards a content marketing strategy? Or are you choosing to focus on affiliate marketing, or event marketing, or public relations instead?
Employment Hero provides you with marketing tools and resources to help you succeed
When you partner with Employment Hero, we provide you with powerful payroll and workforce management software to allow you to maximise your offering to clients. We also provide you with marketing and sales support, via ready-made templates that are designed to help you get started with showcasing your offering.
Learn more about Employment Hero Payroll and what we can offer your clients worldwide from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Are you interested in more blogs like these? Check out our blog on SEO for payroll services: Blog writing tips to boost organic traffic.