Search Engine Marketing for Tax and Accounting Professionals

White Paper By Mr. Pat Bhatt, November 20th, 2006

Traditional advertising models involve high upfront costs with no clear guarantees of return on investment. As a result, small enterprises have simply been unable to compete effectively with larger businesses, with bigger marketing budgets. A simple flier or coupon campaign may run into several hundreds of dollars with, often, less than 1% success rate with customer acquisition.

With the advent of the Internet and dramatic changes in consumer behavior, marketing is taking a whole new dimension due to web-based technologies. Foremost, they have significantly lowered the entry barriers for launching marketing campaigns from hundreds of dollars to just pennies. Second, they have allowed businesses to better target customers. Finally, they provide better decision support tools that enable rapid responses to changing conditions.

Today, more and more people are using the Internet to shop for and find products and services. This trend is not only rampant among younger demographic segments, but is also fast becoming the norm among baby-boomers. While this creates new opportunities for small-businesses, it nonetheless poses challenges in being discovered quickly on the Internet, especially with 100s of millions of companies posing a web-presence. Most businesses today believe that simply hosting a website will automatically result with clients pouring in. Much to the contrary, competitors offering the very same products and services will win clients at a much greater pace, by simply employing smart, yet affordable, web-marketing strategies.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) levels the playing field by giving the small business an equally likely opportunity as the large business, in acquiring customers at a very low cost. The concept is quite simple - prospective clients shopping for a product or a service are likely to enter a certain set of keywords in a search engine to locate businesses offering those services. For example, Ms. Jane Doe looking for a tax professional may enter “Tax preparer”. SEM produces advertisements on-demand, based on keywords entered by the consumers. For example, you may choose to display your advertisements during the months of January and March for the keywords “Tax preparer”, for the Eastern Michigan area. If Ms. Jane Doe belongs to this region, your advertisement will appear to her. She may click on your ad to follow through to your website, where you impress her with your credentials, and thus acquire a client! Such a click may cost a small fee, such as a penny or a nickel, depending on your budget. If Jane does not click on your advertisement, you incur no cost. Thus, unlike other traditional forms of advertisement, you are charged only when a prospect with in an interest in your products or services clicks through to your website.

SEM allows you to tune your strategy to deal with competitors, by placing higher bids on user-clicks so that your ads will achieve greater prominence in relation to theirs. You may also run multiple campaigns if you are offering a portfolio of products and services, or may want to target customers by region, time of year, among a wide variety of other parameters. Tuning your strategy requires advanced analysis of current campaign results, and the modification of campaign parameters periodically, to achieve the right results that you desire. Like any marketing campaign, results are not always guaranteed, but you have the option of changing your strategy or campaign quickly and without incurring any costs for printing, etc.

At Experient Financial Technologies, the makers of OneView SiteWorks™ and OneView Practice™, we believe that you should be spending more on your web-marketing than on your website. Web-marketing will help you grow your business at a much faster rate than simply investing on a fancy website. We therefore offer highly affordable websites, starting as low as $9.99/month, so that you can spend more on promoting your website and making that website work for you.

Experient offers a variety of affordable SEM management packages for your business. Depending on your goals and your budget, Experient will first prepare your website through its OneView SiteWorks™ offering. The website will be SEM ready. We will then devise a web-marketing strategy, gain your approval, and put it into effect. We will send you periodic reports on how your strategy is working, and modify the campaigns to maximize your results.

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