When is a good accountant’s newsletter a bad newsletter? A good accountant’s newsletter should be brilliantly informative for letting existing clients and prospects know about tax tips, forthcoming changes, reminders about deadlines, insights into the small print of the budget, interesting things you are doing and just generally letting them know how brilliant and professional you are.
However (and you knew there was a however cantering up) the rub is you have to think of those useful things, write them up, get them formatted, send them out, and let’s face it, you could be doing chargeable work instead.
So it seems eminently practical to let those magnificent people who do your specialist accountancy website (already stocked with up to the minute information on tax and everything or you can sue them) do your newsletter for you, right?
Two reasons why this is horribly counter productive:
- The information is not unique, which can have a negative impact on your search engine optimisation. Google and friends use all sorts of clever algorithms to work out who comes up on the first page of a search engine, and if you have exactly the same content as 100 other practices (you didn’t think they wrote it just for you did you?) week after week they spot that it is not unique and treat you accordingly. If you don’t believe me, copy a couple of paragraphs of your latest newsletter (not a title with your name in it) and paste it into a browser you do not normally use. Your usual browser will remember your browsing history and probably just take you to your own website.
- The information is generic, but you aren’t. You probably have specialisms and areas you don’t want to touch with a bargepole. You may have a lot of clients in agriculture for example, but not so many in the finance sector and its convoluted financial instruments. Whatever your preferences and specialist areas, it is those you wish to promote, and those types of clients you want to pitch to, not a vague general generic world. You need to be segmenting your market and targeting your communications.
You are not one of a herd, you are unique. So make your communications reflect precisely who you are and who you want to speak to.
If you are an accountant and would like to talk about your newsletters or marketing in general, then please call us on 01482 860244 and ask for Lindsay Hartley. As well as being a Member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, she also passed her ATII exams whilst working for two of the big four accountancy firms (so she she speaks your language!)
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