How an accounting firm generated 3,000+ leads through digital strategy

Simplebooks is an accounting firm, offering online bookkeeping and accounting services to clients. The invoices and bills of the clients are uploaded to the cloud routinely.

The problem around trust

They came to Surge with a challenge. Since, Simplebooks was recently launched, acquiring customers were proving to be difficult. The main requirement to acquire customers for bookkeeping is trust. Bookkeeping involves receiving all financial transactions and details from the client. Prospects preferring a stable and established business to outsource their bookkeeping made them reluctant to sign up for this service through Simplebooks.

To fix this problem, we intended to create awareness around the brand and to position Simplebooks as a trusted authority for information on accounting services. We maximized on two marketing capabilities; content and search marketing.

Keyword and search strategy

For an organization like Simplebooks where the foundation is built on trust, a good domain should be chosen to represent the brand. The website of Simplebooks is a premium domain. Premium domains are perceived higher in value by website visitors.

One of the main services provided by Simplebooks is bookkeeping. Initially, the objective was to brand Simplebooks as a leading authority figure in bookkeeping by educating website visitors with highly informative content. Through researching keywords for that market, we discovered that the keyword, “bookkeeping” was in demand and significantly competitive. The work and resources required to achieve high rankings would have taken years of effort.

 

 

Brand positioning and acquisition strategy

The assumption, “Startup companies would eventually require bookkeeping as a service”, was put to the test. Every new startup needs to be registered with the Government to proceed activities. Our research indicated that the keyword, ‘company registration’ was a viable alternative with low difficulty levels in ranking and over 700 searches. This enabled the business an opportunity to deliver quick wins and start working together with the prospect.

 

Stimulating a loss leader pricing model, business registration was introduced as a service below the market average. Establishing Simplebooks as the leading source of information for company registration in Sri Lanka would allow bookkeeping to be advertised to the same target audience of registered startups. If an individual registers their business with Simplebooks, they would not hesitate to sign up with other services offered by the business. Startups using bookkeeping as a service would cover up the negative margin generated by the previous product offering.

 

Content strategy

In Sri Lanka, for the keyword, “company registration”, the leading authority for information according to Google is the Registrar of Companies. Their target audience is mainly lawyers and government officials, resulting in the language used for the content being technical and difficult to understand. This meant that there was lack of information curated to educate the general audience on company registration.

To position Simplebooks as a reference guide for anyone, we crafted blog posts using simple language and explained the company registration process in a concise and functional format. The blog posts included the pricing structure of registering a business individually and through Simplebooks. A call to action was present at the end of the blog post, prompting visitors to contact the team of Simplebooks.

 

Funnel and conversion strategy

The idea behind the funnel was simple; a prospect who uses one service provided by Simplebooks would be driven towards the rest.

 

The keyword-rich content was gradually gathering traffic. A goal value of $1 was assigned to the ‘Contact Us’ page, the highest converting page. Once prospects finished reading the blog post, they visited the pricing page to get in touch with the Simplebook’s team.

 

Generating results, growth and ROI

Simplebooks.com has over

30,000 page views monthly, with a total user count of 3,000 leads in their pipeline, and generating over 10 new leads every single day.

The strategy has been updated to include conversion rate optimization, custom CRM integrations with programmatic social media ads based on activity levels with sophisticated marketing automation.

Over the last 12 months, the strategy deployed for Simplebooks generated over 3,000 new leads that have started to sign up for bookkeeping, tax and related services validating the initial assumption.