Social Media and Telemarketing for Accountants

I’ve just added my comments to an article at Accountancy Age but it hasn’t been published yet so I thought I would add my comments here for people to see straight away.

The general gist of the article is that neither Social Media or Telemarketing for Accountants are good marketing methods for new business development.

Hmmm. Let me think… that’s the two aspects of accountancy marketing that are on the increase for me then.

You can read the full article here:  Accountancy Age – Social Media, Telemarketing for Accountants and the Emperor’s New Clothes.

My response is as follows

Unfortunately there is a tendency for people to jump in with or without the help from a consultant, get blogging, link to twitter, facebook and linkedin with the aim of blasting broadcasts. People quite quickly reach a conclusion as you have, that it is the emperor’s new clothes and that social media for accountants doesn’t work.

Heather (Townsend) is spot on with Social Media being valuable in identifying people to connect with.  Whether that then becomes an online or offline conversation is a different matter but I would remind people that there are remote working accountants who sign up clients without ever meeting them at all face to face.

My business is cold calling and telemarketing for accountants.  I am not short of customers and demand is increasing. I also know what our ratios are in terms of hours for appointments, conversion rates etc so can be objective about this return on investment.

Not only is traditional cold calling and telemarketing for accountants popular because of the attractive return on investment from a well thought out campaign, it is evolving to incorporate social media as a lead generation method.  Conversations and people are identified via social media monitoring tools, connections are made, and where appropriate marketing and sales approaches take place.

Maxxy has been making cold calls from social media discussions since around 2007 (from business forums mostly at that time) so it’s not a new thing.  What makes it feel different is the huge increase in online conversations.  People will always be drawn to sticking to what is comfortable and so social media or cold calling may not be for everyone but that doesn’t mean it isn’t successful.

You may be interested in this white paper produced by social media examiner this week from a base of 3300 marketers.  Page 16 gives an overview of how people rate benefits of social media marketing with 51% indicating their main benefit is generating qualified leads.

The next page talks about Improved Sales demonstrating it takes time to develop relationships that lead to actual business. The people who achieved the most benefit are self employed and small business owners with 2 or more employees. Another interesting statistic is that 52% of people see lead generation benefits from only 6 hours per week.

So, are all these marketers wrong?

I can only say that based on my experiences of using social media for my own business and on behalf of clients which includes accountants it seems pretty accurate to me. I know what leads we generate from cold calling and social media and I can’t recruit staff quick enough!

So what are your thoughts?

I would love to hear them either here or over at accountancyage.com

accountancy, accountants, Cold Calling, Social Media, Social Telemarketing, telemarketing for accountants

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