Like any other business I have to balance the need for attracting new clients with our ability to service existing ones. I don’t like to overextend my resources to sacrifice service to long-standing clients. During the past year I actively pursued adding 2-3 more clients and possibly adding staff to handle them. You may ask yourself only 2 or 3? The reason for such a conservative goal is that each client is different and can eat up a lot of support time either on the phone or in person. I like to over deliver and under promise to keep satisfaction levels high. Besides tax season, the past 10 years has seen a new client added about every 18 months, and I’m ok with that. Most of these add-ons were from tax work that progressed into part-time accounts and some even full-time.
Fast forward to 2015. I started advertising on Twitter, Bing, and Google with a modest yet effective budget designed to deliver new leads. What I experienced from SEO, Display and Search ads was a lot of noise and window shopping. The new clients that I did add were from the QuickBooks Partner program which is free and another referral which was from some previous tax work done in the past. So taking my own example and data into consideration, I’ve decided to end my experiment. All the time and effort I put into designing ads, managing different platforms, choosing keywords and ad text, can now be spent on my current clientele. I’ll probably wind up spending more time with my family and get more referrals as a result.
Bottom line is don’t believe the hype. Be your own judge and make sure the cost/benefit is in your favour, not Google’s, Instagram’s, Twitter’s or Facebook’s.
Likes are not sales nor leads.
‘Till next time
Rick
bbtfinancial.ca 
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