Firms Improve Marketing Campaigns by Utilizing Students to Manage CPA Websites

The most desirable first contact with potential prospects for just about all small practices are quality CPA websites. Above all else they must give a good picture about your practice. Although a site advertises for you in the background around the clock, it needs hard work to manage your site content so that it is always new. This ensures your site is listed high enough in search engine results pages (SERPs) so that potential clients can locate your practice.

This takes a lot of diligence. One excellent method is to work with a student to help you with your online marketing. New webmasters and students are a strong labor pool. They generally welcome the opportunity to create web marketing programs. Here are some pointers to effectively bring a student into a practice to help create and manage marketing programs and CPA websites.

Intern Skills

You actually don’t need an intern with a lot of accounting expertise for this position. Instead the most desirable candidates will already have some experience with online marketing. They need to be skilled in SEO (search engine optimization). They should also have SEM (search engine marketing) skills. It isn’t an impossible task to improve your search engine results. However, it takes a lot of effort and you must be patient. You want a steady stream of fresh content. It’s a big challenge keeping CPA websites fresh and interesting. Examine writing samples, especially if any are written about financial management and accounting. You obviously don’t have to spend time teaching them the fundamentals of your business, but you’ll have much more luck teaching a writer to sell accounting services than you will trying to turn an accounting student into a writer.

As a CPA, you understand the importance of a professional and dependable image for not only your prospects, but for your current clients as well. Your intern does not directly work with your clients. However, their work represents you and your practice directly. It is a good idea to review their work carefully. Because they will be representing you online, you want to make sure the quality of their work is sufficient.

You want your intern to develop a set of statistics to measure your website’s performance. For this they only need a very basic set of experience with math. An understanding of spreadsheets and basic statistics is all that is needed to measure the effectiveness of the marketing programs over time.

Your Staff and Your Intern

Even though the intern role may be a temporary one, it is a good idea to treat your intern as if they are a permanent employee. You want to think about how compatible they will be with your permanent staff. They will all be working together. The content your intern creates is a direct reflection of your firm. It helps when your intern communicates effectively with your employees.

Marketing Results

Because search engine programs can take several months to produce real, visible results, it is a good idea to let the intern make suggestions on SEO and SEM programs. They can make valuable contributions for your CPA website. It is a good idea to consider their input. Interns can make substantial contributions to your practice’s bottom line, so it is a good idea to keep all options open.

Once the first marketing campaigns are over, you might decide to continue to work with your practice’s intern after the initial scope of the project. Business School students and aspiring webmasters can continue to contribute to your online success, in particular in the competitive atmosphere of accounting sites.

Tags : cpa websites, human resources, internet marketing