Behavioral analytics (BA) is a rapidly expanding segment of analysis that grew at a pace of 40% CAGR between 2017 and 2023. While many businesses are adopting BA, the accounting industry has yet to fully embrace this segment of analysis.
Many accounting firms tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach to their marketing and are missing out on great opportunities.
For example, how often do you send out an email to all of your clients about taxes, bookkeeping or one of your many services?
You might hit the mark with clients that use your tax services, but do the people who use you for just payroll want to read these emails? Probably not. In fact, some subscribers might unsubscribe from your list or never engage with your mail.
BA allows you to improve:
- Engagement
- Retention
- Conversions
What is Behavioral Analytics?
How are your clients interacting with your content assets, website or app? BA unlocks these insights by allowing you to see:
- Conversion rates
- Session duration on your site
- Click-through rates
- Open rates
- Time on page
- Bounce/exit rate
- Sign-up rates (think a webinar)
- Etc.
Behavioral analytics provides you with data collection and points to understand how people interact with your site or email, where they’re getting frustrated, what actions they take and even where they click on the page.
When you use these data points in your marketing, you can reach the right clients, improve conversion rates and eliminate frustration. Imagine being able to create content, such as a newsletter, that you know the right persona wants to read and will have a 70% open rate. That’s the power of behavioral analytics.
Benefits of Behavioral Analytics for Accounting Firms
If your marketing is “working,” why should you use BA? Because it:
Personalizes Your Marketing Campaigns
Did you know that 86% of B2B customers expect you to know their personal information? You need to do the “legwork” before closing sales or trying to get these companies to take an action.
BA allows you to add personalization to your marketing campaigns (see how below).
Improve Engagement and Retention
Imagine if your dentist sent you an email about the latest baseball scores. You might click on the mail the first time out of curiosity, but would this information keep you opening each mail?
It’s unlikely.
Unless you’re a big baseball fan, you will become unengaged and even unsubscribe from the email list. Now, if the dentist used BA, they would know how to cater emails to their audience that drive engagement and keep readers coming back for more.
Better Allocate Marketing Resources
Marketing budgets always seem to be stretched too thin. There are so many channels to cover:
- Social media marketing
- PPC
- SEO
And then there are traditional forms of marketing that we’re not even listing. When you segment clients based on their behavior, you can allocate more of your budget to the things that work instead of things that are less effective.
Jump on Emerging Trends
Experimentation is one of the key ways to see what works and doesn’t work. Data allows you to be confident in your decision to jump on emerging trends and capitalize on them. Your demographic may love webinars, which is something new for you, or they may dislike them.
Behavioral analytics helps you learn both good and bad trends to make the right marketing decisions.
How to Apply Behavioral Analysis to Your Marketing
BA sounds good, but what application does it have for your firm? A lot. For example:
- You can segment your prospects and clients into groups to send them targeted marketing material. You may decide to have a list for your tax clients and one for payroll that you can then use to optimize landing pages on your website.
- Perhaps you find that certain clients do not open up any of your emails. But you may look at their behavior and find that they’re very active on your social channels. With this information in hand, you can then allocate some of your budget to target them on these channels.
- Where are people clicking off on your landing pages? If you know this information, you can redesign your pages to improve conversions.
You can use BA to drive engagement and sharing of your content, too. With all of this information in mind, there remains one question: how do you begin using BA?
Most firms rely on a marketing agency, like ours, to handle all of the nitty-gritty work for them. Scouring through data points and spending time on analytics is often too time-consuming for non-marketing experts to handle on their own.
You’ll need to:
- Integrate analytics into all of your marketing channels
- Set up ways to gather additional user data on your website, app, etc.
- Gather enough quantitative data to make accurate decisions
- Analyze the data using tools or by working with someone who knows how to “make sense” of all the information
Based on the data, you then need to make decisions on how to use it properly. For example, you may begin by segmenting your email list and enabling heatmap tracking on your website. After you segment your email lists and start sending out personalized emails to each of the groups you have, you’ll need to continue analyzing data to see what’s working and what’s not.
Why put so much effort into email marketing? For every $1 spent, the returns can be as much as $40.
Heatmap tracking will further help you by allowing you to understand where people are clicking on your website, why they’re clicking off and how to make impactful changes to get the results you want.
Of course, these are just two small sources of marketing that you’ll need to cover. You’ll need to gather, analyze and utilize data across all channels to leverage the full power of behavioral analytics.
What’s the result? Targeted marketing that can drive more leads, fill up your client pipeline and generate more revenue.
Whew! Behavioral Analytics is Powerful
Harnessing the power of your own data helps you create personalized marketing campaigns that engage your audience, retains them, and converts them. You can begin by integrating analytics into your marketing strategy and analyzing the data to extract beneficial data.
If your accounting firm wants to stay ahead of the competition and elevate its marketing efforts, it needs the insights that BA provides.
