When it comes to marketing it seems as though some businesses have it easy.
The perception is those businesses are in non-boring and relatable industries and that it’s easy to come up with creative ideas and strategies.
After all, how are you expected to develop creative ideas and strategies to market your payroll services company for example? I mean really, who can relate to payroll and HR?
The reality however, is that when it comes to marketing any type of business there is one common factor. This of course is the goal of connecting with a customer.
Yes budget size, expertise, and the skillset of your marketing team make a difference, but I think it’s safe to say we’ve all seen big budget marketing campaigns that didn’t produce their desired results.
With that being said let’s see if we can simplify the marketing of a payroll services company in order to make it easier to attract more clients and exposure.
How can you start to market your payroll company more easily?
To start us off lets begin by looking at the strengths and weaknesses of a payroll business. We will keep this real simple.
Strengths
- Chances are you in an office and are in front of a computer the majority of the time.
- You have access to a lot of information and numbers.
Weaknesses
- You don’t really interact with your customers that much, or on a personal level.
- You are not in the forefront of your customer’s (or in fact most people’s) mind.
You can begin by building on your strengths. Compared with many other businesses you are in the unique position of perhaps spending much of your time on the computer. Also as strength two suggests, because you are involved with money and payment, you have access to a lot of numbers and information.
How can you use your strengths to build your marketing?
You can leverage both of your strengths from above and start online marketing. You have different options with the type of internet marketing you want to do, but you might want to try blogging, and/or social media to try to connect with your target customers.
There are huge advantages with both of these choices. For example it’s free and easy to setup a social media account such as Twitter, or LinkedIn. The same goes for blogging, even if you don’t have a website you can setup a free WordPress, or Tumblr blog.
Also, if done right both blogging and social media allow you to really connect with your target audience. Your goal in doing either of these is to strive to be an industry expert or authority. You want to be a resource center or hub full of helpful information and advice.
As strength number two from above indicates you have a lot of information to use with your blogging or social media.
For example you might know income disparities among different groups or locations, how much money a person is likely to give up depending on their filing status, or even how much money companies are paying for certain fields.
Whereas some businesses might feel as though they don’t have enough to share on a blog or social media, you actually have a lot you can share. Also, your information or content is very relatable to people as it has to do with money and work. Both of which are huge parts of all of our lives.
How can you start to blogging about payroll?
To get going you can first start to define what you do. Possible topics include:
What role do you play in people’s work lives?
How important it is to comply with all the required rules and regulations.
You can then move on to next level topics such as:
Why it’s important to show up to work on time, and how much every hour missed costs you.
Where and how your tax dollars are spent.
Which areas of a city or zip codes the most people claiming single, married, or exempt statuses?
Which areas of a city do people have the more of their money deducted? Are there any surprises?
How can you use social media to connect people?
Once again you want to focus on relating to people. One of the keys is to figure out the areas or subjects that you can use to connect with people.
For example your immediate subject area or field is payroll so you can share this type of content to connect with the people who might be most interested about your services. You can then move up and get into other areas that are in your sphere.
Possible areas where you can offer value include employment, money management, and even career advancement.
Are there any creative strategies you can use?
So far we focused only on the strengths we mentioned above. As we move on to the weaknesses I think a little bit of creativity is in order.
The first weakness listed above deals with not interacting with people on a personal level. One strategy you can use to offset this is to connect with people on their possible aspirations or goals.
As you know every so often checks are delivered or payment is direct deposited and that’s it. Everyone moves on looking forward to the next payday.
Why not take advantage of this time period to change things up.
Depending on the company and type of employees, one strategy you can use is to mail, or deliver a degree with the check or stub. You can make replica bachelors, masters, or PhD degrees with employees names on them.
Imagine someone with a bachelor’s degree receiving a replica master’s degree with their name, and the name of a nearby university on it. Also included with the degree is a note with a message. The message can relay something to the effect of how they can afford to pay for that particular degree. For example, if they put a specific amount to the side every two weeks or even month, they can actually help pay their own way sooner than later.
Sure it’s going to cost money to print the degrees, but remember many businesses spend money on mailers frequently. However, the difference with this strategy is its personal and you are reaching a specifically targeted audience.
Also remember to put you company name on the degree, and a call to action to check out your blog for more information. Now you have even more to blog about, and hopefully people who will be visiting your blog for that specific value.
The other weakness we mentioned above is about not being in the forefront of most people’s minds. This doesn’t have to be the case. A company offering payroll can indeed be fun and exciting.
One idea you can use to get people to take notice is to hold a race. That’s right, a race. This race however, isn’t just any race. It actually touches on a key relatable point to your business.
In the race you have just two contestants. The first participant is supposed to symbolize a business who is receiving payroll services from a capable company. The second is supposed to symbolize a business that is doing payroll on their own.
It’s a simple two person race, with only one catch. The first competitor is able to run the race free and clear. The second competitor has to compete with something slowing him down.
It’s up to you, how exactly you want to do this, but one example might be to have contestant number two run the race carrying three large balls, similar to the ones used for exercise.
On the balls you can write the labels “regulations”, “errors”, and “OSHA” to symbolize those things possible being the way of a company not getting professional payroll help.
As you can see it’s doesn’t have to be hard or costly to market a business such this. Just remember to focus on your customers and how you can best relate to them.
Also are there any other creative ideas to market payroll that you can think of? Or any other type of business that you think is a challenge to market?
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