Marketing Case Study for HR & Accounting Firm
About
Under new leadership, a Nashville-based HR and accounting firm sought to amp up its marketing efforts and drive aggressive growth to the business.
**Spoiler alert: they were so successful in achieving their ambitious growth goals that they were acquired by another larger payroll & HR firm based out of Texas just 2 years later. Huckleberry Branding was alongside them for the entire wild ride, serving as their outsourced marketing department the whole way through. Learn exactly what our team did to help drive business sales through effective content marketing.
Challenge
For more than 20 years, our client has supported the growth of numerous Nashville companies through their outsourced HR and accounting services. In 2018, a change of leadership prompted the company to shift their service focus from business process management services to outsourced HR, PEO, and accounting services exclusively. And with energetic and ambitious leaders at the helm, they had their sights set on rapid growth.
Little did we know it, but the world — and business as we knew it — was about to come to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Solution
With just one new marketing director leading the efforts, there was a lot to do in a short amount of time. So, she called reinforcements to handle the day-to-day. That’s where we came in..
With new leadership and a new service focus to promote, band-aid fixes wouldn’t cut it. Huckleberry Branding hit the ground running with a website redesign and strategic marketing plan that was focused on driving growth to our client’s key service areas. We took a close look at competitors’ marketing efforts, audited existing marketing assets and sales channels, and developed a strategic, aggressive plan of action to drive rapid growth through content marketing. Here are the specific marketing tools we used:
Marketing Tools
- Website redesign
- Search engine optimization
- PPC advertising
- Email marketing
- Social media management
- Lead Magnet Creation & Promotion
The collaborative aim with this project was to aggressively drive new inbound leads to the website. To achieve this, the website was heavily optimized in search engines with weekly blog content and backlink-building efforts; lead magnets were created to drive new email subscribers; and monthly email marketing, social media management, and PPC advertising efforts were employed.
Huckleberry Branding also supported ongoing graphic design and website maintenance needs required to fire all cylinders in the marketing machine.
Results
Website Visits from Organic Search
Since partnering with Huckleberry Branding, the majority of our client’s website traffic came from organic search. Over the course of two years, (between Jan. 2019-Jan. 2021), the company’s website traffic from organic SEO increased 174% from 818 to 2,239 users driven from organic sources per month.
Email Subscribers
Huckleberry Branding created valuable lead magnets, including small business guides, a PPP loan expense tracker, an employee handbook checklist, and more, to drive more email subscribers into the company’s sales pipeline. These lead magnets drove approx. 44 new leads per month, on average, to the sales team and increased the master subscriber list 1,235%.
Leads
The company has also noted an increase in leads coming to their business as a result of its improved organic search presence and inbound sales leads from all across the country. Even through the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to drive inbound leads by creating valuable resources for businesses in transition, from PPP expense tracker downloads to a wealth of blog content about transitioning physical offices to virtual ones.
In the happiest of happy endings, our client’s strong, yet sustainable, growth attracted the eye of another company seeking to expand its service offerings in the Nashville market. In January 2021, our client was acquired by a Houston-based firm with a national footprint.
