Clements Purvis & Stewart (CPS) is a regional accounting firm based in Douglas, Georgia. CPS focuses exclusively on the business sector, providing white-glove accounting and advisory services to companies across various industries.
Challenge
For years, the partners at CPS enjoyed success via word-of-mouth referrals. In late 2021, they set aggressive revenue growth targets for the year ahead and aimed to expand into new markets across the state of Georgia and Florida.
Then they faced a problem: they realized that they would not be able to hit their revenue targets and reach a new generation of clients across a larger service area with word-of-mouth alone. CPS needed to accelerate their digital marketing efforts, improve lead generation, automate follow-up, and increase customer conversions, all while making sure their firm stood out from the competition.
That’s when they reached out to Ascend.
Solution
With a number of challenges to tackle, Ascend conducted an in-depth discovery workshop with CPS stakeholders, identified objectives, developed recommendations, and delivered and executed on a thorough plan of action.
Objectives:
- Increase overall revenues by 4%
- Cross-sell to existing client base
- Generate leads via additional channels other than word-of-mouth
- Increase brand awareness
- Improve brand perception
Key Recommendations:
- Implement and use HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional to deliver, measure and optimize marketing campaigns; as well as clearly attribute marketing activities to customer and revenue growth
- Develop and implement marketing plan centered around pillar topics that focused on meeting a key objective each quarter
We took a multi-pronged approach to achieve our objectives. Key aspects of our plan of action included:
Email Strategy in HubSpot
Using their existing client contacts list, built campaigns to educate them on CPS’ robust offerings and improve cross-sell opportunities.
Social Media
To improve brand perception, we updated CPS’ collateral and used HubSpot’s social publishing tools to develop a regular content calendar and publishing schedule.
Video
We regularly interviewed their experts over Zoom and used the recordings to generate informative clips covering a variety of topics, such as:
- The Employee Retention Tax Credit
- Compilation, Audit & Review: How are they different?
- What’s involved in succession planning for family businesses?
- How Can an Audit Benefit Your Business?
Content & SEO
Using HubSpot’s SEO tools, we identified topics that would help generate qualified organic search traffic to their website. One topic we identified as particularly opportune was “employee retention tax credit.” We determined that the topic was:
- Specific in that it was a narrow topic within the realm of business tax, therefore allowing us to use a long-tail approach to generate relevant traffic.
- Measurable in that we had the tools within HubSpot to measure the performance of organic search visits and conversions to ERC-related content.
- Relevant in that CPS was capable of providing expert assistance to businesses that wanted to obtain the credit.
- Time-bound in that qualified businesses had a window of time to apply for the tax credit.
Blog Post: Who is Eligible to Obtain the Employee Retention Tax Credit
Content Offer: Employee Retention Qualification Guide
Results
Through our multi-pronged approach, Ascend’s marketing efforts brought in more than double the firm’s revenue growth target. CPS has been very happy with the results achieved through their partnership with Ascend.
Email Results
Emails earned an average click rate of 4.23%, nearly four times the industry benchmark of 1.26%.
Social Media & Video
CPS’ social media presence grew tremendously in 2022 vs. their previous year’s performance.
Organic Search
CPS’ organic search traffic increased substantially over the course of 2022.
During the early months of 2022, organic traffic stalled at around 500 sessions per month. As we built out and implemented content throughout the site, organic traffic skyrocketed to 3,450 sessions in September (a 590% increase).
The Employee Retention Tax Credit content was especially successful, with the blog post generating over 10,000 organic search sessions since being published in June 2022.
The related Employee Retention Tax Credit content offer landing page achieved a 28.57% conversion rate.
Impact
Overall Business Transformation
According to Ryan Stewart, COO of CPS, Ascend’s solutions have transformed how CPS generates engagement and new business opportunities.
“In the short-term, Ascend’s marketing solutions introduced the concept of digital engagement to us and our firm. We really began to see the reality of digital interactions translating into real-world interactions and, therefore, revenue.
In the long term, we’re looking to expand into new markets. To know that we have Ascend there to help us get our brand out into these new communities is of great value to us. Not only are we able to get our name out there, but they’re able to help us find the right clients. The right fit for us is extremely important to us because we value long-term relationships with our clients.”
ERC Campaign
The ERC Campaign achieved staggering results. According to Ryan:
“We started to see that we could take this tax credit opportunity beyond our client base. We needed Ascend to help us reach those clients who would be eligible. For just the businesses that we have worked with, we’ve been able to bring back almost $22 million to their businesses, their employees, and their families. Of the businesses that we’ve worked with, we realized $2 million in service fees, and of that $2 million, we are able to attribute over $420,000 to Ascend’s marketing efforts.”
Watch the video below to hear Ryan’s full perspective on working with Ascend.
We congratulate CPS on their success in 2022 and look forward to helping them thrive for years to come.
