Have you thought about where your existing client base has come from? Chances are that as a book-keeper or firm offering accounting software and financial management, most of the people on your customer list have been recommended to you via word of mouth. If that’s the case, even if you’re not aware of it, you’re already harnessing the power of business networking – one of the most valuable ways of collecting targeted new clients that a business can have.

Whilst many businesses have to market to the UK and even abroad, book-keeping and accounting businesses typically follow a business model which draws clients from the locality – which is why networking groups in particular are a fantastic resource to plug into. These are widespread throughout the UK, with several operating in every major town, offering breakfast or lunchtime meets. Check out 4networking.biz as an example of friendly, welcoming national networking groups.

How can Networking Groups benefit my business?

It’s simple. Every business, no matter how large or small, needsMore...

My role is to manage the Fusion Marketing Website and the User Interface for the Fusion Accounts Application. For those of you who are not familiar with Fusion Accounts it is an online bookkeeping and accounting system. We’ve recently been working on improving visits to the website and we monitor this via Google Analytics.

We’ve started a new online Marketing Campaign combining various different strategies such as banner advertising, email marketing, YouTube and social networking. Our team created a short, funny YouTube video to test YouTube and viral marketing. We’ve also been testing strategies on our homepage to improve bounce rates.

We’ve just started our campaign so hopefully in the coming weeks you’ll see some of our efforts online. From what we’ve gathered so far, you can definitely improve the traffic to your website with a few simple changes.More...

Members of the Fusion Accounts team take part in the second UK election debate.  They listen intently as David Cameron gives his closing speech while Gordon Brown gets flustered.  One member of the audience finds his time better spent invoicing one of his customers.  The beauty of online accounting, anytime, anywhere access.

Just had a call from a marketing agency who specialise in mailing lists who I used several years ago.  They had sent us a special offer in the post which had been returned to sender. 

Could they confirm our new address?

Rain on a wedding day is just bad luck.

I am continuously reading about how I should be using Twitter and other social networking to as part of my marketing activities.  Whilst agreeing with this in principle it is quite difficult to put into practice and I’m never really too sure of the value.

I have a personal twitter account @stuartm9999 and we also have a twitter account for Fusion Accounts - @FusionAccounts.  Although I find it easy to tweet verbosely on my personal account the product account is a bit more sparse than perhaps it should be.

Then this morning I got a great tweet from an unexpected source – Belfast City Council.

On Saturday I tweeted that I had received my new food recycling basket from Belfast City Council.  This morning I received a direct message from them with a link to further instructions on how to use it.

This has really lifted my perception of them as an organisation and consequently my belief in twitter and other “social networking” as a marketing tool.