Engaging small businesses with helpful content

Earlier this year the HMRC made a major change to the way VAT is declared, and collected. It’s part of a major transformation called Making Tax Digital, which will have a pretty big impact on small businesses over the coming years.

The problem is, despite all the advertising from this category, most small business owners still don’t get it. At best, they don’t know what changes are coming, or what they need to do. At worst, they just switch off… as you are starting to (hey, come back! Ok, tax is a bit dull, we know).

That’s why for FreeAgent, we decided to eschew a straight up ‘ad-bombardment’ approach, instead focussing on striking content partnerships and creating native articles that would set out in a simple and straight-forward manner what business owners needed to do.

We identified the industry sectors most likely to engage, and the ones best suited to FreeAgent’s USPs, and created a series of articles and explainers together with those publishers … all helping the reader to choose FreeAgent’s easy to use software, of course.

Our articles did a great job of explaining the issue and FreeAgent’s solution, with an average dwell time of 106 seconds, far in excess of the standard dwell time of display ads for 1.2 seconds.

That’s a dwell time getting on for 2 minutes, for those of you that aren’t too numerical. Hey, if you need help with your company’s finances, why not check out freeagent.com?