Marketing

The business and its buyers

accord implements and supports Sage Intacct for mid-market organisations across more than thirty countries. Customers often come from QuickBooks, Xero or Sage 50 and need to manage multiple entities or currencies, or handle more complex reporting.

The buyers are finance directors and financial controllers choosing software their teams may use for a decade. My content needs to help them assess whether it fits their business, with enough detail to answer practical questions. That means researching the requirements of four sectors: not-for-profit, construction, financial services and distribution.

Results

LinkedIn followers grew five-fold over two and a half years, with no monthly decline during that period. All organically, with zero ad spend.

A different approach to acquisition news

I used a meme to cover Sage's acquisition of Criterion. It became accord's best-performing post.

43,923 impressions. 309 reactions. 24 reposts. 2.8% engagement. That single post accounted for roughly sixty per cent of the month's reach and sixty per cent of its reactions.

The response gave me a useful example of how humour can work with this audience. It remains the strongest result among the posts measured here.

The remit

I wrote and maintain accord's voice guide, bringing the tone, formatting and channel rules into a single document. It includes a record of corrections so those decisions carry through to later work. I rewrote it for the June 2026 rebrand and use it across four sectors and three channels.

Strand one — content

Sixty published articles on financial management software and the questions buyers ask about it. Research includes FCA surveys, FRC amendments, Charity Commission guidance and Sage's product documentation. I use these sources to check the detail and explain what it means for the reader.

I also review and update older content. For pages that already rank, I improve the article while retaining its URL, H1 and canonical, so useful existing pages stay part of the content plan.

See the writing in detail →

Strand two — measurement

I built a LinkedIn engagement baseline using 39 posts to make monthly comparisons more useful. I pooled engagement and impressions because a simple average gives a 68-impression post the same weight as a 1,700-impression post. That mattered in May: the two largest posts accounted for 66% of impressions but only 2/11 of the average's weight, masking a drop in engagement.

The analysis also allows for followers seeing multiple posts, using a dispersion factor of √2.18 to widen the confidence intervals. With roughly 13 posts and 3,200 impressions a month, small changes can be hard to distinguish from normal variation. The report makes that limit explicit.

Video was the only format that performed clearly above the baseline in this analysis. The data did not show a statistically clear difference between graphics, carousels and photos once reach was taken into account. That gave us a stronger reason to make more video.

Strand three — the August 2026 website audit

After accord's website rebuild in June 2026, I audited the site in August to check what had changed and what needed attention. This was my most technical project to date, covering the live pages, old URLs and search performance.

• Crawled all 139 live pages to check the site against its sitemap.
• Recovered the pre-rebuild URL map from the Internet Archive and tested all 192 addresses against the live site.
• Reviewed Search Console data for the whole site and individual pages, comparing the same periods year on year to account for seasonality.
• Found that 71 former product, service and sector pages now led to three pages. Flagged redirects to loosely related content that could be treated as soft 404 errors.
• Prepared an implementation ticket with 26 redirects, every destination tested.

The report separates what I could measure from what I couldn't establish. It also considers external changes, including the expansion of Google's AI Overviews during the same period, so the findings don't attribute every change in search performance to the rebuild.

Strand four — brand and social design

I created accord's social graphics from March 2024 to July 2026, including carousels, event and webinar promotions, testimonial cards and video. Since August 2026, I've also worked with an external agency on some Friday posts, editing the copy as part of the review process.

The designs work within accord's brand and are aimed at busy finance teams. I use clear text and a simple layout to make the topic easy to pick up while scrolling.

Some examples of that work are below.