On first inspection, marketing on a profit and loss account for a typical business will not come as a surprise to most people, however, seeing it on an IT contractor who is operating through a limited company may come as a surprise to many.

However competition for many roles has increased in recent years, and web technology has increased the number of channels available for hirers to find workers.

At the same time, the number of methods contractors can use to promote their own personal services has increased massively.

To maximise your chance of securing fresh sources of work, you may benefit greatly from setting aside a modest chunk of your company’s profits towards marketing and publicity.

Here we look at how marketing costs are treated by HMRC and have compiled a list of typical marketing costs you may encounter as a contractor.

Marketing costs for professional contractors can claim:

• Paying for a professional Linkedin profile review– to make sure your profile stands out to potential hirers, achievements are listed in the correct order, and the right keywords are used and your content is primed for recruiter searchers.
• Paying for a professional CV review – your CV should be concise, with a focus on relevant experience and skills. Given that many recruiters judge a CV within seconds, this is a worthwhile cost for a minimal outlay.
• Creating a website for your company – this needn’t be an expensive exercise. For many tech-savvy contractors, you can simply use an out of the box CMS, such as WordPress. However, unless you have design experience, you may need to pay for the one-off costs of creating a logo and/or designing your core website templates.
• Social media / web-based profile costs, such as advertising on Google Adwords, promoted ads on Twitter and paying for other things which will boost your online profile, such as LinkedIn Premium.
• Web hosting –For most contractors’ needs, a shared hosting package is more than enough – often costing under £100 per year.
• Search Engine Optimisation – you may benefit from some professional help to boost your website rankings, although we’d urge you to take great care, as Google can spot unnatural activity with ease. Writing great content, and securing relevant and strong inbound links to your company site are the two tried and tested ways of strengthening your search engine rankings.
• Domain names – provide your company with a professional image by securing a domain name – to use with your custom website, and use the name for business emails too. Domain names are inexpensive (often under £30 for a 2-year .com name, and under £15 for a 2-year .co.uk name), however, you will need to renew them periodically.
• Stationary costs – a wide variety of physical products, including business cards, professionally printed company paperwork (for those increasingly rare offline communications), pens, paper, notepads, etc.
• You may also incur costs for advertising your services in paper or online magazines, newspapers and websites.