When it comes to marketing an accounting firm, brand image is everything. And that includes your website. A poorly designed website is like wearing shorts and flipflops to a client meeting – it definitely sends the wrong message. If you want people to see your firm as credible, important and trustworthy, then your website needs to convey that image.
At the same time, your website has to be compelling. It needs to get people’s attention and make them want to engage with you. Otherwise, they will click off to someone else’s website for reasons that have nothing to do with your professional knowledge and expertise.
How you do create a website that is both credible and compelling? By populating it with a variety of interesting, useful and meaningful content. Not just about you and your firm, but about topics of interest to your clients and prospective clients. This includes:
Original content.
Many companies pay college kids $10 an hour to scour the Internet and repurpose content from other sites. Then they put the repurposed content on their website and call it their own. This is not a good approach for a B2B service firm where a professional image is key. Creating your own blogs, videos, white papers, and webinars is essential for positioning your business as both credible and trustworthy.
Valuable content.
It’s not enough to tell people about who you are and what you do. They also want information that helps them make smart tax, financial, and business decisions. Use your website to position your firm as industry thought leader. For example, provide regular updates on tax laws. Offer tips for savvy money management. Address the issues that you would want to know about if you were in your clients’ shoes.
Fresh content.
Website content is like the fresh produce section in the grocery store – it doesn’t have a very long shelf life. That’s why your website needs to be updated on a regular basis. Otherwise, clients will stop seeing you as a source of valuable new information. If you don’t give people a reason to keep coming back to your website, they won’t.
Publishing a steady supply of quality content on your site offers several important marketing benefits. Studies show that websites with more pages and content have much higher conversion rates. And from an SEO standpoint, more pages means more keyword rich content, which will help your firm rank higher for keyword searches.
If creating quality content on an ongoing basis presents a challenge for your firm, try these suggestions. First, make sure someone takes responsibility for overseeing the content creation process. This doesn’t necessarily mean they have to write the blogs or conduct the webinars. They just have to make sure the content gets produced and published on schedule.
Another way is to find relevant articles on the web and post the links on your website. Don’t repurpose the content or try to claim it as your own. Instead, simply position the links as value-added resources to your clients. It also helps to make content creation a team effort. If you have four people creating one blog entry a month, it adds up to 48 new pages a year. And it provides a variety of insights and perspectives to your readers.
When publishing the content, it helps to have a website with an integrated content management system like WordPress. That way, a non-technical person can update the website without requiring assistance from a web developer.
Remember, when it comes to marketing your accounting firm, a professional website design with regularly updated content is the right formula for success.
