7 Website Tips to Drive Real Accounting Firm Growth

This is the value of marketing diversity, through a thoughtful growth plan.

What most firms don’t realize is that there are far more prospects outside of their immediate network looking for help—and not just any help, but the specific kind of expertise that firm has to offer. In today’s highly digitalized market, it’s less and less important where you’re physically located, and increasingly important what you can do better than anyone else.

If you’re really committed to growing your firm, you need to turn your website into a marketing machine. Invest the time and money to do this right up front, and then step back and let your site do its job. While you’re focusing on more important things, like taking good care of your clients, your marketing platform will be automatically generating a healthy pipeline of high quality potential clients and nurturing them for a sale.

Firms that use a digital marketing platform are consistently generating 20+ quality leads a month—and their referral traffic is just frosting on the cake.

So, are you ready to get serious about growing your firm?

Let’s talk about the four essential ingredients of a high functioning CPA firm website:

• Well defined niche
• Thought leadership
• Conversion focused website
• Lead nurturing tools

Well Defined Niche

If we asked you to write one sentence defining your firm’s offerings, how many other firms could reuse the same sentence for themselves? If we hid your logo and firm name on your website, could prospects still differentiate you from other firms, based on your copy alone?

Most firms, when asked what differentiates them from their competitors, will use phrases like “client focused” and “value driven,” or they’ll reference years of experience. They take pride in their massive offering lists (Weaver needs 40 whole pages to get through theirs), wearing “full service” like a badge of honor.

But it’s not 1980 anymore, and no one really wants a firm that can do everything anymore. Modern prospects want a firm that can meet their specific needs really, really well—and they want it to be done fast, with solid, well-vetted processes and without a lot of fuss. They want a firm that understands the nuances of their industry and can help them avoid common pitfalls long before they happen. They want a firm with incredible foresight and depth, not just breadth, of expertise.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve “gotten by” without claiming a niche—the tide is turning quickly, and the firms who insist on ignoring it will eventually be left behind.

It’s time to decide: where does your firm’s greatest value lie? Is there a specific industry you’ve found yourself working in the most over the years? Is there a certain service your team excels at the most, or that you truly do better than anyone else? Do you have a unique approach or perspective that certain clientele would appreciate?

As challenging as it is to identify a niche, there’s an even bigger challenge: owning it. This is where most businesses falter. Be honest: do you have the guts to funnel all of your marketing efforts into one specific niche, meaning that you’ll be actively excluding any prospects who don’t fit your target audience?

For this to work, you need to be all in.

Is it scary? Oh yeah. Is it worth it? In time, definitely. Is it necessary? Moreso every day.

If you still want to put off finding your niche, fast forward another decade, when cognitive computing will be handling most of the tax and accounting problems you’re hired to solve today. KPMG is already using IBM’s Watson to expedite audits, and H&R Block has implemented that same technology to simplify taxes. Once this technology starts working its way through the industry, only those who have hunkered down into a niche will be left to survive.

Positioning your firm is so important that we’ve written a 30+ page guide on it.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is a fancy term for extra content on your website: blog posts, guides, downloadable assets—anything that goes above and beyond the standard “about us” content.

What was once a nice perk, reserved mostly for big firms, is now practically a necessity.

Thought leadership has become an essential tool for attracting new clients in the digital era. The idea is to position your firm as an authority in your area of expertise (niche) by publishing regular content that shows off not just your skills and smarts, but your ingenuity and forward thinking.

This isn’t about keeping up with trends—it’s about setting them, and this is where most firms fail. Those who are creating content aren’t going deep enough, usually just glossing over simple, surface level issues.

Firms that commit to creating real, thoughtful content on a regular basis are seeing a 200% lift in website leads and a 100% lift in website traffic in 12 months. How does this happen?

Thought leadership…

• Drives more traffic to your site.
• Demonstrates your expertise more effectively than your site copy ever could.
• Nurtures leads across all stages of the buying cycle.
• Guides prospects to the next step in the buying cycle.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Write within your niche. Stop writing vague blog posts with general tax or business advice and start owning your niche through your content. Everything you publish should reinforce that you’re an expert in this specific area.
2. Introduce bold ideas. Follow current conversations online, pick the newest, boldest, most exciting ideas, and see if you can push them a step further. Publish your ideas in thoughtful, well-written blog posts on your website, and consider guest blogging on other prominent sites to attract new traffic.
3. Identify and solve client problems. Think of a common problem your clients struggle with, and create a step-by-step instructional guide to help them work through it on their own. This guide could take the form of a blog post, video, or even an interactive guide on your site. Beating clients to their problems makes them feel safe and makes your firm look wildly progressive, and you can bet they’ll be coming back to you for help with their more nuanced problems.
4. Write case studies. The most effective way to prove that you can do something is by sharing stories of how you’ve already done it. Concrete examples of solutions that have worked in the past will always trump abstract promises of help. Don’t forget to grab a testimonial from your featured client, describing what it’s like to work with you.
5. Get on social media. Long form content isn’t the only way to build a reputation of authority. You can also accomplish this through social media, but contributing to community discussions, sharing relevant content, and engaging with prospects and other experts via Facebook and Twitter.

Today, when clients make initial contact with you, they’re usually pretty far into the decision making process—certainly much further than they were on first contact years ago. These days, clients find the information they need online, and only initiate a conversation when they’re ready to make a move.

And if they don’t find the information they need online? They’re much more likely to pass on your firm altogether than to reach out to you to get their questions answered.

The way that clients seek out and select firms has evolved. You need to keep up, or you risk being left behind.

A Conversion Focused Website

So let’s recap: the first ingredient of a successful firm website is a well-defined niche, which allows you to clearly differentiate from your competitors. Ingredient 2 is meaningful thought leadership content, which drives high quality traffic to your website.

Now, Ingredient #3: you need a “conversion focused” website to house all of your great content and, more importantly, to use it to convert leads into clients.

Most firms still lack the proper emphasis on educating and informing potential clients in a way that moves them toward a sale. Because most of your clients are now reaching out to you later in the sales cycle, you can no longer rely on your sales team’s charm to woo them into making a commitment with your firm—you need to make your accounting website design strong enough to do that on its own.

Rock Solid SEO

The first element of a conversion focused website is thoughtful SEO. You need to communicate your site’s purpose and value to Google, so it knows when to return your content in searches. (This is your golden ticket to great site traffic!) The basics of SEO include writing custom descriptions for each page, rather than allowing Google to auto-generate them, defining your key search terms for each page, and using language in your content that matches what your prospects are searching for.

Despite how much has been written about SEO over the past several years, most firms are still struggling. Luckily, this is one aspect of website design that’s relatively easy to hire out, at a cost that will easily justify the time savings on your part.

Strategic Calls to Action

If you really want a website that converts, you need to pair that rock solid SEO with some effective calls to action (CTAs). First: do you have CTAs at the bottom of every page, at minimum? And do these CTAs actually inspire action?

Get rid of all the phoned-in calls to “learn more.” Beef up your CTAs with stronger offerings that are both more specific and more relevant to the client’s problems. Your page content should touch on problems your target audience is likely facing, with your CTA and subsequent content being presented as the solutions.

Here’s an example of an effective call to action on a services page. This offer is hitting visitors right at their pain point, with a free marketing assessment they can benefit from right now. They’ll get this assessment in exchange for an email address, which adds them to the firm’s mailing list.

Lots of firms offer free consultations, which are nice, but they’re way too big of a commitment for a prospect who’s early in the buying process.

For those who are too early in the process even for the free assessment (they’re not ready to share their email address), this site also offers relevant articles, which allow visitors to dig deeper into the firm’s expertise without directly interacting with them.

User-Focused Workflows

Is it easy for new visitors to navigate through your website and find the information they’re looking for? (Not just doable, but very, very easy?)

Do you have a solid grasp of what information a visitor wants to see, in what order, so that their first trip through your site feels smooth and intuitive?

This guy runs a service in which he gets very drunk and reviews company websites. He judges the fluidity of the site’s primary workflow and the ease with which he’s able to navigate it, even while inebriated. A ridiculous business concept, sure, but the underlying idea is solid: your website should be so intuitive that even a drunk person can easily navigate it. (See also his related service: The User Is My Mom.)

Here are 3 signs that your website is NOT user-focused:

1. You have 10+ links in your navigation bar. This is wildly overwhelming to a new visitor.
   •   THE FIX: Most of those links should be buried a layer or two deeper into the user workflow. They’re available if the user is truly interested in reading them, but they’re not part of the primary workflow.

2. You have links scattered all over your pages, giving the visitor countless workflow options and making it unclear where they should go next.
   • THE FIX: Make sure you have one big, bold CTA at the bottom of each page, guiding the viewer to the next page.
3. Your website talks mostly about who you are as a company and very little about what you can do for prospects.
   • THE FIX: Focus on them. How can you make their lives better?

When you tie together these key elements—solid SEO, strong CTAs, and a user-focused workflow—you’ll have a great foundation for a website that actually converts. You should be aiming for a minimum of a 2% conversion rate on your website, with most high performing firms reaching 3-5%.

Lead Nurturing  

Even if your website is 100% on point from a marketing perspective, the majority of new visitors still won’t bite, simply because they aren’t ready. We call these folks “early stage prospects”—they’re researching and kicking around some high-level ideas, but they’re a long way away from making any concrete decisions or spending any money.

If you want to eventually win some of these prospects, you need a plan for nurturing them through the buying process. Sounds complicated (and to be honest, it is, in the beginning) but thankfully, this is something you can automate. (The last firm we helped implement a lead nurturing program ended up adding $500K to their annual revenue.)

Your first step is to get the right technology in place—specifically, you’re going to need a marketing automation service. There are dozens of solutions out there, and mercifully, none of them are outrageously expensive. If your lead database is below 3,000 prospects, we recommend a simple solution like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor. For those with more than 3,000 prospects on their list, you’ll want a more advanced service like InfusionSoft, HubSpot, or Act On.

Once you have your technology in place, it’s time to do some basic segmentation. Take a look at what you have to offer prospects—an assessment tool, a free consult, a helpful guide—and map those offers to the appropriate stage in the buying cycle: early, middle, or late. (You already know what an early stage prospect is—as you can guess, a late stage buyer is someone who’s close to making a purchase decision, and a middle stage prospect is somewhere in the middle.)                                                       

Next, you’ll need to set some basic parameters to determine where a prospect might be in the buying cycle, based on how much they interact with your firm’s marketing efforts. For example, if you send a series of five emails to new email list additions, and they click the follow-through links on at least three of those emails, you might promote them from early to middle stage.

Eventually, with the right nurturing campaign in place, cold prospects will begin to warm up to your firm, and when the time is right, some will ultimately become your clients. If an email list of 1,000 people garners you just 10 new clients, and your list doubles in size every year (thanks to your powerful, lead generating website), you’ll have 160 new clients in 5 years.

And the best part: this can all happen automatically, behind the scenes, while you focus on your real work.

Are You All In?

Now, here’s the part that trips up the majority of firms: you need to decide whether you’re in or out.

If you want a growth plan that guarantees results and ROI, you need to commit to the whole process. We’ve worked with too many firms that want to cherry-pick from our ideas and bypass some of the more complicated steps of this process, and no one is less surprised than us when the results are underwhelming (although, to be fair, anything helps).

We see firms who are ready to write thought leadership content, but they’re too scared to commit to a market niche. They’re eager to invest big bucks in a fancy-looking website, but they don’t want to pay for the copy, so their calls to action suck. They literally leave hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table because email marketing sounds “too complicated.”

So now we ask you: are you ready to fully commit to your firm’s growth?

The fact that you’re still reading suggests that you’re at least toeing the line. What’s holding you back?

Clearly, because you’re here, whatever marketing efforts you have going on right now aren’t bringing in the kind of business you’d like to see. Stop wasting your time and money on small, random spurts of marketing and invest in a real, cohesive, proven plan.

And if you need help, we’re here for you.

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Jay Baron is the Founder of Madtown a marketing agency focused on helping accounting and CPA firms build smart, strategic, sustainable growth with the end goal of attracting more qualified opportunities from better paying clients.