The Gears of Accounting Growth (Part 1)

In our recent seminar, ‘Ready, Set, Boom,’ we examined the ‘7 Gears of Growth’ that the fastest growing accounting firms in this country all use to accelerate their growth and success. In this blog let’s look at one of the key drivers of business growth, websites.

In the digital age, as a professional services firm your website is one of your most important assets. It should be at the hub of all your online activities, helping you spread your expertise and your content should pull people back to your website no matter what content channel they are tuned into. They could be reading a blog, on a social media channel like Facebook or Twitter, watching a video or reading an email.

Your website is ‘home base’ for all your content and you can cross-promote your content to maximize its reach and influence. For example, you can share your blog post on social media channels, use email to promote your latest case study and promote your e-Book on your blog. All of these strategies are designed to divert prospects back to your website where you have a call to action like ‘book a free consultation’, download our free guide, subscribe to our newsletter or get instant access.

Driving traffic to your website and giving prospects the information they need is important but generating leads and converting those leads into customers is the ultimate objective. Without a website that engages, educates, builds relationships, contains calls to action and is responsive to mobile devices you won’t be winning any new clients soon.

While sales people generally work from 9am to 5pm, your website is open and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year. It is your silent sales person, it never closes and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. But with so much competition online you really need to build a remarkable website that will distinguish you from the competitors and attract more of your ideal type of client.

Your website needs to be more than just an electronic ‘billboard’ that lists the who, the what and the where of your practice. You need a website that resonates with your target market because you are competing with close to 1 billion other websites on the internet. In the profession you’re probably competing with firms with much bigger website budgets than you plus more manpower and financial resources. That might sound daunting but the web is virtually a level playing field so you can compete with the major players in your industry and ‘beat’ them if you are strategic.

When it comes to websites, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Quite often you’ll find the big players in your industry are complacent about their market share and they don’t measure and monitor the performance of their website. In some cases you’ll find their websites are nothing more than a static billboard and they have a ‘set and forget’ attitude so their content is stale. These websites are ‘ripe and rotting’. The good news is, you don’t need a massive advertising budget to get people’s attention today but website success doesn’t come easy.

While the internet offers a ‘field of dreams’ in terms of potential new clients, if you have a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude you are going to be very disappointed. Your website will be a constant work in progress and requires regular fresh content including videos, a blog and e-books to spark the search engines and claw your way up the search engine rankings.