For The Top CPA websites, Think Long Term

Accountants looking at templates for their firm's CPA websites can easily get misled. What your accountancy really needs in its website isn't eye-catching, so therefore it isn't ordinarily what consultants will propose. Many template suppliers will ignore a website's long term promotional performance and market a vision of instantaneous prospect closure. They have several rationales for this.

Firstly, it's easier to build one-size-fits-all sites. A website that fits a long-term strategy necessitates a slew of tools and features that will retain your clients. This requires investing time and money.

Maybe even as compelling, however, are pipe-dreams of instant conversions that hold lots of allure for would-be marketers new to internet marketing. However as any person knowledgeable about internet marketing understands, this is a fictitious hope. It's not very likely that a large percentage of the new traffic to your website will be seeking the services of a CPA firm. The majority of the web users visiting your website are in need of information. It doesn't really matter how groovy your website looks or how persuasive your text is. If you don't offer a visitor the solutions they want, the overwhelming majority of browsers are going to click on by without giving your website, your brand, or you more than a glance.

Meanwhile, the majority of your visitors will not be immediate sales prospects. Some will already have an accountant relationship. Maybe he or she is still able to use the short tax forms. This doesn't mean they're not a good prospect!

According to market research the average life expectancy of a client/accountant relationship is 6 years. If you take a six-year view of client development, almost 100% of your website traffic could be future clients. After all, accountants retire. They get married and move, change their practices or go to work for companies. Any number of things could happen.

Someone without much money now may need your help next year. Income changes. People get married. They start businesses and buy property. I'll never forget the panic I felt the first time I laid eyes on a 1040 long form and knew I needed to fill it out. Suddenly hiring an accountant became very compelling!

The real key to using a website to grow your firm is providing not only the information the visitor wants, but also offering such an overwhelming quantity of high quality content that the visitor will come back again and again. Envision the difference. Your competitors are offering just a service description and a contact sheet. What you offer is a caring compilation of valuable resources. Each visit exposes your brand to them again and again. Long term marketing isn't about making a sale, it's about positioning yourself as the natural solution to turn to when the prospect is ready to buy.

Down the road it's a pretty safe bet that everyone will need an accountant, and if your website has been engaging and informing a prospect for months or years, when that time comes the odds are you won't even need to make a sale. The prospect will call you pretty much ready to buy.

So when you're looking at templates for CPA websites, how do you pick the ones built for long term marketing? It's fairly simple really. Look for content.

Financial guides and free reports are great soft sell tools and are very effective at attracting return traffic. They also offer a great side benefit in that they can help you cross-sell your off season services to your existing clients. Use these articles to showcase ways you can help your clients save money, and position you as the expert that can help you do it. Make sure visitors can access them easily. They should be divided up by topic and searchable by keyword.

Encourage return visitors with other great features. How about interactive financial calculators? Tax due date pages? Downloadable tax forms and publications? Make sure to offer a newsletter.

If a marketing firm advises you to capture email addresses before permitting visitors to have these tools, don't fall for it. They'll suggest you leverage it to capture email addresses for subsequent contact. If you start collecting contact information you'll turn away your best prospects. Anything visitors don't get on your site, they understand they can get from via your competitors.

So, in choosing between templates for professional CPA websites, have long term marketing in mind. On top of standard basics comprised of service descriptions, a map to your office and contact invitations, your site should incorporate the long range principles noted above. You'll see that sustainable website marketing can not only bring in more conversions as time goes on, it should also bring you better clients.

Kenneth T. Marshall is a business expert and former Vice President of CPA Site Solutions. His core service is marketing small firms by making use of high-quality CPA websites. While using online social networking and Search Engines forms the basis of his practice he also stresses the importance of good, old fashioned network marketing and excellent customer service in helping CPA practices grow their client bases.