The Starting Point For Your Accounting or Tax Business Online Marketing

Coming to you from the home office today — the wife is out of town and I am Mr. Mom to four (hear me roar!). Excuse me while I calm the chaos … alright, I’m back.
Anyway, many small business owners — and this is ESPECIALLY true for tax and accounting professionals — make a big mistake with their online marketing strategy.
They believe that an “updated design” and a good “user experience” will lead to success in bringing in new clients from the internet.
False.
Now, don’t get me wrong: those things *are* important — they’re just not the MOST important part of your online marketing strategy.
Here is the thing about the online world that you must understand: Anyone who comes to your website (or anyone that you connect with on social media) can — and will — slide on by with just the little press of a click.
Users are INTENSELY distracted online.
One of the reasons why I still love direct mail is that when people receive a direct mail piece, yes, they can just throw it in the trash, but they actually have to pick it up and throw it away. You can have a kind of one-to-one conversation.
Online, you must do something to capture that person and get them to stay — and enter their information.
When tax professionals have a website, often it’s one churned through a software setup system — and they’re usually just happy if they made a few changes to the boilerplate wording!
And when visitors come, and dig a little deeper … there is nothing on the site, except for, essentially,
a brochure.
So again — a click away, and your visitor is gone. In short, there is no reason for your website visitors to actually begin some sort of relationship. You are, instead, banking on the fact that visitors either are …
A) already looking for YOU,
or
B) just want any old tax professional or accountant.
What, you think that your good looks on the “about” page is going to do the trick?
And then, of course, there is that old standby:”Subscribe to our emailed newsletter.”
If you have this on your website, I challenge you to look at your statistics. If I’m a visitor, and I come to a site like this, I think: Please Sign Up For Meaningless Spam.
An “email newsletter” has no compelling reason for me to actually act! Visitors aren’t dying to add more newsletters to their life.
Note: That doesn’t mean they won’t read good, regular notes from you, if you do it right. They will (you’re reading this, right?). But they’re not actively seeking to sign up for more spam in their lives.
In a future note, I’ll speak to what CAN get people to hand over their information, and give you permission to offer them many and multiple reasons why they should trust you, like you — and give you their business.
So, remember this: Your website is the START of a relationship. It is crucially important, and it needs to look good.
But it is not the destination point for your marketing. That’s something else, and I’ll explain that in the future.
Of course, feel free to hazard a guess and drop me a note — I read and reply to every email from a tax pro.