A prospective client visits your website, but then what? Our experts explore the role of web presence in choosing an Accountant.
In this webinar, we'll look at:
The role of professional services websites in sales and business development
Benchmarks for conversion
Getting your site found
How to make it easy for a prospect to buy from you
The all important conversion
Top tips for you to take away and try
4. Today’s objectives
★ Define your web sales goals
★ Am I any good? Benchmarking performance
★ Step 1: be found
★ Step 2: make it easy to buy
★ Step 3: focus on conversion
★ The supporting acts: DIY tips
★ Why bother with all of this?
★ What next?
6. Define your web sales goals
We’re not talking about buying a new pair of shoes…
… in professional services what we are talking about is lead generation.
8. Good looks like this
On average, professional service firms...
★ Turn 1-2% of web visitors into leads
★ Convert 40% of leads into proposals
★ Win 30% of those proposals
For 1 new client, this firm would need need .approx 425 unique visitors.
Visits ≠ Visitors. Visitors rarely convert on their first visit.
Your website doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
10. Be found
Without visitors, no route to success. We can
(and do!) run whole webinars on this topic.
Infographic shows the anatomy of a search
result on google. 3 areas to concentrate on.
12. See, think, do
Rather think about your content as there to fill a page, give it a task to do.
★ What do you want people to see
★ What do you want people to think
★ What do you want people to do
Keep it simple.
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16. Get it right on mobile
At a recent visit to Google UK, we were told:
★ 2016, more than 50% of B2B searches took
place on mobiles and tablets
★ Nearly half of users will leave a mobile page if
takes longer than 3 seconds to load
★ 90% of users manage their finances across
more than 1 screen
Make it easy for your prospects to buy on mobile.
18. Sign up or see ya!
Logical conclusion of see, think, do.
Our goal is for people to decide to hand over their contact details.
Keep it simple, prominent and easy to use form.
Keep it simple, build landing pages with few options - sign up or see ya.
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24. The call to action (CTA)
Talk to the human.
Be nice to your prospect.
Play around with wording. Test.
NOBODY ever wants to choose to submit.
25. DIY tips: supporting acts
‘Easy things everyone can do to get more prospects and
clients from their websites straight away, on their own,
without paying for an expensive consultant’
26. DIY tip: Nail your ‘about us’ page
An ever-present challenge in sector is differentiation. Why choose you?
Our analytics show across our 500+ accountant web clients the about us page is
commonly the second most viewed page after the home page.
This is a golden opportunity to sell yourselves, your people, your skills, your
culture.
2016 CEB & Google survey of 3000 UK B2B buyers:
● 79% more likely to consider a brand with high level of emotional connection
● 60% more likely to pay a premium
28. DIY tip: Offer a value exchange
Give a little bit of your expertise for free.
Useful for the early part of the buyer journey. A prospect may be researching a
topic, they are looking to see who can offer advice and tips. They don’t yet
care about your brand.
Can come in many forms included blog posts or even downloadable PDF -
latter tactic is more successful in B2B.
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30. DIY tip: Build trust
This is a big decision for your clients.
They are putting their livelihoods in the hands of a capable adviser.
Emotional
Build it visually
Build it through content
Logical
Accreditations
Membership
Regulation
31.
32. DIY tip: Social proof
If I say we’re the best
agency offering marketing
services specialising in
accountants …. If your best
friend says it.
33. Why bother with all this?
Done right, this will make you money.
34. Why bother?
Consider Lifetime value (LTV) of a client. Average spend x average years.
Say... £1,500 per year, 10 years. LTV = £15,000
What would you then consider acceptable cost of acquisition to win that client?
That’s just one single client win.
Now scale it.
36. Action stations!
★ Clearly define what a lead is for your business
★ Benchmarking. Use Google Analytics to see how you are performing
★ Compare your current layout vs see, think, do principle
★ Get the basics right on mobile. Fast loading, slick user friendly experience
★ Add some sign up, or see ya landing pages
★ Test your pages, CTAs, copy, your language. Fail fast and evolve
★ Have a go at the DIY tips, quick fixes that can make a difference
★ Calculate your LTV. Compare it to decide if marketing spend is worthwhile
Notas do Editor
Always a good place to start is to define your goals
Next stop is to get a feel for what good looks like
Then got 3 steps to lead generation
We’ve got some DIY tips. Things you can put into action on your own or at most with only a little bit of support.
Today’s context of professional services… it’s not an ecommerce sale where the actual transaction takes place over the web. However, there are parallels in what a successful process looks like.
The vendor needs to give the prospect the compelling reason to buy.
The end result may be different in that the ‘purchase’ is that you you have their contact details rather than them being sent a pair of shoes.
But a lot of the pattern of success - the journey to get there - can be very similar.
Marketing qualified lead - what marketing send to the sales team - someone who has taken an action and filled out their contact details
How those leads convert is down to your sales team - subject for another day
Focus today is on how you get as many leads as possible
Everyone over estimates the win rate.
Natural to remember the good times = success bias. Gambler only tells you about his wins.
Visits / 5 = visitors. In 2014 Adweek published a survey saying that average purchaser is on their 3rd visit, in 2016 Salesforce produced a report saying a brand touches a prospect on average 6-8 times before they become a viable sales lead.
It’s the opposite of Kevin Costner Build it and they will come
You need to work hard to drive the right traffic
For the purposes of today, let’s assume that you are getting some traffic. And you are looking to improve conversion
What we call at PracticeWEB the power of three. There are three stages here…
Here’s an example from another sector. Zendesk are a software company who have seen massive global growth in recent years. They also used to be a client of mine in a previous job, a company I’ve sent hundredss of leads to.
In the context of SEE THINK DO
I see that Zendesk can lend me a hand. I can see that they are bit quirky with the jumbled stack of shapes and hands coming out
I think they they are going to help me with customer relationships
What am I going to do? Sign up for a demo, start a trial or I am going to contact sales
Here’s another one, this time from the Accountancy sector. The WOW company are brilliant. I don’t know them, I’ve never spoken with them. I just love what they do
These guys are aimed agencies, mimicked their market
See the happy smiley faces. I want to be those guys
Think that this accountant is what I’ve been looking for
I want to click talk to us
When PWEB did a survey to SME owners owners top thing (89%) they said to choose an accountant - I want to see that they understand my business, my challenges and size of my business
Here’s another accountancy example.
They’re from New Zealand, casual ‘no worries’ brand
Again, never had any contact with this company. I heard of them through my brother in law - he’s a kiwi doctor contracting in the UK. He’s their target market.
See great services. I think they are going to help me as a contractor, give me time to live - alriiiight!
What I am going to do, call / email / sign up
Feeds back into being found. Google UK told us that they are increasingly favouring sites with fast loading and slick mobile experience over those that don’t. Neglect this at your peril.
If you have a site and it’s not mobile ready urge you to speak to your web designer or agency.
If you are looking to build a new site use a Content Management System, like WordPress, that is mobile friendly.
Emerging trend right now is searches via voice. Android auto and smart TV. Alexa, Cortana and Siri etc. Millenials increasingly voice search over type.
Primary goal is to get people to convert = that should be your focus. It’s as simple as that. Everything else is a distraction.
This is killer. And they’ve used their homepage as a landing page. That’s brave. I’d like to see accountants do the same.
Front and centre: SIGN UP FREE
There really is very little your eye is drawn to. Very little else you can do. Sign up or see ya.
Here’s Campaign Monitor, competitor to mailchimp. Also taken the front and centre approach to lead generation.
This time combined with aspirational imagery.
OK, back to Accountancy examples. Let’s look at the WOW company again
Talk to us is a little more subdued vs mailchimp’s
I think that’s good in the context of who it is for
And… when you scroll down the homepage
The CTA stays there and goes into relief - white text with black box - striking
Again, another look at No worries..
What am I going to do? Sign up? Ok that’s quite a big ask at this stage compared to WOW companies ‘talk to us’ but I still like the clear user flow that’s going on here
AS it says on the slide really, don’t succumb to business speak. Let’s talk normally people!
Or to give this bit another name, here’s what my colleague Alex has called this bit in previous sessions...
What differentiates you
What results can clients expect
Google survey = you’d think B2C was the more emotional purchase but it’s the other way round. Nobody ever got sacked for buying a new pair of trainers. They might lose their business with the wrong support.
You can also go down the route of putting your about us copy on your home page.
Often this is on the about us page. But the traffic is on the home page. Put the good stuff where your buyers are. Remove the friction. Make it easy to buy.
Here’s an example from one of our client’s Booth Ainsworth
Reads well and gives across a clear message
I also really like the URL they’ve chose ‘our strengths’ all these little moves can really add to a positive user experience
I’m sure you have seen the term content marketing bandied about
NOTE: TALK A BIT about the buyer journey. Have not covered it fully today, could be one for a future webinar.
What you need to consider is that while you might be super keen to talk to your prospect they might not yet care about you. Start building that relationship by offering up a bit of your expertise - in a handy downloadable format!
Examples from Crunch. Not a business I know at all.
Killing it. Topical articles, beautiful interface, and nice calls to action.
They’ve got this theme going through it all - Crunch, Hungry for more. Love it.
Prospects need to feel at ease or they will go somewhere else.
Prospects are less likely to get in touch with you if any part of your marketing doesn’t create trust
Manifests itself in 2 ways: logical & emotional
Both examples from one of our client’s Hentons
Look at the imagery here. Little dude scaling the peak, with emotive words that sum up their values
Bottom we have their association - badges of honour
Afford Bond
These are great because they’ve got names and companies - not just ‘David P from Norwich’
They are also short and snappy
To really make them valuable (and this is difficult) its brilliant if you can get the owner to cite the challenge at the start. It is really powerful to hear someone has gone from problem to solution
NOTE: That is of course the revenue, not the profit so let’s not get carried away with projections.
Not ROI but Return on Ad Spend. Gives you a solid base to make decisions or look at allowable acquisition costs.
Consider that we can build a pretty awesome website and marketing funnel for a lot less than £15k
Right now, we have a growing number of Pay Per Click campaigns recently launched and we’ve modeled out cost of acquisition at less than £2k per client. Break even vs revenue year 1 and they’re typically seeing less than 10% churn, so that’s a client in profit for 12 or 15 years. Numbers really stack up
