subject: Benefit Your Business with Google Places Results and Your Accounting Website [print this page] Benefit Your Business with Google Places Results and Your Accounting Website
Few CPAs rightly know how to use an accounting website as a selling instrument. Professionals have a totally natural desire to acquire new prospective customers quickly and a tendency to focus on quick conversions, but in actuality a website is a long term marketing tool. There are some ways to turn a fast buck if you're familiar with a few secrets, and I'm about to educate you about a significant one, but if you genuinely want to bring in the most outstanding clients you'll have to stay on the long road.
Very few business owners are in the market for a new a new CPA at any given time. As a rule people are happy with their accountants. They already have a bond of trust, even friendship. Avoid the hard sell. High pressure tactics will likely alienate your prospects.
What's the best strategy, then, for luring new clients into the firm?
Well, the truth is that despite all the new technologies the best strategy for finding new clients hasn't really changed much.
Good old fashioned networking is now and probably always will be the key to your firm's success. The more networking you do the more high-quality clients you'll attract to your practice. Your website, if it was properly designed, is a powerful long term networking tool.
There's a downside to networking, of course. It's time consuming and labor intensive. Working a prospect can take months, even years. Market research tells us the average wait for a conversion is 9 or more contacts, and the average life expectancy of an accountant's relationship with a client is about six years.
Now that that's been said, let me show you some effective shortcuts.
If you know where to look and how to attract their attention, there are some fast conversions to be had out there.
The web gives you a huge advantage. For the first time small business owners have an opportunity to really take advantage of what industrialists call the "economics of scale". Economics of scale dictates that no matter how happy most business owners are with their accountants, if you can contact enough of them you'll eventually find one that's ready to find a new one. Even if 99% of business owners are satisfied with their accountants, if you contact a thousand of them with a soft sell you'll likely land 10 new clients. Like the watering holes and wells of old most of these people are congregating in one place, but now that place is the Internet.
In those days the most relevant component in a company's prosperity was "location, location, location". This is still true but for most firms the actual physical location is much less pertinent then their location on the web, and this means their representation in the search engines. Take some time to work on improving your accounting website "location". Your practice will benefit in both the long run and in the short term.
