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Professional Service Firm Websites That Work Harder and Smarter Start with Strategy, Not Graphics
I’ve got to stop banging my head on my desk because one of these days, I’m going to whack myself so hard that I’m going to jar some critical information right out of my noggin – like the date of my wedding anniversary or the middle names of my children.
What caused this latest urge to do some cranium crashing?
It happened when I heard from the CMO of a rather large professional services firm that instead of taking the time to rethink their website strategy and build something bigger and better than just an online brochure, they were committing tens of thousands of dollars to doing nothing more than publishing a new website design to give it a more modern look and feel.
There’s no doubt that the firm’s site was in serious need to a new look and feel, but it needed a lot more than just a fresh coat of paint to make it more useful for marketing.
What Comes First .. the Blog or the Brag?
This is a difficult time for CPA and other professional services marketing professionals.
On the one hand, you’ve got the tug of a new frontier of marketing strategies, tools and technologies like inbound marketing, social media marketing, contextual marketing, marketing automation and a lot more. On the other hand, you’ve got the tug of traditional strategies and tactics like building referrals, snail mail, cold calling, and “the way we did it 15 years ago”.
Change in the ways that professional services firms do marketing is very, very slow. Sure, there are a handful of early adopter firms who have the foresight and risk tolerance for trying new approaches, tools and technologies, but many firms have a wait and see attitude before taking even modest steps towards doing something new.
So where should firms begin this incremental climb? Social media? Pay per click marketing? Blogging? A Strong email program?
My belief is that the “crawl” in a crawl-walk-run marketing philosophy needs to be a website that’s built for getting found by online searchers and capable of converting site visitors to leads using offers built on the thought leadership of the firm’s subject matter experts.There may be many of you who believe that investing in an email program needs to come before investing in a website, but that’s the stuff that blog comments are made of ...
Resources for Your New Website Strategy
For firms contemplating an investment in a new website design, there are a number of resources that can help you with developing a new website strategy. Here’s a list of our four favorites:
(1) From HubSpot, start with this blog post - How to Develop a Website Redesign Strategy That Guarantees Results - and then download the Website Redesign and Project Planning Kit.
Guidance offered in this tool ranges from how to do and use benchmarking for your current website metrics to tools for assessing competitor websites to understand their strategy, and well as their strength and weaknesses.
(2) From BlueWire Media, check out The Web Strategy Planning Template. It’s a tool that will help you define your buyers, what digital marketing tactics to use and the best way to communicate online.
This tools will help you develop the who / what / when / where / and why questions and answers that are fundamental to a sound website strategy.
(3) Check out the The Complete Web Design Strategy Checklistfrom Bright Ideas Company.
We like this slide show it draws attention to how your firms needs to define its audience, brand, success factors , situation and process in order to develop a sound website strategy
(4) At the risk of being somewhat immodest, one of our most frequently downloaded whitepapers is our Best Kept Secrets to Successful Websites.
In it, we cover subjects ranging from what your firm should be getting from its website strategy and design to the 13 critical features of an effective website. One of the don’t miss chapters is all about the pieces of led generation infrastructure that need to be part of a website strategy and design effort.
Show Data, Get Budget
If your shareholder or partners don’t believe in how important it is to have a powerful strategically driven website, then here’s a few critical facts that you may want to share from a recent Pardot study:
- Almost three quarters (72%) of B2B buyers planning to purchase a business product begin their research with a Google search.
- Nearly 90% of these buyers report that they do more research on more expensive purchases.
- More than 80% of buyers return online at least two to three more times to conduct additional research on the purchase.
The upshot – your website strategy needs to incudes each engine optimization, multiple forms of content and persistence when it comes to continually refreshing and publishing new content. It’s not about having a pretty looking, static online brochure anymore.
That should help in some small way when you tell them that you’ll need a pretty significant sum of money to develop, publish and maintain a website built for both branding and lead generation. Making a cogent, research driven, statistically infused argument may even eliminate the need for banging your head on your desk, and then forgetting about your anniversary.
By the way, does anyone know if Rite Aid sells roses?
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My belief is that the “crawl” in a crawl-walk-run marketing philosophy needs to be a website that’s built for getting found by online searchers and capable of converting site visitors to leads using offers built on the thought leadership of the firm’s subject matter experts.
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