A CPA Website Can Make a Personal Connection With Your Prospects
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Good for you on making the effort to get your CPA marketing website up and running. Now you need to determine how to use your website to earn more clients. If you’re going to see a good ROI on the money you spent getting your site you’ll want to aim to attract brand new clients every month. Of course, the more new clients the better – so be sure not to limit your goals to any particular number
This might not seem very difficult at first blush but there are a quantity of challenges to tackle. As you strategize you will probably discover that your CPA website is not the only attractive one working for new clients. Even though you should be glad to be counted among firms with good websites, you do need to figure out how to stand apart.
Having a professional CPA website is sort of like meeting the minimum requirements: without it, a lot of potential clients won’t even consider you; but just having it is not necessarily enough to get you the job.
Want to know the one component of any successful accounting website? Showing your prospects that you’re a real person with real clients.
And the best way to show them this is with a one-minute video.
The Reason Video Is a Great Investment
Video is simply the best way to reach out to new clients with your website. The reason for this is that a video helps potential clients feel a personal connection to you. Making this connection overcomes an important hurdle.
“Personal connection” doesn’t mean sharing intimate details about your personal life, or even demonstrating shared traits or interests with your prospects. It simply means the prospect needs a sense of who you are as a person – how you dress, what you look like, how much you smile, even how you decorate your office.
It may seem that a short video doesn’t give your clients enough time to get a sense of your personality. You’d be surprised, though. People tend to snap to judgment A few seconds is really all it takes (this is the premise of the best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink).
According to SearchEngineWatch (February 2010), a short video on a landing page raises response rates by 4 to 7 times over pages with just text and images.
Share the Inside Details
Another reason video is successful in engaging your leads is that it shows them what your office is like “behind the scenes.”
People love having inside knowledge. Prospects like to see the everyday things: talking on the phone, typing on the computer, chatting to your coworkers.
Although folks want to know you’re professional, they also respond on an emotional level to seeing you doing real things at the office.
The best way to strike the right balance between professional and down-to-earth is to just talk on camera as you would to an acquaintance you really like. Assume you’ve already made a connection to the person watching the video, and act engaged and friendly. You could even place a picture of a friendly face somewhere off camera that you could look at to remind yourself to relax and be yourself.
The popularity of social media like Twitter and Facebook speaks to this need for folks to make emotional connections. There’s so much advertising and branding in the world today that it stands out to hear real words and see real pictures from real people. Take advantage of this human need. If you’re not ready to get started with social media, you can still get results by posting a video.
Don’t Wait to Establish Trust
If you’re trying to get new clients every month to “pay for” your website, video is the best way to do this. It gets the job done quickly and with minimal effort.
A great side benefit of drawing in clients through video is that the folks who come to you this way already feel somewhat loyal to you. They already know what you look like, how much you smile, that you really do have an office – in short, that you’re a real, regular person. In other words, you don’t need to sell yourself nearly as hard. Your video has already done that, even before your clients have met you in person.
Getting the Most from Your Accounting Website
You’ve taken the step to create a CPA website for your business. Now make it work! A short video on your home page is the easiest way to wring every dollar out of your investment. A video enables your leads to trust you – and when they’re choosing between your practice and the accounting practice down the road that doesn’t have a video, this makes all the difference.
Tags: internet marketing, online video, CPA website