There are four types of visitors to your accounting website. Only one of them has any chance of being affected by your landing page marketing copy no matter how brilliant it is. Here they are:
- Nevers
- Not Todays
- Heck Yas!
- Wellll… I Don’t Know…
“Nevers“
A simple truth is that not all visitors to your website are prospects. Most visitors are coming onto your website with absolutely no intention of using your services.
The first of these “nope” visitors is the easiest to deal with… I call them the “nevers”. Maybe they are a competitor just checking out your website or a web designer who just wants to grab a look at your landing page.
It could be some person looking for free t-shirts. There are a thousand reasons that someone might come to the web site who is, in no way, shape or form, even a prospect. These are the “nevers”. Don’t waste your time even thinking about these people.
“Not Todays“
Just above the “nevers” are the “not todays”. They are completely unaffected by your landing page copy like “nevers” are, but they’re really not “nevers”.
They may be a friend of a friend grabbing a tax form or leafing through your free reports to see if you have any good articles about selling their house. They could already have a good accountant that they really like, already a client and needs your number or just some guy looking for work.
An accounting firm's most common website visitor type is the "Not Today", or "Long Term Prospect". Don't waste your valuable landing page copy trying to hard sell these users. You won't convert them, and you'll even scare some away.
While you should consider all these people long term prospects for sales, cross-sales, and up-sales, it’s a waste of time trying to convert them with your landing page copy. The trick to landing a “not today” prospect is “relationship marketing”.
We need to provide them with what they are looking for. It is usually a good newsletter, a library of financial information, or forms, and tools that will bring them back whenever they need information related to accounting.
It’s OK to do a soft sell in your free reports and set yourself up as the authority to turn to. For the most part this is a low intensity pitch. These visitors offer no useful opportunity to get us a sale with good landing page copy.
By far the “not todays” are your biggest contingent of visitors. They have no need for your services today, but in a month, or two, or six… this may change.
Perhaps the prospect will buy a house, or get a big promotion and a fat raise. Maybe the accountant he already works with will retire or take a job with a large firm.
By providing these visitors with a wealth of useful content we are keeping our brand in front of them and establishing ourselves as an authority so when that time comes we become the logical choice for that change. This is a type of relationship marketing.
We need to treat the “not today” crowd like friends. This also keeps them coming back. We stay in touch, listen to their suggestions, care about their needs and feelings, but any potential professional relationship is in the future.
“Nevers” and “Not Todays” are Landing Page “Nopes”.
Combined these two groups are the “nopes”. You can’t convert them with your landing page content. No matter what you say, no matter what you do, they are not going to call you based on your landing page copy. If you start pushing a “not today” for a sale you may even scare them away.
“Heck Yas!“
The next prospect group is are the “heck yas!”. This is a very rare and precious visitor. This guy is an absolutely dedicated buyer.
He’s going to log on to your site just long enough to look up your phone number or find and fill out an online form. This buyer will overcome any obstacle to contact you.
These guys will even navigate through a badly designed site, exploring the site, relentlessly clicking through page after page unutil he finds your phone number. You could hide your contact page under a pile of links in a locked basement of an abandoned building and put a sign on the door that says “Beware of the Leopard” and this buyer is going to reach you.
Some of these dedicated buyers are just stubborn. Most have already been sold on your service by off site factors. If your practice is in the boonies the visitor may just see you as the only game in town.
For the most part this guy is a referral, so the better you are at networking and off site marketing, the more “heck yas!” you are likely to get.
There’s no point even trying to convince this guy of anything. He’s already sold. Just ask him where he heard about you (so you can send the referrer a ham) and set an appointment.
“Wellll… I Don’t Know…“
THESE are the buyers you need to capture. This is a very large segment of your visitors. They represent your best chance for a fast sale. These are the people you should be targeting with your landing page copy.
Find Your Niche and Sell to It:
You are going to convert some of the “welllls” without lifting a finger. To maximize the effectiveness of your landing page you need to understand your prospects.
No landing page can convert every “wellll” prospect. Don’t even try. A landing page that appeals to one prospect, say a business owner, may very well scare away an individual.
At best you can only hope to convert a portion of the eligible prospects on your site. If you focus your landing page too heavily on business you will lose individual clients. If you focus too much on individuals business owners will leave. If you try to find a middle ground you’ll lose prospects on both ends. One web page can’t be all things to all people.
You know your market. Focus your landing page on the “welllls” in your area. Look at your market and realistically assess what the needs are there, then focus your landing page marketing copy on the prospects you think will most likely bring in the best return for your practice.
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I agree with this fully, however I wish you would offer a solution to the landing page problem (i.e. too much business emphasis scares away induviduals and vice versa). We design laser focus campaigns to certain suspects. We have url(s) that are linked to these campaigns (i.e. QuickBooksMentor.com, LedgerSense.com, etc) which we would like to be our campaign landing pages within our main site. Apparently this can’t be done with your service without displaying our main site taxsense.com in the address line.
Do you have any alternative solutions that do not include subscribing to additional sites on your server?
Using separate landing pages can help. And you really don’t need a fancy solution for that. You can set up links from specific sites or ads to land on any page you want. You do this by specifying a filename in the URL.
There are limitations though. Most visitors will come in by direct request, and these visitors will automatically default to what we call the “index” page.
Unfortunately the limitation you are running into is not intrinsic to our solution. That particular limitation is intrinsic to the way the web works.
The reason is very technical. It has to do with the way DNS (the “switchboards” that direct internet traffic) works and can’t be easily explained. I’ll try though though:
A root directory can only have one page in it called “index”, and this will be the sites default landing page. This is a fundamental principle to how the web works. When the web directs a domain name request to a directory on a server without specifying an exact filename the page called “index” gets displayed first. Period. No earthly power can change this.
If you set the new domain up as an Alias the Alias domain will appear in the address bar, but by definition an alias will default to “index” page (again… unless you map it to a specific filename, or page).
In order to have a different domain map to a diferent page on the site you need to use what we call a CName record, and a Cname record is not like an alias. The sites real domain will appear in the address bar.
The only way around this is to set up a separate site. This means a separate DNS zone with a separate root directory with, and here’s the crux, a different index page.