If there’s one tactic you have not yet leveraged in your digital marketing so far as an accounting business, could it be landing pages?
Landing pages are a great way to generate leads for financial firms, but they are not always clearly explained by agencies or understood by clients.
In this guide, we’ll be explaining what landing pages are and how they work, with specific attention on how they can provide a useful lead generation tool for accountants.
If you do not see your question answered here amongst these FAQs, please feel free to get in touch to discuss your digital marketing campaign with a member of our team over a free phone consultation.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is different from the main website pages or blog posts.
In the case of the former, you tend to offer “core content” to your website visitors so they can find out who you are, what you offer, who you work with and how they can go about buying from you. In the case of the latter, you tend to find information, thoughts or advice regarding a specific subject or topic – a bit like the blog post you are reading right now!
Both of these types of content are usually accessible via the website menu (i.e. navigation). A landing page, however, is often not easy to find through the navigation. Rather, it tends to sit on your website in the background, meaning your website visitors are unlikely to find it by browsing your website.
Rather, the aim is to get your landing page to appear high up in certain Google search engine results. Or, to make it appear to users on their social media network, or in display banner ads when they are browsing certain other websites. The idea is that your audience will see the preview to your landing page, and click through to it in order to attain some kind of value or useful resource.
This latter part is the other key attribute of a landing page. It usually offers something that the audience wants, and which is specific to their needs. It could be an educational video, a whitepaper download or a guide on a particular financial topic.
For instance, suppose someone in your target audience is visiting lots of websites which talk about how to do a tax return. Google notices this behaviour, and stores this information. Around the same time, you launch a Google display campaign in Google Ads, targeting people who are looking for tax return advice.
Google remembers that this person was looking at websites on this very topic, and so includes them within your ad targeting parameters. Hopefully, at some point, this person then sees your ad and clicks on it, which takes them through to your dedicated landing page on how to do a tax return.
How do landing pages generate leads?
The ultimate aim of a landing page is to generate leads for your accounting firm. They do this by inviting visitors to enter their name and content information, in exchange for a valuable resource.
As mentioned earlier, this resource could be any number of things (e.g. a guide or webinar series), but in order to work effectively, it must be something that people really want – enough to be willing to part with their personal information.
The landing page must also look credible and trustworthy. If it looks old, is difficult to use or just appears “plain dodgy”, then people are unlikely to fill out your contact form no matter how good the resource looks to them. This is where it can really help to get the assistance of a dedicated digital marketing agency to design a compelling landing page for you.
Example offers
What sorts of things can you offer to incentivise your landing page visitors to become leads?
One example might be a short online course. For instance, suppose a large percentage of your website visitors want to be able to do a tax return themselves, as well as perform a host of other important accounting tasks on their own. Could you offer them a short video course, explaining the key steps and information they need to know? In order to gain access to the material, you ask for them to enter their contact details.
Another example might be a podcast on an important topic. For example, perhaps you are an accounting practice working primarily with professional sportsmen and women, and have released an interesting podcast where you have interviewed a famous footballer about how sportspeople can manage their money more wisely and effectively. Again, for your audience to gain access to the content, you could “gate” it by requiring that your visitors enter their name and email address into the contact form.
There are many other examples including offering registration for an interesting and exciting event, offering a free trial of a certain product/service or presenting a free, downloadable guide.
Why do you need landing pages?
Many people think it is sufficient simply to send internet traffic to their homepage, but it is not. As important as your homepage is, it is not possible to address each specific need or pain point experienced by your website visitors using just this page.
You are much more likely to turn a visitor into an enquiry if you can offer content to them which most specifically addresses their motivations for coming to your accounting website. This is where landing pages offer a lot of tactical value.
For instance, suppose someone is looking for a very niche, specific kind of business accounting advice. You could send them to your homepage, but it is unlikely that you will even mention the kind of thing here that they are dealing with. If, however, you have a dedicated landing page on this topic and you can find ways to send these people there, then you are far more likely to see conversions emerge as a result.
