Fresh Financials is a great accountancy firm name. It reflects well who the firm is: dynamic, friendly, modern, and highly qualified in bookkeeping.

Unfortunately, their website did not get this across at all.

It had some redeeming features, including bright colours and a fresh font, but it followed a fairly typical, bog-standard accountancy firm website template. And the home page – which was their first opportunity to really impress the visitor – had a “we-focused” message and a few services listed.

Emma met us at Xerocon, where Karen was speaking about the power of content marketing to change accountancy firms’ lives. She joined the Content Marketer, and as she did, her perspective on the content and design of her website began to change.

So we got to work. Here’s how the process went:

• Key messages: We reviewed what Emma was learning in the Content Marketer programme, and identified the issues her audience faced, and the things Emma stood for. This is how the phrase “bookkeeping, reinvented” was born. Emma found she was always sharing with people how she wanted to reinvent bookkeeping, and we agreed that needed to be front and centre on the new site.
• Updated design: Fortunately, the WordPress template on Emma’s site was not the problem. There was great potential there: but it was hidden, unused, lost in the admin side of the site. So we knew that all we had to do was mock up new designs for key pages on Emma’s site, and once approved, they could be built and published. And that’s what we did.
• Call to action: Emma didn’t have any helpful calls to action other than her phone number or contact page. There was nothing to appeal to the visitor who was interested, but possibly not quite sure if they were ready to change accountants yet. We talked with Emma about her process with prospective clients, and the end result was the “Become a client” questionnaire which asks a few questions, but doesn’t presume anything.
• Overhaul of the main menu items: The main menu items on the Fresh Financials site were right when they originally created the site, but as time moves on you realise that your main menu items need to be the most important, most critical items for your visitor. We changed these significantly so that things like ‘Bookkeeping, Reinvented’ and ‘Become a Client’ were easy to find.
• Continuing content: Once these foundational issues were sorted, we moved on to helping Emma create educational, helpful content on a regular basis – blog posts, downloads, a new programme to help train bookkeepers, and more.

Now that Emma has her website in a more solid place, adding continual content becomes much easier – and has a far greater impact on a day to day basis.