Has this happened at your firm?
- You decide to move forward with a new website build because you know more traffic will equal more leads, and an attractive site should generate these traffic gains.
- The site is launched and nothing happens.
- Your firm loses whatever faith it had in marketing online due to the lackluster response to your new website.
In short, firms expect a new website to change their business, but a website alone is not enough.
Where are all my leads?
Your new site is responsive, it’s attractive and it’s built on great new technology. So why are you not receiving more traffic or leads? Websites themselves are not very effective lead generation tools in M&A. Instead, they are great platforms for other activities/strategies that require a contemporary functional website to ultimately create a lead generation engine.
To generate more leads you need to be found by more qualified prospects. To attract more qualified prospects your website needs to be optimized specifically to appeal to those prospects’ behaviors online.
Enter your SEO strategy…
What really is SEO?
Search engine optimization work is the evolving art of telling the various search engines who you want to visit your site and why. Think of your new website as a restaurant. Without a listing in the yellow pages, reviews on Yelp and a sign on the door, no one will ever know you exist.
The M&A prospect audience online is not big enough to simply launch a site and hope people find it. You need to promote in a number of ways including:
- Submitting to search engines
- Developing on-site content reflective of a keyword strategy
- Creating referral channels and outside links to your site on other highly trafficked sites
The biggest mistake an M&A firm can make online is simply not having a plan to ensure that its new website can be leveraged as a lead generation tool.
If you have recently relaunched your website or are considering developing a new site I want to urge you only to do so if you also have developed a sound digital marketing plan, ideally starting with a quality SEO strategy. You would not open a restaurant without a way to drive customers in the door, so don’t launch your M&A firm’s next website without knowing how you plan to be found online.
Need help developing your M&A firm’s digital marketing strategy? We can help! Contact us for for more information.
Check out our case studies here: Merger Labs Case Studies
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Check out the rest of our insights here: M&A Insights from Merger Labs
