Bookkeeping is one of the most daunting (and error-prone) tasks for any entrepreneur. Enter Bench Accounting, offering more than 25,000 American small business owners the resources they need to feel confident about their financials. Pairing intuitive, cloud-based software with in-house bookkeepers, Bench simplifies small business finances by making them easy and affordable.
To grow their own business, Bench relies on their main marketing website and blog, both of which were originally built and hosted on Contentful. Since it was easier for Bench’s marketing team to maintain their blog, that’s where they were forced to spend most of their resources—but the blog converts at a much lower rate than their main marketing website.
To increase organic traffic to their main website via high-intent keywords from target customers, Bench sought a powerful solution that would grow with them. “We needed a professional platform that would enable our marketing team to build web experiences freely without requiring engineering support,” says Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Corey Ferreira.
Giving the marketing team freedom to deliver brand-consistent content experiences
Webflow’s visual-first CMS offers the perfect balance between intuitive content editing and publishing, while having flexibility for more advanced developer capabilities. It’s much more freeing than our previous headless setup.
— Corey Ferreira, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Bench Accounting
As a leader in the accounting space, Bench relies on its blog to publish thought leadership and educational content. Though it does generate lower-intent traffic, Bench relies on their main marketing site to drive high-quality leads to their sales and marketing teams.
But because Contentful was too complex for non-technical teammates, Bench’s main marketing site remained stagnant at 150 pages for years. Bench’s engineering team was understandably focused on higher priority dev work and couldn’t dedicate the time to building and optimizing new web experiences.
Once the marketing team did get a request prioritized with engineering, pages would often remain static as they were unable to experiment or optimize for performance. “No matter what we learned, we couldn’t justify the resources it would take to test our hypotheses, so it actually deterred us from trying new things,” says Corey. On top of that, Bench was seeing poor SEO performance, which was impacting their monthly site visitors and lead conversion rates.
Bench did their due diligence in looking for a new platform, as it had to work for both engineering and marketing. To give marketing more flexibility, faster speed-to-market, and the ability to seamlessly migrate and scale their main website, Bench turned to Webflow Enterprise.
Tripling published content and transforming impact across the business
The migration to Webflow Enterprise has already paid for itself: We can build high-intent pages so much faster and attract better clients to the business.
— Corey Ferreira, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Bench Accounting
Since a one-to-one migration was essential, Bench asked for a Webflow Partner that had experience migrating customers from Contentful. “If we got even just a temporary dip in conversion, traffic, or keywords, it would be very hard to explain to leadership,” Corey says. Webflow Partner Shadow Digital expertly collaborated with the Bench team and provided strategic expertise to ensure the team met their migration goals. Yannick Lorenz, Founder at Shadow Digital recalls, “We collaborated with Bench to organize, structure, and upload 1,000+ CMS items such as blogs, resources, and more so they were set up for long term success post migration.”
Since the migration, the Bench team has published over 450 new indexed pages in five months—up 3x from their original 150 pages. They’ve launched another 200 internal pages for clients and internal stakeholders. And because Webflow’s CMS has built-in, best-in-class SEO features to boost search rankings and maximize visibility on content, the team has seen massive improvements in SEO.
Before, it would take weeks to launch a new webpage on Contentful because of the need to request engineering resources. “Our process has totally changed with Webflow… We can build something the same day because of the component library we have in place,” Corey says. “It often takes just a few minutes to make an impactful tweak. It’s a massive difference.”
They’ve come to rely on advanced collaboration features, like page branching to work on different pages at the same time, and roles and permissions to empower the right people with the right modes of working. They even give limited Guest Role permissions to Shadow Digital so they can publish certain content on the blog.
With Webflow’s extensibility into third party APIs, Bench also uses Webflow’s Marketo integration to populate and update leads. “Connecting sign-up and email collection with native Webflow forms has been quite easy,” says Corey. Bench also integrates with Calendly and other tracking and analytics tools.
Webflow has unlocked the broader Bench team to build, launch and optimize new web experiences quickly. The paid team is constantly creating new pages and optimizing for performance; the inbound team has seen substantial gains in conversions; while the engineering team is now free to focus on more fulfilling, impactful work. “Instead of requesting changes, our team can simply come up with ideas, experiment, and take action,” says Corey.
Embracing a paradigm shift for growing Bench’s web presence
With Webflow, we’re no longer limited. We can launch a page for every single type of audience or search intent we want to target… which has been a game changer in optimizing Bench’s overall web presence.
— Corey Ferreira, Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Bench Accounting
Since migrating to Webflow, Bench has seen an internal paradigm shift. Whereas before they couldn’t even consider new ideas, the teams are no longer limited by their platform. “Now that we have Webflow, it’s like night and day in terms of what we can actually accomplish on the website,” Corey says. “We can be more idealistic and push the boundaries to make sure our website is our biggest marketing asset.”
As Bench evolves and optimizes their web presence, they’ll continue to leverage their dedicated Webflow Enterprise account team and Shadow Digital for more complex web projects. “The Bench team always brings new and exciting ideas to the table which forces us to push the limits of what’s possible… We’re grateful for the synergistic partnership between them and Webflow,” says Yannick.
Teams across Bench are now confident to make changes and ship content on their own. “With Webflow, we can improve the site, increase our leads, and, most importantly, inspire business owners to trust Bench with their books.”
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