If you are an expert in the field, you’ll notice it is getting easier to generate tax preparation leads compared to a few years ago. With demand comes people who want to dedicate themselves to this field, which means you have more competitors than clients.
It can be tough to put yourself in front of those prospects and ensure your company’s growth by beating your competitors. However, it isn’t impossible.
What it takes to generate high-quality leads is a good marketing plan that includes enough lead generation strategies around your target market and company’s goals. In this way, you will be investing money and time in people who are actually worth it or are most likely to turn into clients.
Remember, there are a bunch of strategies you can use today, and you cannot limit yourself to one or two nor rely entirely on offline or online options individually. This means there needs to be a complement of everything you do and how you do it.
That being said, do you know where to start with those strategies? We’re here to share the best ones for tax preparers and experts!
Consider Personal Preferences
Some people prefer to avoid taxes altogether and shift their tax burden onto a professional accountant.
Tax accountants are professionals in their field and have a good understanding of local tax laws. They often come at a high price whatsoever, so you may consider going for this specialization.
Although it is nice to have someone else do the work, people will not understand the tax filing process or be able to control the return, which makes people hesitate a bit when hiring accountants.
To avoid having problems in getting your clients, it is vital to consider how your clients need you and what kind of offer they are looking for.
Do they want to be more involved in the process? Or do they truly one someone who will get a hold of everything and lift this weight off their shoulders?
Regardless of the final judgment you come up with; you will need to consider it to be able to market your services successfully.
This is what we mean by “personal references.”
It is important to remember the personal nature of your relationship when you advertise tax services to existing and new clients.
Your clients will trust you with their most private information, and we all know that financial matters can be sensitive. You are privy to all this information and can be trusted with it, but people don’t actually believe you 100% when they are first hiring you.
This is an area that you should leverage when marketing tax preparation ideas. Trust is just as important as calculation in your work. Tax accounting is, at its core, a business of relationships.
Which is why your tax preparation businesses should focus on the relationships more than the numbers.
From here, you should be able to take notes of all the tactics we can share and focus on getting trust and preferences out there with the considerations.
A Highly Functional Sales Team
A professional graphic designer in your sales team can create your marketing materials or website. You may be able to do most things alone today or, at least, in the beginning.
However, having a sales team that can provide assistance with closing deals, and let’s include the previous professional we mentioned, will save you time and money in the process once your company has grown a bit.
This functional team you want to build will help you build your brands. This includes a logo and design and a consistent color scheme for your marketing materials. A strong brand image will ensure that your customers feel that you are a professional company, not just a small business.
A short motto that describes your tax preparation business will guarantee customers that you are professional and able to give them the best refund possible. You can use the tagline in flyers, advertisements, and other marketing materials.
To distribute information about your company to your local community, hire a sales team consisting of five to ten people. Each team member should have a unique code to identify each person.
This will allow you to pay him a commission on every sale and a low hourly rate for footwork.
Signs that are Not Spinnable
Signs are a great lead generation strategy to promote your local business, which means they are still worth your investment.
Although it may sound old-fashioned, outdoor advertising is one of the most popular forms of advertising and continues to give great results, especially now that people are more eager to go out after all the lockdowns have hit them.
Outdoor advertising creates brand awareness and drives foot traffic to businesses. It can be difficult to market to someone who is always on the move if you choose other options on our list.
Therefore, stationary signs and banners are a great way to stand out from others in transit and invite them directly to your services.
Signs websites offer various signage options, including decals and banners. You can use vinyl banners to decorate your storefront or direct people to your business. You can also place A-Frame signs in the community to advertise.
No matter the type of sign you choose, it is crucial to make sure your signs are memorable and eye-catching. It would help if you designed your poster with the customer in your mind. Use QR codes to interact and focus on promotions. Be unique with your sign usage.
Build Your Email Lists
It is essential to reach out to current and potential customers via emails to encourage former them to return to use your tax services the following year or whenever they need it. But for this, you should have built your email list by now with all the contact information you’ve compiled from previous clients or marketing strategies you’ve tested so far.
Everyone likely has an address with an email, so it will be easy to promote your services to the masses, and since they prefer this channel compared to text messages or so, you want to build this list as soon as possible.
Email lists are also good because they help keep your prospects organized, and it is usually the option you’ll use to compile most of your leads and nurture them over time.
It would help encourage your visitors to sign up for your email list. WordPress sites can integrate with third-party email services and plugins to make this possible. Hello Bar and SumoMe can be used on any site, no matter its built platform.
You can also place offline invitations for email lists on signs in your store and then manually enter email addresses into your preferred vendor.
MailChimp is a popular one, but you have many other options. Incentives for signing up for the email list are essential as well if you want to get information “for free.” You could offer exclusive discounts, giveaways, or tax tips.
Once your email list is established, optimize it to benefit all subscribers. We mean that you should customize emails should to each customer’s needs. Email lists are called “segments” in marketing and email marketing parlance.
You can use them to help people get an early start on their taxes. Create a list and offer discounts or coupons for those who wait until the last minute to file taxes.
While you’re working on this strategy, make sure you’re targeting different demographics.
The younger generation often needs extra assistance with taxes. Offering them additional benefits and assistance will encourage them to use your services. You can also divide your customers to help them send the tax information they need.
Segmenting your email list will increase the chances of the emails being opened, not “trash”/spam.
Remarketing to Prospects
Your business’s success depends on how you use the Internet for advertising and how you learn to remarket.
In case you aren’t familiar with the word or what it entails, it is basically how you can market to people who have previously visited your site or shown interest in your company in any possible way.
This marketing strategy is excellent for reminding past visitors of your services. It allows you to reconnect with them and encourage them in a way that says, “Hey, I think you may need my services.”
The way to do this is by usually using paid ads to attract both returning customers and first-time customers at a cost-effective price.
However, ads are not the only way to achieve what you want.
You can do this by using remarketing mailing lists. You can also remarket to particular visitors to your pages or take specific actions on your website. This is similar to setting up email lists to reach specific people.
The whole idea of remarketing is focusing on those who have had contact with you so far, so regardless of the channel they used to interact with you, you should be able to include them among the people you want to learn about.
Using AdWords for Your Business
Google AdWords are massive lead generation tools for your tax preparation business. They let you advertise your business to people who search for specific keywords and phrases on the Internet.
And yes, these are the ones you’ll pretty much use for the previous strategy.
Companies decide to invest in this paid option because it gives you an advantage in your city, region, or zip code.
AdWords will show ads for your services to potential customers who search for ‘tax service/preparation/accountant [CITY Name].’
Although some people consider it a “wide” marketing option, the truth is that AdWords should be used more locally by being specific with the keywords and always adding a location.
This will allow you to cut down on unnecessary spending by not targeting customers outside your area.
You can choose specific keywords that you know potential customers are looking for. This will allow you to avoid competition for customers outside your local area. However, your ad must still be visible and bid high enough for the keyword to ensure that it is easily found.
Standing Above the Rest
Standing involves more than a couple of strategies and ideas since this needs to be done properly, or you will get the opposite result.
These simple and inexpensive ideas will change the way you market tax services. You will impress your company and guarantee yourselves many businesses from old clients but also many new ones:
Reminders for Appointments
Your tax season marketing should include customer retention. A common statistic across industries is that profit increases by five percent when customer retention is higher than twenty-five percent.
You will need fewer clients to win the loyalty of taxpayers from last year than you can get this year.
All your clients who have been with you previously need to do is to complete their taxes again for the current year. Sending an email with a clear subject line can get them to hire your services.
Now, there’s no need to overthink this. After all, it is easy to create a reminder campaign.
It is possible to send the same message as before to all your clients, or you can divide your audience into groups for tax concerns. Segmentation is a technique that helps you deliver more relevant messages to the right people, just as we mentioned for emails.
An email marketing tool allows you to improve lead quality and run segmented reminder lead generation campaigns. Constant Contact is a tool that allows you to set up your audience and schedule emails at the right time.
Offer Referral Incentives
Accounting Today’s 2019 study found that client referrals are the best source of new business for tax experts, and for it, you only need to use your email list if the traditional referring process limits you.
However, this strategy comprises people who have opted in to receive your messages only.
Offer a discount on tax preparation services or a gift certificate to a local business. You might offer fifty dollars gift certificates to people who refer you.
You can create referral incentive programs through community partnerships. Give them a gift and just be creative with the options you provide.
Just make sure that whatever you use as an incentive can actually be afforded by your business in the short and long term.
Client Appreciation Events
Emails are an excellent way to thank clients—and yes, we know there’s a lot going on involving emails. However, they will be the key for most of your contacts and qualified leads.
Thanking previous clients or just people who decided to sign it for your business will help them have a different perspective of your business and how you worry about your clients.
Thus, do more than just send an email and prepare them an event to say “thank you.”
Set up an automated email sequence leading up to the event to generate buzz. The first message should announce the event’s date, time, and location. Virtual client appreciation events are as effective as in-person events.
After the first email is sent, set up follow-up emails to maintain the buzz, encourage people to sign up, invite them into contests, and ask questions for live Q&A.
Ideas For Social Media Marketing
Social media is a significant way to reach taxpaying adults. Over seventy percent of Americans use at least one social networking site. The number of people when we separate them in age is quite thrilling considering that people between 30-40 years or more are quite active, which means your clients are there; you just need to get in front of them.
Facebook is the most common social media site. Fifty-eight percent of Americans have an account on it and will use it actively. You can do your tax advertising there and generate qualified sales leads.
You can also upload your customer database to Facebook. The platform will match the addresses to your profile and allow you to target specific ads to them.
Next, save your list in CSV format and go to Facebook to create an audience. Click on ‘Customer List’ to begin. Next, follow the instructions to upload your CSV file.
Blog Ideas to Generate Leads
Content marketing is of great importance to tax season marketing strategies. When so many people seek tax tips, authoritative and valuable content can help push your website to the top search results and stop your competitors from getting your deals.
Blogs will help you in your quest of generating leads for the business and growing its customer base by giving you enough space to rank for specific keywords, making sure you are offering value, and connecting with people thanks to it.
For the content, it is a matter of keeping it in the areas you’re experienced in: taxes.
You can offer some tips to handle them when just starting and lead them to make an appointment with you to play it safe or do things right.
You could write content about related topics and not entirely about taxes so you can diversify a bit, so it doesn’t feel repetitive either, or you don’t run out of ideas way too fast.
If you want to take this strategy to the next level, you can always guest blog, so you get relevant links and exposure from other blogs from similar websites or those related to your niche.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Tax Preparation Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Tax Preparation Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Tax Preparation Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.