Marketing Tax Services Doesn’t Need to Be Difficult

You want to get more tax clients, right? Well, according to Accounting Today, there are around 42,000 other accounting firms who are looking for more clients too. How can you rise above the competition? The fact is, the average business has lots of choices when it comes to who they can go to for tax services. Much like eating out at a restaurant, you can cater to certain types of clientele by what you offer, your price, and the atmosphere (level of professionalism) you bring to the table. There are both “McDonalds” level tax firms and “5-star Michelin restaurant” level tax firms, along with everything in between. How is your tax firm positioned, and where do you want to be positioned in the future? 

The Secret to Marketing Tax Services

Your marketing strategy is where you begin to position your tax firm to potential clients. This is why it’s important when you’re doing active marketing to stop focusing on offering all of your services. If you want to make $50,000 per month, you need to put all of your efforts into ONE main service. Don’t offer everything. Keep in mind we don’t mean that you should only offer one service, but that you should only market one service. Figure out what is the one thing that your target client needs the most and market that.

Why? Because active marketing works best for tax firms when they don’t try to sell every single service that they have. Focusing on one main ideal service brings higher ROI. Even if you’re offering all kinds of accounting services, when you’re doing active marketing and you’re shouting at the market on LinkedIn, is it better to say, “Hey Mr. Attorney, I can help you with…everything tax?” Or the one thing that he really needs most?

People respond more often to targeted offers, not generic offers. “I can help you with your taxes” is a much different sales pitch compared to “I can put together and implement a tax plan for mid-sized construction companies that will save them on average $30,000 a year.” 

In that case, it’s better to market yourself as a tax planner for a specific niche than to generically market yourself as a person who helps with any tax service. Of course, you can always upsell your client from a tax plan into other tax services after you secure them as a client. The point is, market one main service you do, not all the services you do. This helps you control how you position yourself compared to other tax firms in the market. 

Marketing Tax Services Involves Knowing Your Numbers

Before you start marketing, you need to have a goal. What numbers do you want to do? If you want to make $100,000 in new sales over the next 12 months, then you need to pick the service you want to advertise, and calculate how many clients that will take. If you’re going to market individual tax preps at $500 each, you will need 200 new clients (yikes!). 

That’s why we suggest you market a higher level service. The higher the dollar amount, the less number of clients you need to go out and find. Don’t believe it’s harder to sell a $5,000 tax plan than it is to sell ten $500 tax preps. Start with which tax service will be your main service to market, then choose a revenue number you want to hit. This way you quickly find how many clients you need.

Breaking the Numbers Down for Marketing Tax Services

You might want to make your main service a monthly recurring service such as bookkeeping, controller service or even CFO services. Or, your main marketing product might be for an annual recurring service such as tax prep or tax planning. The point is, you have to factor whether your service is one-time, monthly or annually into your marketing calculations. 

You can’t just say, “I want $100,000 in new revenue” without defining if it’s monthly or annually. If you’re doing monthly accounting for $1,000 for certain sized businesses, you will need 100 clients to do $100,000 monthly, but just over 8 clients to do $100,000 annually. So, when it comes to your marketing goals, you’re really first asking yourself how much money you want to make in a given time period.  

Without cementing down your specific tax service you’re going to offer along with a financial goal attached to it, you will not have the math to even know how many clients to shoot for. 

So, going back to our example, if you want to be charging businesses $1,000 a month for monthly accounting in order to get to $100,000 revenue a month, it’s going to take you 100 clients. Next, ask yourself how many clients can you onboard per month? Your goal with LinkedIn marketing, and really any type of marketing, should be to always keep your capacity full. 

So, let's say you want to sell $250,000 worth of tax plans over the next 12 months. You sell, on average, each tax plan for $5,000. You will need 50 new tax planning clients in the next year. This means to reach your goal, you need to find at least one new client each week. It’s all simple math, but we’re laboring this point because many tax firms don’t do this. They never do the math on their marketing for tax services!

Organizing Your Marketing For Tax Services 

If you’ve done the math, then you will know exactly how many clients you need. So, let’s use the same example from above—you want to sell $250,000 worth of tax plans over the next 12 months, with each tax plan at $5,000, you need 50 new tax planning clients in the next year. The goal now is to break this down into further detail. 

How many strategy sessions does it take to secure one tax planning deal? Perhaps you close 25% of those who you get on a call with, so you need 4 strategy sessions to get one new client. Maybe only 50% of those you book a strategy session with actually show up, which means you need to make 8 appointments per week. To further break it down, if you’re only in the office Monday through Thursday each week, to reach 8 appointments per week, you will need to make 2 appointments every single day to reach your goal of selling $250,000 in tax plans over the next year. 

Scheduling 2 appointments each day in the office is now your actual practical goal, not “making $250,000.” The latter will come if you do the former. This is how you need to organize your marketing goals in order to reach the end result. 

Pick Your Method(s) of Tax Service Marketing Channels

You must also pick where you will find your appointments. Many accounting and tax professionals use Facebook and LinkedIn for the best results. Other social networks can work for general branding, but not generating appointments. We can also confirm that LinkedIn is the most cost effective way to begin marketing your tax business. 

While many tax firms only use cold calling, mailers, or wait on referrals, we know that LinkedIn (along with Facebook) are great marketing channels that can help put you ahead of other tax firms who are searching for clients in less effective ways.  

So, marketing for tax services doesn't need to be difficult! It starts with marketing one main service that you excel at and are profitable with (not marketing all your services). Next, it’s about knowing your numbers so you can calculate exactly what your marketing efforts need to result in. Finally, pick a channel that best brings these results (we recommend LinkedIn or Facebook). 

If you’d like extensive details on how to market on LinkedIn and Facebook (they’re both very different strategies), along with which tax or accounting services could be most profitable for you to concentrate on (plus pricing and packaging strategies), schedule your free call with us today!