How to Leverage Positioning & Perspective to Grow Your Tax Firm

Maybe you're aiming in the right direction, but you're not thinking about it from your customer's perspectives...

You want to grow your firm, and you're struggling to find ways to connect with new business prospects, and you KNOW you need to invest in marketing... You also know that you need to invest in DIGITAL marketing.

You also know that your last 10 digital marketing investments have been total busts even when the agency you engaged was thrilled with the results.

What the heck???

When I was in B2B sales at a company that specialized in R&D tax credit studies and other specialty, job-growth incentives, I learned very quickly that my world was Booooooring to my customers... That is, until we started talking about their refunds.

My target audience (CEOs of small businesses) only cared about two things when it came to taxes - that they pay as little as possible, and that they are not going to raise any red flags with the IRS.

My secondary audience (Partners and Managing Partners at CPA firms that support R&D qualified industries) cared about looking good in front of their clients and keeping them out of trouble.

There was one common theme tying us all together, and that was our service offering, the tax studies. Our CPA partners didn't have the capacity to handle something as in-depth as us, but they wanted to make sure their clients were being taken care of. Our actual customers wanted their CPAs to handle EVERYTHING related to tax, so they didn't have to think about it, and only have to interact with one another during tax season.

So, it's true... when I say that...

Perspective really IS everything!

I'll be honest - I really just wanted to post a picture of my hometown (Huntington Beach, California) with our new drone, and it seemed that "perspective" was a good topic. The reality is that I just wanted to go fly our drone and call it "work."

But when I got to my usual jogging spot (the wetlands) and started flying around this area that I've been to a thousand times, I started noticing what a great little metaphor it actually was.

I have never seen Huntington Beach quite like this, even though I've been here so many times - I was missing SO MUCH! Turns out that you're probably having the same issues with your marketing. What little investments you have out there are very likely not being seen by the right eyes to begin with, but even if they are, I'm willing to wager that they're not seeing it the way you want them to.

But I can help you make a few tweaks or changes in direction, and open up a whole new world of possibilities for your tax firm.

1: Small adjustments in strategy

Before you get so frustrated that you want to walk away from it all, let me help you see if there is a way to get more out of your existing investments.

I hear a lot of business owners, especially the more savvy tax and audit firm Managing Partners and rainmakers, talk about putting money into Adwords, blogging, SEO, and even social media, but getting very little to NO return beyond reports that look nice.

But you can't pay bills with traffic reports, can you?

No, but if you're getting a nice, steady flow of traffic every month already, then don't STOP doing it, but maybe figure out how to really take advantage of it.

For example, if you're..

• BLOGGING: Create a few content downloads aimed at your perfect customer based on messaging of your most popular blog posts. The idea is to help learn more about the problems you solve, and give them something they find valuable enough to share their contact information in exchange for.
• SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: If you and your firm are actually on social media, and your pages are all updated, you're about 10 steps ahead of most of your competitors. But it's not enough - especially if you're posting ads all day. But if you adjust your focus to 3rd parties, sharing content that isn't just yours, and isn't just motivated by sales, then you'll find that people who are engaged to your messaging end up on your site... in front of content offers.
• SEO: This one kills me the most, because if you're not blogging or engaging i social media marketing, you're not doing yourself any favors with respect to SEO. Most of you see this as a once-every-two-years kind of deal, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. SEO is a moving target, and you're actually going to drastically improve your results by continuously adding to your site. Blogging, landing pages for your content offers, and the language you use in your social media posts should follow the same SEO strategy as your website. Put them all together, and POW!

2: Understanding the impact of your efforts

This is one of the hardest things for my managing partners and rainmakers... I bet you feel pretty clueless about the impact your marketing is having on your business. Most of the folks I speak to either have no idea, or just assume that there's nothing good happening.

Buuuut, you're not always right. Sometimes GREAT things are happening, but you don't have a way to quantify your results.

To fix this problem, there are a couple of programs out there that will help you see your website in a way you've never seen it before.

1. Traffic flow, sources, and even demographics: Google Analytics is the bare minimum, and it will show you those things, plus bounce rates, how long people spend on your site, etc. It's free, and only takes a couple of minutes to set up. Even if you're not planning a website redesign or increased marketing investment anytime soon, you should still have this set up.
2. Heatmaps: We use Hotjar, but CrazyEgg is another good program for this as well. With Hotjar, we get to see where people click the most, where their mouse hovers, and how far they scroll down before leaving. This data is very helpful to us website developers, because we prefer making improvements based on hard data.
3. Polling: We use Hotjar for this as well. It's basically a series of pop-ups that we place on pages we're trying to improve asking simple questions, so we can understand the user experience, and what needs to be done to improve it. Hotjar costs $29/month for the Pro plan, and we highly recommend it!
4. Everything else: Email open and click rates, blog view rates, CTA clicks, content downloads, visits-to-leads ratio, leads-to-customer ratios... We track all of this using Hubspot. We also execute it using Hubspot, so that's helpful. It's minimum $200/month, and likely closer to $400 - $1,000 or more depending on where you're starting from, and you don't want to get this one until you're ready to execute an inbound marketing program (learn more about that HERE).

3: Jargon

There is nothing you guys struggle with more than speaking a language that your customers actually understand. 

The reality is that very few people understand your world, and most have no interest in learning about it. Yet, time and time again, when I look at blog posts written by CPAs, Managing Partners, and/or Rainmakers, I see a pile of words that are so jargon-rich, that they put the rest of us to sleep after the first sentence.

I understand your world, and it STILL makes my eyes sag.... Seriously - INSTANT sleep mode.

So, if you're blogging or sharing content on social media, or doing anything that involves communication between you and other people, please focus on the language THEY speak, and keep your jargon restricted to internal meetings and team-building happy hours.

Take this concept to your SEO strategy, and go from there.

CONCLUSION:

I have no doubt in my mind that you can help a lot of people with their taxes. I also have a feeling that you've been biting off your marketing investments one at a time to see which is going to have the most impact.

The good news is that you're probably doing the right things, and with some small adjustments, or different perspective, you could see some great results. The bad news is that you MUST be willing to invest. Most experts will tell you to put 10 - 20% of your goals into marketing. If you put that into inbound, you'll get a slower, long-term build to your traffic, leads, and customers, and over time, it will be the cheapest way to grow. If you put it into ads, you'll get immediate results (in at least one department, like traffic), but there will be ZERO residual effect. Your investment that day is your investment that day.