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looking to grow your tax accounting tax preparation Services business in this video I'm going to go through a marketing strategy to help you keep a consistent pipeline throughout the year not just in your busy season and help you grow your business so my name is Phil Richard I own flash Consulting we work with local service businesses like tax preparation Services accounting firms and we help them grow their business using this framework right here that I'm going to go through and I'm also going to show you some other strategies that you can utilize to keep your funnel full all right so let's hop right into it so there are three components to Growing your business the first one is creating more visibility for your business and we're going to talk through some of these strategies and the second thing is once you get this visibility it's converting it into actual leads for your business and scheduling an appointment getting them an estimate or the cost and then ultimately selling the job and then finally it's going to be retargeting your prospects retargeting your customers on an annual basis or whatever that looks like for your business specifically when we talk about accounting or tax preparation Services retargeting as you may know is going to be your number one bread and butter the quickest way to a return on investment because every year people need to get their taxes done so let's start with retargeting and how this looks for your business so let's say you do taxes every year and you should be sending out your letters of Engagement or something to get people to sign and schedule an appointment with you to do their taxes so I'm going to walk you through a simple framework of how this can work for your business you can implement this starting today going into your busy season or even after your busy season to get your deadlines met all right so you take all your customers in a database and you can send them an email in some type of monthly newsletter or email marketing and you can also send them a text message and so what we would recommend is if you don't have a CRM or a platform there's a bunch of them out there um for email marketing specifically a free one that you could use is called MailChimp but a lot of crms have this we obviously do this for our clients but whatever you choose to do to reach out to people MailChimp again is a free one that you can use what you want to say is like hey it's time to start planning for your attack for tax season if you can sign this uh engagement letter and you can send them a digital copy and also you can schedule online for your appointment so what we recommend that this would look like for scheduling online is having some type of a calendar this is our calendar and having this calendar integrate with your outlook Calendar or whatever calendar that you have internally and allowing people to schedule time on people's calendar so let's say instead of a 30 minute strategy session you have a tax preparation meeting and maybe you do them on Zoom or in person whatever and you get this set up and so a really good option is called calendly and calendly is a free online appointment scheduling software again you could pay for the upgraded version but it looks very similar to how this looks and what this allows you to do is to put this thing on your website and then when you send out a text message or an email or whatever you can say hey schedule your appointment right online here and when they click on this button it goes to your website and they can literally schedule an appointment right on your on your calendar fill out this basic information and then you get a notification and if you do integrated with zoom or whatever you can build those automations but from a retargeting perspective this is a great way to get people on board a lot of old school you know sending out letters and sending and mailing physically physical stuff this is very old school nowadays you can streamline this whole process and automate it through text message email online scheduling online signatures all that kind of stuff so from a retargeting perspective that's how you should start if you're getting into your busy season and especially if it's you know if you're going to go into January February March you should start this process in December you know send out these email blasts get people going so that way they can start scheduling on your calendar so they're not waiting for the last minute uh what we found with text message is that text message they actually get a 98 open rate so if you can do a text blast with a link to your online scheduling it's a home run you're going to be booking jobs all day long and get to this point very very quick because they don't even need to speak with someone they can just go and schedule an appointment and get right here for the sale automatically all right so we talked about retargeting let's go to visibility real quick and then we'll go through a little bit of the ways you can optimize your conversion pipeline so from visibility when someone searches for tax preparation Services I just ran this one as if I was in Chicago what we can see here I mean you should do this in your area because you want to see what other your competition is doing so these are search ads so these are your Google search ads if someone searches for tax preparation you can see that this company is running an ad and this company's running an ad so you could run ads that's one of our parts on here is see an ad or pay for a lead and then the next part is this is a separate section this is your organic local search pack Google Map Pack whatever and basically what this allows you to do is to see your competition so about 50 to 60 of clicks happen right here and what this shows you is that Jackson Hewitt Tax Services 39 reviews compared to Dearborn Tax Services most people are going to select this one because it has the highest rating and the most reviews even though this company's been in business longer than this business they're probably going to start with Jackson Hewitt what you can do for your business if you want to get organic search online for people searching for tax preparation Services is to get a Google business profile and get reviews and especially if you're going into your busy season if you notice on here right after the sale the first thing that we have is asking for a review or a referral if you do review if you do your meetings in person you should have something like this with a QR code that people can scan and leave you a review right after you do great service for them if you do it online you should have an email or an automation closing out their account that asks for a review and when they send you a review then you can go right here they leave you a review and if you see this helps boost your online ranking now what we found this is actually what Google the percentage is and so you can see the local pack area 17 of your ranking is Google reviews so just by simply getting Google reviews will allow you to show up in this area majority of the time what we found with tax and preparation accounting services is that they don't have much of an emphasis on their organic search engine optimization Google Business profiles any of that stuff so it's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there to start getting reviews and to start ranking for these keywords some of the other strategies that we have on here are obviously running ads so you could run ads on Google you can run ads on Facebook you could run ads on Yelp Facebook is a really good one because everyone's need in that tax preparation Services um at a specific time so you can in Tangent with social media a really cool strategy is on Facebook join your local group whether it's like your city county um not really state but City County or even like your local neighborhoods and what you can do is just post in there hey if you know anyone that needs tax preparation Services we're offering 30 off to anyone in this neighborhood specifically and we know that time is of the essence so what that will allow you to do is to get your local Target area and maybe it's like a local moms group or something like that it allows you to get in front of people that are local and what we found with the groups is that a lot of people are are much more engaged in the local uh content instead of just like posting it on your Facebook page if you go into the groups there's a lot of interactions happening and more people are going to see your stuff um referrals Direct Mail prospecting calls so you could take your retargeting list and you could Prospect call those people to try and get them to book jobs but again text message and email is much more efficient with your time and the last one is business to business so if there's bookkeepers out there what we would recommend is to build a list of bookkeepers and then send them an email or call or text and say hey if any of your clients need tax preparation Services we'll give you a referral fee back or we'll incentivize your people to book with us by giving them 50 off because they know you something like that is a really good strategy to get your visibility and to get a quick pop especially with those bookkeepers so once they come into your funnel and they come in as a lead maybe they don't fully schedule an appointment but they come in as a lead for some reason or even if they do schedule an appointment it's really important to nurture those leads until they get to this point so I'll give you a perfect example let's say you send out your text message or someone books an appointment or whatever in December for March to get their taxes done well in that time between December and March you need to stay in touch with them and this could be something as simple as setting up an automation that every week or every two weeks you send them an email about something else that they need for example you should have a checklist that goes out I'm sure that you have a checklist so that could be one of your emails you also send out like what other forms that you need to keep an eye out for like whether it's like a you know W-2 or whatever interest you might get from your bank or whatever other forms that typically people get but they don't know that they need then maybe you have another content piece that goes out for donations what can you write off what can't you write off to come prepare to this appointment so like every week you're touching base with them as far as getting prepared for their their meeting with you what this allows you to do is you don't have any leak points out here of people canceling their appointments or or looking to go somewhere else and then also what you can do is offer a referral inside of here one of the emails can say like hey if you know someone else that's interested um here's a coupon that you could give to them for 50 off or if you know someone else that needs their taxes done we'd be happy to do theirs those theirs as well and so it allows you to stay top of mind because what we see a lot of times is people book in December January and then they just leak out because they cancel the appointment or something comes up they're not they don't remember because it's so far out for their booking window um so that is a good marketing strategy for tax preparation and accounting firms I'm curious if there's any other strategies that you utilize that maybe I didn't mention be sure to drop a comment below if you're interested in growing your your business and you like content like that be sure to hit like And subscribe we post videos about growing local service businesses and if you're interested in implementing this in your business I'll put a link down below you can schedule one of those 30-minute strategy meetings and again these are just strategy sessions where you can bounce ideas off of us we can come up with a strategy for you you know if you do work with us great if not we just love talking about the stuff so we would love to meet you all right well we'll see in the next video and have a great day