Marketing During Tax Season

By Kristy Short, Ed.D, is president of SAS Communications 360.

Marketing doesn't have to take up a lot of time during the season. In fact, it's fairly easy to keep communications flowing consistently without much effort. The key is to keep your name in front of your clients and maintain the appearance of working hard to keep in touch.

Here are a few easy tips to ensure your marketing efforts don't go cold during tax season:

Focus on Client Marketing Only—Save your aggressive prospect campaigns for after April 15th…when you have time to handle them. Remember, it's far more lucrative to maintain the clients you have than to bring in new leads; so make sure you continue to "touch" your existing clients with brief, helpful, and feel-good communications. By focusing only on clients during tax season, your marketing load will lighten tremendously.
Set it and Forget it—Schedule client communications to launch each month automatically. You can use one of the many intuitive email marketing services, such as Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor, to pre-schedule simple "touch base" communications. Emails don't need to be any longer than a few paragraphs…just make sure the information is useful and timely. One or more of these communications can also be as simple as reminding clients to get their tax documents in as soon as possible. Again, it's about staying in front of your clients consistently.

Update Your Blog Post Each Month—Your website is the new "front door" to your firm. It's where your clients do business with you—exchanging data and documents. Keep you clients coming back to your website as often as possible by offering relevant information. Maintaining a blog is a good way to do this. For those who simply don't have time to write blog posts, outsource this task to a freelance writer. There are plenty of them out there.

Doctor Up Your Reception Area—Because your head will be down for most of tax season, make sure you've prepared your reception area with updated printed marketing materials. As the primary waiting area, clients will look for things to read. This is a great opportunity to plant the seed for up-selling services. Have a firm brochure that lists all your current services. You can also create specialty informational pieces such as a fact sheet on the convenience of portals, a how-to (step-by-step) on logging in to and using a client portal, or the value of outsourcing payroll. Again, outsource this to contractor if you don't have the onsite resources.

These are just a few sound tips to keep your marketing program rolling even during busy season. Marketing is all about frequency and consistency; that is, staying on the minds of your clients and the community as a whole. Tax season can certainly put many non-tax related tasks on the back burner, but just remember—if you are not staying in touch with your clients, someone else may be. It's okay if your marketing slows down a bit, as long as you don't hit idle mode. Take a few minutes to implement a few of these tips and join the firms that successfully keep their marketing engines running all year long!

About the Author:

Kristy Short, Ed.D, is president of SAS Communications 360 (SAScommunications360.com) and a partner in RootWorks LLC (RootWorks.com)—firms dedicated to providing public relations, branding, and marketing services to the accounting profession. She is a regular columnist with CPA Practice Advisor and has been published in multiple State CPA Society magazines and Accounting Today. Kristy is also a professor of English and marketing in the SE Michigan area. Reach her at kristy@sascommunicatio..