I’ve seen a TON of accountant and tax marketing over the years.
Not only here at TaxProMarketer (where I still see plenty as I research and provide input to clients), but I’ve coached and consulted with hundreds of firm owners over my decade in the industry, and I’ve spent a few years speaking around the country to groups of tax/accounting professionals on marketing and firm development.
And what I’ve seen usually wasn’t too pretty.
Though, perhaps that’s the wrong choice of words — some of it actually *is* “pretty” — just … highly ineffective. People go for “pretty” far too much because that’s what “everybody else does”.
But that’s not the worst part about it all.
Take a look at just about any industry with many competitors–colleges, hotels, sedans, tax and accounting firms (especially accounting firms)…
The websites bend over backwards to be just like all the others. You can’t identify one hotel website from another if you delete the name of the hotel (unless there’s a beach or a snow-capped mountain in the background).
Sometimes, we try so hard to fit in we give consumers no choice but to seek out the cheapest. After all, if everything is the same, why not buy what’s cheap and close?
This is a HUGE problem for firm websites and the rest of most tax marketing — and it’s not solved by “picking a different template”, as some might have you believe.
No, what you need is a Unique Selling Proposition. And that term is thrown around so much, that too many tax business owners just sort of nod to themselves, and say: yeah, we got that.
Really?
If that’s the case, why do your marketing materials (if you even HAVE them!) talk about the same bland services:
- Small Business Accounting
- Tax Preparation
- QuickBooks Services
- Payroll
- Part-Time CFO Services
- Personal Financial Planning
- Yada, yada, yada, ad infinitum
Sorry to rain on your parade, but that just don’t cut it. What you NEED, is a conversational, *direct* reason why your prospects (and yes, your clients too — they need continual “re-selling”) should choose to engage your services.
It needs to be a part of everything you communicate, from your website to your brochures, to your client-intake forms — EVERYTHING is marketing, my friend.
And “copying” what every other accountant or tax firm in the country is doing is a surefire recipe for becoming a commodity.
Which, if you haven’t yet noticed, is the worst kind of position to be in (just ask the news industry).
So get clear on what makes you different. And be sure to make it known.