Stories Like This Popping Up Everywhere — Where's Yours?

Unlike a significant percentage of your clients, you may not have a procrastinating bone in your body.
I’ve worked with hundreds of tax professionals during my years in this industry, and while *some* of them fly through tax season in a disorganized, caffeine-induced haze, MOST have their ducks in a pretty good row, when it comes to organizing their lives.
Which, perhaps, is why so few tax professionals will properly leverage these next 18 days.
Any procrastination plaguing you or our office staff around now has much more to do with your clients lack of organization than it does yours, right?
[Though, I should tell you, that there are solutions for that … but that’s a topic for a different day.]
What I want YOU to do, is to pop your head out of the ocean of forms and receipts and use the incredible opportunities which these next 18 days provides.
Scan the news stories, and you’ll see lots of stories like this one, or this one. One of those stories cited the fact that only 43% of filers will have their returns in by the end of this month (that’d be tomorrow, for you caffeine addicts).
Now certainly — many of those folks are already in process (like me, for instance!) and just haven’t yet filed. BUT there are hordes of tax procrastinators who haven’t really thought about their taxes until … probably next week.
What are you going to do about that?
My suggestion (based on the incredible results we’ve seen for clients, and in the tax firm whose marketing I ran)? Do what it takes to extricate yourself from the forms and receipts and harvest the bounty.
If you haven’t already prepared direct mail, don’t mess with that. But here’s some media which you CAN still leverage to get more clients in the door.
1) Post-it notes on the front of your local newspaper. A very simple “gift certificate” or coupon with your contact information and basic marketing message will do the trick.
2) “Guerrilla” methods. Hiring a high school kid to blanket the area around your office with similar gift certificates or coupons, placed at the register of local high-traffic merchants, who fit your target client profile.)
3) Press Releases. Those stories which I cited above did NOT happen by accident. Even better, pick up the phone, and offer yourself to local newspaper and TV reporters — even influential bloggers — and make yourself the “go to authority” for the cavalcade of stories which are about to hit everywhere about these zany procrastinators.
4) Social Media, Email Marketing. USE your list. Invite your best, most referral-iciouis clients to send their contacts a special offer, which they can post on their Facebook walls, their Twitter feed or by good ol’ email (STILL the best way to reach people, and not changing anytime soon!).
You get the idea.
If you have other ideas which have worked well for you in the past, I’d love to hear ’em. I’ll share any good ones that I get.
Kick some butt out there. Even if you have to extend everyone who comes through your doors … the fee’s the same, right?:)