Marketing Your Tax Resolution Practice

With 61% of global internet users researching products and companies online, your tax resolution practice needs an online presence. To attract customers to your tax resolution website, you need to define your brand and you need a marketing strategy.

"Branding" is one of those marketing buzzwords. The American Marketing Association defines branding as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from other sellers." 

 To define your company brand, ask yourself and your team the below:

• What makes our CPA firm tax resolution practice different?
• What specific services do we offer that set us apart?
• What is our trademark? 
• Do we have a logo or a company slogan?

Your brand is essentially your company identity. 

Your brand makes your customers remember you and should create some kind of emotional connection. When we are talking about taxes, tax preparation, and tax resolution branding - you want your customers to feel security, confidence, and competence from your brand. There is nothing like going to meet with my accountant and trusting that my financial health is secure in his hands. However you want your customers to feel when you interact with them one-on-one, that is the feeling you should be going for in your online branding.

Excellent brands deliver a clear message.

There is nothing more confusing than a strange logo or a slogan that doesn't make sense to anyone outside of the company. Your message should be simple, clear, and memorable. 

Your brand should motivate the customer to action.

You don't want to come off as a salesperson, but your message needs to be powerful enough to evoke interest or an emotional response.

For example, General Electric has excellent and creative branding. Their slogan is "imagination at work." Their company description on their Twitter site is:

"GE imagines things others don’t, builds things others can’t and delivers outcomes that can move, power, build and cure the world."

The branding message is simple - General Electric is all about innovation. They want to affect and produce big change. They talk about the "why" (what the company intends to accomplish) instead of the "what" (the product). 

Smaller businesses may not have the luxury of just focusing on the why, especially if you are just starting and need to get the word out about your tax practice.

GMLCPA, a CPA firm based out of Tuscon, Arizona, is a great example of a tax practice with a clear slogan. When you enter their website, you see the below message:

Your Business Isn't Just About Numbers

So, Why Is Your CPA Firm?

Start Seeing Things Differently

This message does a few things really well for their branding - they target their audience (businesses), include a line that clearly states the product (CPA firm), and includes an intriguing message about changing perspective. 

Millennials are quickly becoming the group with the highest spending power in the United States. Marketing and branding your tax practice to millennials requires that you to understand what they want. The Boston Consulting Group found that millennials are characterized as idealistic, egocentric, and tech savvy - with a desire to live in the moment, and pursue adventures and experiences over high-cost items. In fact, 78% of millennials would prefer to spend money on an experience rather than buy coveted goods. 

Marketing and branding to millennials means that your brand needs to cater to their needs. What does your CPA firm offer to millennials? Does your team operate on a cloud-based technology, ensuring millennials customers that they can communicate with you seamlessly from anywhere in the world? Does your company slogan resonate with millennial values?

Marketing your tax resolution practice is worth the investment. The end goal of marketing and clear branding is to secure customer loyalty––making your firm the customer choice for life.