Real Tax Business Success
Lesson - 47
The Way You Really Get a Flood of Clients:
Additional “Bonus” Advice
Author: Chauncey Hutter Jr.
It’s smarter to use 50 different ways to get one client, than one way to get 50 clients!
In marketing, diversity is the opposite of laziness! In the long run, it’s better to know 50 different ways to bring a new client into your tax business than to put all your eggs in one basket and try and do the same numbers with one ad.
And you know, it’s actually EASIER to learn 50 “little” ways to get one new client at a time as compared to “hitting a home run right out of the box” with your first ad.
So how come more tax professionals don’t learn the “little easy” ways to land more new clients? It’s called MARKETING LAZINESS! (I admit, it is much more fun to write one ad that’ll bring in a bunch of new clients right off the bat. But the reality is I built our tax business on MANY marketing ads, picking up 10 to 15 clients at a time.)
Yes, we’ve had our share of “BIG HITS” when close to 200 people responded to one little third of a page flier (half of them new clients). But you don’t always get those kinds of responses, so in order to play it safe, you DIVERSIFY!
Does finding 50 ways to get a new client overwhelm you? It shouldn’t. Just go by this simple rule during tax season and you will not fall into the “marketing laziness” trap most tax professionals do.
Starting January 1st, don’t let a day go by without trying or testing one simple promotional idea. By the 50th day (or the middle of February), you will have found over a dozen (probably closer to two dozen) ways to get one or two clients at a time.
Let’s say you have found 20 ways to get at least one client every time you do them. That’s POWERFUL! And you will not be doing most of these marketing ideas now. You will have delegated them to your staff or hired high school kids to do them after school.
What kind of ideas am I talking about?
1) A small classified ad (both offline and online) that gets three calls every time you run it and one of those three comes in to have their taxes prepared. (The ad costs $50 and you make $300 or net $250 each time it hits the newspaper.) * Switch headline if response slows and retest again.
2) A high school kid promises to hand out (at least) 50 coupon fliers door to door every day after school, stamping a red deadline date at the bottom validating your “special offer” good for only the next 10 days. You pick up one new client every time this kid hits the streets. That’s five per week (or $1,500) and you’re paying him an hourly wage totaling $50 to $100 for the week.
* This is also a good way to find “hungry” neighborhoods starving for a quality tax service business.
3) You do a deal with the owner of a pizza business. His delivery people take a copy of one of your full page ads and staples it to their pizza boxes. They deliver 800 pizzas per week to local homes and businesses around your tax office. Only three clients respond per week, by bringing in the ad with a pizza stamp on it. The deal you made gives the pizza owner was he’d get $25 per new client you receive. He gets $75 per week and you are netting $825, plus you are picking up three new clients each week for free with no effort.
Are you getting my drift? These are easy ways to pick up one or two clients at a time. Once you get them up and running they run by themselves or you have other people run them for you from your office.
No, it’s not flashy. No, you are not going to get your picture in the paper for the biggest response ever for a single ad.
Depending on how aggressive you are, you’ll have 50 or more new clients coming into your tax office per week, netting you large sums of income. This is how million dollar tax businesses are built, one client at a time!
(It might not be a story for Hollywood, but I don’t think the bank tellers will refuse your money when you bring the deposit down to your local branch.)
Chauncey Hutter Jr.
Tax Marketing Expert
Chauncey Hutter, Jr, is a best-selling author and leading marketing consultant and success coach to the tax industry. Mr. Hutter grew his father’s $50,000 per year tax preparation business to a multi-million dollar empire with 24 locations, 400+ employees and over 27,000 tax clients all coming from his marketing campaigns.
For more info on Real Tax Business Success, go to www.taxmarketing.com
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