Leveraging the busy tax season to grow your finance business

For professionals providing financial services, tax season presents many opportunities for experts to alleviate anxiety and provide helpful, valuable information to potential leads and customers. Since the entire U.S. population must pay taxes in order to obey the law, tax season offers accountants and other finance experts more opportunities to market their services, provide useful education, offer tax guidance, and build successful relationships with clients.

This guide explains how to capitalize on the busy tax filing season to grow your finance business.

Offering tax planning services

Proactive tax planning strategy helps both individual taxpayers and tax-paying business owners meet their payment deadlines and avoid fees or penalties. Planning taxes in advance can also help people alleviate their stress, especially when they’re guided by the expert help of a professional.

Some of the benefits tax planning provides include:

• Lower tax liability: You can help your clients take advantage of all available deductions, credits, and exemptions. With effective planning and tax saving strategies for high-income earners and earners of all incomes, you can help your clients reduce the amount they owe, both in taxes and in potential penalties. For finance professionals who work with business owners and self-employed professionals, this is crucial, as extra capital can help clients grow their businesses.
• Improved compliance: Tax planning helps ensure clients meet their deadlines and avoid legal trouble. This means fewer time-consuming legal headaches, and the ability to avoid legal fallout that could damage a business’s reputation.
• Peace of mind: Having a tax plan in place means individuals and business owners know exactly what to expect from the upcoming tax season. This enables people to plan more effectively, whether they’re saving up to take a family vacation or want to use capital to open a new business location. Less stress equals happier clients.

How you incorporate tax planning into your services will depend on what you currently offer. If you’re an accountant who specializes in taxes, adding tax planning will be a natural value-add. You can promote this service to any client you see, which enables you to create long-term relationships with an eye on taxes all year-long.

If you’re a finance professional who doesn’t specialize in taxes, such as a personal finance advisor, for example, you can identify tax professional partners who can offer this service. You may choose to work out a referral service or partner with an accountant to bundle these services into your regular offerings.

For effective tax planning, you’ll want to schedule regular tax planning sessions with clients so both parties stay on track. Tax planning involves:

1. Gaining insights into potential deductions, tax-saving opportunities, and investment opportunities through document sharing
2. Staying up to date on tax rules and regulations, as these may change during the year and affect your clients’ tax planning
3. Creating tax planning strategies, which may involve building checklists and to-dos for both your firm and the client, as well as scheduling quarterly/annual tax planning meetings

Taxes affect a large portion of an individual’s income or business’s revenue, so adding tax planning to your services can help you improve your service offering by providing proactive, meaningful help to clients.

Marketing tax webinars or workshops

Content marketing is using content (blog posts, thought leadership articles, eBooks, webinars, videos, etc.) to gain leads and customers by building trust and authority. For finance professionals, content marketing can help you capture more leads and strengthen your relationship with clients, as you provide helpful information that positions you as a subject matter expert in your industry.

Proactively offering tips and advice for tax season can help you achieve big wins with customers. According to Pew Research Center, 53% of Americans say the federal tax system’s complexity “bothers them a lot,” which is a 6% increase from 2021. Around 87% of Americans are at least “somewhat” bothered by the federal and state tax systems.

When you host tax-related educational events, you gain benefits like the following:

1. Drive people to your website or motivate them to contact you with a call to action.
2. Increase your trust and authority as a subject matter expert in the finance industry.
3. Introduce leads to who you are as a person, which gives them a better impression of what it’d be like to hire you.
4. Nurture leads, so when they’re ready to look for a finance expert, you’re top of mind.
5. Improve your search engine rankings by optimizing your content with relevant searchable keywords.
6. Create content that provides you free long-term marketing as long as the content is live.

To create and promote tax webinars or workshops, follow these steps:

1. Choose relevant topics. Brainstorm topics to cover in a webinar, workshop, or video. Think about questions or phrases your target leads and customers might be typing into search engines, like “how to file your tax return.” Or, use questions you’ve heard from clients as a starting-off point.
2. Select the right platform for virtual events. There’s a variety of technology platforms that enable you to host a webinar. These include social networks like Facebook Live, as well as webinar platforms like Crowdcast. Most paid tools will offer a free demonstration before you commit, so try out a few to see which one works best for you.
3. Market your event. Marketing strategies to attract webinar or workshop participants are vast. You can create events on social networks like Facebook, promote an event in an email newsletter to clients (you can use Clover’s customer relationship management [CRM] for this), tell clients in person about upcoming events, and buy pay-per-click advertisements to promote your webinar. Also, be sure to use relevant keywords in event titles and descriptions. That will make your event more likely to show up in search results when people are searching for those terms online.

After the webinar is over, you can continue to promote it to leads and clients. You may get new questions as a result of the webinar, which you can use for future content.

Providing financial guidance during tax season

In addition to talking about taxes specifically, tax season is a great time to introduce general financial guidance and leverage tax-related discussions to address broader financial goals. Money and finances are on people’s minds, so you can capitalize on what people are focused on during this time.

Some topics to consider covering include:

• Budgeting and expense management
• Retirement planning
• Investment strategies

Again, you can partner with other finance professionals to help you cover areas in which you don’t specialize. Consider putting on workshops with a cohost, asking other finance pros to guest blog for your website, or creating a referral system where you send each other business.

As you promote non-tax-specific content during tax season, think about ways to tie in other content to what’s relevant now. For example, if you’re writing about investment strategies, consider how they impact people’s taxes. You can tie in your expertise to how those topics impact or are affected by taxes, to make them more optimized for searches people do online during tax season.

Building long-term relationships

Since most Americans get stressed come tax time, this is the perfect opportunity for you to be there for your clients, ease their stress, and work on building trust and rapport. Nurturing client relationships during tax season shows you anticipate your clients’ needs and are there to provide personalized financial advice for whatever they’re going through.

During tax season, some ways to demonstrate reliability and expertise include:

• Extend your office hours, or promote to clients ways you’re there for them–open communication channels via email responses within 24 hours, for example, or add a chatbot to your website to answer commonly asked questions
• Reach out to clients in your email list with helpful quick tips and a call to action to contact you if they have additional questions
• Be willing to get clients the expert help they need, such as making a referral to a more specialized financial professional

When you’re proactive with your communication and offer to help clients during tax season, you can ensure you stay at top of mind when clients do need assistance or have questions. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes, then find ways to deliver before the client realizes they need help.

As tax season comes to an end, you can also set the stage for post-tax season services. By delivering exceptional service during tax season, you can build trust and strengthen your client relationships. Continue to promote year-round services like financial guidance and investment strategies, so clients know when and how to contact you for continued assistance.

Expanding your customer base during tax season

As many Americans are confused by the tax system, tax season is a great time to provide expert knowledge and expand your client base. During tax season, some strategies to gain new leads and customers include:

• Purchase pay-per-click advertising for keywords that relate to your services
• Create keyword-optimized content that you promote on social media channels, in email marketing, and in other digital marketing methods
• Use digital and word-of-mouth marketing to offer referral rewards for clients and finance partners who send new clients your way
• Promote bundled services or discounted offerings

Ideally, you’ll want to make new customers you gain during tax season long-term clients. To convert seasonal clients into year-round clients, you can use Clover’s lead nurture strategies for CRM. By organizing your customer base and using customer insights, you can create custom promotions that are relevant for specific customer groups. You can also reward your most loyal customers, create a customer feedback channel, and nurture relationships all in one point-of-sale (POS) tool.

Using Clover’s CRM, you can identify and anticipate additional financial needs for your clients, based on the services you’ve provided and their customer demographics. You can then promote custom, comprehensive financial planning services based on their unique needs.

Personalizing your marketing messages and services to customers can help you quickly grow your business. According to research from McKinsey & Company, companies that grow faster drive 40% more revenue from personalization compared to slower-growing competitors.

Growing your finance business with the right POS system

Many individuals require assistance during tax season, and Clover’s CRM features and POS solutions can significantly enhance your ability to provide expert support to your clients, which can help your business grow. These tools empower you to efficiently organize your customer database, gain profound insights into your clients, and customize your marketing messages to ensure they are both personalized and highly relevant to all your leads and customers.

Clover’s POS solutions for accountants, tax preparers, and financial professionals can help you do it all with one sleek, user-friendly tool.

Why wait? Elevate your business, and get started with a Clover point of sale system today.