Category: Get More Tax Clients

Writing effective sales and marketing copy is one of those skills that we all need, but often lack resources for learning.

While there are a number of training courses available to people to learn how to become a full time copywriting professional, I’ve been hard pressed to find a guide, course, audio, book, or anything else that shows a simple, step-by-step method for actually creating effective marketing pieces for somebody that doesn’t want to be a professional copywriter, yet needs needs professional copy for their own business.

So, I wrote one for you!

Just from reading this newsletter, you should be getting plenty of ideas of how to market your practice, and how to pick your target market. But, you might still be confused about what to actually SAY in your marketing. That’s what this book is for.

Effective Copywriting For Accounting Professionals walks you step-by-step through the process of creating a marketing piece. In this book, you’ll discover:

• How to write attention-grabbing headlines
• What you can learn from looking at the marketing of other firms
• A simple formula for creating an effective marketing piece that actually gets responses
• How to use “widgets” to generate leads for long-term follow up.
• How to get people to contact you NOW, rather than in six months
• The single biggest mistake that accountants make in their marketing that costs them clients

If you’re ready to hit the ground running with your marketing, but haven’t been sure what to actually WRITE, then this book is for you.

Effective Copywriting For Accounting Professionals is available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com.

Even if you don’t have a Kindle device, Amazon offers Kindle apps for iPhones, Android Phones, and Windows and MacOS computers. These apps are completely free, and allow you to have a massive library of books in the palm of your hand (I’m a huge Kindle fan).

Order Your Copy… Continue reading

The cure for any revenue problem is simply to increase revenue. The more revenue flowing into your tax practice, the better things in general tend to be for everybody at your firm.

In order to get more revenue flowing into your practice, you must add more value to the world.

What does this mean, “add more value to the world”?

You add more value to the world when you make solve more people’s tax and accounting problems. When you give somebody a solution to a problem that keeps them awake at night, they happily pay you money for doing so.

In order to solve more people’s tax and accounting problems, they need to be made aware of the fact that there actually exists a solution to their problem. You need to make them aware of that solution. Also, realize that most people are a bit stubborn, and resistant to change. So, you need to tell them multiple times that there is a solution to their problem.

Because marketing isn’t a one-shot game, and you should be receiving marketing support on an ongoing basis, I have decided to make some drastic changes to how our programs here at Tax Marketing HQ are structured.

While our comprehensive systems courses and marketing toolkits will still be available individually, as will the new subject-specific courses we create each month (such as last month’s Direct Response Marketing course), we are also making that course content available through our new premium membership plans.

These new premium membership plans are an outgrowth of this daily newsletter, merged with our tax lien data subscriptions, and enhanced with the marketing plans, ready to use marketing templates, and other resources you need to grow your practice.

Where is this coming from? So many tax practitioners have asked me to either take over their marketing entirely, or to bundle different pieces of our bigger courses together just for them, that I started seeing the need. Many readers of this newsletter need more than just mailing lists — they need ready-made marketing pieces, very specific “how to” instructions for getting their message out, assistance evaluating tax resolution cases, or want their marketing done completely for them and they just take the phone calls.

Depending upon the membership level you choose, here are just some of the new benefits available to members:

• Monthly premium marketing newsletter
• Monthly tax lien download credits
• Access to new ready-made marketing pieces

Just in case you don’t keep up with IRS regulatory changes on a day to day basis, yesterday was a momentous day. After 15 years, the IRS finally fixed the single greatest problem with the Offer in Compromise program, and reduced the remaining income multiplier from 48 or 60 down to 12 or 24 when calculating the Reasonable Collection Potential (RCP).

In addition, the IRS is now allowing Federal student loan payments and delinquent state and local taxes as an allowable expense, and has expanded the national standards under the miscellaneous category to allow room for minimum credit card payments.

What does this mean for you? It creates an incredible marketing opportunity, as the minimum acceptable Offer amount for prospective clients just dropped by as much as 80%. This will drastically increase the number of people that can (and will) file processable Offers.

In particular, I see this as an opportunity to tackle two distinct target markets:

1. High dollar Trust Fund Recovery Penalty (IRC 6672) cases, particularly those with lien amounts between about $100,000 and $250,000.
2. Mid-range 1040 debtors (those that owe approximately $15,000 to $50,000) that have traditionally been blocked from the Offer program because of the remaining income multiplier.

This kind of marketing opportunity has been handed to us on a silver platter by the IRS approximately once per year for the past three years now. If you missed this opportunity in 2010 and 2011, then be sure to take advantage of it now.

Here are my suggestions for exactly HOW to take advantage of this policy change:

1. Utilize the 80% reduction in the minimum Offer amount statistic in your direct mail pieces, email newsletters, blog posts, and telemarketing scripts.
2. If you traditionally only market to businesses, start marketing to individuals using the criteria I suggested above.
3. Create a limited-time flat fee Offer in Compromise service, and market it heavily.
4. Go through your list of prospects from the past 6 to 9 months that did not hire you, and call, email, and mail them in regards to the new OIC criteria.

I guarantee you that some astute practitioner out there that doesn’t subscribe to this newsletter is thinking along the same lines as this, and is going to take action. The relaxation of the OIC criteria is going to create a slew of potential new clients in the marketplace, and you can choose to either take advantage … Continue reading