Building A Strong Online Presence For Your Tax Business

Building a strong online presence for your tax office is very important. One of the main benefits of having cultivated a strong online presence for your tax office is that it will help people find your business. Maintaining consistent messaging across your online properties will help keep your customer base informed on your business activities and educated on changing tax laws. It helps you increase your level of service to the community by increasing efficiencies which in turn allows you to do more in less time.

Building a strong online presence for your tax office starts with having a website. A functional website is going to save you time communicating over the phone and via e-email over things like requesting documents, questions regarding your fee schedule, document signing, and other tasks that have been streamlined by technology. Whether or not you personally build and host your website, you can still choose the domain. There are some great template based website builders for those inclined, but the bottom line is that a nice looking, functional website is a must. It will be the focal point to which all online traffic is funneled. Secondary online properties, like social media profiles, are great for additional exposure and community engagement, but they rarely can take the place of a primary website. Pay-per-click marketing is still a highly viable, but arguably expensive, marketing channel and this allows a knowledgeable person to use all the online properties in combination to create online marketing strategies and experiences that span all online media and are tracked across platforms.

Because the internet never sleeps, you can get started cultivating a strong online presence for your tax office as soon as the urge strikes. Don’t wait until tax season to buy your domain. Don’t wait until tax season to build your website. If the budget does not yet allow for an expensive, custom-coded website, there are alternatives that are just as functional and this will allow you to operate normally until you can make the jump to something more custom if that is even necessary for your particular situation. Many people find template based websites to be functional enough for them without requiring too much work from the business owner and without being too expensive.

If you are looking to budget what it might cost to build a strong online presence for your tax office, here are a few estimates that may help you in your financial planning. For a custom-coded website, you can expect to pay anywhere from a few thousand to several thousand dollars for all the design and function that you may need. If you are thinking about a template based website that also hosts your website, you can expect to pay roughly $50 to $100 per month. For digital marketing, your costs will vary by industry and platform, but it would be wise to have a budget of at least $500-$1,000+ for an effective digital marketing campaign for your tax office.

Are there alternatives? Absolutely. Alternatives to online marketing are going to be in the traditional marketing arena which is print heavy, post heavy, and heavily reliant on personal time cost to reduce actual financial cost. For example, door hangers are not very expensive, but in order to get them disseminated, you are going to have to pay someone to go hang them or go hang them yourself. If you are looking for more cost-effective ways to market your tax business both digitally and traditionally, give us a call to see if Federal Direct is a good fit for you tax office.