Written by: Samantha Russell
Everyone wants to increase the engagement they receive on social media. They want clients and prospects to see their posts and interact with them, whether it’s through comments, reactions, or sharing. What matters is that they are engaging with your social media and creating conversations around your business. For advisors, there’s one season out of the year that creates a buzz and is the perfect time to boost engagement: tax season.
Why Tax Season is Great for Engagement
Tax season is a hectic time for people because they want to ensure their taxes are done right. But one thing you might not know is that taxes are among the most in-demand services for advisors. In fact, according to Edelman Financial Engines, around 21% of unadvised people are interested in receiving tax guidance, and it is the number one most sought-after service for the wealthy. In this case, taxes become quite a popular discussion topic when the season comes around.
Now, this leads us to why advisors should use taxes as a talking point to increase engagement on their social media. Once tax season is upon us, advisors should be talking about taxes and using them to their advantage. Talking about your tax expertise is just the beginning, here are 5 tips that advisors should use to engage prospects during tax season.
5 Tips to Engage Prospects During Tax Season
1. Use Scroll-Stopping Headlines
Scrolling is a major part of any social media, whether you’re on a computer, phone, or tablet. Social media users are constantly scrolling through their timelines until they find someone or something that catches their eye. Whether that’s an image that pops or a headline that brings their scrolling to a dead stop. For our discussion, we’ll be going over scroll-stopping headlines or headlines that make people stop on your post.
First, you have to think of titles or headlines that make people think or ask questions. That’s the hook: if you can get them to question what your post is about, they’re more likely to stop and engage. For example, one great example of a scroll-stopping headline is an article by Quarry Hill Advisors. It’s a blog posted during tax season and titled “How to Avoid Taxes Like a Billionaire.” The headline is attention-grabbing and makes you think, “What does that mean?” or “How do you avoid taxes?” It has great pull value and is very likely to get engagement because of the interesting title. Remember that the headline is the first impression of any content you create, so make sure it’s a show-stopper.
2. Keep Things Simple, Get to the Core of Your Value
Next, think about the core of your business. What are you there to do? What services do you provide, and how do they impact your clients? Take that same idea and transfer it over to fit the theme of taxes. Keep it simple and get to the core of your value. What value are you bringing when it comes to helping clients with their taxes? Show why you should be the one to handle their tax needs through your expertise and content selection. Don’t overcomplicate things because that makes it harder for the client or prospect to connect with you and engage.
Additionally, keep things interesting. Content and social media posts about taxes don’t have to be boring. For example, Mando Sallavanti shared a social media post on LinkedIn mentioning how having no taxes in retirement isn’t a pipedream. It’s an interesting headline that gets right to the core of the post. There are no wasted words on the post, and it hits the core of his value, what he can help bring to the table. It’s a perfect example of keeping things simple while also making them appealing to your prospects to create engagement.
3. Use Visuals to Draw Attention
Engagement tends to happen when advisors can draw in an audience. This can be done through the use of interesting and attention-grabbing headlines or by the use of visuals. For social media, visuals tend to be a big factor in drawing in those users and getting them to engage. While simple text does tend to work for some, many users want to see images or graphs. Instead of having to read a paragraph of text, they want to see a chart that shares the information through a visual. Below, you can see a post by Jeff Hurst, CPA, using charts and imagery to spice up his social post.
Using charts in posts is a great way to grab the attention of social media users. It adds color to posts that might be loaded with text and makes things skimmable. Instead of skipping past a word-heavy post, if they see an image/chart, they might stop and see what it’s all about. Visuals are there to draw people in and have them want to engage with whatever content you’re sharing. The more interesting and informational your imagery is, the more likely they are to increase engagement with both clients and prospects.
4. Host a Webinar with a Tax Professional
Next, let’s look at a popular way to get prospects to engage with your advisory. In the same vein as hosting events, webinars are a great way to impress clients and bring in prospects who might be interested in you. With webinars, they’re able to learn about specific topics that might interest them. In this case, it would be about taxes and tax season.
Hosting a webinar is a good start, but there are even more ways to make it have a greater impact on both your client and prospect engagement. That is to invite a tax professional who can get into the nitty-gritty of taxes. Inviting someone who is an expert in their field (taxes) is an essential way to show prospects that you are ready for anything they throw at you. Even if there is something you might not be able to do on your own, you know experts who have them covered.
Additionally, co-hosting a webinar with a tax professional allows for a bigger audience, as you both can promote the webinar to social media. The more you cross clients and prospects, the more you both gain from the webinar. To take it even further, webinars provide a bounty of additional content and clips that you can edit and share on social media.
5. Be Different from Your Competitors
Lastly, we have one of the most important tips to know when trying to engage prospects during tax season. That is to be different from your competitors. Do something that makes you stand out from every other advisor trying to show off their tax expertise. The first four tips are part of the toolkit you’ll need to stand out. if you’re able to produce headlines that stop people mid-scroll, show your core value, use appealing visuals, and host events such as webinars, then you’ll stand out from your competitors.
You’ll be the advisor who goes above and beyond to highlight and showcase what makes them great and why prospects should come to you during tax season. Why they should engage with YOU! Being different from your competitor is less of a tip and more of something that you have to do to truly be successful. Be proud of your business and the work you do, show that off to the world and you’ll be sure to engage with prospects during tax season.
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