When looking at accounting website templates for the first time it’s easy to get distracted. Many providers will offer you what they think you want to see rather than what your firm really needs. To that end many accounting website template providers will neglect a websites long term marketing appeal and sell an illusion of quick ‘n dirty prospect conversion.

There are a lot of reasons for this. First of all these websites are cheaper to build. Long term marketing requires a number of specialized tools and features that add to an accounting website template’s development costs. Perhaps more important, however, is that promises of short term conversions offer a significant appeal to customers new to the internet.

Unfortunately anyone familiar with internet marketing knows that this is a false promise. Very few of your first time visitors are going to be looking for an accountant. The vast majority of the people visiting your site are looking for information. It won’t matter how flashy your site is or how expertly written your sales copy is if you don’t offer a visitor the information they want the overwhelming majority of your visitors are going to leave without giving your site, your brand, or you a second glance.

There are a lot of reasons not to push too hard for a first visit sale. Dedicated buyers are going to buy whether you push them or not.

Unfortunately the reality is that not many of your visitors are going to be dedicated buyers. Maybe our visitor already has an accountant she likes. Maybe she’s still able to use the short tax forms. This doesn’t mean she’s not a good prospect!

According to market research the average life expectancy of a client/accountant relationship is 6 years. That means statistically speaking just about everyone visiting your site is a long term prospect. Maybe her accountant is at the end of his practice. Maybe he’ll get married and move. Or take a job with a large firm. Any number of things could happen. Even poor folks could need you someday. Income changes. People get married. One day they could start their own business or even just buy property. I’ll never forget the panic I felt the first time I laid eyes on a 1040 long form and knew I needed to fill it out.

The real key to using a website to grow your firm is providing not only the information the visitor wants, but also offering such an overwhelming quantity of high quality content that the visitor will come back again and again. What we’re offering them isn’t just a service page and a contact sheet. We’re offering them a library of financial information. Each visit exposes your brand to them again and again. Long term marketing isn’t about making a sale, it’s about positioning yourself as the natural solution to turn to when the prospect is ready to buy. Down the road it’s a pretty safe bet that everyone will need an accountant, and if your website has been engaging and informing a prospect for months or years when that time comes the odds are you won’t even need to make a sale. The prospect will call you pretty much ready to buy.

So… How can you identify accounting website templates with a long term marketing strategy?

It’s fairly simple really. Look for content.

Financial guides and free-reports are great soft sell tools and are very effective at attracting return traffic. They also offer a great side benefit in that they can help you cross-sell your off season services to your existing clients. Use these articles to showcase ways you can help your clients save money, and position you as the expert that can help you do it. You want your visitors to have easy access to them. Divide them up into categories (Business Owners, Home Owners, Self Employed, etc) and make them searchable to make it easy for visitors to find information of interest to them.

Other great features for luring repeat visits are interactive financial calculators, tax due date pages, downloadable tax forms and publications, and most importantly a high quality email newsletter.

Aggressive old-school marketers will advise you to block this content. They’ll tell you to use it to “trap” email addresses for direct marketing. DON’T DO THIS. As soon as you start demanding contact information you’ll alienate your best prospects. Savvy visitors will know full well that if you won’t give them what they want one of your competitors will.

When looking at accounting website templates keep long term marketing in mind. Look for these features in addition to the standard short term marketing features; services pages, contact forms, driving directions, etc; pretty much all providers offer. Long term marketing will not only bring in more conversions over time, it will also bring in better ones.

Tax Time Is Here! Are You Using Your Website to Optimize Your Firm’s Operations?

Today’s economic backdrop is pretty tight and CPA firms are increasingly making use of experienced designers to produce CPA websites to augment their marketing programs.

What many firms still haven’t realized is that the value of your CPA website goes far beyond simple business promotion, it can also substantially trim your business’ expenses and streamline your labor costs.

Sounds too good to be true? Here are some of the basics:

1. Email Newsletters: Switch from sending traditional newsletters via the postal service to using an email service. We’ll will create and deliver your enewsletter for you, and there are many other vendors that will be happy to do the same! This completely eliminates the costs of printing, postage, and staff costs to label and fill your envelopes. It also allows you to cheaply expand your mailing list to include even remote prospects and this brings even more qualified leads to your website.
2. Tax Forms and Publications: Another great use for your website is distributing tax forms. It’s very labor intensive and expensive to mail tax forms to your clients and over time the cost of the staff time accumulates. These are lost hours for which you cannot bill. Instead, create a document center on your website. This document center can contain tax forms that your clients can download.
3. Tax Organizers: Every tax season mailing your tax organizer becomes a major expense. It consumes staff hours and costs a fortune in printing and postage. This can cost hundreds of dollars, depending upon the size of your client base. Use your CPA website to host a PDF document instead. This way your clients can download it and print it from their homes. Some modern CPA websites, including your basic CPA Site Solutions Silver and Web Tools Packages, have their tax organizers posted as an online form. This can be securely sent online directly via the website. 
4. Online Secure File Transfer: Tax time is an expensive time of year. This is particularly true for postage expenses. As the April 15 deadline approaches, clients sometimes procrastinate sending their documents, which is frustrating for both you and the client. Frequently, you must resort to overnight mail so that you don’t miss deadlines. A CPA website can include a secure file transfer feature, which allows your clients to submit their confidential documents quickly and safely, without the postal service expense.
5. Frequently Asked Questions:A CPA website does much more than just marketing. It can also contribute to business optimization initiatives. During the year, your staff answers a lot of calls that are not billable, which can add up to hundreds of dollars of labor cost. The time loss for these calls isn’t just time spent on the phone, because the calls also need to be documented. Every time one of your staff members is interrupted, even for a moment, it takes them several minutes to adjust and return to task. Of courss let’s not overlook the main benefit of these features. In addition to helping out your customers, they can also attract prospects and website leads…
   • Interactive Financial Calculators can help your clients find answers for themselves.
   • A “Track My Refund” feature can give your clients a reasonably accurate estimation without clogging up a phone line.

While a CPA websites’ most important role in your firm is prospecting, it can also save you money by decreasing your operating overhead and helping you better serve your clients.

Effective communication is a key factor in the success of any accounting firm. It can mean the difference between a hectic and stressful tax season and a smooth and efficient one. Therefore, websites for accountants should be designed with communication in mind. Communications systems can be integrated into websites for accountants to make the entire office communications streamlined. Employees and clients will benefit from a centralized means of communicating throughout the company. The better your communications features are on your website, the better experience you and your clients will have with your company as a whole.

Designing websites for accountants with streamlined communications features may seem like a lengthy and costly project, it will pay off with improved productivity and efficiency throughout your entire company. You may want to implement these changes in the off season when you and your employees have time to adjust to the new methods of communication. Keep in mind that you may need to assist some employees and clients with the new technology. Allowing yourself ample time in the slower months of the year to roll out the new system will allow for a smooth transition.

The New Year means the beginning of a few intense months of work for accountants. Every second counts during tax season and an organized office with streamlined communication is the key to ensuring efficiency. This will allow you to better serve your clients throughout this stressful time of the year.

There are many ways to make the work flow during tax season more efficient in your office. One easy way to accomplish this goal is to set up a website that supports chat between co-workers. It should also facilitate sending and receiving email. These communications features will allow office workers as well as those who telecommute to communicate instantly. An instant messenger chat system will truly speed up the work process within your office because people will free up a lot of wasted time trying to make contact with other co-workers. A simple status message will alert people to when the person they are trying to contact is busy or available. In the meantime the co-worker can focus on other tasks until the other person becomes available.

Another important component of communication is networking. Networking is absolutely essential to any accountant. Therefore, effective websites for accountants must have a networking website on the company network. The networking website will enable employees to network with ease. Accountants need to network with co-workers, clients and other industry contacts. The website should support communication and networking capabilities for those who are away from the office. Employees who work from home or are traveling should be able to access the company network so that they can remotely participate in the work flow of the office.

Another great option for networking is the social networking website, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a valuable resource for accountants. Encourage every accountant at your firm to set up a profile. This will allow them to send and receive referrals from colleagues and clients. In many cases this will draw in new prospects. An added benefit of LinkedIn is that you can set up a private group for your company within the site. This is ideal for interoffice communication and brainstorming in one central networking site. It will bring employees who work remotely into the discussion as if they were in the same room.

A final element that all websites for accountants with the aim of improving office communication should have is a means of managing clients. Integrating a client relationship management program is an ideal way to organize client information more effectively. Everyone in the office will be able to track client information and feedback. It will also create a centralized place for organizing information such as email addresses, documents, telephone calls and business deals. A comprehensive approach to office communications through websites for accountants will allow accountants to work efficiently throughout the craziest of tax seasons.

How many practices, I sometimes wonder, are paying an expensive professional to design and manage their CPA websites? There´s almost nothing worse for your professional image than having a tired site full of obsolete content and out of date “news” just because you´re avoiding the expense of updating it.

The way CPA websites are built and managed has changed enormously. A good deal of education was required to be a designer a decade ago. Web designers had to be proficient with HTML editors like Dreamweaver, and they had to be fluent in bizarre programming languages like HTML and ASP.

Well, stuff changes.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. These people are still major components of the website design industry.

But…

There is an astonishing new instrument called a “CMS”, or “Content Management System” that renders them much less essential in the construction and upkeep of just about any individual small business website. Any moderately computer literate person on your staff can likely use these tools to manage your site.

A CMS is essentially just a “point and click website editor”. It can be used to add and remove pages. All CMS also have what’s oftentimes referred to as a “WYSIWYG” editor, a simple word processor that permits you to alter pages. As usual the lingo isn’t nearly as daunting as it may sound! WYSIWYG is only an abbreviation for “What You See is What You Get”. It permits a user to arrange the pages, upload photos and other images, and construct tables. By allowing you to make alterations to the website’s Navigation Menu you can also set up a site’s whole experience .

All the tasks that took a master coder hours to do only years ago can now be promptly and without difficultly fulfilled by nearly anybody with the help of a Content Management System.

A complimentary or inexpensive content management system is available from very nearly any leading hosting provider specialized in respectable CPA websites.

Obviously the outstanding difference between a CMS and a custom website designer is expense. For most small CPA firms this is a big difference. Despite making make upwards of $25 an hour, most website designers are normally not as motivated as you are to get your tasks completed in a timely manner. It´s not uncommon for waits on pro web design jobs to be a a month or more.

If these costs seem high to you brace yourself: they don’t even include the cost of actually designing the site. Constructing CPA websites from scratch can easily take 200 hours or more. That translates to months of lost time and thousands of dollars spent.

CMS web site providers void these costs by creating the websites in advance and presenting menus of “ready-to-use” templates.

More and more CMS providers are able to tweak their existing templates quite inexpensively, if not straight-out re-create your current site, for those site owners who are already very happy with websites they have already spent lots of money on (or those who just protest using “templates”). While this is a recent technology it’s disseminating fairly fast.

Of course the trouble with sites built in this manner is that, while inexpensive and simple to manage, they often lack essential content. The requirement for industry specialized content has given birth to a whole side industry encompassing the demand for CPA specialized content, so before running off to a general purpose or retail website provider, do a Google search for providers that focus on superior CPA websites.

CPA Site Solutions is the best of these, as far as I’m concerned. For more than ten years we have innovated fantastic CPA sites.

If you’re not a CPASS client, or if you’re a new client and you’re still not sure what your new CPA Site Solutions website has to offer, Take a look at this video demo and you’ll see what we mean when we talk about “CPA specific content”:

Make a note of the tools built principally for website owners in the CPA field: free reports, tax due dates, links to tax forms and publications, a portal for transferring accounting files, interactive financial calculators, email… A website like this may be comparatively utile for a very limited number of companies outside their intended market, possibly a head-hunter or business consultant could use much of the content on this site, but it would be squandered on a business like a retailer.

For selected large national CPA practices it´s worth the time and cost of retaining expert designers, but for nearly all small and medium sized firms, especially in these hard economic times, it´s time to consider new solutions. Finding a CMS that specializes in accounting websites will cut your costs and at the same time improve your management over your website.

Most accounting practices have high quality websites to promote their practices these days. Standing out on the Internet is all about offering something of value to the viewer. If you are able to consistently offer something of value to people, you will establish trust and loyalty. Content like free reports and interactive calculators offer a lot more marketing punch than a simple list of services.

Unfortunately, it takes more than first-class design to turn prospect’s heads’ these days. Making an impression on the web requires adopting some new marketing skills.

One option is to utilize the power of YouTube.

Video clips that are strategically used to promote financial services have plenty of advantages over other marketing efforts. A quality marketing video doesn’t cost much at all, but it takes time, thought and preparation. Once posted it can effectively generate interest in potential clients and help attract new visitors to your website.

There are many people who need the assistance of a CPA. Most of those people search for CPA services on the Internet search engines. The majority of these people are often in need of assistance with a problem they can’t understand or deal with on their own.

It’s easy to understand why videos that discuss common accounting problems are a great addition to CPA websites.

You don’t need to hire a production company for your videos. All you need to do is present yourself well. A good option is narrate the videos yourself. Another option would be to have somebody on your staff take on the task.

Remember to focus on making the video simple to understand, professional and welcoming. The videos should make people want to stay on your website and come back often. They will also help to build a certain level of trust and loyalty to your company based on the quality information they receive. Who knows, they may even become new clients.

The purpose of YouTube video marketing on CPA websites is to demonstrate the knowledge and credibility of the CPA. A lot of people don’t know anything about accounting or financial practices. Personable video clips can help your visitors feel more informed and position you as the expert to turn to for more information.

If they are done in a professional manner streaming videos can often be more effective in gaining the trust of the consumer than other forms of marketing.

YouTube advertising will connect you with the people who are looking for videos about accounting. Search engines LOVE to rank videos, and if you can get a video to rank for an important search term this will help you to effectively reach your market.

Keep in mind that YouTube itself is a search engine of sorts, and it will also drive traffic to you. Because people are actually searching on YouTube for the information you are presenting, the chances of them finding you is greatly increased. It is an active way of finding people rather than the more passive traditional print or television ads.

Videos give viewers someone they can relate to, which is important in an online setting. It is particularly important when you are marketing a subject that is somewhat difficult for laymen to relate to. The human face will naturally allow people to relate to your business. Think about it, would you rather read about accounting or view an accountant explain it in an easy to understand manner in a short video? The personal connection you make through a video will be lasting. After viewing a helpful video or two, your business will be the first one that comes to mind when they need a CPA.

So with all of the benefits of YouTube video marketing, you’d think it is expensive. It is actually very affordable and in many cases free. The beauty of the Internet is the low barrier of entry for communication. All you need is a qualified spokesperson, a video camera, and/or some kind of screen capture software.

Youtube offers an excellent opportunity to show off the experience and knowledge of your CPA firm. Be sure to link all of your videos to your CPA website. This is one of the best approaches to promote a company that is part of the financial sector.

The Internet is growing in importance as a promotional medium and the full potential of video marketing is just beginning to be recognized. Looking forward the web will be increasingly valuable so it’s becoming increasingly important that CPA firms give more and more effort into applying it to its full potential.

As a successful CPA starting your organization from scratch is fun and exciting but to get started you need to ensure your business can attract new clientele. At minimum you want adequate clients to maintain your organization through the busy tax season. Then after the tax season passes by, you’ll want to develop your business even more so that it can sustain itself through the next season as well.

Providing this level of service leaves little time to market your business into a steady and continuous revenue stream. You need to ensure your success in the long term. To do this, you must learn how to successfully market your business.

“Interrupt”, or “outbound”, marketing techniques are expensive and they do not work. They are usually only 3% effective at best. A much better strategy is to shift the allocation of your marketing budget towards inbound marketing techniques. Your only cost is the expense of labor it takes to create them. Inbound marketing will give you more time to do what you do best, which is accounting. It will also free up more of your budget so you can invest in other parts your business.

To successfully use inbound marketing, you must have a solid strategy. The best strategy is to carefully blend the following techniques:

Pay per Click Advertising

Get yourself a Google Adwords account. The fastest and easiest way to get a good listing in Google is to buy one. It may seem a little expensive at first, but you’ll find it will start paying for itself in no more than a few months.

If you’re a CPA Site Solutions customer call your design representative about setting up Adwords for your website.

Creating a Blog

Make yourself known as a thought leader by starting an accountant website blog. This is an excellent way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in the field of accounting. Show off a little, but don’t be too pretentious. A blog is a great place to show your prospects how much you know about the field of accounting

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Increase your rankings with search engines and domain authority by optimizing your website. This will increase the visibility of your site online. Be sure that your content is optimized for the keywords under which you would like to rank on search engine results pages.

Social Media: Expand Your Firm’s Network

Use social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to establish and engage a community around your business. In this way, people can see the faces behind the firm. It also helps you establish trust. Links from social media sites rank highly with search engines. This can help with search engine rankings for your website.

One added benefit of using Facebook is its feature-rich marketing toolset. Not only does it contain a robust advertising engine that helps you fine-tune your target audience, but you can also offer exclusive specials to your Facebook users. Promotions such as these can take off on their own. They require very little work.

Video Distribution

Producing and distributing great website videos are an excellent way to educate and in some cases, entertain your community. Use videos to show your prospects how to prep their documents for tax season, or create a client testimonial where your firm helped a client maximize their return. Videos are favored by search engines. They help boost the authority of your domain.

Article Distribution Sites

Blogging offers many benefits, and article distribution opens up a whole new channel via the web. This not only helps your rankings with search engines, but it brings interested leads to effective websites for accountants.

Inbound marketing kinda fun and you’ll soon discover that a successful inbound marketing campaign is far easier to create than a traditional outbound marketing campaign. It is also far less costly when compared with outbound and interrupt marketing campaigns. Perhaps most importantly, inbound marketing campaign delivers uniform, long-term results.

More and more accounting practices are getting on-line with their marketing. Pretty much all accounting firms today have smart-looking, professionally designed web sites. But while great websites for accountants are the beginning of a successful internet marketing campaign, they are certainly not the end-all.

Here are a few contemporary internet marketing strategies that your competitors may not be taking advantage of yet:

Social Media
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are three of the many social networking websites popular today that gather immense attention from individuals and businesses alike. Facebook especially has grown into the choice hangout spot for most big companies and the “like” button has evolved into a valued commodity.

Twitter is similarly utilized to fire out short messages to followers, many of whom might be looking to utilize the business’ services in the future. LinkedIn, being a professional network, can lend credence to your company and your name as well.

Video Sharing
Your business may be able to find new clients on YouTube. Millions of people peruse “how-tos” and information on the site, so posting your expertise can help people discover the resources you have to offer. These needn’t be complex videos and needn’t take up much of your valuable time to create, either: a simple “today’s business/financial tip from *Insert Your Company Name Here*” will suffice.

Article Distribution
If you can, hire a writer or two to create articles for you which can then be published in article databases, generating links back to your site. As above, the articles will need to be informative and interesting or your prospective clients won’t want to read them. These articles will not only guide traffic to your practice’s accountant website, but also attract internet search robots to link to you.

Search engines find your article or site in a number of ways: not only by keyword but also by taking note of hyperlinks contained in the body of the text. Your ranking in the search engines depends partly on the number of hyperlinks in your story. Naturally you don’t want to spam your article with hyperlinks and keywords, but strategic placement can generate a ton of new leads.

Blogging
This includes guest blogging on authority sites, maintaining your own company blog, and participating in blogging communities frequented or run by likely prospects. Blogging is superbly equipped for informing people of your CPA firm’s latest exploits in detail – something essential as you create a longstanding awareness of your business in the minds of possible clients.

When blogging, avoid over-committing to a rigid schedule. Instead, plan your blogging to fit into the time you have available.

No matter what kind of marketing you try, know one thing: forming this broad-spectrum knowledge network about your business is the very top trick to attract new customers reliably and steadily.

Provider of CPA Websites Saved Time and Increased Efficiency with CodeIgniter and Smarter Coding Procedures

CPA Site Solutions, a provider of CPA websites for accountants, announced they recently redeveloped their proprietary Email Marketing System using new architecture, methodology, and coding standards.

CodeIgniter Cut Down on Time Spent Coding

The niche web developer opted to use CodeIgniter for the system’s architecture.

“We evaluated several frameworks for PHP web application development.  Many of them could have worked, but they really tried to lock you in to their way of doing things,” explains Bob Rayl, Chief Technology Officer at CPA Site Solutions. “They did not offer the flexibility we need to accomplish some of the heavily proprietary functionality we bundle into our systems.”

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework for PHP developers. It provides a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks. CodeIgniter considerably trimmed the hours developers spent writing tedious code. And because the code comes secured and optimized out of the box, the team saved additional time and resources on those tasks.

The team chose NetBeans, an integrated development environment (IDE), for their new interface.

Localized Server Streamlined Testing and QA

The tech team at CPA Site Solutions chose to use a localized server for code development and testing on which they could “step-through” their code line by line as it was running on an isolated test environment. This enabled them to catch bugs early in the development cycle, resulting in less end-of-development quality assurance.

The team could also access a step-by-step history of the code, quickly leading them to the cause of any new bugs. And with a roll-back function in place, they could return to a previous working version if problematic code reached the production environment.

Finally, the localized server allowed multiple developers to work on the same project without having to trade entire copies of the code. Each developer simply located the latest version from the server to be in sync with other team members. They could also test small bits of code on their own working area of the server, so their testing and QA didn’t slow down the rest of the team.

New Coding Practices Increased Team Efficiency

For the application rebuild, CPA Site Solutions wrote object-oriented, reusable code that extends the basic functionality of CodeIgniter.  They also wrote libraries that sit in a separate website but deliver programmatic data to their CodeIgniter applications. For example, getting a firm’s domain information will never need to be written into any given application again; it’s now served via a service the team created and centralized.

About CPA Site Solutions

CPA Site Solutions (http://www.cpasitesolutions.com) provides websites for more than 5,000 CPA and Accounting firms. They offer personalized websites, a dedicated webmaster, a secure client portal, a client newsletter, secure email accounts, search engine optimization, and 109 additional website features designed specifically for Accountants.

*Facebook: www.facebook.com/cpasitesolutions
*Twitter: www.twitter.com/cpasitesolution
*YouTube: www.youtube.com/cpasitesolutions
*CPA Websites Blog:  www.cpasitesolutions.com/cpa-websites

This video provides an overview of CPA Site Solutions’s offerings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxMz_GwWgX0

Odds are you already have a really good website. Heck you probably got it from me, in which case you have a really great website.

This article isn’t so much for you. Please keep reading! It may help you use your website more effectively, but rest assured all the toools and design features I’m about to talk about are already integrated into your CPA Site Solutions website!

If you have a paid a professional design company to custom build your site I want you to take a look at it and honestly evaluate something: Did they hone in on your website’s customer retention potential?

Current clients are an important component of your CPA firm website’s strategic market. A little attention to what current clients secretly want from your website will go a long way towards keeping them with you.

For example, consider putting a “Secure File Transfer” tool on your website. Clients will enjoy the ability to quickly and effortlessly transmit records to your accountancy. Whenever tax season rolls around, it can be a Godsend. Your customers, especially the ones most prone to procrastination, will genuinely value being able to deliver their late forms to you without the cost of priority delivery.

Another tool that clients love is online tax organizers. Most accounting website providers offer downloadable tax organizers, but the cutting-edge is a tax organizer that can actually be filled out online. These secure forms can be filled out from anyplace with an internet connection and include a save function so they can be completed at the client’s leisure .

Business owners’ needs are probably a priority for your firm. Imagine how much time they can save with online payroll. Not only is it easy for your clients, but payroll companies make it easy for you too.

These elite clients will also really appreciate an online library of relevant tax forms that they can print out as needed. The IRS offers all their forms and periodicals as downloadable PDFs so it’s a simple matter to include links to these resources. Your website will help clients navigate through to what they need.

Another IRS feature that’s easy to re-brand and add to your website is an automated form for tracking your clients’ tax refunds. This wonderful client benefit will also save your staff time answering the common question “when will my refund arrive?”

Growing customers into true fans is not just beneficial for customer loyalty, it’s also good for appealing to new clients. Incorporating a “Testimonials” section on CPA websites is an excellent marketing tool. Customers enjoy the interactivity of adding their experience. What’s more, great testimonials speak more convincingly and more personally than any marketing effort, so you’ll be getting a double bang for your buck.

Although the economic climate may be tight, this is actually a great time to build your firm.

The recession affects everyone. Still, those worries are paired with opportunity. Make arrangements to connect with your business customers, new leads, and clients that are influential and offer them some extra, highly personalized services. This can result in not just developing your customer base, but it can also help you increase your client base.

Your best clients will always be by referral, and when there are fewer clients to go around it’s a good idea to try to shift your focus from getting the most clients to getting the best clients. Providing exceptional personal service is the best way to do this. For a relatively small investment in time you’ll soon find your clients are no longer customers but have become fans, and they will eagerly refer you to their friends and associates.

Before the busy tax season, a great way to get started with your clients is to plan 4th quarter tax planning sessions. Most professionally designed CPA websites have calendar functions that can help with appointment setting. The uncertainty of the economy creates an opportunity to explain to your clients that their lives are dependent on impact planning. It has a direct impact on their future.

An important metric for the impact of successful tax planning is money. However, boosting the confidence of your client and giving them some hope is the real value. This provides a real competitive advantage for your business. Your leadership gives your clients confidence and a sense of hope. This will make them more dependent on your firm. It will also help them manage day to day stress. Reducing stress can of course improve your clients’ lives.

Tax planning effectively isn’t just about minimizing the amount of taxes a client needs to pay over a period of time. It also has to do with investing, managing cash flow, and in some cases, planning an estate. You want to bring your clients lives back to order. This is the true value of effective tax planning. The natural result is managing fear, reducing negativity and alleviating stress. This can significantly improve the quality of your clients’ lives.

Once you have properly executed a planning session, it can make a big difference in terms of referrals. Your clients will speak of their experience to their family, co-workers, and friends. It is a great way to set your CPA practice apart from the competition, increase your client base, gain referrals and for existing clients, expand your service engagements.

At the planning session, you should:

1. Listen to and validate the concerns about the current economy. You don’t want to sound too optimistic or you will not seem realistic. Your client is not thinking optimistically.
2. Relate the client’s concerns to their situation in particular. Everyone is affected differently by recession, so speaking generally will not be as effective as if you connect someone’s personal concerns about the economy to their situation.
3. You must be realistic. Everyone needs to file taxes, it is inevitable. This shifts the client’s focus to their lives instead of the act of filing taxes.
4. Effective tax planning can bring a sense of hope. You need to present strong guidance. You can create a CPA website reference library of topics on which you can coach, which will help you improve your clients’ lives by giving them a sense of direction.

Here’s how to combine all of these points:

Keep in mind that everyone is feeling stress and anxiety about the economy, and the reality is that it will likely become worse before it improves. For clients with kids, this is especially hard. The responsibilities of parenthood are frightening enough even in the best of times. To help your clients adjust do more than just file a return, help them out by doing some strategic financial planning with them. Show them that no matter what the future brings they’ll be able to adapt effectively.

It is important to remember that recessions bring anxiety, stress, and uncertainty. In order to make informed decisions, you must provide strong leadership for your clients. It isn’t just about filing a tax return.

Arranging tax and fiscal planning with influential customers is the most effortless and cost effective method of increasing your firm’s profile within your local community. Your customers will speak of you, telling others how your business spent the extra time with them helping them manage their lives and their finances, not just filing their tax return.