What You Need To Know About Tag Lines And Growing Your Accounting Practice

The days of the novelty website is over. Prospects expect a great deal more from a website these days than they demanded two years ago. If you truly want folks to look at a website in the current business environment you have to give them a clear REASON.

The best way to do this is by using a marketing gimmick called a tag line.

The most important rule of website marketing is very easy: From From today forward when you mention your website include a “tagline” that offers a material benefit to prospects inclined to check out your site.

It’s not hard to use a tagline. It’s just like a newspaper headline. A newspaper headline is designed to get a prospect to read an article. A “tag line” performs practically the exact same function and therefore is designed using the exact same basic rules:

1. Appeal to your reader on an emotional level, not an intellectual one. Most buyers make important choices emotionally, so invoke things they are sincerely interested in or afraid of. Your marketing will be much more effective if you present benefits that appeal to a visitor’s , primitive motivators (pride, greed and fear) than it’ll be appealing to their common sense.

2. Learn the words that people like to read. Of course, the word “free” is now and always will be the king of the hill, but words like YOU, YOUR, HOW, NEW, WHO, MONEY, NOW, PEOPLE, WANT, and WHY catch peoples eye and appeal to them on a very personal level. Use these words.

3. Understand your reader. This will tell you which tagline offers the most effective benefit. Mom’s are wrong. We’re not really special or different. We all want basically the same things from life, and that list is very short. Once you know what these things are it becomes easy to write to them.

Different people value these things to different degrees. Some people are naturally more fearful than prideful and vice versa, but more often than not the prospects attitude is more influenced by their situation than their personality. For example, if your reader is a home builder in the current environment he’s likely to be fearful, but if the reader is a home buyer pride is a much more likely motivater.

Here’s the actual list. These are the five consumer motivators professionals advertise to:

* Safety: People want to feel secure.
* Acceptance: People like to feel like they belong.
* Empowerment: People like to feel like they have control over their own destiny.
* Status: People like to be perceived as powerful and important.
* Fun: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. People just plain like to have fun.

I know what you’re thinking. “What about money?”. Everything else, even money, is a secondary motivater. Money is really just a means to an end. With money you are more able to achieve these five primary motivators.

4. Target your tagline to your market. Just as an example: if you are marketing to new residents you might want to use a tagline like, “Special offer to New Homeowners! Free initial consultation and 15% off your first tax preparation”. If you’re targeting a larger more generic group use something more universal like “Free to New Tax Preparation Customers”.

5. Mention your offer right away in your tagline. The whole point is that the tagline is an ad for your web site. In a lot of ways the tag line is more significant than the web address itself. After all a a superior tagline is much more able to get a prospect to read deeper than a good web address is!

Let me offer a few example of tag lines that could be used to lure prospects to your site.

* Learn 7 tax Secrets You Need to Know…
* The IRS is targeting Your Business…
* 10 things the IRS doesn’t want you to know about your taxes…

TIP

Add taglines to your email by using a signature. I love email. It’s far and away better than using printed stationary. One of the most amazing things about it is you can efficiently and without problems change your taglines. I’d like to see you try that with traditional stationary! Don’t be lazy about it. Every so often change your message. It’s powerful, it’s easy, and it’s free!