How To Measure The Effectiveness of Your Tax Season Marketing

Last week we talked about thanking your clients, and mining for “gold” within your existing client list.
Well, I want you to step back, and give you the framework which I used when we evaluated the results from each season. And, for clients who were on our coaching call this week, here’s a framework you can use for evaluating with your staff, as we discussed.
Without the urgency of deadlines, marketing and growth strategies are tough to consider now.
But that’s EXACTLY what you need to do.
In fact, since focusing on growth really is all about starting from where you are NOW, here’s how to get a very clear picture, from a marketing and leadership perspective.
The goal here is to give you a broad framework–you can fill in deeper details yourself. Here it is (with some guidance from me):
(This might be a good one to print out, and work off a hard copy)
FOR THE OWNER
Marketing ROI
1) What measurement did you have in place?
a. If you did NOT, BEWARE of making knee-jerk decisions
        b. If you DID, measure on ROI, not response percentage
2) How you measure your marketing depends on your mindset
a. What were the reasons why some ads worked, and some didn’t
(Market, Message, or Media?)
b. Is “breaking even” acceptable based upon future revenue?
Sales Conversions
1) Can you track how many phone calls came in?
2) How many converted into appointments?
3) How many appointments converted into clients?
Staff Hires
1) Do you have a written evaluation procedure for your employees?
a. Not just on accuracy, but also salesmanship, dependability
i. New services or up-sells attempted?
ii. Referrals stimulated by this employee?
iii. Ability to “play well with others”?
iv. Communication effectiveness with clients
b. Exit surveys for seasonal hires–set them up now!
And NOW is the time to begin research of other services you can offer, if you have no proven service which you consistently can “upsell” your tax clients into…
FOR THE TEAM & OWNER
Operations flow
1) Where were the specific hang-ups?
2) Accuracy controls–were they effective?
3) Where can we combine functionality to increase efficiency?
4) What can the owner delegate for next tax season, and the offseason
5)  Facilities — Problems? Upgrades needed? What worked? Check now
Training Procedures
1) Were you measuring the effectiveness of your training?
a. Employee evaluations of YOU the owner (www.surveymonkey.com is an effective tool if you have lots of employees)
Communication Procedures
1) Were they clear?
2) Where were the bottlenecks?
3) Was there TOO MUCH communication? Too little?
This is a start … and I’ll touch more next week about making NEW marketing plans.