subject: You Can Easily Write and Utilize Persuasive Tag Lines for Your Accounting or CPA Business [print this page] You Can Easily Write and Utilize Persuasive Tag Lines for Your Accounting or CPA Business
Got a website? How long has it been since you took an honest, critical look at it? CPA Firms beware: If you've had a website for a few years but you haven't been vigorously improving it you may want to give it another look. A basic website just won't cut it anymore. very few prospects visit websites any more merely on the grounds that they are an exciting new technology. If you actually want prospects to look at a website in the current business environment you have to give them a clear-cut REASON.
This is done using a marketing gimmick called a tag line.
The golden rule of website marketing is extremely straight forward: From In the future when you put in a good word for your website include a "tagline" that promises a real profit to folks inclined to look at your site.
A tagline functions just like a newspaper headline. A newspaper headline is designed to get somebody to check out an article. A "tag line" serves almost the exact same function and therefore is crafted using the exact same basic rules:
1. Appeal to your visitor on an emotional level, not an intellectual one. Most buyers make significant choices emotionally, so invoke things they are honestly looking for or worried about. Your marketing will be much more successful if you proffer benefits that appeal to a prospect's , fundamental motivators (pride, greed and fear) than it will be appealing to the visitor's good sense.
2. Know the buzz words that attract readers attention. Use them. 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. Use a tagline that promises a tangible 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. Appeal to one of these things.
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.
Every tangible product benefit falls into one of these categories:
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 selling your services to new residents 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 straightaway in your tagline. The whole point is that the tagline is an advertisement for your web site. In loads of ways the tag line is more significant than the web address itself. After all a a serious tagline is much more likely to get a reader to act than a neat 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
Use your email signature to add a tag line to your electronic correspondence. Unlike old-fashioned stationary you can quickly and with no trouble amend signatures repeatedly on your email without needing to reprint your stationary every time. Switch out your tagline occasionally. It's powerful, it's easy, and it's free!
