Every season, Tampa Bay small business owners who specialize in tax preparation services lose customers to the do-it-yourself options. This year, 589,000 local consumers will spend $113,000,000 with professionals. But, based on the average cost of services, more than $129,000,000 will stay in the wallets of the DIY crowd.
To clawback this enormous amount of money from the DIY market, Tampa Bay's tax services will need to advertise the valuable benefits of using a professional.
The best advertising option for professional tax professionals is on Tampa radio stations. Here's why.
According to Nielsen, when it comes to driving sales, the most potent media element of an advertising campaign is reach. This is the number of different people exposed to the marketer's message.
Each week, Tampa radio reaches 86.4% of local consumers that will use a professional to prepare their tax returns. This is significantly more than are reached by local TV, newspaper, social media, or streaming audio services like Pandora and Spotify.
Advertising to this target audience is important for tax professionals to preserve the current market size by limiting defections to online solutions.
The most lucrative opportunity, however, is for professionals to advertise to consumers who plan to do their own taxes. Once again, radio has, by far, the largest reach among this target audience.
Most Tampa Bay small business owners who provide tax preparation services, generally, cannot afford to use multiple media to reach target consumers. Advertising on Tampa radio, though, will reach almost the entire user base of all other media.
To affect the upcoming tax filing season, Tampa Bay tax professionals will need to start advertising soon. According to the National Retail Federation, 28.5% of taxpayers plan to submit their returns by mid-February. Another 30.1% will be submitted during the last two weeks of February. Just over 27% will be submitted by the end of March. The final 14% will be submitted in April.