Tax day. What does it mean for your firm's marketing? On this episode, we share some of the experiences we've had working with financial firms using tax-related messaging to engage clients and prospects.

In this week's podcast, we reference search data from Google Trends. For anyone not familiar with this tool, it's a fantastic and free resource for uncovering consumer search data on the world's largest search engine, Google. With this tool, you can get high-level metrics on how frequently a specific search term is being entered into Google and any seasonalities that may exist within the data.

We looked at three search terms: "tax planning strategies", "tax strategies", and "tax planning". On the following chart, 100 represents the highest weekly search volume during the last year for each of these three search terms. A reading of 50 indicates that the search volume for the period was half of peak volume.

How can you interpret this data? Here was Logan Burgess' take: "If you just look at the search term 'tax strategies', which is arguably one of the best search terms to capture someone who is looking at taxes from a financial planing perspective, we see relatively uniform search volume throughout the year. In August, for example, you see about 50% of search volume from the peak which occurs the very last week of the year when people are really looking at tax-loss harvesting and other year-end decisions.

There's this idea with advisory firms that getting started on a tax planning campaign in September or October might be early because prospects aren't focused into the conversation until December through April, but the search volume is showing us that investors are focused on getting tax advice earlier than a lot of financial planners and marketers may be thinking."

As always, thanks for tuning in to the FinMar Today podcast and use the scheduler below if you'd like to discuss the topics covered on this week's show.

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Photo by Hal Ozart on Unsplash