Say the word marketing to most accountants and watch the reaction. A small flinch. “Oh no, that is not me. I am not a marketer.” It is one of the most common reflexes in the profession, and it quietly costs firms a great deal, because it rules out something that has nothing to do with ad budgets or pay-per-click and everything to do with running a better tax season.
Here is the reframe worth sitting with. Strip the word marketing right back and what you are left with is communication. How are you talking to your clients? How are you helping them get ready for what is coming? How are you keeping them organised? That is not marketing in the uncomfortable sense. It is just good client communication, and it happens to be the single most useful thing a firm can do in the weeks before tax season.
And it matters more than it looks, because the number one source of new work for an accounting firm is still referrals. Clients refer the experience they are having. Well-communicated-with, well-organised, well-looked-after clients refer other people who then arrive expecting that same level of service. So the communication you do with your existing clients is not separate from growth. It is the engine of it.
Why does “I am not a marketer” cost you so much?
The flinch is understandable, but it is aimed at the wrong target. Nobody is suggesting you become a marketer. What the firms that come through tax season calmly actually do is simpler: in early November, they start communicating. Services, deadlines, what the next couple of months will look like, what clients should be thinking about now.
That is the whole move. Not ad spend. A comms plan to your current clients, and maybe a few prospects you have been talking to. Most business owners are heads-down running their business. They have not thought about any of this. When someone turns up and says “given where we are in the year, let us not wait until January, let us start now,” that is genuinely useful to them. It is also exactly what being a trusted advisor means: popping useful ideas and information across to clients before they have to ask.
One to many, not one to one
Most firms already have these conversations. The trouble is they have them one client at a time, usually only with their top-tier clients, and usually too late. The shift that changes a tax season is taking those same conversations and making them one to many.
You almost certainly already have a plan in your head for what clients need to do and when. The problem is you hand it over all at once, in January, to each client individually. Instead, systematise it. A newsletter. A blog. A simple email to a group of clients. Open, transparent communication with your clients stops being a scramble of individual phone calls and becomes something structured that reaches everyone at once. How hard is it to send one email that says, “based on where we are in the year, here are a couple of things worth thinking about”? That is the whole idea, scaled.
The drip beats the dump
There is a ritual worth retiring. Every year, firms post out the 24, 45, or 55-page tax organiser, give themselves a pat on the back, and hope the client does something with it. They will not. Expecting a different result from the same once-a-year document dump is its own small definition of insanity.
What actually creates momentum is the opposite: the steady drip. Regular, small, focused reminders that keep your firm top of mind, so the client thinks, “oh yes, I should get started on that, and actually I can.” One giant PDF lands with a thud and gets ignored. A cadence of short, useful nudges every couple of weeks gets clients moving. Same information, completely different result, because of how it is delivered.
Tell them what is coming, in chunks, with the why
The best version of this borrows a trick from a good teacher. Imagine a professor who, on day one, hands out the five essay questions that will be on the final exam. Students know exactly what is coming, they know what to focus on, and they know what a good result looks like. No surprises, just a clear map.
Tax season is no different. You know exactly what happens every year. It is not a surprise. So tell your clients in advance, in chunks: here is what we will ask you for, here is when, here is why we need it, and here is the benefit to you of getting it to us in good time. That last part is what most firms skip. “I need this information” is weak. “Here is what this unlocks for you, and here is what it saves you” is a request people act on. The benefit can be as simple as us not chasing you at the last minute, a faster-filed return, or even a small discount for getting details in early.
You already know 90 percent of the questions
Think about the questions that flood in every tax season. What do I need to provide? Why do I need to provide it? The same ones, year after year, from most of your clients. So write the answers down once. Put them on the blog, in a FAQ, in the newsletter, record a short webinar. Then as the questions start arriving, point clients to the answers that already exist.
This is the one-to-many idea applied to the inbound side. Instead of answering the same question fifty times one-to-one, you answer it once and let it serve everyone. It quietly removes a large chunk of the inbound noise that clogs a firm during the season, and you can build it now, in the quiet weeks.
Communicating is also how you grow, and how you keep your team
Two things fall out of this that are easy to miss. First, communicating with your existing clients unlocks work you did not know was there. One firm assumed tax planning was only for the clients they decided needed it. When they instead emailed every client to say “now is the time to think about this, no obligation, let us know if you want to chat,” a surprising amount of work came back. Their growth did not come from chasing new clients. It came from telling the clients they already had what they actually do.
Second, a proactive comms plan is quietly one of the best things you can do for your team. Getting clients organised early levels out the workload that otherwise spikes into a brutal crunch, and it is that crunch, more than anything, that makes good people threaten to leave or actually walk mid-season. Bring the whole team into the plan, the admin staff, the bookkeepers, the advisory people. Ask them what the biggest frustrations are and which clients always cause problems. People who feel heard, and whose workload has been thought about in advance, are people who stay.
None of this requires you to become a marketer. It requires you to communicate with your clients a little more often, a little more deliberately, and one-to-many instead of one-to-one. Start now, in early November, and you send a strong signal to your own team too: we are doing something different this year, we have a plan, and we are not waiting for January to start. If a second set of hands on getting that groundwork in place would help, that is a conversation our outsourced back office accounting support team is glad to have, and it is the quiet logic behind CAS support that frees you to focus on clients instead of drowning in last-minute admin.
For more on building a better accounting practice, MoneyPenny hosts Beyond Numbers, a podcast of practical conversations on capacity, workflow, pricing, technology and the realities of running a firm. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify.
