Alysia shares how she uses audience insights to make sure TaxScouts is talking to the right people, in the right places, using the right messaging.
TaxScouts make tax returns stress-free by connecting their customers with freelance accountants for a fixed fee. An estimated 12 million people are required to file a tax return in the United Kingdom every year. But how does TaxScouts go about talking to them in a nuanced way? How do you really know your audience?
Alysia Wanczyk is the Brand and Product Marketing Lead at TaxScouts. She says that while they can identify their customer at a general level, customers come from all different walks of life with all kinds of outlooks. To truly know them and what makes them tick, TaxScouts have had to dig a little deeper.
Joining the What’s Possible Community sessions, Alysia shared her rich insights and provided invaluable advice to fellow growth-minded marketers in the Community.
TaxScouts recently investigated using postcode data to classify their consumers into segmented, targetable and marketable groups.
They paired that data up with YouGov data to learn more about what kind of behaviours their segments engage in, what media they consume, and what personal opinions they may hold.
“That helped us identify some clusters. We were able to have a view of why someone needs to file a tax return and then understand them as people and their lives. We were able to create a matrix of understanding of taxpayers – which was cool” Alysia said.
Armed with some audience data, Alysia and her team then ‘enter the matrix’ and begin reaching out to customers to harvest truly unique audience insights.
30 to 50 emails and phone calls later, the marketing team have found the nuggets they were looking for. They ask customers about their experience before filing a tax return, organise those responses, and discover what unifies them. These insights help establish the core messaging they’ll push out to potential customers.
“It’s quite indulgent being able to chat with people. Not only so we can communicate with them and find more people to use our great service, but also to feed into the product teams so that we are creating more solutions and features that make the experience better and less stressful” Alysia explained.
The detailed audience insights collected become the ‘voice of the customer’ within the organisation. These insights can be plugged into future product strategies.
From a content perspective, Alysia and the team can tailor tax-advice content for their customers to help them with the typically daunting task. This service is a new offering that speaks to customers inside and outside of the tax season to keep them engaged throughout the year.
However, as fate would have it when a marketer thinks they truly know their audience, and they have finally figured out how to talk to them, a new challenge arises.
Technology is developing fast. These leaps in technological advancements have given rise to new platforms of investments. For example, crypto trading has become fashionable.
Each trade on a crypto app is arguably a taxable event due to the capital gain that occurs. And so, just like that, a potential new customer segment is born.
Alysia notes that with the introduction of these new platforms comes a responsibility to educate not only their users but their freelance accountants too. They must stay on top of systems that produce tax implications.
The comms team find out what forums new customers use and become present on them, using the correct language, and focus on being an authority on the topic (Alysia says Reddit is quite active). Forums can be a wealth of knowledge to marketers who can gain fresh audience insights and truly know their audience. They can also inform what kind of problems future customers will need assistance with.
From a product perspective, changes in the market create unique opportunities. TaxScouts can start to develop new functionalities inside their offering that adapt to the morphing financial world. The organisation is also open to partnering up with other brands that could help make the one-click tax return a possibility in the near future.
From a brand-tone perspective, Alysia says she has to do one thing and one thing only – though it may be a tall order – make filing tax returns sound sexier for those different customers from different walks of life.
“It’s tricky. We are trying to make sure we are easily found by people who have to file tax returns, but also make sure we are reaching out and finding them. We have to have our finger on the pulse” Alysia concluded.