Death, Taxes, and Marketing?
Isn’t Tax Day over? Tonight, I attended a presentation on Mobile and Social Strategy at Intuit in San Diego and all the nightmares of the numbers came back. It was good that the speaker, Dan Maurer, made excellent points to keep even the non-CPA’s in the audience awake. His presentation focused on how they are adapting to the growing mobile segment, why social referrals are critically important to Intuit’s business model, and how they view their Live Community to be an extremely successful value-ad for their consumers.
Who really wants to sit at home doing their taxes? Intuit recognizes that most people really don’t want to spend a lot of time on their taxes and if they can do it on the go, that is even better. This has made Intuit’s iPhone apps some of the most popular finance apps through Apple’s App Store with fun features like taking a camera phone picture of your W2 which then inputs it into their software—wouldn’t that make for a fun first date demonstration of your net worth? Moving back to the marketing application, mobile, time-saving applications can be a very effective way of reaching your target audience.
Dan surveyed the audience as to who uses their products and then joked that those in the audience who do not use the products should be recruited by those that do. This made an excellent point, referrals are always a very effective part of the marketing mix but why do so many companies not formally integrate obtaining referrals into their marketing strategy? Intuit states that 39% of its TurboTax consumers try the product because of a referral. Don’t forget that referrals will always be important to your marketing.
When people find a product that they can believe in, they want to tell their friends about their discovery. This is where social media must provide a platform for accomplishing this. Intuit has done a very good job of doing this. Its online Live Community is unique in that in the first 16 weeks of 2010 they had over 100,000 replies with a one retired CPA contributing over 48,000 responses. Wow! I would challenge anyone to find a more active online evangelist for any brand.
While we cannot get away from death and taxes, innovative marketing approaches can make at least one of those topics much more interesting.
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Apple now has Rhapsody as an app, which is a great start, but it is currently hampered by the inability to store locally on your iPod, and has a dismal 64kbps bit rate. If this changes, then it will somewhat negate this advantage for the Zune, but the 10 songs per month will still be a big plus in Zune Pass’ favor.