A US Tax Firm Enters the Cold Market: First Sales From Ads

What the client came with

Omega Tax Group is a tax and accounting firm from Jacksonville. Evgenia Sheldon is an Enrolled Agent, an IRS-licensed specialist, in practice since 2019. Natalia Strutovskaya is a lawyer, a partner since November 2022. Before us, the firm lived by the season: tax returns from late January to mid-April, up to ten company registrations in three years, not a single client on monthly retainer. There wasn't a single sale to someone who had never heard of the firm — they hadn't even tried.

The brief: move away from the mass tax-return market toward subscription service for small and medium business. In other words, enter the cold market for the first time.

What we did

We started with the financial model: before promising clients, we worked out with the firm how many they needed and what one lead would cost. We broke the audience down into ten segments and put together fourteen demand hypotheses. We put eight of them on ads with code words, and seven got a response.

We launched a content pipeline: 50 pieces of content across six platforms in four months, with another 81 drafts left with the client. Ads ran along two tracks — for subscribers and for leads — with analytics on every post and campaign.

What we got

Over four months of the dead season — 42 leads from the cold market at $7.80 in August and $12.50 on average for the period. The market norm for an accounting firm's lead on Meta is $10–50. The audience grew from 401 to about 1,500 subscribers. The firm made its first three sales ever to people from ads.

The main result is an acquisition mechanic that was found and measured: how to warm up this audience and get leads at the lower end of the market price. A year later, the firm is doing on its own what we advised at the start: running Evgenia's and Natalia's personal brands and entering the English-speaking market.