End up with a bit more profit this year than you planned for? Tax write-offs are glorious if you know how to wield them. Personally – I believe profit is super important for small businesses, but if you already have your 15% or however much you wanted to land on – and have an extra 3%, why not spend it on these 5 marketing pushes that will ACTUALLY save you a heftier tax bill.
1. Buy tickets for next years events / conferences you were already planning on going to.
You’ve got 3 work events or conferences that you need to attend the next year anyway, and they are almost always on sale now. If you do need to decrease that taxable income – this is a great place to start!
- Trade shows where you could exhibit that have a ton of your best customers in attendance.
- Events where you could visit that your existing best customers might want to attend, maybe you could also pay for one of your best customers plane tickets as well!
- Local events where your niche is being served, and your community will be heavily represented.
2. Pay for all of your tools a year at a time.
For us – digital marketing tools are expensive! For you – it might be other kinds of resources, that you are certain will be required over the next year – so why not knock em’ out all at once?
- Digital tools like ‘Ahrefs’ or other expensive digital marketing tools.
- According to Google you can pay for ads ‘in advance’ – so you could always throw money at Google for your next 3 months of Google ads spend.
- Podcast tools, Adobe products, SEO tools, Stock photos, Hosting, Email automation tools, MailChimp and other email list building tools – often give options for spending money up front, and so there’s no shame in knocking out a year on 5-10 of these services if you’re not interested in giving the government that 30%, and instead decrease your costs for the next year.
3. Bulk content writing –pay your content marketing or SEO team for 3 months of effort.
If you already have a content team that works ‘a la carte’ why not furnish the keyword targeted list you already have, and pay in advance?
- Make sure you work with a team that asks good questions, and will work with you closely to get edits if needed.
- Make sure they understand the tone and trajectory of the company, and the point of each post – in a little synopsis – make sure they know ‘who it’s for.’
- I strongly suggest doing a smaller test batch before spending a couple thousand dollars – or worse, 10k on content. Do a couple posts and see how it works out, test 5 services or writers, and then once you find one that can match your companies vibe, this might be a great place to spend end of year marketing effort.
- It’s really important that a ton of work be done on targeting stuff your actual ideal customers will care about, and not letting them write ‘commodity content.’
4. A link bomb – Drop 10k on high-quality links / guest posts
We loooove getting high Domain Rating links back to websites we are trying to rank – even more than the amount of content on a page, the amount of links, and the quality of those links define how high a site will rank. If you know you’re going to spend money on links, or you have a marketing surplus, and know how to link to gain traction for your organic rankings, this could be a place to focus your money.
- Authority Builders is a great and has a nice interface for working with sites on paid guest posts (think of it as influencer marketing in a way – just you get higher on Google, rather than a fancy instagram post and 1,270 likes.)
- NoBs.link is one of the closest delightful options – that has a ton of different niches, just ensure you’re getting links that relate to your websites topic closely, and using a lot of ‘branded’ anchor text, and ‘brand + keyword’ not just keyword laden anchor text in your backlinks.
- The Hoth often does end of year sales on guest post links, and other promotions – though you really kind of have to know what you’re buying because they do sell a lot of low-quality backlinks too, watch out for this kind of stuff. If it’s cheap – it’s usually not very effective.
5. A new website design – focus on ‘Conversion-centric’ design
New websites don’t always make people money.
You don’t want to update your website just because you’re ancy.
Look at the most important metrics and aspects of your site’s effectiveness:
- How many conversions are you getting per month?
- How much traffic are you getting per month?
- Do you have a blend of trust factors, call-to-actions, persuasive language and imagery, as well as 700+ words on every one of your most important service pages?
- Do you have niche-centric landing pages to go after different target markets?
- Do you have a content strategy and how does your website support those ongoing efforts?
- Is your blog compelling, are the articles easy to read, and do you have call-to-actions at the end of your posts that are visual and persuasive?
Sometimes – you just need to improve on your existing website, you don’t necessarily need to start from scratch.
You likely need – ‘conversion rate optimization.’
You don’t always need to redesign if you have a nice-looking and persuasive website that’s well structured – but you just don’t have enough traffic – you likely need ‘search engine optimization.’
