If there’s one thing most people can agree on, it’s that taxes are dull and anxiety-inducing – which means tax prep companies have one of the most challenging jobs in marketing.
So how do you get people excited to use a service that they don’t want to need in the first place?
H&R Block’s somewhat unconventional approach includes making relatable TikToks targeted at young adults more so than sharing actual tax advice. It’s also done integrations with gaming platforms and even produced a tax-themed riff on a reality dating show (more on that later).
The company believes that “life moments are tax moments,” said Chief Marketing and Experience Officer Jill Cress, and so finding ways to “hijack culture in a big way” – like, for instance, letting the Kansas-based associates leave the office early to “celebrate love” after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement – is key to connecting with audiences on a more personal level.
Cress spoke with AdExchanger about H&R Block’s marketing strategy and how the company stays relevant even outside of tax season.
AdExchanger: Your marketing strategy seems to focus a lot on Gen Z. Why is that?
JILL CRESS: Once you start doing your taxes, even if you’re very dissatisfied, you’re probably going to stick with your provider, because the barrier to switching feels high. It’s like, “Oh, they have my data, and I’m not super delighted,” but it’s taxes, and it’s not a delightful category anyway.
So the biggest opportunity for us to grow is to capture new entrants into the category every year. And the only demographic that enters the category in mass every year is Gen Z.
Generally, when you graduate from college, move out or get your first job, your parents stop doing your taxes, and we have an awareness and a relevance gap with Gen Z.
How do you get Gen Z interested in taxes?
We’ve been leaning into TikTok pretty aggressively. We also sponsor gaming. You’ll find us integrated into Roblox and Minecraft, putting our brand into platforms where that audience is normally engaging.
One thing we did that was really fun was creating a branded spoof on a reality TV show. It’s called “Responsibility Island,” and it was intended to put us into culture using a format that really resonates with both Gen Z and millennials – their obsession with reality TV.
Building on “Love Island” and “Love Is Blind” and everything else, we created a semi-scripted reality TV show where you couldn’t leave the island until you learned how to do a series of “adulting” tasks like your own taxes, and we featured our AI tax assistant in that.
How do you reach other audiences outside of Gen Z?
We have other priority audiences. More established households tend to really like H&R Block, and we have a very different content strategy to meet that audience.
For example, we do a takeover with Yahoo Finance during tax season, which is the most trusted source of financial knowledge for Americans who are 40-plus. It’s their homepage with our expertise, like blog content, embedded in there.
We also do broad reach. We’re on television a ton, largely across sports, which is where most of the eyeballs are. And we do a ton of addressable streaming, because life stage moments really matter to us, like if you’ve just bought a home or just got married.
YouTube is a really strategic partner for us. We can mine insights about the kind of content people are engaging with and what content we should present on YouTube. “Responsibility Island” did really well there.
Another partner that’s really critical for us is Amazon because, of course, no one has more life stage data than Amazon, and they now have a full-funnel DSP. Last year, we did a lot of full-funnel marketing through Amazon. It was incredibly performative for us, because we have all the signs and signals that you might be shopping for baby gear, for example, and you could have a dependent on the way.
Unlike tax professionals (who are so focused on their job that they refer to babies as dependents, apparently!), most people only think about filing taxes for a couple of months of the year. How do you market the rest of the time?
We start by asking, who is the consumer? What are their needs, and were there unmet needs?
Take financial services. A lot of our clients were not really getting the solutions they deserve from traditional banking. So we launched a mobile banking app a couple of years ago called Spruce, which is a full-service, free deposit account with access to a debit card. It also gives people access to their paycheck two days early.
We launched a high-yield savings account, too. It’s a really hard thing for young people who are starting out to feel like, “I’m gonna put money in savings and I’m gonna get, like, some dinky interest rate.”
The other thing that we do is lean into life stage moments, like wedding season. And when the One Big Beautiful Act passed [in July], there were a lot of questions about what would happen with taxes on tips, so we created content, like a live Q&A for small businesses, and we published that.
How do you measure what’s working well in your advertising?
Traffic is really important. Is that traffic converting once we get someone into our product? Are they converting within the product? Are they submitting their taxes? How do you know what happens from the time someone starts their experience to how quickly they finish it?
We just launched a proprietary marketing mix model solution with Adobe so we can get more real-time attribution across the funnel. Otherwise, like many marketers, we get sucked into the last-touch spiral.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
