Introduction
TurboTax is the leading tax preparation software in the United States. However, to reach and maintain this position, the management and marketing team responsible for the product had to solve many problems. One of such issues included the question of customer retention, which existed due to the seasonality of the demand. Therefore, the TurboTax team decided to adopt Twitter as a central platform for the company’s marketing efforts, and such a strategy proved to be successful. In this regard, the current paper seeks to analyze what marketing aspects the management had to address and what were the specific benefits of using the Twitter strategy.
Corporate Values and Firm’s Reputation
TurboTax was able to successfully exploit the brand recognition and the popularity of another Intuit software – Quicken. For instance, the product’s marketing team decided to concentrate on similar value as Quicken for its online promotion strategy, called “follow me home,” first introduced by the company’s creator Scott Cook. For this reason, Team TurboTax could attract loyal customers that used Quicken before to the next firm’s product and appeal to new customers by applying the strategy that proved to be effective. As a result, the emphasis on consumer-driven innovation yet again determined the success of the new product.
Management of Online Customer Service
Managing consumer requests, questions, and complaints via Twitter can have advantages and disadvantages for the organization. On the one hand, such an approach ensures a fast and timely response to customers and necessitates fewer efforts on the latter. On the other hand, the platform users may have high expectations concerning the speed of the reply (Hall, 2020). Moreover, the text length limit of each tweet is 140 characters, which can constrain the effective communication between the users and the staff. Therefore, although online customer service can significantly add to the firm’s competitive advantage, it is also difficult to manage. To address the adverse aspects of operating in Twitter, the managers decided to enlarge the number of people responsible for online customer service from 2 to around 50 people, including experts in the tax sphere. Such a tactic ensured fast and effective levels of interaction with the customers.
Management of Seasonality
The final aspect that TeamTurboTax needed to consider operating in a social media environment is the seasonal demand for their product and analyze how it can facilitate or deter marketing efforts. As for the former, the seasonality allows the company to prepare for the peak season more thoroughly by developing the best marketing messages during non-busy periods. Also, it is associated with a lower cost as inventory and employees are not needed equally throughout the year. However, on the contrary, during periods of high demand for the product, it can be more difficult to address each consumer problem and control the information flow concerning the product. To avoid such problems again, the TurboTax team’s decision to hire more staff members was fruitful. Moreover, the fact that users could share their expertise with each other further enhanced the firm’s marketing efforts.
Advantages of Twitter Strategy
Considering the company’s previous steps to ensure marketing efforts’ success, it is now necessary to discuss the overall advantages of the TurboTax Twitter strategy. First of all, the company benefited greatly from positive word-of-mouth. Secondly, Intuit achieved a high customer retention rate and, thus, has more loyal customers. Finally, the strategy added remarkably to TurboTax’s competitive advantage over similar products in the market.
Conclusion
In summary, the current paper discussed the specific aspects of TurboTax marketing that were considered by the management team. It was shown that TeamTurboTax could successfully incorporate the company’s core value in its promotion efforts and, thus, exploit the firm’s positive reputation. Also, the company hired a large staff, including field experts, to manage customer service. Finally, the platform allowed consumers to share personal expertise and experience, which further increased the products’ popularity.
Reference
Hall, A. A. (2020). 21st-century customer service: investigating how companies use social media for customer service. Journal of Research in Business Information Systems, 12(12), 1 – 141.