Tax preparers aim for America's 83 million millennials

Alexander Hamilton nuzzled Pierce Thiot's chin bristles. Washington took to his mustache. Lincoln hung from his muttonchops.

The presidents were posing for a picture in Thiot's beard, which was stuffed with cash as part of a social media stunt for a tax preparer. Thiot, 29, is known on the Internet for Will It Beard, an Instagram account with over 125,000 followers where he shows whether various items such as Peeps, carnival beads or Legos will stick to his beard. Thiot bartered his advertising services for free tax preparation from Fishback Tax, a three-year-old Nebraska shop that offers certified-public-accounting services online and by phone.

"The people most comfortable with our services are millennials," said Catherine Fishback, head of marketing. "It just connected to me that he might be a good person to reach out to."

"It made sense for the account as well," Thiot said, "because I hadn't stuck any money in [my beard] yet."

The U.S. tax prep industry, from small players like Fishback to big ones like Intuit's TurboTax, is stepping up efforts to reach America's 83 million millennials, who increasingly are of tax-filing age, with their own business opportunities and challenges.

Online service TaxSlayer says 60 percent of its customers who file electronically are millennials. It launched a marketing campaign geared to the group on Twitter, which is used mainly by 18- to 32-year-olds, according to the Pew Research Center.

TurboTax has turned to mobile devices and apps including SnapChat, the platform of self-dissolving images, where it ran a 10-second ad in January 2015 and plans to run another this tax season.

As for Fishback's gambit, the vast majority of Instagram users are millennials, most of whom Pew determined earn $30,000 to $74,999 a year.

The challenge of reaching this group is authenticity, said Jeff Fromm, president of the marketing consultancy FutureCast and author of Marketing to Millennials.

"I think that a hashtag works if the brand has a passionate group of followers and the hashtag is relevant to the conversation," he said. "Otherwise it's #EpicFail, if it's a piece of marketing stuffed in my face."

Even when social media marketing is entertaining-Will It Beard's sponsored post gained over 7,000 likes-it isn't necessarily pushing business for the brand. Fishback said reaction to the post, which she praised as creative and fun, was less than she expected, partly because people scroll fast on Instagram and don't always read the captions.

#TaxSwag, a campaign that TaxSlayer launched two weeks ago to target taxpayers ages 21 to 44, enters e-filing customers in a sweepstakes for stereotypically millennial prizes: a belt buckle featuring bacon, a retro '80s mug and, of course, a poster of the world's most beautiful beards. (Marketers seem a little obsessed with millennials and beards, perhaps emboldened by Google Trends, which shows a steady rise in searches for "beard" and "hipster beard.")

Though millennials increasingly consume marketing through mobile and social media rather than television, "if all things are equal they will prefer a trusted brand," Fromm said, based on a survey he took. To build that brand and name recognition for it, he said, one must consider various media, including TV.

TaxSlayer ran a television campaign this tax season in which e-filers declared, "I am not a tax expert." The spot was viewed on YouTube more than 1.1 million times. Across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, #TaxSwag reached over 3.2 million users. This tax season's crop of TV commercials from TurboTax, which features famous brainiacs such as the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku showing an ordinary person how to file a return, emphasizes filing through mobile devices.

"It's a nod to where we feel the puck is going," said Cathleen Ryan, TurboTax's director of advertising. TurboTax also gears its app to younger taxpayers but doesn't focus whole campaigns on millennials.

Indeed, Fromm cautions clients not to treat the group as "a monolithic cohort."

Maybe not monolithic, but the way Thiot arrived at his barter deal with Fishback is kind of ... millennial. Fishback offered a base price "of under $500, with commission for each referral we received," as she described it. He declined.

"I've never wanted to do a [brand] collaboration," said Thiot, an art director. "But being a millennial myself and hating doing taxes, I said I would help out if they helped me out."