If you live in the Canadian province of Ontario (or British Columbia for that matter), you have no doubt heard of the rollout of the Harmonized Sales Tax on July 1. And most of what you heard is probably bad.
But guess what, it was a tremendous marketing opportunity for anyone involved in the financial services sector in these two provinces. You know why?
Because it created a lot of problems that needed solving. How do you account for HST in your business? Will HST affect my mortgage? How about HST on new home sales? Do I need to charge HST? I could probably go on and on…but you get the drift, these are all questions that are being asked by people. Questions mean problems and problems need solutions.
Well before we get down to some nitty gritty research. Let’s use Google Trends to question my assumption that people are looking on line for information about HST. If you take a look at the image below, you can see that there was some solid interest related to HST. We charted the relative volumes of searches for the terms “harmonized sales tax, HST, HST Ontario” in Ontario for the last 12 months. You would be blind not to notice the up-trends.
Google Trends: harmonized sales tax, HST, HST Ontario
Clearly there is an opportunity and the reality is that its not going to go away anytime soon. In fact it will probably intensify as the actual impact of the tax hits home
Let’s see if anyone is capitalizing on this opportunity. If ever there was one, this is a text book case of news driven marketing. Let’s do a few Google searches on HST related terms and see what pops up on the PPC ads. For the sake of accuracy, all of these searches have been localized to Canada. In fact, most of these search were done with Google’s auto-complete function which uses data from other people’s search to suggest relevant search terms for me. This is like spoon-feeding leads to heads up companies. I wonder who has their heads up on this little situation.
Wait a second, I can do one better! In fact, rather than guessing, lets use Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool to see how many people might be looking for related terms and how much an advertiser might pay to grab the attention of one of these solution seekers
HST related keywords generated by Google
See all those search terms………look at how many are looking for tax related information and look how much competition there is for these keywords and phrases. This is like manna from heaven if you know what you are doing. Remember, this was a quick and dirty example of keyword research, but it should give you an idea of the potential for Ontario businesses to generate revenue from the implementation of the HST. Our next step is to look at some of the PPC ads that they keywords trigger.
Search for "Harmonized Sales Tax" on Google
"GST HST" - 5,400 local search last month @ $0.33 a click
2900 local searches for "sales tax ontario" last month - @ $0.05 a click
"hst training" - 110 local searches at $0.49 a click
Did you notice the lack of well written PPC ads targeting these keywords (Hello, CA’s, CGA’s, bookeepers, software developers anyone home)? If this isn’t failing to seize an opportunity, I’m not sure what is. If you were an accountant or professional service provider or sold a product remotely associated with the HST implementation, you are missing the opportunity to generate qualified leads for less than bus fare……..How much are you paying your marketing manager again?