How Liberty Tax Uses ButterCMS to Redefine The Filing Experience

Liberty Tax is a trusted name in the tax preparation industry. With franchises in the United States and Canada, they serve thousands of communities, and that poses challenges when it comes to Liberty Tax’s approach to content and marketing. To effectively reach such a diverse audience, the team knew they needed to pick up the pace of their content, but their old CMS made it hard.

For quite some time, all of Liberty Tax’s websites ran on Umbraco — a hefty solution that met their needs initially but slowly grew from robust to rotund as the site expanded. Technical hurdles made it tougher for the marketing team to keep stride with the rest of the business, and it became obvious Liberty Tax would need to upgrade its website platform to continue offering a top-notch user experience.

They chose ButterCMS for its functionality, ease of use, and hands-on support.

“Butter has helped us better manage our digital properties and streamline our processes to reduce time and costs. With integrations across our different business units and across countries and languages, we have been able to better allocate resources and reduce overhead.” Kyle Sawai, CMO, Marketing.

Editing and publishing pages previously was a multi-step process that required building several individual components, but now with Butter, the Liberty Tax team is able to spin up pages and blog posts at moments notice, without needing to bring in technical experts. As a result, they now have several individuals across the company who are enabled to publish content in an effort to stay ahead of the ever-changing complexity of taxes and to help elevate their authority in the tax space all while being able to systematically account for content, design and SEO consistency.

Customers are critical to any business, but the high seasonality of tax preparation allows no room for error when it comes to standing out and securing a new client — something the team at Liberty Tax knows all too well. All efforts, especially in the marketing department, are guided by the overarching and constant challenge that is customer acquisition. 

For years, Liberty Tax had been running its website on Umbraco, which offered lots of options but proved to be very heavy and costly. New deployments were challenging and put a strain on the team’s resources, even if all they needed to do was update a page. That made it difficult for Liberty Tax to fine-tune its messaging around announcements and deadlines, and even harder to target specific personas.

After ten years on Umbraco, the team knew it was time to graduate to a system that was better equipped to power a painless user experience. They were eager to utilize the latest technology and sought to find a CMS that would be simple and speedy enough that all of their internal teams could utilize it to update the site themselves, without having to wait around for someone else to execute. 

With a clear list of wants and needs, Liberty Tax engaged BonfireLA to conduct a full review of the tech landscape and determine what the best direction would be to rebuild their consumer-facing web experience from the ground up. Leading up to 2021, Liberty Tax recognized a significant shift in consumer behavior—more people were turning to mobile devices to access financial services, including tax preparation. With significant year-over-year mobile usage increasing, a key requirement for the new Liberty Tax web platform was a “mobile-first” experience.

After so many years in business, Liberty Tax had a clear vision of what they wanted going into their website overhaul and they weren’t about to jump into another system without a thorough understanding of their options.

While cost was a consideration in the decision-making process, the primary focus was on ensuring that the new CMS possessed the technical capabilities necessary to provide a fast, flexible user experience, particularly in multiple languages.

After a careful assessment of different content management systems, they chose ButterCMS. All in one day, they found the developer’s docs, created a developer account, and got up and running. 

“We established a really terrific relationship early on. Any questions, any help that we needed, people on the ButterCMS team were directly available to us. It was a difference-maker. The ButterCMS team is second to none,” says Tony Bartoli, Technology Director, Bonfire.

The team initiated the ground-up redesign of their website in July, placing a strong emphasis on improving the user experience. Remarkably, within just one month, they had completed all major components. By November 1, the US site, consisting of several hundred pages with both English and Spanish versions, was successfully launched. Within another month, the Canadian site, equally extensive with English and French versions for every page, was also up and running. This rapid and efficient timeline underscores the effectiveness of their website redesign project.

“There was a lot of stuff to do, but just the interaction and partnership with the ButterCMS team just made all the difference in us being able to meet this very challenging schedule. Butter even assisted with the content migration because there was so much,” says Stephen Fahlsing, Managing Director, Bonfire.

Being a headless solution, ButterCMS also helped Liberty Tax address the unique needs of franchisees by giving their branches powerful tools to manage their public-facing website and streamline the virtual and in-person booking appointment setting.

Liberty Tax has been running on ButterCMS for nearly three years now, and they remain ecstatic with the solution and service. Not only have they realized new efficiencies in how they manage content, but they’ve been able to leverage key features to support their customer acquisition goals. 

Since moving to ButterCMS, all technical hurdles have been cut from Liberty’s content creation process. Gone are the days of calling on a developer to change basic content. Instead, Liberty’s team can make changes to the site on the fly while developers are able to focus on what they do best, like whipping up new reusable components that other users can call in the next time they’re designing a page.

In addition to offering a highly accessible drag-and-drop interface, the components library also empowers team members to get creative when laying out a new landing page or blog post. If they want to drop in an appointment manager or update the site’s navigation bar, they can do it in a few clicks. Plus, the team can dream up a design without the worry of going off-brand, since components are designed and managed on a global level. 

Bryan Nester, AVP of Creative, regularly hops into ButterCMS and makes changes himself instead of delegating it out. “Because it’s just that easy,” he says. “The timeline to implement content changes is almost instantaneous now. Lots of friction has been eliminated.” 

With the renewed ease of updating the website, it’s now easier to maintain a healthy cadence for Liberty’s content calendar. Content is being updated and added more frequently, and little tasks — like redirecting a page — no longer require a technical person because built-in tools make it a point-and-click process, just as it should be. 

ButterCMS also helped the team at Liberty Tax stay on top of their marketing goals. With a lightning-fast online experience and pertinent content that can be deployed quickly, potential customers are able to get the information they need right away — which is critical to supporting the anxiety-free process that Liberty Tax is known for. 

When it comes to SEO, ButterCMS has helped with that too. Liberty Tax tried to address certain aspects with their old website, but ButterCMS has allowed them to implement best practices across the board and handle inline SEO with ease. Also, BonfireLA implemented their SEO Component for ButterCMS, adding in more robust SEO fields directly into the CMS. The switch has led to major upgrades, like schema implementation, that have noticeably improved search engine performance.

Beyond the initial launch, Liberty and Bonfire work together to maintain and continuously evolve the platform by building custom components within ButterCMS to streamline user experience and backend operations. Their team seamlessly integrated Liberty’s Appointment Management System, Franchise Admin System, and several other internal and third-party APIs creating a robust digital ecosystem that provides users with a best-in-class experience that starts with their first interaction with the website and carries all the way through the process of having their taxes done by their local franchise. 

Had they not moved to ButterCMS, the team says they would’ve faced big challenges rolling out new initiatives and would’ve taken on excess overhead in the process. They wouldn’t be able to maintain the pace they’ve reached today, and their old buggy CMS would’ve held them back from keeping their messaging and UI in alignment with their vision of a pain-free tax filing experience.

As Liberty Tax continues to innovate the user experience, ButterCMS is providing the efficient, easy-to-use tools they need to get the job done. Now, with a user-friendly interface of their own, Bryan, Kyle, and the whole team at Liberty Tax are free to focus on streamlining customer acquisition, and they know the team at ButterCMS is here to support them along the way.