To grow your assets, you need to bring on more clients. And as some of your existing clients age out, you’ll need to start attracting a younger crowd. And that crowd is living online. According to a Demand Gen report, 47% of buyers viewed three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. That means that your prospects need to view three to five blog posts, videos, newsletters, whitepapers or infographics before they’ll start taking your calls or agree to meet with you.
So to reach and win over clients you need to create a financial advisor marketing and content strategy for garnering leads by pushing out great content. This content should answer the questions of your target audience and keep them coming back. And that starts with building a strong brand.
Create a strong brand
Between ads, organic content and the products used in everyday life, the average person is exposed to thousands of brands per day. The only way to make sure yours stick out is to make it recognizable and memorable. Your brand voice, the look and feel of your marketing materials and the fonts you choose on your website all contribute to your brand. You need to create a brand story that explains who you are, what you do and why.
But before you can begin any of the work on your brand, you need to define your target audience and understand them inside and out. What are their wants and needs, where and how do they spend their time and what drives them? With well-developed personas, you can start to craft your brand and with it, your website.
Build an SEO-friendly website
Your website is your calling card. An SEI surveyfound that 58% of millennials say websites are their top financial resource. But it’s not enough to create a website that can be read by your clients—it also needs to be read by Google. In order to show up in search results, your website needs to be optimized for search engines. Creating an SEO-friendly website involves researching industry keywords using tools like Moz and Google’s Keyword Planner and sprinkling them in throughout your site. You also want to ensure your site has enough quality backlinks and is built with the proper headers and page titles.
Start a blog or resource center
Another way to improve your SEO ranking is to create regular, relevant content. Fresh, informative website content keeps people coming back to your website and shows Google that your site is a valuable resource.
One of the best ways to build new content is to create a blog and publish posts once a week. Not only will you have long-form content to draw your prospects and clients in, but it provides more opportunities to add keywords to your site. If your financial advisory firm has design capabilities, you should also build a resource center with visually appealing infographics and whitepapers, which you can offer for free or in exchange for an email address.
Your content can cover anything from the latest industry news and trends to investment and planning strategies you find most effective for your clients to key takeaways from whitepapers and hot topics within your industry. The goal of your blog and resource center should be to educate clients and prospects, answering their questions before they even have to ask them.
Write a newsletter
According to HubSpot, 86% of professionals prefer email over other communication channels when it comes to their work. So you might find success reaching your customers with a regular newsletter with snippets of information that draw the reader in and lead to the blogs on your site. A good newsletter is fairly simple to manage and creates regular touchpoints between you and your clients—making sure you stay top of mind.
Beyond great content, you need to ensure your subject lines or optimized for good open rates and avoid any trigger words that will send it straight to a spam folder. You should also test which day of the week and time of day get the most opens and clicks with your specific customer base to make the most of your efforts.
Capture and nurture leads with email automation
In addition to a content-rich newsletter, you should also collect leads in a CRM and set up automated drip campaigns to nurture and convert those leads. A lead nurturing drip campaign can be an incredibly affective way to get those three to five touchpoints needed to score facetime with a prospect.
Just be sure to review the CAN-SPAM laws before building out your email communication. There are a lot of regulations around opt-outs and the information you need to have on your email templates and violating these rules can result in hefty fines.
As you become more adept at creating these drip campaigns, you can start to better segment your audience and build additional campaigns that are more targeted.
Be social
According to FTI Consulting, 70% of financial advisors are using social media as a part of their marketing efforts. Provided you have a solid strategy behind your social efforts, it can be an incredibly effective tool for reaching your client base. Social media should be a means of connecting with your clients and prospects, fielding questions, offering advice and building community. It should not be used to sell your products and services.
Social media is also a great way to organically get referrals from clients, the community and other professionals. By remaining active in relevant conversations, you can position yourself as an industry leader, and if your content is valuable enough, brand advocates will share it with their own networks, expanding your reach.
If digital marketing and content strategy isn’t your forte, call in the experts to help with these six marketing initiatives. Peregrine Consulting Group helps financial advisors across the country reach clients and prospects with data-driven creative. To learn more about how we can help with digital marketing for financial services firms, fill out the form below or shoot us an email at support@peregrineconsultinggroup.com.
