Once considered an afterthought or a possible “nice to have,” a blog is no longer an optional piece of digital marketing content that financial advisors use to increase their overall visibility and credibility online.
And while there’s no shortage of blogs about anything and everything on the internet, visitors to your website are clearly looking for information on financial advising and more specifically, your firm. But visiting your website and/or blog is only the first step. The key to turning that visit into a possible lead and ultimately possibly a client is to get them to subscribe to your blog updates.
Instead of a visitor having to remember to check your blog, they can be notified via email when something new publishes, ensuring they never miss a piece of content you produce. In order to keep people interested in your blog and also grow your email subscriber database. Read on for some new ideas on how to gain more subscribers to your financial subscriber blog.
Content Content Content
The importance of quality content can’t be overstated when it comes to gaining traction for your blog. The competition for getting people to view your content is fierce, and every day it gets harder to compete for common keywords and phrases that are popular among financial advisor websites. Quality content is a key for adding blog subscribers for multiple reasons and here are a few:
- People crave new and insightful information. If you’re using your blog to simply recycle content that has no “new and exciting” qualities that make it appeal to your clientele, you won’t see a big increase in subscribers. However, if you’re creating unique content that is timely, relevant, and offers an incentive to your readers, you will see subscriptions increase.
- Visitors like to share quality content. If you’re the one producing quality content, your visitors will want to share it. By sharing it, they’re getting your content in front of new readers who may not have otherwise seen your article but can now possibly become subscribers.
Optimize Your Highest Performing Blog Posts for Subscriptions
As long as a post is still relevant, there’s no reason not to continue to share it. By optimizing your highest performing content for subscriptions you can get your best content in front of more people than perhaps the original post did. You can also optimize these posts through SEO practices, as well as by sharing the content via other channels such as social media.
You may be wondering how you can tell which of your blog posts are your highest performing. This can be monitored through your website’s analytics and can be made even easier through the use of Google Analytics. This free platform allows you to monitor your site’s performance on both a basic and granular level.
Position Yourself as a Resource for Information
Quality content is the first step to positioning yourself as a thought leader in your area among other financial advisors. By offering timely and relevant content, you’re giving yet another incentive for people to subscribe to your newsletters and seek more information from you. One of the best ways to establish this authority is by listening to your audience.
If there are multiple requests for the same information, consider making a video and/or a blog post to cover this information. Also, when sharing this information via your newsletter subscription, be sure to have either a “forward to a friend” option or at minimum the verbiage for encouraging the reader to share with a friend. If you remind and encourage your current subscribers to share, you can likely increase your subscriber numbers and gain more potential leads.
Gate Your Most Valuable Content
Anyone who has worked hard to produce content knows that it can be difficult to seemingly just “give it away.” And while sometimes that’s exactly what you should do, there are some cases in which you should consider gating your content.
One example would be for content that is more in-depth, such as Whitepapers and eBooks. For such valuable information, your visitors would likely expect to enter their contact information to pass through the “gate.”
When asking for them to enter their contact information, be sure you have included a checkbox or some other indicator where they must agree to receive emails from your company. This gives you permission to legally reach out via email, or whichever other contact information you requested (i.e. phone, mail, etc.)
By gaining subscribers through your gated contact forms, you are offering an incentive for signing up for your subscription services in the form of free access to your quality content.
Find a Niche Within Your Area of Expertise
While you may be labeled as “just a financial advisor,” you know more than anyone that every financial advisor firm has an area of expertise or at minimum a niche market that you’re better qualified to serve than anyone else. If you capitalize on that area of expertise, you can position yourself as a specialist of sorts and will likely find that the benefit of having a niche is that referrals come in from your existing clients.
For example, if you have a great deal of experience working with estate planning, make it known in your blog and other content sources that this is something you are very familiar and comfortable with. By doing so, you can begin to target your messaging to focus on that niche area and potentially find more value in your current marketing efforts.
Gaining subscribers to your blog is a crucial part of growing your financial advisor business but growing them ethically and successfully can be tricky while you’re already busy running your financial advisor business. If you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out to a digital marketing partner. By choosing the right partner, you can increase the subscribers to your blog and ideally, increase your business overall through quality content and outreach.
