While your first priority as a financial planner is your clients and their financial well-being, having a solid content marketing strategy is also critical to growing your business. Without it, financial advisors risk missing out on valuable opportunities to be in front of prospective clients with the right messaging at the right time.
While it can seem like a huge undertaking, building the right marketing plan for a financial advisor or firm doesn’t have to be complex. Here are five actionable steps to build your financial advisor's digital marketing strategy:
Step 1: Lay the Foundation with Branding
While it may be tempting to dive right in and start putting your marketing out, it's important to look at the big picture and put the right elements in place to lay the framework for a successful marketing campaign. Critical components of a financial advisor marketing strategy all start with one thing in common: branding. More than just a logo, as a financial professional, branding is everything from your colors, fonts, messaging, images, and anything else that represents your advisory firm—both online and offline.
Suppose your firm already has some branding in place. In that case, it's recommended to take inventory of what has been used in the past, what's currently being used, and if it's consistent. If conflicting branding elements are used, it can do more harm than good from a marketing perspective. To streamline branding efforts, using a style guide can be a valuable asset.
A style guide is a document that outlines the pre-determined branding elements to use in your marketing efforts. It can be as detailed down to the font size and boldness or as general as the logo and colors. This document can be shared with your advisory firm and any marketing partners to ensure your branding is consistent across the board.
Step 2: Determine Your Marketing Channels
Establishing and maintaining a good mix of marketing channels is necessary for an overall successful marketing strategy. However, there are many to choose from, and it's nearly impossible (and not recommended) for your financial advisor marketing content to be everywhere all the time. Traditional marketing channels—sometimes viewed as obsolete—can still be valuable given the audience and objective.
However, the main focus for most financial firms' digital marketing strategies is focused on digital channels, which seem endless at times. But your website should be the main focus when looking at the big picture for an overall marketing strategy. With little exception, your digital marketing efforts will lead back to your main website. And without an easy-to-navigate website with high-quality, relevant financial advisor content, those other digital marketing efforts will have less impact than they should.
Step 3: Content
While there's no shortage of financial advisor content online, that doesn't mean you shouldn't produce and distribute your own. This can not only bring your advisory firm to the top of Google searches, but it can also help establish your firm as a trusted source of financial information to potential clients. But how do you know what kind of financial content to produce? Do your research – including (especially) on your competitors and others in the financial services industry.
Consider if you were an investor looking to partner with a financial advisor; what kind of information would you be looking for? If you can't find it, then you need to be the one to create and distribute it. This can be especially true for underserved audiences, allowing you to form a niche within that group to meet their needs.
For example, suppose your firm is especially knowledgeable about educators and the retirement benefits and programs used in the state education system, such as public schools and colleges/universities. In that case, you can better serve that niche group than a financial advisor who primarily serves business owners.
Step 4: Audience(s)
Having the right content won't matter if you haven't identified who is searching for or who will benefit from that content. Identifying your target audience(s) will help you determine where to distribute your content and what kind of content this audience is searching for.
One way to identify your target audience is to look at your existing clients and identify which of those clients represent your "ideal" client, and then find the characteristics of those clients and create an audience profile that matches. And remember that there may be more than one audience profile representing your financial advisory firm's target clients. In that case, you can create multiple audience profiles and leverage your marketing accordingly to where those audiences interact online.
Step 5: Measure Your Marketing Efforts
While marketing efforts have historically been difficult to "measure," when it comes to digital channels, it's easier than ever to see what's working and what's not. This is true for everything from social media content to website traffic. These built-in analytics tools can show everything from clicks to engagement metrics, such as likes and comments/shares.
Keeping tabs on these metrics can help show you what financial planning content is the most popular and which may need some work. Pro Tip: Don't be afraid to change things up if your actions aren't working. The beauty of digital is that it can be changed frequently to find the best results.
Getting The Right Support From a Digital Marketing Agency
No matter how much you want to be directly involved with your marketing strategy, time may be unwilling to let you. If this applies, seeking professional support from your financial advisor marketing firm is a good alternative to doing it yourself. By partnering with marketing professionals specializing in financial advisor marketing strategies and execution, you can be involved as little or as much as time allows and still have a solid marketing strategy that works for your financial advisory firm.
