We would like to emphasize this article is about the ways financial advisor webinars produce more clients. However, financial advisor webinars also:
- Produce attendees
- Convert attendees into leads and contacts
- Convert more leads into qualified prospects
This article assumes investors registered to attend financial advisor webinars. Consequently, advisors already have their contact information. The next challenge is best practices for using webinars to convert more of the leads into prospects and clients who are seeking financial advisors.
Advisor Websites
You may already know your most powerful sales tool is a website that is designed to convert more visitors into leads and contacts.
Webinars are an equally important sales tool because they help produce visitors to the website. Websites require visitors to produce leads that advisors can convert into prospects and clients.
Why are websites so important? That is where investors go to learn more about financial advisors. The webinar may draw them to the website, but it is the content on the website that causes them to contact the firm.
In this context, financial advisor webinars bring traffic to advisor websites and the website convert the visitors into leads and contacts that advisors convert into prospects and clients.
Build Brand Awareness
Webinars are a great way to build brand awareness in a way that levels the playing field.
In the past, 62% of investors said they selected advisors from brand name firms because they felt safer. That is less true today with the rise of the independent RIAs.
Financial advisor webinars can be used to build brand awareness. Investors learn about firms in webinars where no one is trying to sell them planning, investment, or insurance products. Instead, the webinar is providing valuable information that solves financial problems.
At the same time, the financial advisor firms that sponsor webinars are building brand awareness that results in a more recognizable name. Building the brands of financial advisors produces a lot of future value.
Increase Your Credibility
Building credibility may be one of the primary reasons why more financial advisors are using webinars to introduce their firms to investors.
Increasing brand awareness is an important benefit of the financial advisor webinar strategy. A more important benefit can be building credibility for financial topics that are important to the investors who are seeking expert advice when they attend financial advisor webinars.
Webinars establish financial advisors as experts on particular financial topics. There is a good chance that investors are attending webinars as an easy, free way to learn more about the topics. The presenter, who represents the financial advisory firm who sponsors the webinar, should be an expert on the topic that is being presented.
This is a unique opportunity to establish the firm as an expert in its field.
Since investors are seeking information about the topic of the webinar, there is a good chance they will hire the financial advisory firm that sponsored the webinar to obtain their expertise.
Create Trust
How are investors supposed to measure the trustworthiness of financial advisors when every advisor in America claims to be trustworthy? They make this claim knowing it is relatively difficult for investors to verify their claims of being trusted advisors – even when they are salespeople.
Sure, investors can view compliance records on the FINRA website, but that has very little to do with the quality of the financial advisor’s advice. In general, financial fiduciaries are more trustworthy, but again that may have a limited impact on the quality of the advice of the advisors.
This illustrates the problem investors have selecting trustworthy financial advisors. On the other hand, a financial advisor webinar has everything to do with the quality of financial advisors’ advice. The quality of the content on the financial advisor webinar establishes credibility and trust.
The webinar produces both when investors commit time to attend webinars and like what they see and hear enough to stay for the entire webinar.
Conversion Rates
Financial advisor webinars are the beginning of a sales process. They establish contact, brand awareness, credibility, and trust. Financial advisor websites also play a big part in the process because they deliver important information about the firm and the professionals who work there. Websites build on the emerging relationships that are produced by the webinars.
The one metric that matters the most is the number of opportunities financial advisors have to present their services to investors. Everything else is just part of the numbers game that impacts the marketing of financial advice and services to investors.
It stands to reason the more brand awareness, credibility, and trust that is produced by financial advisor webinars and websites the more leads and contacts the advisors will have to talk to.
Webinars and websites are what brought them to the table. Then it is up to the advisors to convert prospects into revenue-producing clients.
Conclusions
Financial advisor webinars are a great way for firms to reach investors who are seeking advisors or financial information.
Webinars build brand awareness, credibility, and trust when investors are seeking financial advisors.
The more credible and trustworthy the advisor, the higher the probability investors will submit their contact information to initiate contact with the financial advisor.
The role of financial advisor websites is critical because they convert visitors into qualified leads and contacts.
Financial advisors win when they combine great webinars with great websites.
