If you’re a financial advisor and you’re not talking to people on YouTube yet, it’s time to start. The channel simply cannot be ignored anymore. YouTube and video presentations have become a huge and successful part of good Internet marketing for financial advisors, and most times, it’s a free opportunity!
As of 2019, YouTube is the second biggest large search engine, seeing more than 1.5 billion users each month. Customers are between 64 percent and 85 percent more likely to buy a product after watching a video. And 72 percent of all small businesses who use video say a video has improved their conversion rates. Yet less than one in 10 small businesses is actively leveraging YouTube to reach their customers.
Why is that when video marketing is here to stay?
Google is still the 800-pound gorilla of the search engine world, of course. But optimizing specifically for YouTube is becoming critically important. People don’t just search for topics on Google anymore. They search for “Topic + YouTube.” Or they start out by going directly to YouTube, where their searches don’t even look outside the platform.
How-To Videos Drive Traffic
Video is a tremendously effective way to convey a message. Few people learn best by reading without involving the other senses.
YouTube is rapidly becoming America’s life instruction manual of choice. How-to searches on YouTube are skyrocketing, growing at a rate of 70 percent per year. And 91 percent of Smartphone users are turning to their devices to do just that.
When someone wants to learn something about money – be it budgeting, college funding, retirement saving, starting or running a small business, cash flow management or any other number of topics – chances are they will look up a video tutorial on the subject. More than two-thirds of Millennials believe they can find a YouTube video on anything they want to learn, and 70 percent of Millennials watched at least one YouTube video to learn how to do something last year.
This should be a golden opportunity for financial advisors to get in front of them, explaining their services, branding themselves and setting themselves up to convert the searcher to a prospect, and then from a prospect to a client on a favorable basis.
Working with an expert Digital Marketing firm like Paladin Digital Marketing, which has worked specifically with RIAs and IARs since 2003, can help ensure you do it right.
Advantages
Video marketing has become a huge part of Internet marketing for financial advisors.
RIAs and IARs of all types are struggling with lead generation. Personal financial advisors feel pressure from increasingly sophisticated robo-advisors and the big mutual fund houses that cater to Do-It-Yourselfers.
But YouTube gives financial advisors the opportunity to showcase the vital differentiators of their firm that no algorithm, robo-advisor or impersonal website could ever match: Themselves.
By showing up on video on a regular basis, expressing good ideas and useful knowledge, financial advisors immediately set themselves apart from their competition, establishing themselves as experts on any given topic and – most importantly – building trust. Even if you don’t want to be on camera, hearing your voice while watching an animated video or presentation can have a huge effect.
According to reports, 64 percent of consumers are more likely to buy after viewing a video, and 52 percent of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online-purchase decisions.
Best Practices
So, how do you incorporate videos and YouTube into Internet marketing for financial advisors? Here are some guidelines to follow:
- Use SEO. The need for Search Engine Optimization doesn’t go away just because you’re on YouTube. Financial advisors will want to use a variety of smart SEO techniques.
- Use a good title. Title your video with appropriate and targeted keywords.
- Provide a synopsis. When you include a quality synopsis in the description box, you provide further oomph to your keywords, boosting your ranking in the search engine.
- Type out a transcription. A transcription of your speech on a video page will give even more chances to find you online and increase your online rankings.
- Name the file itself with appropriate keywords. Don’t title a video “Vid001.avi.” Give it a descriptive name like “Roths_vs_Traditional_IRAs.avi.” This will increase your chances of getting a lead to find your video – and watch it!
- Turn on the Closed Captioning feature. This has multiple benefits for financial advisors, as it adds additional data for SEO purposes. Closed captioning also improves your social media effectiveness: As much as 85 percent of videos on Facebook are viewed without sound. Furthermore, research shows that video clips are shared 12 times more often than text and images alone.
- Make parts of your video linkable. As you get more fluent with video marketing, you’ll be able to direct viewers to click certain spots on your video to get to other parts of your website. If working with a Digital Marketing agency like Paladin Digital Marketing, a team should make this quite easy for you, or even do it themselves.
Include Shorter and Longer Videos
When creating videos, give yourself options.
Shorter videos are great for a quick “how-to” or basic tutorial. But it can be good practice to offer some longer videos as well that do more to showcase your expertise, professional demeanor and ability to teach. These videos go a long way to building trust and setting you up to convert a prospect into an actual paying client.
Keep in mind: Unless you offer some great two-minute videos, people may not initially click on a 5- to 10-minute video on a more complex topic first. However, longer content can be effective. Rather than limiting yourself to a certain video length, try to offer a variety, so people looking for very short videos can get what they want, and you can still offer longer-form content to people who trust you and who are looking for more in-depth information.
Ask Viewers to Subscribe
When leads subscribe to your channel, you don’t have to rely on a search engine to reach them again. They get an update whenever you post a new video, and it’s displayed prominently on their own YouTube main page.
So, ask them to subscribe! Don’t leave it up to the viewer. Tell them precisely in the video what you want them to do and how to do it.
Getting Started
If you have a niche, by all means, milk it. Find topics that are specific to your area, or anything to put your own unique spin on an already covered topic. (Remember, any good topic that you blog about may also be a good topic to repurpose into a video.)
Also, make sure you include all videos on your website as well.
Having a YouTube channel is great. Over time, you can even build a following and a community by encouraging people to subscribe. But it’s also a great idea to feature videos on your own site too. Talk with a Digital Marketing specialist with experience in the financial services industry about if, how and where these videos should be posted for better performance and accessibility.
You can also easily share your video content on Facebook and Twitter, leveraging your natural market and creating favorable brand impressions, or “touches,” that can eventually lead to a new client.
Don’t waste any more time. Talk with Paladin Digital Marketing to see how we can help bring your financial advisor marketing plan into the video age. And start reaching more clients!
