Content marketing is an effective way for financial advisors to gain traction online and connect with their audience. And as the name implies this marketing is all about the quality and relevance of the content itself, and it all comes down to the numbers.
Keeping tabs on important performance metrics is critical to understanding if the content marketing for financial advisors is effective.
Known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), these vital stats can provide insight that can turn consumers of your online content into clients of your financial advisory firm. Read on to learn more about these KPIs, and how you can get started tracking them right away, using different channels such as:
- Website KPIs
- Email KPIs
- Social media KPIs
What are the different KPIs for different channels?
Each type of content marketing has its own KPIs. For financial advisors, website and email campaign KPIs are a great place to start tracking and measuring performance. Here are some of the most important website and email campaign KPIs for financial advisors to monitor.
Website KPIs
Organic website traffic: Knowing who is coming to your website organically (not through a paid ad or listing) can tell you not only how your website content is performing, but if your SEO is doing its job.
Bounce rate: Once someone gets to your page, do they stay, or do they leave right away without taking any action? This metric can say a lot about the content as well as user experience on your financial advisor website.
Time on page: Once someone gets to your page and actually interacts, the amount of time they stay is a good indicator of the quality of your content. If they like what they see, they will likely spend more time viewing your content.
Pages per session: Taking it a step further, if someone visits your page, stays, then continues on to other pages of your site, this can demonstrate the quality of your content. Conversely, this metric can point out issues that need to be addressed with your financial advisor marketing strategy and website content.
Inbound links: When you have high-quality content, other sources online are more likely to include links to your website. These inbound links are an indicator of your financial advisor website’s reputation and content quality. After all, most websites want to provide value to their visitors, and sending them to a site without quality content would reflect poorly on them as well.
Leads/conversions: Without appropriate and prominent CTAs, advisors will have a hard time growing their prospect list and an even harder time attributing conversions to any specific content they have created. While what qualifies as a “conversion” is different for the professional services industry versus the retail industry, this is still a metric that financial advisors can use to determine the overall performance of their content marketing.
Organic rankings: These KPIs are important for content marketing, as well as also another way for financial advisors to monitor their website’s SEO. Many components go into determining a search engine’s organic search algorithms; however, Google has made it clear that content plays a large role in where your website will rank.
Keywords: While keywords are no longer the be-all end-all of website SEO, keywords are still important. Now, keywords are one metric among many others that can help financial advisors determine how their content is performing online. As an example, by monitoring keywords from popular search terms, you may realize your content is not performing as well as it could if you were using specific words and phrases within your website content.
Measuring Website KPIs
While there are many tools available, Google Analytics is still recommended for advisors looking to measure KPIs. This free service offers insights into hundreds of website metrics, from the basic KPIs mentioned above down to extremely granular data that you may not ever need, but it’s there, nonetheless. If you’re not already taking advantage of Analytics, you should be!
Email KPIs
Open rate: When it comes to creating engaging email content, the kicker is that if the user isn’t compelled to open the message in the first place, then it was all for nothing. It’s tantamount to planning a party only to have no one show up. Strong open rates are mostly reliant on the subject of the email and in some cases also the preview text assuming that recipient has email previews displaying.
Additionally, the sender’s reputation as well as time of day and email frequency can play a part in how many users actually open it. It's critical to measure your email open rates to identify the ideal messaging your ideal client wants to receive.
Click-through rate: Now that someone has opened your email, the click-through-rate shows how much engagement the content is generating. If the email recipient chooses to read the rest of the article excerpt included in the message, they will then click and be sent to your financial advisor website. The same goes for CTAs such as contact buttons and links to other lead-generating content.
Unsubscribes: People unsubscribe from email lists all the time. It’s a fact of life in today’s digital environment that when an inbox gets out of control, the owner will likely get fed up and want off of so many lists. The key for financial advisors is to become someone the user wants to continue to hear from. And this can only be accomplished through quality content.
Bonus: Social Media KPIs
Now that social media is becoming a large part of financial advisor content marketing, that also means there are performance KPIs that can indicate how your social media content is performing, and how it can be improved. Here are some suggested social media KPIs to start tracking:
- Reach: The number of users who saw your content
- Shares: The number of times your content was shared
- Impressions: The number of times users were shown your content in their feed
- Number of followers or likes: The number of users who “like” or follow your page
- Audience growth: A measurement of how your page is growing or shrinking
- Engagement: Interaction with your content such as likes, shares, or comments
