Your financial advisor firm has decided to outsource your digital marketing work to an agency, and you are skeptical about the results that digital marketing agencies produce.
You plan to interview several digital marketing agencies and select the one closest to your requirements. Make sure to ask the right questions so you select the right digital marketing agency suitable for your content marketing efforts in order to grow your business.
How do you know digital marketing for financial advisors works? On the one hand, there are no guarantees, just like advisors can’t guarantee results for their clients. On the other hand, you have seen how the internet has impacted the marketing practices of other industries.
Increasing numbers of individual investors use search engines to find, screen, and contact potential advisors for interviews. It makes sense to market your services where investors go to find financial professionals.
Your challenge is to select the digital marketing agency that will produce the best digital marketing strategies to reach prospective clients. There is a minimum amount of information you should obtain from digital marketing agencies before you make your selection decision. We want to help by providing the Top 10 Questions that financial advisors ask Paladin Digital Marketing.
Let’s get started.
How much experience do you have working with financial advisors?
The toughest digital marketing challenge is reaching their target audience online, bringing them to advisor websites, and converting them into qualified leads.
Investors have been over-solicited for eons and have built several lines of defense when dealing with the financial service industry.
This makes it very important that the agency you select has years of experience working with financial advisors. You do not want to be the client paying money to a firm going through its learning curve. Working with an agency that can cater a marketing plan for financial advisors is critical.
Is your work custom and original, or shared with other advisors?
Google rewards original work opened and read by investors with increased visibility, which can produce more traffic for financial advisor websites.
Google does not reward websites that produce duplicate content - that is, content that other financial advisors are using.
A frequent example of duplicate content is blog articles downloaded from libraries and shared by hundreds or even thousands of other advisors.
Duplicate content is much cheaper than original content because the expense can be amortized over large numbers of advisors. Original content is more expensive than duplicate content because one financial advisor covers its cost.
What is the breadth of your digital marketing services?
Financial advisors may need several services to achieve their marketing goals:
- A custom website optimized for digital marketing
- Blog articles (1-6 per month)
- Pillar pages (1-2 per quarter)
- Social media posts (3 per week)
- Local SEO (100+/- Directories)
- eBooks for free offers (1 per quarter)
- Videos (Build a library)
This must be a consistent effort with new content every month. The ideal agency can provide all of these services. However, multiple agencies working independently can be a problem.
Who owns the work (websites, blog articles, eBooks)?
Who owns the work impacts the portability of the work. For example, the work is owned by a digital marketing agency. Any changes in agencies may require you to start over.
On the other hand, if financial advisors own the work, it is transferable to new firms. There is no need to start from scratch.
What is the length of your contract?
Some digital marketing agencies have 12-month contracts because it takes time for the services to start producing results.
There is no question it can take time. For example, results can take time based on the current visibility of advisors online.
On the other hand, you do not want to pay for services that are not producing results. Therefore, month-to-month service agreements are preferred over 12-month contracts.
What is your schedule of fees?
As you might imagine, digital marketing agencies have different ways of being paid. For example, fees can be bundled (combining several services) or unbundled (a la carte).
Some firms may charge an hourly fee for their services. This can create an open-ended fee when financial advisors do not know the total monthly hours.
Other firms may charge a fixed monthly fee that covers a specific array of services.
A more common approach is for agencies to charge monthly retainers for a specific amount of work. Future retainers should be reduced if the agency does not complete the work specified in its service agreement. Or it is also possible that excessive retainers are refunded for incomplete work.
Can you provide examples of your latest work?
Digital marketing agencies should be able to provide several examples of recent work which displays their current best practices.
Be cautious with this one. No advisor will provide an example of bad work. They will show you their best clients; you may want examples of work you can talk to.
What types of reports do you provide each month?
Financial advisors should expect comprehensive reporting from a digital marketing agency. You have the right to know what is working and what is not working.
The reports should document your progress from month-to-month - for example, higher rankings for increasing numbers of keywords.
You should also expect a quarterly performance review where you set new digital marketing goals and review results from previous periods.
How long before we start seeing results?
Some advisors are relatively invisible online. They should expect results about 100 days after a new lead generation website goes live. Search engines take that long to recognize websites as consistent sources of high-quality information.
Original work, quality, and consistency are the three variables that impact the visibility of our work.
How do you measure your digital marketing results?
Three key metrics measure the results of a digital marketing agency:
- Visibility for relevant keywords online
- Traffic to financial advisor websites
- The website’s conversion rates (visitors to leads)
Financial advisors need all three to produce a steady flow of new leads.
For example, a great website with limited traffic will have trouble producing a steady flow of new leads. The opposite is also true. A weak website with a steady flow of high-quality traffic will also have trouble converting visitors into qualified leads. For help in developing the right digital marketing strategy for your business and help with connecting with potential clients, contact the team at Paladin today to learn more.
