When it comes to digital marketing, it is possible to manage all the aspects of your efforts step by step through a sales funnel. For busy financial advisors, having a fully integrated platform that manages these efforts can be a digital marketing game-changer. For example, a CRM system (Client Relationship Management) does just that. It acts as a central marketing “hub” where most – if not all – of your digital marketing efforts are housed, deployed, managed, and analyzed. In short, a CRM is the brain of your digital marketing efforts across channels and audiences.
While there are many CRM platforms out there, this discussion is focused on HubSpot. In the broadest sense, HubSpot is a CRM platform. But, that would be a gross understatement. HubSpot offers the fundamentals of a CRM, and so much more. As an inbound marketing and lead-nurturing platform, HubSpot’s tools are meant to help digital marketers manage their sales funnels and produce customer journeys that create an optimal experience for both the marketer and the prospective client.
According to HubSpot, lead nurturing is “the process of building relationships with your prospects with the goal of earning their business when they're ready to hire advisors. Lead nurturing is important to inbound marketing because it's your opportunity to provide value to your leads and prospects with an end goal of converting them into revenue-producing clients.”
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a form of marketing that is meant to create positive relationships through content that attracts and benefits a financial advisor’s ideal types of clients. The key characteristic of inbound marketing is that investors initiate contact with financial advisors. This is the opposite of obsolete outbound marketing tactics, when financial advisors initiate contact with investors, whether they want it or not. The personification of outbound marketing is the disruptive cold call that occurs during the dinner hour.
With inbound marketing, you are forging relationships that draw investors to you for content and services that help them achieve their financial goals. HubSpot technology manages the relationship until the investors are ready to start the interview process. Then Hubspot helps you stay in touch until the investors have hired financial advisors.
Using HubSpot to Nurture Leads
Leads are the fundamental first step of investors becoming revenue-producing clients. You have the investors’ contact data. Now what?
How advisors handle the first stage of the sales funnel can make or break the conversion rates that impact financial advisors’ ability to convince leads to become prospects and prospects to become clients. It is essential to have fully integrated technology to support your marketing efforts. This nurturing process has been broken into critical steps inside a sophisticated sales funnel.
Segmentation – One Size Does Not Fit All!
Just because leads have ended up in advisors’ sales funnels, that doesn’t mean they’re going to have the same needs and goals as everyone else. By segmenting audiences in HubSpot, advisors can group prospects with similar interests to customize “relevant” messaging and content to appeal to their specific interests. Audiences can be segmented in any number of ways, depending on how detailed you want to get.
For example, advisors can segment their audiences by geography, net worth, referral source (i.e., did they find you in an email, blog post, video, etc.), profession, or business interest if you have the data. This is important to keep in mind when setting up any contact or lead generation forms. Advisors can only segment audiences based on the information they already have.
If you aren’t asking for net worth on your contact form or behind a form for gated content, you can’t include that person in any segmented audiences by net worth. As for referral source, this is something you can manage within the HubSpot platform through UTM codes. A UTM code is a unique set of numbers, letters, and symbols added to the end of an online asset that allows marketers to identify where that action originated.
As an example, let’s say your web address is www.abcadvisors.com and you have a blog that is www.abcadvisors.com/blog. If you get 100 visitors to that page, how would you be able to attribute them to any of the number of places you shared that exact link? That’s where UTM codes come in. Within the HubSpot platform, there is a function to take any web address and add a unique UTM at the end for each channel you share it on.
That way, when you pull up your analytics, you can see just how many visitors ended up on your blog from Facebook, email, YouTube, etc. To tie this back to audience segmentation, you can use the referral source UTM codes to segment those prospects by preferred channel. If you have a segment of all Facebook referrals, for example, you can target them with content that is similar to the type of content you share on Facebook, since that’s what brought them into your funnel in the first place.
Using Email as a Lead-Nurturing Tool
HubSpot’s email marketing platform is also highly specialized to nurture leads and grow relationships. This is mainly achieved by using personalization and email campaigns meant to guide the prospect through the sales funnel in a methodical way that allows for a conversion at any time, in which case they would be moved out of the sales funnel and ideally into a new customer/client onboarding campaign.
It stands to reason that financial advisors want leads they can contact right away. But, sometimes that is just not realistic for the following reason. It does not fit the way most people make decisions, in particular financial decisions. They are going to conduct their due diligence before they start contacting financial advisors for interviews. So at a minimum, there is a timing issue that is a significant marketing obstacle if it is not handled properly.
Does it make sense to assign the contact to your drip email system and start sending them relevant contact based on the information they are seeking? The more automated the process the better the tracking and results. This is far more effective than sending them generic content that has nothing to do with their current financial situation.
HubSpot can be the hub of this marketing activity.
