Only 37.4% of financial advisors use financial blogging to produce traffic for their websites and prospects for their services.
Why such a low percentage? Most financial advisors are too busy to commit the consistent amount of time it takes to make this marketing tactic work.
Why is business blogging the key to productive advisor websites?
RIA Website Traffic
Want a website that produces more qualified leads?
First you need to generate qualified traffic to your website which means that your site should be easy for investors to find when they are searching the Internet. Internet visibility is a function of keywords that investors enter when they are researching advisors or looking for information about advisors or financial topics.
You could buy the traffic using Search Engine Marketing tactics (also called Pay-Per-Click), but that is expensive and not very productive. Investors have too many choices and too many of your competitors have much deeper pockets to spend on advertising.
How do financial advisors generate traffic for their websites? The three most popular strategies are blogging, social media, and local SEO.
Website Content
- How many pages appear on your website?
- How often do you update those pages?
- How much time do visitors spend reading the pages?
- How many pages have Calls to Action (CTA)s that convert visitors into prospects?
Financial Blog Site Content
Whereas website content is relatively static, blog sites are constantly being updated with fresh content.
Every blog post is one more indexed page on your site, which increases your organic visibility in search engines and increases traffic to your website. This tells Google you have an active website which increases the number of times it checks your site for new content.
Social Media
Every time you write a blog post, you create content that people can post on multiple social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest).
This is a great way to increase the Internet exposure of your business. It is all about awareness – reaching people who do not know you.
You're strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels.
Converting Traffic Into Leads
Website traffic creates the opportunity to create interest and convert that interest into qualified leads for your services.
This is much different than operating a brick & mortar retail business where you need foot traffic to generate new revenue for your business.
Each article that you post on the Internet is an opportunity to generate new leads for your business. The way you do this is to make sure you add a Call to Action (CTAs) to every blog post. CTAs give visitors access to free eBooks, consultations, survey results and other relevant data – high value content that motivates visitors to submit their contact data.
Email Nurturing/Drip Systems
Traffic does not automatically become leads for your services. It may be the beginning of a marketing process that takes weeks or months to generate actual appointments.
Expert Credibility
Who writes articles? Experts write articles. Frequent blog posts help establish you as an expert in your field.
This is a critical marketing tactic when investors are seeking experts who have specialized knowledge that can help them achieve their financial goals.
For example, what will investors see when they Google search your name or your firm’s name. Ideally they will see a lot of quality content that establishes you as an expert in your field.
A verbal sales claim that you are an expert does not work. Every advisor in America makes this claim whether it is true or not. You need proof that documents this claim. Internet content is one way to provide the proof.
Leverage Your Work
Your blog posts can rank in search engines for days, weeks, months, or years. The posts will continue to produce traffic and leads for as long as they retain their online visibility.
According to HubSpot, Paladin is a HubSpot agency, 70% of its monthly traffic is produced by blog posts from previous months. More importantly, 90% of its monthly leads result from posts that were published in previous months and sometimes previous years.
While you might not see immediate results, over time, you'll be able to count on increasing amounts of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment -- the work to generate traffic and leads was completed in previous months.
