Step one is to determine who are the "right" investors. Let's say you are a financial advisor who provides planning, investment, and risk management services to prospective clients. So anyone with enough assets to meet your stated minimum is a viable candidate for your financial services.
Financial advisors may be generalists, as in they work with anyone who meets their minimums, or they may be specialists. For example, they work exclusively with pre-retirees and retirees. FYI, more knowledgeable investors prefer specialists because they believe specialized knowledge benefits them.
How does marketing connect investors to financial professionals?
The next step in financial advisor marketing is to develop a strategy for reaching these investors. Investors have to be able to connect with financial planners to initiate an introductory conversation.
There is the passive approach: financial advisors wait to be referred to a prospect by current clients, friends, family, or associates (for example, other professionals - CPAs, attorneys, etc.). This approach can produce high-quality prospects, but it has two major marketing drawbacks for financial advisors; referrals can be few and far between, and advisors rarely have any control over the flow.
Why is an outbound marketing plan obsolete for most financial advisors?
A small percentage of financial advisors are still using the outbound marketing approach to try and grow their business. The two most common forms of outbound marketing are cold calling and direct mail. Both strategies are relatively obsolete due to their diminishing returns. For example, 100 cold calls per day may produce few, if any, legitimate prospects. All too often, it could be 1% or less.
Outbound marketing has also become more difficult due to Caller ID and spam filters that make it easier for potential clients to avoid unwanted solicitations. Chances are new technologies in the future will make these invasive marketing efforts (contacting investors who don't want to be contacted) even more difficult, more expensive, and even less productive.
What is the inbound marketing alternative for financial advisors?
The other primary alternative is an inbound marketing approach based on investors initiating contact with prospective advisors. This marketing approach has one major benefit - investors initiate contact to seek advisors, information about advisors, or answers to financial questions.
Major advisory firms, particularly brand name firms, have used inbound marketing for decades when advertising on radio, TV, and print. They expect investors to see their ads and initiate contact with the advertisers. Of course, this is a relatively expensive form of financial advisor marketing and is best used by larger firms with substantial marketing budgets.
Very few smaller advisory firms can afford this form of inbound marketing. However, the web is a game changer for marketing the services of all sizes of financial advisors to individual investors. Every financial advisor in America has a website. The visibility of financial advisors online is up in the air.
The internet is an efficient way for investors to find, research, and contact financial advisors when they are ready to schedule interviews. Millions of investors are already using digital marketing to make these connections.
Financial advisors should not ignore the web and inbound marketing when they develop marketing strategies for their firms.
What two inbound marketing alternatives are used the most by financial advisors?
This step is the dicey one. How do advisors market their services online and reach the right investors?
This form of financial advisor marketing requires a website that:
- Delivers the information that investors are seeking
- Is competitive with other financial advisor's websites
- Converts visitors into qualified leads
But, even the best advisor websites will struggle if they are relatively invisible online. 100% of financial advisors have websites, and 82% say their websites are not a consistent source of new leads for their firms.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are the two strategies for building or buying visibility.
SEO builds visibility with original content that includes: Blog articles, pillar pages, social media posts, and local SEO.
SEM buys visibility with paid advertising campaigns for keywords used by investors when seeking financial advisors. This is the faster way to buy your visibility on Google's page one.
Who are the ideal types of leads for financial advisor marketing?
Step four is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Financial advisors need a marketing strategy that produces the right types of leads for their services.
Some advisors say their ideal clients are HNW, VHNW, or UHNW investors. They use these descriptions to describe investors with enough assets to meet their minimum asset requirements. This makes perfect sense, but they don't work for two reasons:
- Investors may not use these acronyms to describe themselves
- The assets may be illiquid and not available for investment
Financial advisor marketing should focus on descriptions that investors use for the money that is in motion. For example, investors are:
- Retiring and moving assets from 401ks to IRAs
- Former DIYs who are seeking professional advice
- Recently widowed or divorced
- Recipients of a substantial inheritance
- Relocating to a new city and want local advisors
- Using search engines to find advisors to protect their privacy
- Selling the family business and retiring
- Changing jobs and rolling 401k assets into IRAs
- Unhappy with their current advisors and seeking replacements
These are just a few examples of money in motion that creates marketing opportunities for advisors.
Conclusion
Investors used to respond to financial advisor solicitations when there was no other way to learn more about them.
Search engines and digital marketing have changed that.
The internet is the information superhighway that makes it possible for investors to find and research potential advisors and maintain their anonymity while they do it.
Suppose online is where millions of investors go to find and research financial advisors. In that case, the web is where financial advisors should market their services.
The internet creates tremendous benefits for investors and financial advisors and will only improve over time. Contact Paladin today to take full advantage of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
