Financial advisory firms can benefit from digital marketing KPIs yet many financial advisors understandably do not have a clear idea as to what KPIs are and/ how to best use them. KPI is an acronym short for key performance indicator. This is an important indicator of the progress a financial advisory firm makes toward its targeted goal. In short, this is a performance measurement that gauges success in regard to financial advisor digital marketing.
Let’s take a look at how financial advisors should approach selecting the optimal digital marketing KPIs for their firm in the year ahead.
Consider the Context When Choosing Digital Marketing KPIs
Those who have experience selecting KPIs for financial advisor digital marketing agree it is best to choose indicators based on the unique context of their advisory businesses. Digital marketing KPIs should be suited to the company’s unique goals as well as additional factors ranging from company strengths to unique factors that drive its success.
Even the company’s “life stage” should play a role when choosing digital marketing KPIs. In short, the best digital marketing metrics for financial advisors are not likely to be ideal for other businesses, even if they are local and similar. Furthermore, the KPIs that are optimal for one of your competitors may not be ideal based on your specific financial advisor marketing goals.
Focus on Your Financial Advisor Firm’s Unique Goals
The digital marketing KPIs you choose for your financial advisory firm should be directly tied to the goals that will drive the success of your firm. Otherwise, you won’t be able to accurately monitor your campaigns’ progress and results..
As an example, if you want to increase investor awareness of your financial advisory firm, it makes sense to choose and track a KPI that details the frequency at which users share your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn social media posts. So go ahead and establish clear goals at the outset and choose your financial advisor marketing KPIs based on the achievement of those goals.
Consider Your Financial Advisory Firm’s Size in Relation to Competitors
The digital marketing KPIs that are optimal for a financial advisory firm will be different than those that are best for a company in a different industry. Furthermore, the size of your business should also influence the KPIs you choose. As an example, a financial advisor that has just launched will be more focused on building brand awareness and producing leads for the advisors at the firm.
Comparably large, established businesses are looking for ways to establish competitive advantage and boost their market share while working with larger and larger clients. Consequently, the KPIs for companies will vary by industry, size, and goals. For example, if your primary goal is to add large numbers of new clients, you should zero in on your sales funnel conversion rates and the number of unique visitors to your website.
Consider Weaknesses That Undermine Results
The KPIs you select should not strictly pertain to the strengths of your financial advisory firm’s digital marketing campaign. KPIs should be selected in a manner that helps you make meaningful progress in addressing any shortcomings that may exist at your firm. As an example, if your company’s social media marketing is not achieving the intended impact, it is sensible to choose KPIs that zero in on specific problems so you can take corrective action and measure your improvement.
Unique Online Visitors are Particularly Important
Aggregate web traffic to your financial advisor firm’s website is an important marketing metric. Unique online visitors are also worth focusing on. The number of unique online visitors to your website is the level of traffic that is from specific individuals who are new to the site as opposed to those who are repeat visitors or already know your firm.
How do you know they already know you? They enter your name in the search engine. Your stated goal may be to reach people who do not know you.
If half your monthly online visits are from those who have been to the site in the past, the audience is not as large as you might have previously assumed. Ideally, the majority of your online visitors will be unique, indicating there is a wide audience with considerable online visibility and the potential for lead generation.
Take advantage of web measurement tools such as Google Analytics and you will be able to find out how many unique visitors you have versus repeat visitors. It is also important to study other metrics for a more comprehensive view of your website’s unique visitors. As an example, the surrounding metrics of the top pages on your site and the average amount of time spent on each page provide particularly valuable insight that helps you better understand your site’s traffic.
Focus on Client Engagement
Zero in on the pages and the online content that capture your target audience’s attention. The bottom line is your financial advisory firm needs to engage leads through intriguing online content. Consider whether more online discussion takes place in the comments section of your social media as opposed to your blog or another component of your online footprint. This insight will help you make the most of each of these components to better optimize your website, social media, blog, etc. to better engage your target audience.
Consider the Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
This KPI clues you into how effective your website is in generating leads. As an example, if your financial advisory firm website is visited two thousand times per month yet only results in a couple of leads in that period of time, it is time to make some serious changes. Even slightly altering the look of your website and updating its content has the potential to convert that many more visitors into leads who are eventually converted into revenue-producing clients at the bottom portion of your digital marketing sales funnel.
Replicate the Success of Your Most Popular Pages
It is not enough to merely measure the length of time people spend on your financial advisory firm’s website. The pages that receive the most traffic and the longest view times are also quite important. These popular pages provide insight as to the type of services or content your online visitors are interested in.
Consider what makes those popular pages different from the rest of your online footprint, replicate those strategies/features on the rest of your site, and your unpopular pages will become that much more likely to generate measurable interest in your firm.
When in Doubt, Keep it Simple
It is a mistake to attempt to track a wide variety of KPIs assuming more information is always better. It is better to monitor a couple of important KPIs as opposed to an abundance of them.
Then your results do not get lost in the data. Narrow the scope to the KPIs to those that are most important and you will enjoy better results than would be possible had you attempted to track a dozen or more such indicators.
There is no sense in using one analytical tool after another and investing your limited time tracking dozens of KPIs when you can obtain valuable insight by tracking comparably few. It is quite possible tracking an abundance of KPIs will overwhelm you with information and ultimately steer you toward making increasingly poor decisions.
