If you’re currently wearing multiple hats at your financial advisory firm, chances are that digital marketing is one of those hats. Why? Because unless you’re a large firm with a massive marketing budget, you likely don’t have a dedicated marketing team at your disposal. But you’re not alone. And even better news? There are many tools and resources available that can help.
While it’s highly unlikely that anyone with even the slightest bit of digital marketing experience has not heard of HubSpot, there is even more to the mega-popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that’s been around since 2005. Since that time, HubSpot has expanded its product offerings to cater to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
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What Does HubSpot Do?
In short, the HubSpot CRM platform keeps sales, marketing, and content management in one place. Without it, it’s likely that these efforts are siloed in different places and aren’t working together, which in turn means you’re probably working harder to manage all these different aspects of your financial advisory firm’s marketing and sales efforts.
By bringing them all into one platform, HubSpot can connect and streamline these channels, eliminating redundancy and improving efficiency.
How Can HubSpot Help Financial Advisors?
Specifically, here are some of the ways HubSpot can help your financial advisory firm’s bottom line:
Marketing Automation
A huge part of digital marketing success is getting the right message to the right people at the right time. With HubSpot’s marketing automation, your financial advisory firm can do just that. These automation tools include workflows, chatbots, trigger and drip campaigns, and more.
And with the ability to segment your prospects by demographics, psychographics, lifestyle traits, and even behavior, you can offer a deeper level of personalization in your outreach efforts.
Sales Funnel/Pipeline Management
Once you’ve added a prospect to your list, what happens to it? Is there currently a defined process guiding them through a sales funnel? If the answer is “no” then HubSpot can help with this also. Prospects often need multiple contacts before converting.
This is especially true for financial service providers more than those in retail, as the decision to partner with a financial advisor is a bigger commitment than purchasing sunglasses online. By having a predetermined sales funnel, you can guide them through the process by delivering messaging at specific intervals depending on where they are in the process.
If they convert at any stage of the funnel, they’re moved out of the pipeline. The best part of this entire process is that it’s happening automatically, without intervention from anyone at your financial advisory firm.
Schedule Meetings
If scheduling meetings with clients and prospects is another time-consuming task you’re faced with, you can use HubSpot to help with that too. The Meeting Scheduler can prevent back-and-forth communication by trying to find meeting times that work for everyone involved. And because it syncs with Google and Office 365 calendars, you don’t have to worry about using yet another calendar app to keep track of your meetings.
Analytics and Reporting
With so much information inside one CRM platform, it’s no surprise that HubSpot also offers detailed analytics and reporting. This reporting not only includes activities of leads and prospects within the funnel, but goes much deeper into website performance, SEO, sales reporting, digital ad campaign management (such as Google Ads), and more. It also offers attribution reporting, which credits specific interactions with each user.
Integrations
In addition to its all-encompassing, user-friendly interface, HubSpot’s CRM is also known for easily integrating with other platforms. This is great news for financial advisors who have client and/or prospect data in other areas, such as webinar hosting platforms, email marketing platforms, and even event management software applications. This makes it easy to bring all this data into one place to streamline your financial advisor sales and marketing effort and tracking.
Tips for Choosing a CRM
Scalability
While it’s easy to think about your financial advisory firm’s current marketing needs, it’s very important to think about future growth. That’s why scalability is an important factor when choosing a CRM platform. In other words, don’t limit your options based on where you’re at now, since a platform like HubSpot can grow with your firm.
Cost
Knowing how much a CRM will affect the bottom line of your financial advisory business is necessary before making any commitments. The good news is that Hubspot offers a free version that can be upgraded when you’re ready to use some of the more advanced features.
Compliance
CRMs hold a lot of important data about not only your prospects but your existing clients as well. For this reason, financial advisors need to be diligent in vetting potential CRM platforms that only have the utmost security and compliance measures in place.
And while ultimately your financial advisory firm is responsible for the content shared to and distributed from a CRM platform (i.e., emails, digital ads, website content), the CRM partner you choose needs to understand the importance of safeguarding all data held within their system.
And HubSpot fits the bill there as well. In fact, according to their website, they offer an “end-to-end approach to data security, privacy, and control, each product includes tools that empower your teams to achieve compliance with confidence and security infrastructure that keeps your data safe.”
Can Someone Help Me Manage My CRM?
Absolutely, and since HubSpot is such a popular CRM platform, you’re likely to find someone with expert-level knowledge at a digital marketing firm. If you don’t already have a digital marketing partner, consider how much additional time you or your staff will have to spend setting up and managing a CRM.
While it’s true that many of the processes are automated, it still takes time to get them in place initially. This includes migrating client and prospect data, loading and cataloging financial advisor marketing content, setting up integrations with social channels and ad platforms, establishing website analytics goals and benchmarks, and customized dashboards for reporting and measurement.
In other words, setting up and making the most out of your financial advisor CRM is a job that may be too large for you or your internal team to take on alone.
About Paladin
Paladin is a team of digital marketing professionals with more than 100 years of collective financial industry experience marketing our clients' services to individuals, institutions, and financial advisors. Paladin is a boutique agency that was founded in 2003 to provide game-changing digital marketing services to a limited number of firms and professionals in the financial service industry. Our services range from designing and developing custom websites to providing SEO, SEM, and Fractional CMO services. Want more information about our digital marketing services? Email your request to Paladin’s CMO: Jack@PaladinDigitalMarketing.com
