If you’re a financial advisor, you may be considering hiring a digital marketing agency to help promote your firm online. There are many digital agencies out there but you want one that specializes in working for firms in the financial services industry and has a history of producing leads for financial advisors.
Digital marketing is a major part of the sales funnels that financial advisors use to produce new clients, assets, and revenues. You might even say it is the key part because it is the front-end that produces leads that you convert into clients. No leads mean no prospects and no prospects mean no new clients.
It is important to know digital marketing agencies for financial advisors can produce several benefits for your firm and not just the most sought after one - more qualified leads. Done right, digital marketing for financial advisors is an active process that helps advisors like you, produce more leads for their sales funnels.
Investor Benefits
It stands to reason, the processes investors use to find, research, and select financial advisors should have a major impact on the sales strategies that are used by advisors.
The more steps in your sales funnel that match investor processes for finding and screening advisors, the more productive your digital marketing sales funnel will be. For example, the best sales funnels are designed to help investors find, research, and contact you and your firm.
In fact, digital marketing sales funnels should be designed to facilitate the investors’ processes when investors use the Internet to:
- Find financial advisors
- Research financial advisors
- Initiate contact with financial advisors
You have seen how the Internet has impacted other industries based on the way consumers make buying decisions. It is just beginning to impact the financial service industry. The Internet gives investors unprecedented access to information about you and your firm. It also gives you a new way to market your services to investors.
Top 7 Financial Advisor Benefits
Digital marketing should be the front-end of the sales funnel for your firm when you rely on the Internet to produce leads for your firm.
There is no particular order of importance to the benefits. They are all important and they are interactive.
The Top 7 benefits are:
- Online visibility
- Brand awareness
- Website traffic
- Increased credibility
- Improved trust and credibility
- Competitive advantage
- Higher conversion rates
Each benefit has a major impact on the final results that are produced by the sales funnel for your firm. For example, the sales funnel starts on the Internet where investors find you/your firm. It ends when investors sign service agreements with you.
Online Visibility
A digital marketing sales funnel starts on the Internet because that is where many investors go to find financial advisors. The more visible you are, the easier your firm is to find.
The role of an agency is to build advisor visibility using a variety of digital marketing tools and tactics that increase online visibility:
- Lead-generation websites
- Blog articles
- Free offers
- Calls to action
- Landing pages
- Pillar pages
- Social media
- Local SEO
- Videos
- Drip email marketing
- Paid advertising (SEM)
A critical variable for building online visibility is critical mass so Google and the other search engines know which financial advisor websites are dependable sources of high-quality information.
Brand Awareness
Large companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on increasing and maintaining the visibility of their brands.
Why are brands important? A high percentage of consumers prefer to buy products and services from companies they have heard of. They can be extremely cautious when they are dealing with firms they have not heard of. This may be a false sense of security because the firms with the biggest marketing budgets may not deliver the best services.
How does that impact the digital marketing strategies of financial advisors with a few hundred million or a few billion dollars of assets under management? Your goal is to maximize your visibility when investors use the Internet to find and research advisors. You may also use advertising campaigns to buy visibility that promotes your brand/firm. But, only a select few are on TV promoting their brands.
Website Traffic
If finding financial advisors firms on the Internet is step one in the funnel, then step two is getting them from the Internet to your website. The concept is relatively simple. Investors have to find something that is compelling enough that they click on it.
A digital marketing agency can assist you in creating compelling meta titles and descriptions that get investors searching the Internet to click on your link. Boring or non-descriptive titles/descriptions can exclude you from investor searches that are based on the click of a mouse.
Once an investor lands on your site, there are typically three paths they can take based on their needs:
- The investor has an immediate need for an advisor
- The investor is seeking information about you/your firm
- The investor is looking for information about a financial topic
Optimizing the visitor experience on your website is considered a key service that is provided by a digital marketing agency.
Anonymity
Digital marketing plays a key role in the sales funnel by convincing investors, who visit your site, to give up their anonymity and submit their contact information. This process begins the part of the sales funnel when financial advisors use their personal sales strategies to convert prospects into clients.
This might be the pivotal service that a digital marketing agency can assist with. From a sales funnel perspective, there is nothing worse than a visitor who exits your website without submitting any form of contact information and does not return to the site.
Credibility
When investors use the Internet to find and research financial advisors, all too often, this is the first time they have heard of the firms they are researching.
So, another role of a digital marketing agency is to make sure the visitor’s first impression of your firm is a very positive one.
Nothing erodes credibility faster than a poor first impression. This occurs when investors land on a website and are not able to easily find the information that they are looking for. If your website’s navigation is not totally intuitive or the website is not user-friendly in terms of usability, clear messaging, and appropriate graphics, you run the risk of that visitor leaving and not returning.
The right digital marketing agency can assist you in building a lead-generating website for your firm. The agency’s role is to understand your target audience(s) and build a compelling website around those individuals with the right messaging, graphics, and navigation.
Trust
Using the Internet to build trust is another important benefit of a digital marketing agency that really understands your business. For example, trust can be based on what investors see on the Internet. So it is important that you provide a minimum amount of disclosure about your firm and the professionals who work there.
Another form of disclosure is how financial advisors are compensated. This could be a published fee schedule if it creates a competitive advantage or a description of your compensation - a quarterly asset-based fee for investment services and a fixed or hourly fee for planning services.
Another example of trust is making sure investors feel safe when you are asking them to submit their contact information on your websites. A feeling of safety is important because many investors are cautious if they have had bad experiences with previous financial advisors.
Competitive Advantage
Google says the typical investor will visit six financial advisor websites when they use the Internet to find and research financial advisors.
This means what investors see on the Internet for particular advisors has to be competitive with what they see for other advisors.
For example, There are several ways to measure the competitiveness of advisor websites. An important one is the delivery of the information that investors are seeking when they visit multiple financial advisor websites. Investors are in a position to compare the information they see on the sites of several advisors. What they see or don’t see has an impact on which firms they contact for appointments or additional information.
The role of a digital marketing agency is to turn the needs and practices of investors into a competitive advantage for financial advisors.
Conversion Rates
From a digital marketing perspective, this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Digital marketing plays a critical role in the sales marketing funnel process when it converts visitors into leads and leads into qualified prospects.
Consider the following. Some financial advisor websites rarely convert visitors into leads so their conversion rates are close to zero. On the other hand, a typical advisor website may convert one of two percent of visitors into leads. In an ideal world, a digital marketing agency can double or triple the conversion rates of financial advisor websites that were not designed to convert visitors into leads.
Digital marketing pays for itself when it produces the right types of leads.
