Let’s face it, a high percentage of financial professionals struggle with digital marketing strategies because they are much better financial planners and investment advisors than sales representatives. In fact, many of the best advisors struggling with marketing do not even believe it is the highest and best use of their valuable time. Frequently, they are way more productive and valuable when developing financial plans and investing in their client’s assets.
Consequently, many of these advisors do not even have effective marketing plans that enable them to build bigger, more profitable firms. They tend to be stagnant firms that win a few clients each year, usually from referrals, and lose a few clients each year, so their firms are in a perpetual state of going sideways.
Paladin Digital Marketing can help. We specialize in working with financial advisors, and our main role is building effective financial advisor marketing strategies that produce traffic, leads, and prospective clients. Read our top five marketing tips to learn more about making the web your best source for a steady flow of high-quality prospects.
What are the Top 5 marketing tips that will increase the productivity of your firm?
We will answer the following five questions with proven tips that will improve the marketing results of your financial advisory firm:
- How is digital marketing by financial advisors similar to duck hunting?
- Why do targeted audiences with liquid assets work best?
- Why do investors use the web to find you?
- Why do investors research online to learn more about you?
- Why is your website a key piece of your marketing efforts?
How is digital marketing by financial advisors similar to duck hunting?
Where would you go to find ducks if you were a duck hunter? You would probably build your duck blind near a large body of water with an abundant food source nearby (a rice field). Your odds for success go way up when your hunting strategy is based on going where large numbers of ducks congregate.
The same can be said about investors and the internet, which is where investors go to find financial services. It is also where investors learn more about financial advisors and the professionals who work for them.
But, unlike the ducks, investors can be anonymous until they have completed their research and want to be contacted (not shot). They want to get answers to their questions about financial advisors.
Outbound Marketing versus Inbound Marketing for financial advisors
Enough about duck hunting. Let’s focus on advisors who want to expand the number of investors their firms serve. How are advisors going to reach the right investors for their services?
The answer is digital marketing. All you have to do is look at the internet’s impact on the marketing practices of other industries. It has been profound, and there is no going back.
How many advisors are still cold-calling investors to sell their advice and services? Many higher-quality firms have stopped cold calling due to its invasive nature and extremely poor results. The final nails in that coffin could be Caller ID and spam filters that help investors avoid unwanted calls and emails.
These obsolete Outbound Marketing tactics required advisors to initiate contact with investors who did not want to be contacted. Their rejection rates approached 100%. This was not an effective strategy for producing new clients.
The internet created the opportunity for Inbound Marketing. The foundation of this marketing strategy is investors initiating contact with financial advisors.
Why?
Because investors had to be able to find advisers before they could learn more about them and contact them. This made the internet an invaluable source for investors and financial advisors who mastered digital marketing or hired an agency like Paladin to help them.
The internet created a convenient way for investors to find and research advisors while maintaining their anonymity until they wanted to schedule interviews. The challenges for digital marketing have been creating online visibility, producing website traffic, and convincing investors to give up their anonymity and contact financial advisors.
Why do targeted audiences with liquid assets work best?
Many advisors make a big mistake when they target broad groups of investors online based on criteria that do not include liquidity. Let me give you a couple of examples.
They target business owners who have substantial assets but are tied up in their businesses.
They target individuals who meet their minimum asset requirements, but the assets are tied up in company 401k plans.
A third example may be the broadest. The investors already have financial advisors and are satisfied with their services and results. They are not seeking replacement advisors.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Contrast that to seeking:
- Owners who want to sell their businesses and retire
- Individuals who are rolling 401k assets into IRAs
- Investors who are unhappy with their current advisors
You can see how targeting investors with liquid assets would be a much more effective marketing strategy. The alternative would be a waste of your time and money.
Why do investors use the web to find you?
You may already know the answer to this one. The web is a fast, easy, anonymous way for investors to find advisors, learn more about them, and select the firms they want to interview. They do not have to wander into a broker/dealer’s branch office and ask to speak to the broker of the day.
Instead, they enter a few keywords in a search engine and have instant access to as many firms as they want to review. The same can be said for any other professional who markets their services online: attorneys, CPAs, doctors, dentists, architects, etc.
Why do investors use online research to learn more about you?
You might think the number one Inbound Marketing application would be investors using the web to find financial advisors. However, that is not the case. Investors have a lot of ways to find financial advisors. That is also no longer the case.
Today, investors have access to unprecedented amounts of information online. This means what they see on websites and what they see when they Google search names impacts who they contact for interviews and eventually hire.
To get in the game, you must hire experienced digital marketing professionals or a digital marketing agency that knows how to market financial advisors online.
