Timing your move into digital marketing requires careful planning, alignment with your long-term goals for growth, and a solid foundation—especially when it comes to your marketing budget. For financial advisors who want to grow their firms, digital marketing is no longer optional. It has become an essential tool for growth in today’s increasingly tech-savvy, digital age.
But let’s not sugarcoat it: outsourcing your digital marketing to a specialized, high-quality agency isn’t cheap, and you’ll need a well-thought-out competitive strategy to make the investment worthwhile.
Whether you are new to digital marketing or an experienced pro looking to fine-tune your digital efforts, understanding the different phases of digital marketing development can be your key to producing meaningful results.
This article breaks it down into three phases—Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced—and explains why digital marketing is the future of significant growth for financial advisors.
Before diving into the nitty-gritty, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: “The Internet is a game changer”. More investors than ever are using the Internet to find, vet, compare, and contact financial advisors. Whether they’re Googling “best financial advisor near me” or looking on LinkedIn, your future clients are out there, online, researching their options.
Even if they heard about your firm at their country club there is an 82% probability they will visit your website before initiating any form of contact. There is a 64% they will Google search your name. What they see on the Internet impacts who they contact for appointments.
Digital marketing gives investors a safer, more informed way to evaluate, compare, and select financial advisors. It’s how they initiate contact, often without ever picking up the phone.
If your firm isn’t easy to find—or worse, doesn’t inspire credibility and trust once they find you—those investors will click right past you and move on to your competitors. And no, they don’t leave thank-you notes. They are ghosts.
Every financial advisor’s digital marketing journey starts somewhere. Here’s what to expect in each phase.
The beginner phase is all about laying the foundation for your online presence. Think of it as building your digital storefront: it needs to be clean, inviting, and credible. At this stage, you’re not aiming to conquer the digital world with a smaller budget—you’re just trying to show up and make a good first impression.
Key goals:
Budget recommendations:
Once you’ve nailed the basics, it’s time to level up. The intermediate phase focuses on increasing your online visibility and generating traffic for your website.
You might say this is the key to your digital marketing success. Websites need traffic they can convert into engagements. The best engagements want to schedule appointments. Other engagements are seeking financial information.
Key goals include:
Budget recommendations:
Welcome to the big leagues. The advanced phase is for financial advisors who want to dominate their niche and have the resources to commit to a robust digital marketing strategy. At this stage, you’ll treat digital marketing like a full-time job (or hire someone to do it for you).
Key goals include:
Budget Recommendations:
Goals are the North Star of your digital marketing strategy. Whether you’re just starting or already in the advanced phase, these goals will guide your efforts:
Let’s address the financial elephant in the room. Your marketing budget will depend on your goals, phase of development, and overall revenue. A general rule of thumb is to spend 3-5% of your annual revenue on marketing. That may sound steep, but remember: this is an investment in your future growth.
In general, you will be spending several hundred to several thousand dollars per month to hire a digital marketing agency that specializes in your industry.
Will digital marketing pay for itself? There are two ways to measure positive ROI. First is annual revenue that is produced by a new client (1% of $1mm is $10,000).
Second is the long-term economic value of a new client. If your average retention is seven years then the economic value of a new client is $70,000 plus market appreciation and reinvested income.
If you’re expecting instant results, digital marketing might not be your best bet. Building an online presence takes time, at least one year of consistent effort to see meaningful results. But here’s the good news. Do everything right and the digital marketing process can produce better results sooner and for the foreseeable future.
Consider the longevity and results that have been produced by the two main lead generation firms: SmartAsset and WiserAdvisor. They produce thousands of leads per month using digital marketing.
This is your opportunity to produce your own leads using a similar strategy.
Still wondering when to start? The answer is simple: right now. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to catch up to your competitors who have already embraced digital marketing. Remember, the Internet isn’t just a wave of the future—it’s already here, transforming the way investors find vet, compare, and choose financial advisors.
Don’t get left behind. Whether you’re just getting started or ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, the time to act is now. The question isn’t if you should use digital marketing—it’s when. And if you’ve read this far, you already know the answer.
Are there any digital marketing shortcuts? No! It takes a commitment of time and money. The key is to select the right digital marketing agency to help you or build an in-house marketing department that can do the work for you.