Are you ready to do a better job of keeping the lights on in your digital space?
An active blog will tell investors that you are in the kitchen and ready to serve up what they are hungry for. Let’s review some background before we dive into tips that will help you make blog marketing your best source for high-quality leads, contacts, and prospects.
At its core, blog marketing is like betting on the Internet. You are betting that increasing numbers of investors will go online to find financial advisors and economic information. Yet, within this bet, you can better your odds of being seen with a solid SEO strategy.
A second major bet is that financial advisors initiate contact with advisors. For decades it was the other way around. Financial advisors contacted investors (cold calling, direct mail, networking). This has become very rare due to the invasive nature of the marketing investors’ increasing use of Caller ID and spam filters.
To be clear, blog marketing is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy used to reach investors who do not know your firm. If they did, they would enter your URL in a search engine. Since most of them don’t, they need another way to find you.
Our tips provide answers to several crucial digital marketing questions that will help you:
- Produce financial advisor leads
- Build credibility and trust
- Compete with other financial advisor websites
- Avoid digital marketing mistakes
- Select a digital marketing agency to help you
How does blog marketing produce leads for financial advisors?
Keep in mind that investors can search for financial advisors by name or financial information. Either way, you want them to find your firm online, right? Your blog articles serve the following three purposes.
- Blog articles include keywords that investors use to find what they are looking for. For example, a blog article that describes how investors transfer assets from a 401k to a self-directed IRA.
- Investors must visit your website to read the blog article that contains the information they seek.
- Once they are on your website, you have an opportunity to convince them to contact you.
Leads occur when target audiences read the blog articles, contact your firm for more information, or schedule an interview.
How does blog marketing produce credibility and trust for financial advisors?
This is an easy one: The content in your blog articles establish you as an expert in your field. In particular, the pieces are well written, contain the information the investors are looking for and are not overly promotional.
The more compelling the title and content, the higher the probability clients and prospects will visit your website to read it.
Credibility occurs when the blog article convinces the investor that you are a financial planning expert on a particular topic or pain point.
Trust occurs when the blog article convinces the investor that you are trying to help them and not just sell them an investment or insurance product.
In an ideal world, investors will read blog articles, then view the content on your website to learn more about your firm and the professionals who work there. If they like what they see, that may be enough to convince them to give up their anonymity and contact you.
Why is original blog content so crucial for the production of leads?
The role of blog marketing for financial advisors is to build SEO visibility in the search engines for keywords used by investors when they seek financial advice or information. Therefore, we must play by the search engines’ rules to achieve higher visibility (pages one, two, and three). Less than 2% of search engine users scroll past page 3.
One of the most critical Google rules for content is originality. There is no SEO visibility for content that Google or any other search engine has previously crawled. In fact, they call content they have already seen duplicate content.
Therefore, downloading content that the search engines have seen hundreds or thousands of times has no SEO value. This explains why so many advisors say their websites do not produce leads. Their websites don’t have traffic because their blog marketing is not producing any online visibility.
Investors are on your website. Now what?
The efforts of blog marketing for financial advisors are to produce Internet visibility, website traffic, credibility, and trust. These websites' crucial role is converting traffic into qualified leads and contacts. Leads want to schedule interviews; contacts want financial information.
It makes sense that leads will visit multiple financial advisor websites to determine which firms they want to interview. This could mean they review six to eight sites and contact the three to four they want to interview. The entire process may take 30 minutes on the Internet.
Investors have access to an unprecedented amount of information on financial advisor websites – information about firms and the professionals who work for them. More cautious investors seeking financial advisors will also search the firms’ names and the professionals who work there. This is their access to extraordinary amounts of information that is only limited by their own initiative.
How do investors compare advisors on the Internet?
It stands to reason that investors are seeking the same information on multiple financial advisor websites. Comparing their findings and based on their preferences, they will determine who they contact for interviews.
It makes sense that financial advisor websites have to be competitive. Why? Because 75% of investors use a process of exclusion when they select advisors for interviews. That is, they exclude advisors from further consideration based on all sorts of criteria: Too big, too small, not enough experience or certifications, etc.
Why do they use this process? They do not know enough about financial advisors to select the best ones for the right reasons. And yet, if they start with eight advisors and want to choose one, they must exclude seven.
What is on competitive financial advisor websites?
We have already established that investors will visit multiple websites when they seek financial advisors to inquire with. Call it caution, but investors will be careful, particularly when they have had bad experiences with financial professionals in the past.
There are five pages on financial advisor websites that define their competitiveness:
- About Us describes the background of your firm
- Our Team describes the credentials of the professionals who work there
- What We Do describes your firm’s services
- Who We Serve represents your ideal clients
- Why Us provides differentiating characteristics
Investors will spend two to three minutes reviewing the content on these pages and contact the advisors who best meet their needs.
What causes investors to give up their anonymity?
This answer is more complicated than you might think. If investors are seeking advisors they can interview, they will contact anyone who meets their requirements.
Let’s use this eBook as an example: A compelling title and content that addresses your frequent pain point is an effective combination. You will download our free offer if it grants you the insight you seek, and you feel safe enough in doing so, knowing that we will reach out somehow to see what support you need. The same applies to your potential clients.
What are financial advisors’ top 3 digital marketing mistakes?
Many financial advisors fail to recognize the extraordinary amount of online competition.
Notwithstanding the significant differences between the sizes of firms, start-ups to firms responsible for billions of dollars of assets, just about any firm can be successful on the Internet. They just have to be smart, creative, and consistent when they produce content for public consumption.
So what are three of the most frequent digital marketing mistakes?
- You believe all websites are the same: Template-based Do It Yourself websites and custom lead generation websites. There are substantial differences in the performance of websites created for various purposes. Most websites are online sales brochures. The most productive websites go way beyond that.
- You download mass-produced library content thinking it has some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value: There is no value if Google has already seen the content hundreds or thousands of times. It takes original content to obtain recognition from Google and the other search engines
- You spend money on a higher-end website but do not allocate sufficient funds to the SEO services that produce traffic for their websites. Then you are disappointed with their lack of results.
Why does blog marketing produce the best leads?
There can be several reasons, but we will focus on the top three. In general, blog marketing produces the best results for leads because investors initiate the process. They use the Internet to find, research, and contact financial advisors.
- Investors only contact the advisors that they believe will meet their requirements.
- They conduct their research before they initiate contact. They already know a lot about advisors.
- They have a positive predisposition about the advisors they choose to contact.
Why select a digital marketing agency to help you?
Hiring a team of internal professionals with all the requisite skill sets would be costly. Based on industry averages, the fully loaded expense for a median level full-time professional could be $80,000 to $125,000, and you may need more than one professional based on the amount of work.
A digital marketing agency like PDM can provide a whole team of professionals for a fraction of the expense.
It makes sense to select a digital marketing agency that specializes in working with firms in your industry. Then their knowledge is even more applicable to your firm.
Be cautious if a firm claims its digital marketing knowledge will cover multiple industries and services. Specialized industry knowledge can produce superior results, which also applies to your firm.
Paladin is a specialized digital marketing agency that works with B2C and B2B firms in the financial service industry. We provide teams of professionals that can adapt to your needs and wants to help you reach more prospective clients.
