As the adage says, “You can’t see where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.” And in terms of your financial advisor marketing, it’s vital to have a clear path for your marketing efforts moving forward.
By performing a marketing audit at least once a year, you can take a deeper dive into what worked, and what didn’t, analyze your budget, and adjust accordingly as you move into the next phase of your financial advisor marketing plan.
Here are the most important areas that should be included in your financial advisor marketing audit:
Branding
Your financial advisory firm branding elements include logos, taglines, colors, fonts, images, and anything else that helps identify your firm across channels and platforms. Your financial advisor branding should be consistent across the board and should represent your knowledge and trustworthiness.
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Some common branding mistakes include the use of old, outdated logos, out-of-date messaging, and even graphics and images that no longer fit the overall aesthetic of your financial advisory firm. This can be troublesome from a branding perspective because these kinds of inconsistencies can confuse your audience, making them unsure of your brand’s overall identity and values.
Pro Tip: Don’t limit your branding audit to just your own online assets. By casting a wider net, you may discover out-of-date branding elements on partner sites as well.
Content
In terms of your financial advisor marketing content, it’s difficult to tell what to create next without knowing what you have already produced. It’s a good idea to get into the practice of logging your financial advisor content in one place to keep track of all the assets you’ll create over time.
This can be as simple as a spreadsheet, or as elaborate as a full content library where all the content is sorted and can be accessed. Taking the time to create a list or library can be intimidating, but the idea is that you only do it once. After that, by logging each piece of content as it’s created and distributed, you’re saving time down the road as well as always having a full picture of all the content you have at your disposal.
And it’s critical that you know the financial advisor content you have already created so you can repurpose it, avoid duplicating your efforts, as well as find where your content is lacking and fill the holes by creating new content.
Analytics and KPIs
Many times, marketing audits revolve heavily around numbers. This includes performance reports from advertising platforms, website analytics, budget analyses, and all other reporting that shows how your financial advisor marketing content performed, how much it spent, and if the ROI was within your expectations.
By analyzing all this data from the past year, you’re better equipped to make decisions that affect the upcoming year, including where there are weak performance areas and where to perhaps double down on successful efforts. For example, if one advertising platform is performing well above others, you may want to allocate more of your budget there instead of elsewhere, especially if those results were lackluster.
The important thing to note is that this should be viewed from a big picture, overall perspective and not simply based on one or two campaigns that happened to perform well.
Perform a Competitor Audit
Keeping tabs on the competition is nothing new. But who the competition is can change rapidly, especially in the digital space. And it’s nearly impossible to watch the competition if you don’t know who they are.
By performing a competitor audit regularly, you’ll know exactly who is vying for the same clients and identify how you can differentiate your financial advisory firm through marketing efforts moving forward.
When Is the Right Time to Perform a Marketing Audit?
There’s never a bad time to conduct a marketing audit. However, many marketers find that the end of the year is a good time to access the previous 12 months of marketing activity and plan for the next 12 months. This can also help you set your marketing goals for the year ahead, as well as assess your budget and adjust from the previous year if necessary.
However, if you find yourself well into the year and have not yet conducted a marketing audit, there’s no harm in doing it then. Afterward, you can decide if you want to conduct another mini-audit at year’s end to get on the end-of-the-year schedule or stick with mid-year if that works best for you and your financial advisory firm. More than the timing of the marketing audit is the importance of simply conducting it at all.
Bonus Tips/Best Practices for Financial Advisor Marketing Audits
Don’t Wait for an Official “Audit” to Make Changes if Something’s Not Working
If you’re performing a marketing audit annually, that doesn’t mean you have to wait until then to make changes to your financial advisor marketing. In fact, with digital marketing especially, things move so quickly that it’s often necessary to pivot.
A marketing audit is meant to be an overall, holistic view of the past year—not a granular, detailed look at all campaigns. That needs to be viewed in real-time to avoid wasting money and resources if something’s not working.
Be Objective (Or Hire a Third Party Who Is)
While sometimes easier said than done, it’s necessary to look at a marketing audit as objectively as possible. Of course, this can be hard to do when it’s your own financial advisory firm.
That’s where the use of an objective 3rd party, such as Paladin Digital Marketing, can be extremely helpful. Since you know your firm inside and out, it’s hard to separate your in-depth knowledge and personal thoughts to see your marketing efforts as someone viewing your content for the first time.
If you’re not using a third party, at least try to review your financial advisor marketing through the lens of someone who doesn’t have daily interaction with your financial advisory firm.
