Quality matters, of course. But quantity pays, too. According to a recent study by HubSpot, average website traffic is strongly correlated with an increase in the number of monthly blog posts. Businesses that post 15 blog updates or more per month get 5 times more traffic than websites that don’t blog.
This translates into actionable leads: Companies that increase the number of landing pages from 10 to 15 see their inbound leads increase by 55 percent.
The big financial services companies know this, and employ advisor marketing services to assist in their efforts. This is why sites like American Express’s Open Forum are publishing more than 50 articles per week: It attracts eyeballs, builds brand equity, generates leads, and sets them up for the sale.
Naturally, putting up quality posts multiple times per week takes time and effort. And that’s where the practicing financial advisor runs into a problem: There’s only so many hours in a day. How much time should you devote to writing blog posts and other inbound marketing content, versus other critical activities?
In many cases, the answer is none.
Here’s why:
Financial advisors are in the business of finding prospects, turning them into clients, and helping them achieve their financial goals with best-in-class service. These are the core activities of any financial services business and while prospect generation can be automated (and professional content is a key element in that process), closing the deal and turning a prospect into a client--and then providing a terrific service for those clients--cannot be outsourced or delegated.
For the vast majority, your time is far better spent prospecting, calling prospects, meeting prospects and clients, doing factfinders, presenting and implementing solutions, and getting referrals from happy clients.
Any activities that pull you personally away from those core activities are distractors. They tempt you into avoidance behavior and they are business killers.
Focus on your core competencies
Sure, any high-end service business needs some written literature. That includes everything from Web copy, blog posts, brochures, newsletters, case studies, appointment reminders and thank-you notes. But that doesn’t mean you should do all these things by yourself. For nearly all financial services practices, it’s critical to automate as many administrative processes as you can, and outsource or delegate as much of your non-core activity as you can. That’s where financial advisor writing services comes in.
Engaging a financial advisor writing service
Writing financial copy is almost never a core activity for any financial planner or advisor. It doesn’t directly generate revenue. Even most well-known advisors who have books of their own don’t do most of the actual writing themselves. Ghostwriting is routine in the financial services industry for one reason: It works.
The more successful you are, the more your calendar fills up with client appointments and client service – and the less time is available for writing books and articles! If this happens, terrific! Except your blogging and writing will likely suffer. This puts a lid on future lead generation (remember the HubSpot study), and inhibits your future growth.
For these reasons, most successful independent financial planners and advisors outsource some or all of their marketing writing to professional financial writers – for whom writing engaging and worthwhile financial content is very much their core competency and business activity!
Advantages of financial advisor writing services
Delegating your writing and publishing activities lets you realize the following benefits:
- Increase ROI. Content marketing generates three times more leads per dollar than traditional outbound marketing methods. Online ads now have a click-through rate of less than one-tenth of one percent. An increasing number of consumers have set their browsers to block all ads.
- Increase cost-effectiveness. Since copywriting isn’t a full-time function at most offices, it makes little sense to keep someone employed full-time. If you have your staff try to do it, you have to take them off their core assignments for hours or days at a stretch.
- Free your time for core activities. If you’re writing a blog update, you’re not calling a prospect or servicing a client. That prospect, if he becomes a client, should have a lifetime value of thousands of dollars to you. Possibly more. An existing client is worth several times more than a prospect – but if you lose a client because you’re not servicing them to a competitor who calls them while you’re sitting there at your computer writing a blog post, that’s thousands of dollars out the door.
- Build trust. Consumers have become jaded to other forms of marketing – especially when they haven’t ‘opted in’ by voluntarily clicking on your content from their own web browsing and searching. By and large, consumers still trust blogs. And they trust custom newsletters from bloggers they’ve grown to trust and respect. Inbound blog traffic gives you a chance to demonstrate your expertise as a financial professional, and then gives you a chance to further market to the reader who subscribes to your newsletter, downloads your white paper, or fills out the contact form for more information.
- Minimize jargon. When financial professionals do their own writing, they tend to employ too much technical language. The result may impress other financial geeks – but it doesn’t engage future clients.
- Maximize your own learning. You may be able to learn a great deal yourself. A professional financial advisor writing service may bring, research, and marketing and sales ideas and financial services insights that you may not have thought of by yourself – all because you delegated a non-core task to a professional, added some brainpower to your team, and cross-pollinated your competencies. Diversification isn’t just for portfolios: It also helps build better financial practices.
Note: While studies have shown that very frequent blog updates (15 per month and up) and marketing touches lead to optimal lead generation, even a small increase in blogging activity can make a big difference to your bottom line. The same HubSpot study we cite above also found that B2B companies that blog only 1-2 times per month generate 70 percent more leads than those who don’t blog at all.
Advisors who want to serve business owners and professionals should sit up and take notice.
Make no mistake: Managing your sales funnel and serving your clients is more than a full-time job, all by itself. Anything that diverts your time and attention away from those two critical activities jeopardizes your future prosperity as a financial advisor. A financial advisor writing service can help you eliminate some significant distractors, increase the number of leads for you to follow up on, and ultimately lead to more clients and more business for you.
