How Digital Marketing Can Help Financial Advisors
In the past, financial advisors relied largely on word of mouth and referrals to get more clients. You don’t normally see financial advisors aggressively advertising on TV, radio, newspapers or billboards. Like other professional services, financial advisors tend to have a more traditional approach to marketing.
But in today’s fast paced world where everybody relies on the Internet to get information and communicate, financial advisors should be ready to embrace modern digital marketing strategies if they want their practice to thrive. Digital marketing is not only essential for new independent financial advisors, but also well established firms if they want to be able to keep up with their competition.
How To Start With Digital Marketing
If you want to establish a solid digital presence, you’ll need a professionally designed website. A website lets you have your own space on the Internet where you can pretty much do anything you like. You won’t have to be constrained by the rules and capabilities of other platforms like social media.
When designing a website, you should develop your company branding first. Your website needs to be able to reflect who you are as a brand so that even casual visitors can easily remember you.
Your website is also going to be the base for all your digital marketing campaigns, so it should be a place that people will want to visit and will compel them to take the next step.
In addition to setting up a website, you should also create profiles on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also create business profiles on YouTube and Instagram depending on your approach to marketing.
Digital marketing has many different branches, so let’s take a closer look at which ones can benefit financial advisors the most.
Content Marketing
Just because you have a website doesn’t mean people will start flocking to it and you can sit back and watch new clients roll in. People will have to find you first, and then you can start educating them about your brand.
In order to drive more traffic to your website and show people that you can be trusted with their financial future, you need to create valuable and relevant content. Great content makes you more visible in search results and introduces new people to your brand.
If you want to get ahead in the SEO game, you need to have awesome content to support your website and your brand. You can’t just rely on people randomly finding your site when you’re on the 20th page of the search results for financial advisors in your area.
You also shouldn’t just limit yourself to posting just your website. You can get your brand in front of more people by reaching out to more established websites and news outlets and asking them to feature your content and press releases.
Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms offer lots of great marketing opportunities for any business. They not only offer tremendous reach that can give your brand more exposure, but also allow you to easily interact with people.
People who are already following you on social media can also help you get more exposure when they share or repost your content on their own social media feeds. This helps spread the word about your brand and your services to new audiences. And since your brand and content was shared by someone they already know and trust, it’s going to be much easier to gain their confidence.
Social media allows you to nurture relationships with your followers, which is a key part in earning people’s trust. You can continually push updates about your business and your insights on financial matters to your followers which helps reinforce your image as an expert in the industry. They don’t have to actively seek out your updates either. It will all appear as part of their news feeds which helps keep your brand on top of their minds. You can also easily respond to comments and messages which makes people more willing to engage with you whenever they have questions or concerns.
Email Marketing
Even though email is the oldest form of communicating online, it’s still one of the most effective, and yet relatively inexpensive, digital marketing options you have at your disposal. All you need is to get people’s email addresses, which pretty much everybody already has.
As more and more people visit your site, you’re going to get emails from people who want to know more about your services. You can also get people’s email addresses by setting up a mailing list on your website. Either way, once you have someone’s email address, you can directly push updates, new content and promotions to their inbox.
Email marketing is a great way to keep people in the loop and also helps your brand stay relevant. Even if someone was only mildly interested in financial advisors when they signed up for your mailing list, you can continuously build up their interest and maintain a relationship with your leads just by sending emails regularly.
Of course, you have to find a balance between spam and engaging content. You don’t want to end up being marked as spam by the majority of people in your mailing list. A new email every few weeks or at least once a month is usually enough. You just have to make sure your emails have compelling subject lines and provide something of value in the message itself.
Paid Ads
While traditional advertising may be considered as taboo or tacky by most financial advisors, paid ads in the digital realm are not as frowned upon. If you want to quickly grow awareness for your brand, paying to get your links on top of search results and in front of people’s social media feeds is a sure-fire way to get results.
But before you go out and start setting up a new Google Adwords or Facebook Ads campaign, you need to determine your goals first. Do you want people to sign up for a mailing list, join your webinar, or schedule a consultation? Make sure you have an awesome landing page with a great call-to-action that will make the most out of every click that you pay for. Paid ads are not just about generating brand awareness, it also has the power to help you increase your conversions.
Final Thoughts
Before you go out and completely overhaul your digital marketing strategy, make sure everything you put out is compliant. Always review the regulations so that you don’t get penalized. If you need assistance with your financial marketing, make sure to hire digital marketers that have lots of experience in the financial industry.