When you’re a financial advisor for business owners, there are many ways to market your business. From social media to blog posts to email marketing, the number of choices can be overwhelming.
And, you probably have a lot of questions, like: What is marketing for financial advisors? How will a digital marketing strategy help bring in new clients? How can financial advisors like me build a marketing plan?
We’re here to help.
In this article, we provide marketing tips for financial advisors who work with business owners. We’ll go over how to get started with your marketing strategy, why marketing matters, and some ideas to set you on the right path.
Let’s get started
Why Marketing for Financial Advisors Matters
For financial advisors, like yourself, marketing is a crucial arm in the overall health of your advisory firm. Without marketing, generating new leads and gaining more business can be difficult – if not impossible.
In today’s marketing, most prospective clients will spend a considerable amount of time online, whether that’s through social media browsing or direct search engine use. By positioning your firm as a leader and authority in your niche industry through effective marketing, you’ll generate more business and watch the value of your firm grow.
Where to Start With Financial Advisor Marketing
When you’re just starting out with your marketing strategy, it can feel overwhelming. However, starting with these three steps will set you up for success:
Identify Your Target Audience
You may have done research on – or already know – who your target is. That’s great. If not, now is a perfect opportunity to do so.
Any successful marketing plan will have a defined target audience. What types of clients are you looking to secure? What problems are they facing? What questions do they need answered?
These initial questions will help you create a blueprint for your marketing plan, and identify when and where you’ll begin.
Get a clear understanding of who your ideal client is. What channels do they frequent online and when? What are their pain points? What solutions are they looking for?
By answering these questions, you can create what some marketers call a “buyer persona,” which is a clear and precise description of your target audience.
Write Down Your Value Proposition
A value proposition is exactly what it sounds like: what do you have to offer to potential clients that the competition doesn’t? What is your promise to them?
While you may not explicitly state your value proposition in all your marketing, using this as the underlying message in your content will help keep your marketing content consistent.
Define Your Unique Brand
A “brand” is the sum of many different things – such as your name, logo, color palette, fonts, voice, values, and so on – that helps people identify your business.
Establishing the foundations for your brand can take a bit of work. A lot of financial advisory firms turn to branding and design experts to help them with this. However, it’s possible to do it yourself if you’re just starting out.
Your brand will help make it clear why your prospective clients should choose you over the competition. In all your marketing efforts, your brand should be clear and consistent.
7 Essential Elements of a Financial Advisor Marketing Strategy
Now that you have your marketing basics established, here are 6 elements you should consider when building your financial advisor marketing strategy:
1. Create a Professional Website
First and foremost, if you don’t have a professional website, you’ll need to get one soon.
A website is ground zero for your financial advisory firm and is the first place prospects go to learn more about you and your business. It’s the place where all your digital traffic will be diverted to in order to learn more about you and contact you. Even if your social media strategy is strong or you become a guest on many different podcasts, if you don’t have a virtual home base, your marketing strategy will flounder – as will your business.
The great part is that creating a professional website isn’t as difficult as it used to be. There are a lot of out-of-the-box website services, as well as website designers who also offer maintenance and hosting services.
But if you really want your digital marketing to rise above your competitors, investing some time and resources into a dynamic, professional website is crucial.
Here are some things to consider when creating your website:
- Showcase your values: As a financial advisor, communicating and connecting with your target audience is paramount. Your website should reflect your values so that potential clients can determine if you’ll be a good fit for them.
- Get personal: Engaging and dynamic elements on your website can help bolster trust. To do this, get personal. Add videos of you and your team, introduce yourself and let your audience know who you are and what you stand for (their growth and prosperity).
- State your value proposition: As we discussed above, what are you offering to your potential clients that the competition isn’t? How can you show this to your website visitors? Include things like case studies, white papers, downloadables, and an enticing newsletter.
2. Gain More Traffic to Your Website Using SEO
Since we’re on the topic of websites, let’s tackle a big topic: search engine optimization or SEO for short.
SEO refers to the actions you can take to help your target audience find you when they’re using a search engine, such as Google.
Search engines use crawlers to scan the internet and understand what content is out there. Then, when a user types a query into the search engine, the search engine tries to return the results it thinks best matches the search. How closely your website responds to the query – and how good of a user experience your website offers – will dictate where it ranks in the results. The goal here is to show up near the top of the first page of results.
When it comes to SEO, there are two types to consider: Technical (or off-page) SEO and on-page SEO.
Technical or off-page SEO are optimizations you (or your website developer) can make to the back end of your website to increase your odds of success. Things like site speed, ease of navigation and readability, no dead links, and mobile optimization are all things that fall within the technical SEO bucket.
On-page SEO are the types of optimizations that most people are familiar with. This includes things like:
- Including appropriate keywords within your content
- Using keywords strategically within your title tags
- Assigning keyword-rich alt tags to images
Publishing relevant and high-quality content on a regular basis will help your SEO. This content could be in the form of blogs, case studies, white papers, infographics and more. Plus, as an added bonus, content is also a great way to showcase your expertise and enhance your firm’s brand, trust, and authority in the space.
3. Establish an Online Presence
Once you’ve got your website up and running, now is the time to establish your online presence more broadly. Here are a few places you can do that:
Social Media
Social media can provide a great place for financial advisors to find new clients. It can help you gain exposure, build brand awareness, and even start curating online communities. From there, you can funnel your audience to your website and ultimately, conversions.
Social media channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., and podcast channels. But not all social media platforms are the same. Far from it. Each social media platform has a particular demographic, messaging, and use.
Where one professional may gain a lot of exposure on Facebook, another might use Twitter. LinkedIn is a great space for professional networking, and a lot of your clients and colleagues will be on there.
Whatever platforms you choose, the key here is to stay consistent with your brand, values, messaging and offerings, while adapting the types of content you post to fit the platform. And, you should always have an easy way for audiences to contact you.
To create an effective social media marketing strategy, you should publish high-quality content on a regular basis, engage your followers and interact with other pages/accounts.
Online Business Listing Services
An online business listing service is a business directory that’s online and specific to your niche, location, or category (or all three depending on the search field parameters). It’s one of the ways business professionals can get found by online searchers.
There’s a plethora of online business listing services available. Some are free and some are paid. You don’t need to be on all of them, so think about which are geared towards your audience.
Here are a few places to begin:
4. Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is still going strong and is an important outbound digital marketing tool that financial advisors use. Through email marketing, financial advisors can showcase their expertise, instill trust and authority, and encourage their audience to take action.
To get started with email marketing, it’s first important to build a list of contacts. You can do this by putting an email subscribe form on your website or in your email signature. Just make sure you’re following privacy law in your jurisdiction when collecting email addresses or other personal information.
Once you’ve built an email list, it’s time to start emailing. You can choose to email your list once per week, once per month or even once per quarter. Whatever you choose, you’ll get the best results if you keep it consistent.
Wondering what you should email people? You could send them insights about financial strategies, industry news or trending articles. You can also send them content you’ve created yourself, such as your blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, and so on.
Many financial advisors will invest in an email marketing automation platform or a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to help streamline their email marketing efforts. With an effective tool, email marketing is easy to track. You can get real-time notifications when a recipient has opened an email, downloaded a piece of content, or clicked-through to your website.
5. Use Paid Methods to Generate Leads
Now that we’ve gotten a handle on some of the marking tools available for financial advisors, let’s dive a little deeper into some of the paid methods of generating leads: search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, and paid social media marketing (also called ‘paid social’).
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the process of paying for ads or rankings within search engines to generate traffic to your website through search engines.
A familiar example is Google Ads. Businesses pay to have their website listed at the top of a Google search results page based on keywords that are important to them. How much you’ll pay is dependent on how many other businesses want to rank for that keyword.
SEM can be an important arm in your digital marketing strategy and can help boost website traffic quickly and, ideally, drive conversions.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
If you’ve ventured into the world of paid media, you’ve probably heard the term PPC or pay-per-click. It’s similar to SEM, but not exactly the same.
When you run a paid ad through a search engine, a social media platform, a website, or other online locations, you’ll be charged each time someone clicks on your ad. Hence “pay-per-click”. How much you are charged will again depend on competition levels and where you’ve placed your ad.
While in the past, PPC ads have been related to search engines like Google or Bing, they can now exist across a variety of platforms, including social media, which can be an incredibly powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal. More on this below.
Paid Social Media Marketing
While social media marketing often uses a PPC and/or SEM model, it does warrant separate mention.
Social media platforms can be a game-changer for smaller financial advisory firms.While you’re still building your organic social media presence, you can run ads on your favorite social platforms to get more visibility and conversions.
For many financial advisors, LinkedIn is a great place to generate leads. While it’s considered one of the more expensive platforms to market on, the quality of your leads are generally quite high.
Since paid ads, in general, can be complex to set up and optimize, many financial advisers turn to a digital marketing agency for support in this area.
6. Consider Podcasts
Podcasts are on the rise and aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. Particularly in the B2B (business-to-business) content marketing world, leveraging on the power of podcasts can generate a strong ROI.
Podcasts are effective because they offer an opportunity to deep-dive into topics that you’re an expert on, showcasing your knowledge and authority. By lending your voice and personality to a podcast, listeners are given the opportunity to get to know you and get a sense of your firm’s culture.
After you’ve recorded a podcast, there are even more ways you can integrate it into your digital marketing strategy. Repurpose your podcast into soundbites, pull quotes, video clips, and key takeaways. Distill this information into graphics and text-based content you can use in email and LinkedIn newsletters, and across your social media channels and blog posts.
Podcasts can be a way to set you apart from your competitors and increase awareness of your business.
7. Rely on a Tool That Will Help Automate the Process
After you’ve developed a marketing strategy for your practice, it’s time to think about automating pieces of it, so you can stay focused on delivering value to your clients. From content creation, to distribution, to analytics, there are many opportunities to add automations.
- Generate more business owner leads
- Convert sales conversations into clients
- Increase your client’s lifetime value
