Traditionally, financial advisory marketing strategies were built around local reputations and word-of-mouth referrals, but a wave of new investors is bringing a new set of needs and behaviors to the table. Your financial advisor marketing strategy must address these new expectations.
As recent McKinley research describes, this audience is largely made up of women, young active traders, and affluent investors using a hybrid of traditional and self-directed accounts. Alongside the pandemic-triggered acceleration of digital banking adoption, their arrival means higher standards for personalization, bigger appetites for financial literacy content, and increased expectations for an omni-channel presence.
That’s a tall order, and it takes time to achieve financial services marketing maturity. But there are a few specific tactics that you can focus on right now to help you find, attract, and engage these new audiences.
1. Attract New Leads Across Multiple Channels
Meet your future clients where they are: online, researching investment options.
One study from Google found that 86% of potential investors spend more than an hour researching on the web, and over half of online investors don’t have a brand or institution in mind when they begin seeking out financial resources. This is the perfect moment to connect with new clients by sharing educational content, answering questions, and building up your reputation as a trusted expert.
Adopting a multi-channel approach to online marketing improves your odds of connecting with the right prospects. Use what you already know about your target audience to narrow down your efforts to the channels where they’re most likely to be spending time while conducting online research.
Organic Search (SEO)
Organic search and search engine optimization (SEO) is an important channel, but it takes time to build up your website’s authority and start to rank on Google and other search engines for the terms your clients are researching. Start by conducting keyword research in your SEO tool of choice and gathering input from your internal team to identify the questions new investors tend to ask during the early stages of their research. Create high-quality articles and posts that answer these questions, and over time, you should see organic traffic coming to your site and engaging with your content. In the meantime, you can use the assets you create to support your marketing efforts on other channels, as we’ll describe below.
Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to target long-tail keywords, which are more likely to attract the right potential clients and more likely to rank in search results.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
If you don’t want to wait for organic search traffic to grow, you can pay to see results faster. Creating search, display, and re-marketing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can put your website in front of potential customers at the precise moment they’re looking for financial advice.
Pro tip: Make the most of your ad dollars by pairing your PPC efforts with content. Send traffic to dedicated landing pages with adaptive forms that you can use to collect your prospects’ contact information in exchange for an in-depth guide or ebook.
Social Media Platforms
Let’s be honest: social media can be a time-suck for marketers. But since 72% of American adults use some form of social media every day, it’s a safe bet your audience is already spending time there. The key to being effective at social media marketing is zeroing in on the specific channels where your ideal prospects are spending time. Going after Millennial retail investors? Time to build out an Instagram strategy. Looking to connect with female Boomers? Facebook it is. Targeting high-earning hybrid investors? LinkedIn may be your best bet.
Once you have your target channels identified, focus on sharing relevant, helpful content that answers questions your prospects care about, and experiment to see which formats perform best (like videos, infographics, or links to long-form articles). You can always build community by sharing content created by your partners, or other industry leaders.
Pro tip: Build trust by getting real humans involved. Put advisors in front of the camera to share quick tips, publish posts that highlight your company values, showcase customer testimonials, and be patient. Social media is all about relationship-building over time.
Interactive Digital Events and Webinars
Online events and webinars are a proven channel for financial advisors and wealth managers to introduce their services to new prospects and re-engage with existing clients. Repurpose content from your blog or eBooks to build a presentation deck, promote the webinar across your social media and email channels, and consider partnering with a complementary firm or organization to expand your reach to a new audience.
Pro tip: Once the webinar or event is over, the real marketing magic begins. Plan to follow up with attendees and registrants through automated nurture campaigns with relevant content that keeps them engaged with your brand.
Event-Based Emails
Once you have your prospects’ contact info, keep a meaningful conversation going with event-based emails. These messages are automatically triggered whenever a known contact completes a significant action such as visiting a webpage, filling out a form, or purchasing a product or service. These automated communications allow you to immediately follow up with warm leads as you guide them through the customer journey.
Pro tip: Stay compliant with financial industry regulations by using an email service provider with a BCC archiving solution that easily stores emails as you send them.
The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors
2. Use Segmentation and Personalization to Nurture Your Prospects
Generating leads and collecting contact information is only the first step in customer acquisition. Next, you want to segment, personalize, and nurture your prospects to turn leads into clients.
Create Segments
Building advanced customer segments starts with collecting data. This includes both demographic data (like gender, location, or income) as well as behavioral data (like when a lead visits a landing page or clicks a link in an email). These data points will give you a sense of where your prospects are in their buyer’s journey, and what types of content or topics are grabbing your user’s attention.
Then, you can use this information to create segments within your marketing list.
Pro tip: Consider building out a lead scoring system, which automates the process of moving a prospect from the marketing and nurturing stage to being contacted by a sales team member or individual advisor.
Personalize Experiences
Personalizing the content you share with your audience is essential to converting leads to clients for your financial services business. As mentioned before, today’s consumers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences (in one survey of banking customers, only 8% said it wasn’t important at all).
Inserting a first name in an email simply doesn’t cut it any more. True personalization means sharing relevant content with the right prospect at the right time. This means adopting a customer journey-driven approach to your content and campaigns, and apply marketing automation to make it all work.
So instead of simply sending a generic newsletter to everyone on your list, you might send different variations of an email to different segments, each filled with information and articles that are tailored to that segment’s interests and needs. For example, a new subscriber who signed up after reading your article on “Investing 101” may be ready for more educational content, while a longtime lead who just attended an in-depth webinar, and may be ready to read your case studies, or schedule a discovery call.
Automate Nurture Campaigns
Of course, this kind of segmentation and personalization can’t happen at scale without some supporting technology. You’ll need to automate time-consuming manual tasks and processes to execute your financial advisor marketing strategy.
Financial services marketers use automation to streamline processes and improve customer experiences. You can build campaigns that nurture your prospects along different stages of their journey with specific support for your buyer personas. Then, your programs will automatically enroll the right contacts in the right campaigns at the right time.
As a bonus for financial advisory marketers, automating communications simplifies compliance efforts compared to wrangling one-off approvals for ad-hoc messages.
Case Study: Madrona Financial Services
When done right, this combination of segmentation, personalization, and automated nurturing drives meaningful outcomes. For example, full-service advisory firm Madrona Financial Services started using marketing automation to track website visitors, build out reporting, implement lead scoring, and send targeted email campaigns. They saw double-digit increases in email open and click through rates as a result, along with a 1,000% increase in sales over five years.
3. Apply Data to Improve Your Content Strategy
In addition to collecting and segmenting customer data to improve personalization, you can apply marketing data to build a more successful content strategy. By examining your analytics to learn what’s working in one area, you can see which assets have the potential to drive results on another channel. Here are a few specific ways to get started:
Analyze Organic Traffic Data to Find High Performers to Include in Nurture Campaigns
Look in your Google Analytics or other content analytics tools for web pages with high organic traffic metrics (pageviews and organic entrances) and low exit and bounce rates. These are pages that you already know attract and keep your audience’s attention. Make the most of these articles by promoting these high performers in your nurture campaigns for relevant audience segments. When targeted correctly, you should see strong open and click through rates for these assets.
Use Engagement Data to Inform Your Content Calendar
Similarly, you can analyze your email and social engagement data to determine what articles are most compelling with your existing audience based on open rates, clickthrough rates, likes, and shares. Once you’ve identified your high performers, you have several opportunities to expand, refresh, or repurpose this valuable content.
For example, look for opportunities to create new, deeper content on related topics, and update older articles with fresh insights, statistics, or examples. And always make sure these high-performing articles have plenty of internal links and clear CTAs to guide readers down the path to becoming clients.
You can also repurpose high-performing articles for different audiences or customer journey stages, such as taking a blog post written for beginners and expanding it into a more in-depth version for seasoned investors.
Finally, pay attention to which general types of content tend to see more engagement. If your audience typically loves checklists and ignores how-to guides, create more checklists and fewer how-to guides.
Power Your Financial Advisor Marketing Strategy With Automation
Adopting a multi-channel approach, personalizing customer experiences, and using data to refine your content will help you meet the higher expectations of new audiences and attract more clients to your financial advisor business. But you’ll need the right technology partner to help you automate and execute against this kind of sophisticated marketing strategy.
Act-On works with financial advisory firms to transform their financial advisor marketing and grow their assets under management through marketing automation. If you’d like to learn more, download our ebook about wealth management marketing challenges or schedule a demo with one of our automation experts.