financial advisor marketing strategies

Financial Advisor Marketing Strategies That Work

August 11, 2021 |

New client acquisition is one thing that is crucial for financial advisors to continue to grow their practices. However, generating new client leads can be difficult and expensive, especially for those just starting. Here are a few proven marketing strategies for financial advisors that can be used to drive new leads whether you are a fiduciary or a fee-for-service financial planner.

Develop a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

Before anything else, there are a few key things you should consider when developing client acquisition strategies for financial advisors. Your strategy should outline who you are looking to market to, what you plan to say to them, how you plan to put your message in front of the audience, and how much you plan to spend to do it.

Developing a comprehensive marketing approach requires consideration and knowledge of your target demographic to optimize your content according to their needs. This begins with selecting and understanding the specific audience that best fits your service. This will be the cornerstone of any of the below financial advisor marketing strategies.

Understanding Your Target Audience

It might seem counterintuitive, but it is much harder to grow a business when you try to please everyone than if you specialize and expand in a specific market. Narrowing in on and understanding your particular niche and ideal client is a vital first step to achieving a compelling marketing strategy that draws in new clients. It also enables you to utilize unique, more personalized marketing channels that resonate with your target audience.

Understand Your Audience’s Motivations & Concerns

Once you have considered and selected your target market, you need to learn what matters most to them. Start by trying to understand your clientele’s motivations, fears, and objectives. With this information, you can create a detailed client persona, enabling you to optimize and curate your marketing content to align with their specific goals.

To maximize the efficacy of your marketing efforts, you need to show prospects how you can achieve their needs and why you stand out from the rest.

Digital Marketing Focused Client Acquisition Strategies for Financial Advisors

It is virtually impossible to ignore the importance of digital marketing in determining any business’s success in today’s day and age. As prospective clients increasingly turn to digital mediums, so, too, should your marketing activities if you plan to become and consistently remain effective at new client acquisition.

It is essential to put your energy and marketing budget into a dynamic digital marketing plan that utilizes the latest technology and resonates with your desired audience to increase your online presence and expand your financial advisory firm.

A comprehensive digital marketing strategy utilizes various methods to ensure online visibility, such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click ad campaigns, and increasing social media presence across platforms.

SEO & Content Marketing

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an organic, inbound marketing strategy that targets unpaid traffic through organic search engines like Google. From a long-term standpoint, this can be one of the most effective financial advisor marketing strategies.

This involves optimizing your website for specific keywords, creating valuable content, and acquiring backlinks from other website articles and blog posts. SEO tracking tools use analytical insights on organic data to compile a list of keywords that will naturally bring in larger volumes of higher-quality traffic to your website through search results.

Utilizing search engine optimization and content marketing is a cost-effective, long-term way to boost traffic to your website. While it may take a bit longer to see SEO results than it would by using other strategies, once a page is ranking, you will typically see continuous traffic for the foreseeable future.

Understanding your target audience is a crucial part of this effort as your content and SEO keywords should relate to specific topics and unique value propositions that pertain to your client persona. In addition, you should produce as much quality content as possible, focusing on articles and resources that would be of interest to your target audience.

To ensure the optimal experience for all consumers, search engines such as Google carefully examine the quality of content appearing on their result pages using advanced algorithms and customer feedback.

This quality assurance determines how high your page ranks in the search results consumers see. Therefore, your ultimate priority in producing content should be to write engaging, educational content that feels natural and uses keywords to enhance your writing.

Pay Per Click – Paid Search Advertising

Search engine optimization is an excellent long-term method to bring in more traffic to your website, but if you want to see more significant volumes of traffic in the short term, the pay-per-click tactic might be a good option for you.

The pay-per-click model of digital marketing features your business as a suggested ad on your preferred search engines or another platform. You then pay the search engine a nominal fee each time a new lead clicks on your advertisement.

As with SEO, pay-per-click campaigns send targeted traffic to your website using relevant keywords; however, you are paying for each visitor sent to your website. This means that once you stop your PPC campaign, your traffic will stop with it.

There are many tools designed for pay-per-click advertising campaigns depending on your desired search engines. However, it is essential to note that 90% of online searches use Google, adding up to about 3.5 billion searches each day. Fortunately, Google and third-party marketing companies offer various tools to manage your pay-per-click campaign with ease.

Email Marketing

Another way to reach prospective clients and drive sales is through email marketing. Basic email marketing involves sending commercial emails to contacts who have explicitly opted into your email list.

Email marketing can be a great strategy for financial advisors to keep their clients engaged. While there are more advanced email marketing methods like funnel building and nurture campaigns, we will just focus on the basics of email marketing here.

There are two main types of email marketing campaigns: promotional and informational.

Promotional emails advertise special offers, new products or services, and conclude with a clear and compelling call-to-action. Research shows that consumers typically respond better to promotional messages but sending out too many can inundate customers, resulting in less traffic overall.

Informational emails, such as newsletters, are a great way to keep in contact with clients and keep them informed of your business. The goal is to educate readers, improve communication frequency, and build relationships with clients.

You might want to consider sending out newsletters to different demographics and personalized messages for holidays, birthdays, or business relationship milestones.

Social Media Marketing & Advertising

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are not only an excellent way to raise brand awareness and promote your business, but they are also a highly effective channel for connecting with old customers and converting prospects into new customers.

Your social media profiles should post consistent, targeted, on-brand messages across your targeted social media platforms based on your audience preferences. Remember that FINRA and the SEC have strict compliance rules on giving out financial advice, so avoid all posts, likes, shares, and comments that they might consider implied investment advice.

Also, consider linking to your own articles, events, websites, or third-party financial blogposts when posting on social media. The goal is to generate brand recognition and interest that converts new leads into online traffic and revenue-producing customers.

Online traffic is sure to follow if you stay consistent with your post schedule and brand voice while providing valuable, educational content on your specific services and industry niche.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent resource for professional contacts that can benefit your advisory business with B2B transactions or industry insights. Focus your LinkedIn efforts on building a high-quality community of contacts through organic and paid marketing strategies. A solid list of LinkedIn connections can provide you with the network necessary to expand your business and sphere of influence.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the most widely used apps worldwide, and they offer various marketing tools to narrow in on your desired audience. You can target location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections to tailor your advertising to your ideal client. In addition, many third-party software tools specialize in improving the efficacy of Facebook Ads campaigns.

Instagram

As a relatively new platform for financial advisors, using Instagram can be intimidating, but it is a great way to create brand awareness and connect with your local community. Expanding the social media platforms you are a part of can also boost engagement and get more traffic on your website. The structure of Instagram’s dashboard also offers a unique “show, don’t tell” approach to marketing where images are more powerful than words.

YouTube

Video marketing is quickly becoming one of the most powerful digital tools for any growing business. Every day, millions of people of all ages log onto YouTube for entertainment, education, and research purposes. Maintaining a presence on YouTube is a valuable way to draw in new clients and build relationships with your audience through a different, often more personal, medium.

Retargeting

Sometimes, new prospects aren’t ready to fill out that contact form when they first visit your site. Maybe they were looking into several financial advisors, maybe they were reading one of your blog articles, or perhaps they just got cold feet.

Retargeting is the process of using targeted ads to re-engage prospective customers who have been on your website and did not convert into new clients. Typically, these ads run on advertising networks that include websites, applications, and social media platforms to ensure the potential client receives your ad no matter where they are browsing.

This keeps your brand front and center in the prospect’s mind and increases the likelihood of converting them into clients, as people often prefer what is familiar to them. Consumers are also more likely to click on a retargeted ad if it uses information respondents provided to the brand or states that previous interests are the basis for the recommendation.

Traditional Financial Advisor Marketing Strategies

While we cannot understate the importance of digital marketing in the modern world, traditional marketing strategies remain a vital part of any client acquisition strategy. They have been around for ages and reliably produce new contacts and clients from the business’s launch onward.

Many people believe that traditional methods have become obsolete and do not provide a high enough return on investment, but this is not always the case.

For many target demographics, conventional, non-digital marketing strategies are highly effective and even their preferred means of communication. Physical advertisements and events play a huge role in establishing your brand’s visibility in your community.

Networking Events

Peer networking events are a vital part of traditional marketing strategies in which professionals within the same sector connect and share valuable industry insights. In gaining new contacts, you will also build relationships that increase your center of influence.

To find networking events in the wealth management sector, you can contact your local small business owners association or the chamber of commerce to ask about member events.

Print Ads

Many consumers are inundated with ads throughout the day, resulting in digital fatigue, but studies show audiences are usually more receptive to physical advertisements. Even among younger generations, most consumers will at least read a physical ad before discarding it.

Print advertising is a great way to reach your local market as it increases brand recall and recognition.

Direct Mail

Consumers prefer receiving physical promotional offers the most when it comes to direct mail, so save your informational newsletters for your email campaigns. Direct mail works best with existing customers or those who have shown a keen interest in your company.

While it can be somewhat costly compared to automated email messages, it is highly effective and cost-efficient when correctly targeted.

Local Sponsorships

The return-on-investment of local sponsorships might be hard to measure, but it shows your community that you are an active member who is willing to give back. Not only will this help you maintain a favorable public image, but it also improves business relationships while increasing brand awareness and recognition.

Building A Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is a visual metaphor that symbolizes the consumer’s path from finding your business as a new visitor to becoming a prospective client to paying for your financial advising services and expertise.

The funnel’s opening is where you grab the attention of your new visitors by creating brand awareness through advertising and content marketing strategies. New visitors become leads once they start looking for more information on your industry niche or specific services. Prospects are leads that are seriously considering their options, which is when you need to communicate your value to them the most.

There are three general phases of a marketing funnel: acquiring new leads, creating a nurturing system to guide prospects into becoming clients, and finally, converting them into revenue-producing customers.

Acquisition

Acquisition of new leads begins with generating awareness of your brand and services within the desired audiences. This includes print and social media marketing, having in-depth blog posts on specific search terms, and a call-to-action that draws prospective customers in and communicates your unique value proposition. The goal is to get them hooked so that when they need a financial planner, they immediately think of you.

Nurturing

Once you have the attention of your prospective clients, it is crucial to produce consistent, quality content that informs them of your value. This doesn’t mean pushing sales on them; instead, highlight their questions or concerns and show how you can help address and solve them. You can include customer testimonials and a call-to-action for a complimentary consultation if it fits your business.

Conversion

Now that you’ve done everything possible to draw your prospects in with the value of your services, they just need a final nudge to choose your business. For financial advisors, you could offer a free consultation, discounts, or play up the urgency of your services. Just make sure the lead generation process is smooth and easy so as not to turn customers away.

Marketing Tools for Financial Advisors

Nowadays, wealth managers and financial advisors utilize various digital marketing tools to attract new clients down the business marketing funnel and stay ahead of the competition.

Finding the right tool or combination of tools to help you with performance analytics, social media management, and task automation is essential to developing an efficient workflow, expanding your business, and growing your sphere of influence.

Here are just some of the valuable digital marketing tools that successful financial advisory firms use to optimize their day-to-day operations.

SEMRush

SEMRush is an all-in-one online software that assists with your search engine optimization, pay-per-click, keyword research, and other content marketing activities. You can also monitor things like online visibility and uncover market insights.

Some of the world’s leading brands like Tesla and Apple utilize SEMRush in their marketing strategy. With SEMRush, you can identify industry trends and implement them according to your niche to stay ahead of the competition.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords allows you to display your advertisements on Google’s search engine results for a nominal pay-per-click fee. Although other businesses are bidding for clicks, it is not necessarily the highest bidder that wins, as Google takes the quality of your website or blog into account for the best consumer experience.

With the right keywords and Google AdWords plan, your business’s website can rank at the top of the search results, drastically increasing the quality and quantity of your online traffic.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an all-in-one marketing platform for contact management and engagement practices as well as data analysis.

As the name implies, MailChimp focuses on email marketing with its excellent automation tools to develop a better multichannel marketing strategy. However, MailChimp also has several features that allow you to create landing pages, build email funnels, drip campaigns, and more.

MailChimp is one of the most used email marketing tools because it is easy to use and cost-effective.

WordStream

WordStream Advisor is an online advertising management software that allows users to manage their various Google AdWords, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads campaigns with a single, easy-to-use interface.

They offer powerful ad creation tools to create your business marketing funnel and fast analytics to monitor your marketing success and progress in real-time. For an additional fee, WordStream offers dedicated account managers for premier consulting services and a managed services program for pay-per-click and other ad campaigns.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful inbound marketing and sales platform offering various tools to help you with automated email campaigns, landing pages, and lead magnets. This includes tools for content creation, social media management, workflow automation, and customer relationship management.

Their quality CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool can help you track your leads and prospects with a solid analytics platform.

Connectio

Connectio specializes in offering a suite of powerful tools for marketing on Facebook specifically. If your target demographic frequently uses Facebook as a social media platform, Connectio can help tailor your Facebook Ads campaign to be highly effective in generating online traffic and sales. With Connectio, you can easily connect with your target audiences, run retargeting campaigns, automate your Facebook Ads posting, and much more.

Putting Your Financial Advisor Marketing Strategies Into Action

Running a marketing campaign for your financial advisory firm might seem like a daunting task, but you can succeed with the proper planning and resources.

Utilizing both digital and traditional marketing strategies will help you build brand awareness and reach your target audience. As your practice grows, it’s essential to scale the rest of your processes along with your client acquisition, most importantly, your billing processes.

Redi2 has created a suite of advisory billing and management tools designed specifically to improve the efficiency and scalability of billing processes for wealth managers, financial advisors, broker-dealers, and other financial industry professionals.

If you’d like to schedule a demo of BillFin, Wealth Manager, Revenue Manager, or would just like to speak with someone about which tool may be right for you, click the button below to get started.