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It used to be that starting a business was all about the money, and while you still obviously need the funding, as it generally costs about $10,000 to $20,000 for basic start-up costs, a strong digital marketing presence is what you need in order to continue and ensure that your firm is thriving.
With that in mind, it takes a lot to ensure that everything is running efficiently and that you are able to not only manage your firm and your clients, but you need to continue to invest in your digital marketing efforts. It can become overwhelming, which is where marketing tools come in. The 15 listed below are some of our favorite marketing tools, so check them out and get some ideas for helping your firm thrive.
15 Tools to Help with Your Firms Marketing Efforts:
First things first, let’s break it down into what tools you need for each category. It will help keep everything organized and on track, so check them out.
1. Scheduling Meetings
Even though you are incredibly busy, it’s still important that you take the time to schedule meetings with prospects in hopes that you can turn them into clients. It can be a lot to remember, so how do you go about doing this and easily scheduling meetings? You use the best tools to help. Some of the ones that we suggest are:
CALENDLY:
Calendly is an online appointment scheduling app that is designed to allow your clients to automatically schedule time on your calendar. It has flexible, integrated, and customizable features, so it’s great for scheduling meetings and communicating efficiently without the hassle of back-and-forth emailing. Another reason why we love this tool so much as that we offer a one-click integration with this software, so our clients can easily implement this and use it on their advisor websites.
Twenty Over Ten client, Soundmark Wealth Management has included a call-to-action that stands out easily against the background and when visitors click on it, they are taken to an option where they can schedule a 20-minute phone call. This simplicity makes it much easier to schedule a meeting, which ultimately boosts conversions.
TIMETRADE/SILVERCLOUD:
Timetrade is an online scheduling app that can book thousands of meetings per second, so it’s a great choice for larger organizations. It contains security and privacy safeguards, so you never have to worry about your information. In addition to the top-notch appointment scheduling, you will be provided with complete customer service.
SCHEDULEONCE:
ScheduleOnce is an online scheduling app that allows you to schedule meetings and appointments with your clients and prospects. Just like Timetrade/SilverCloud, ScheduleOnce offers comprehensive services for the financial services industry. With this app, you are able to easily connect with current clients and engage with potential prospects.
2. Social Media Marketing
Social Media is an integral part of your overall digital marketing strategy, as it offers another way to connect with prospects and clients while creating another outlet to display and discuss your content. It can be a lot to keep track of all your posts, especially over multiple platforms, so that’s where the tools come into play. Some that we love are:
LEAD PILOT:
Lead Pilot is the industry’s first-ever AI-powered all-in-one solution for content creation and distribution. By using this tool, advisors are able to launch robust content campaigns from a streamlined, easy-to-use dashboard. Once it is added, the content can be easily scheduled to be sent out via email or social media with branded landing pages.
Easily share your content with the world by:
- Scheduling your content down to the minute to ensure you stay top of mind at all times.
- Automatically archiving so that your firm can meet all regulatory requirements for every social media post.
- Sharing infographics, videos and more with hand-selected content to share from the Lead Pilot library or create your own.
HOOTSUITE:
As you get busier throughout the day, it can be very time-consuming to manually log into each platform and create posts and other content. Instead of having to do this, you can utilize Hootsuite to schedule your posts on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. What’s even better, is that it provides analytics and easy social media monitoring.
At Twenty Over Ten, we utilize Hootsuite to very easily schedule our posts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. This goes both for our own content and third-party content, as well. It’s so easy to choose a day, time and if you need to edit your posts or delete them, then that can be easily done.
COSCHEDULE:
CoSchedule gives you the ability to look at your posts in one glance, collaborate on projects, and schedule your social posts in one place! It also gives you insight into your marketing review and analytics with real-time status updates. The analytics is key, as you can see where your firm is excelling or where you need to go to improve.
3. Email Marketing
What better way to spread the word on your firm than by email marketing. It’s an effective way to reach many different groups while having the ability to not only tailor your message but also your subscriber lists. Below are three of our top tools that you should check out to make your marketing strategy easier.
LEAD PILOT:
With Lead Pilot, you can easily create email campaigns by simply tailoring the content for your audience and modify styling to uniquely match your brand. With Lead Pilot, you can:
- Tailor subject lines, sender names and preview text to keep your audience engaged.
- Send immediately or schedule emails at the optimal time.
- Cater to your contacts’ interests and their unique life stage with segmentation.
MAILCHIMP:
At Twenty Over Ten, we love Mailchimp and the simplicity it brings to sending out email blasts and campaigns. The design tools that they use make it easy to create awesome campaigns that you can tailor to best show off everything that your business has to offer. Additionally, you can gather insights on your most successful campaigns to tailor your next moves, find out what worked best and what may need a little tweaking.
We send out a bi-weekly newsletter with some of our favorite blogs including:
- A round-up of websites we really love
- Tips and tricks
- Financial advice
- Anything that we think our readers will enjoy
With all of the list segments and awesome templates available, it’s simple to send out to our subscribers.
CONSTANT CONTACT:
Constant Contact has a multitude of newsletter templates, an easy-to-use editor, and strong list-building tools. When using this app, it makes it easier for you to create, customize, and send professional emails that work for the financial services industry and engage your customers on every device, making it very mobile-friendly.
AWEBER:
Aweber has a subscriber automation feature and a lot of templates to get started! If you are looking for some lead generation and to send some immediate follow-up messages, this provider is perfect for your firm.
4. Lead Capturing
You need to have a strong advisor website with a killer digital marketing strategy in order to compete. However, after building your advisor website, you need to figure out what works best for you when it comes to capturing leads. Generating and capturing leads may seem like a difficult task, but these tools can help with this and make sure your website becomes a lead generation machine.
RISKALYZE:
Riskalyze is a risk alignment platform that is created to maximize a client’s portfolio by tailoring it to their risk tolerance. Designed to communicate client risk tolerance with a financial advisor, it works to end financial miscommunication and increase client relationships. It is also a great tool to use on your financial planning firm’s website to quickly convert website traffic into lead generation, which also helps to schedule meetings and plan events. What’s even better is that you can easily embed this onto your website when working with Twenty Over Ten.
Twenty Over Ten client, Pacific Asset Management uses Riskalyze as seen above with the page discussing “Your Personal Risk Number.®” You can very easily see what the risk number is and find out which portfolio will fit best. Additionally, they very thoroughly explain this for you and then prompt visitors to “Take The Quiz” at the bottom of the page.
EMONEY LEAD CAPTURE
When working on your digital lead capture, the eMoney Lead Capture tool is great, as it is an interactive and self-guided prospecting tool to attract, engage, and qualify leads.
REDTAIL TECHNOLOGY
Redtail CRM is a web-based, full-featured and easy-to-use client management solution designed specifically for financial professionals. It’s tablet-friendly, and they offer a free smartphone app for customer relationship management.
5. Live Chatting
In this fast-paced world, people want answers and they want them now. That’s where live chat comes in! It’s one thing to have a contact form and hope that you will receive an answer by the end of the day or within 24 hours. With live chat, however, you can ask something and receive it in real-time.
LIVECHAT:
What we love about LiveChat is how clean and easy it is to use this application. Even when you aren’t super tech-savvy, you can navigate it easily and won’t get stuck fumbling around through clunky features. Once installed, you can start to use it quickly, which is perfect for the busy advisor.
DRIFT:
The great thing about Drift is that they use bots which pretty much act as your website’s personal assistant. According to Drift, LeadBot qualifies your site visitors, identifies which sales rep they should speak with and then books a meeting, and there are no forms required! What more could you want?
Green Mountain Planning uses Drift on its website to easily chat and connect with visitors in real-time. If they have questions. CEO and Lead Financial Planner, Nestor Vargas, CFP®, pops up in the corner asking, “Can I help you find the answer to a specific question?”
SUMO
Sumo has a pop-up tool to collect emails, and if you currently using this, then this will be perfect for your firm!
6. Websites
Obviously, no marketing plan would be complete without having a website to drive traffic. For this reason, we also wanted to include Twenty Over Ten as a marketing tool. We have become the most comprehensive website management and blogging content management system (CMS) for financial advisors, as well as the most secure.
The advisors that use our system have the ability to manage their entire online marketing and tailor their website design and content to add unlimited landing pages and lead generation forms. Additionally, all content is easy to update with an intuitive inline editor, which allows you to see exactly how your website changes will look in real-time. Want more information about this unique marketing tool? Check out this blog post that not only discusses everything our website management system includes, but, also included some other website providers.
Are You Using The Tools That You Should Be?
We hope that this has helped you to decide what works best for you and your business. There are so many options out there for your firm to utilize and in doing so, you will be able to turn your advisor business into a lead generation machine that is incredibly efficient and will put you far ahead of your competitors.
Related: Do Lead Generation Services for Financial Advisors Work?