8 Financial Advisor Marketing Strategies

You’ve got everything in order at your advisory business, but you just can’t seem to generate as many leads as you would like to be doing at this point. So, how do you go about fixing this? You need to develop a marketing strategy that will work best for you and your team. Behind every great business, is a strong marketing plan. You may feel as though you have too much on your plate already, so how could you even begin to add marketing into the mix? Let these 8 simple steps help you get started and watch your lead generation increase.

8 Steps to Get Started with Your Marketing Plan

These 8 steps will make your life so much easier when it comes to starting a marketing plan, so read on for your top tips.

1. Identify your Niche Market

You may feel as though catering to a certain niche will make your firm limited, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Defining a strong niche demographic makes your marketing budget and expectations that much better, as you will know the right audience to hone in on when creating marketing emails, newsletters, creating social content and what any aspect of your strategy.If women in business are your niche, then find out which social platforms they frequent, check out Google Analytics to see how your specific landing pages are performing and just really find out what works best so that you can tweak your strategy and website content to find what really fits for them. Kane Financial Planning specializes in empowering women who may have unique financial needs to achieve independence. They specialize in working with corporate women executives, women going through life changes and women business owners.

2. What are your Goals?

If you don’t start off with well-established goals, then your plan will be all over the place. You and your team need to sit down and figure out what your marketing goals are before you can really create a strong plan. Some ways to get on track are to:

Focus Your Message

Figure out who you want to target and craft your message to get across to them. If you specialize in millennials, then you obviously won’t be creating content that is more pertinent to pre-retirees and retirees. Use keywords and phrases that are relevant to your niche. Find out which platforms they are on and tailor your content to fit your customers and clients.

Make Sure You Are Creating Content That Generates Leads

Content is king, so work on creating content for your advisor website is key to driving traffic to your site. From blogs and articles to videos to strong calls to action that lead to eBooks or whitepapers, it’s key that you are capturing the attention of your audience. Coppertree, LLC has a strong blog section that they updated fairly regularly, which is key to captivating your audience. If you don’t create your content regularly then it will be harder for an audience to check back. If your followers come to expect new content every two weeks on a certain day, then they will know to expect fresh content on those days.Related: Which is Better: Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing for Advisors?

3. Audit your Existing Channels

Do a deep-dive on your existing content, social media profile and email marketing campaigns in order to find out what’s work and what needs some change.

Audit Content:

Take a look at your analytics and determine which pieces of content, blog posts, and anything else driving traffic performed the best. This will help you figure out what content resonates best with your niche or target audience so that you can begin to create more content along the same topics for future planning.Did blog posts about retirement drive a lot of traffic? That’s great! You know that you can do similar topics in the future. Maybe financial planning tips didn’t perform well…that’s fine, you can always optimize the posts that didn’t do as well by adding strong keywords, calls to action and updated third-party links.Additionally, keep track of hot topics in the industry, big financial swings, anything that is relevant and consider blogging about that, as well.In the above image, you can see the unique page views and which blogs perform the best or which ones may need a bit of help with additional keywords, etc.

Audit Social Media Profiles:

Once again, take a look at your analytics, which includes both Google Analytics to see what social channels are driving the most traffic to your website and looking at the analytics from each individual social channel itself to see which platform generates the most engagement for you.Perhaps one performs better than the other and if you know this information, it can help you better determine which platforms your target audience is on and where you should be spending the majority of your time and effort. In addition to traffic and engagement, also take a look at the types of content that are the top performers. this can give you an idea of what types of content across each of your channels resonate best with your followers and prospective clients. As we mentioned, making sure that you are maintaining a strong social media presence is key to connecting with a whole different group of contents and potential clients. Twenty Over Ten client, Aton Financial displays their social icons on their website which makes it much easier for people to quickly find your social accounts. Aton has the big three, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, additionally, they have Instagram which is quickly growing in popularity.

Audit Email Campaigns:

Maybe you have been sending out a lot of different email campaigns and you want to make sure that they are working. If you are using an email provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact take a look at your analytics. Find out what campaigns were most successful, what links were clicked the most, what subject lines performed the best, etc. So, what are some things to make for a strong email marketing strategy?

Find the best times to send your campaigns and schedule them properly.

Use a strong subject line to draw in your audience right off the bat.

Make sure that you are creating strong client-driven content that will pertain to your niche.

It’s important that you are segmenting your lists so that you can tailor your emails accordingly.

Doing the above will help you create stronger campaigns, and it’s a continual process, so try to find out what works best for your firm.

4. Create a Plan

Based on the findings from your completed audit, you can now begin to create a more fluid, concrete plan for your marketing strategy. Now, this isn’t a plan for the next week or even next month but rather this should be a long-term plan…like a financial plan! 😉For example in January, maybe you want to start a blog series on preparing financially to send your children through college. then in February, you are going to launch a new ebook on retirement strategies for small business owners. Then in April, you’re laying low preparing for one of your busier months of the year it being tax season. But then in June, you want to focus on creating a video series and launching your YouTube channel.Whatever it may be, you need to ensure that you are creating a plan and writing this out, so that you can keep track of everything that is going on. You don’t want to double up on a topic, and you want to ensure that everything is getting scheduled accordingly.

5. Put the Wheels in Motion

This step is all about figuring out how you’ll actually achieve the plan you’ve drafted in step 4 above. Will you need to hire an intern or maybe a marketing assistant to help you tackle it all and keep your timeline on track?Additionally, you’ll want to identify the types of tools you’ll need to help you achieve all of the tasks you’ve outlined within your plan. from social media to blogging and email marketing it can be a lot to just figure out which tools will help you easily get to where you want to be in a compliant manner. Need help doing this? Need some help creating a killer marketing strategy? That’s where Lead Pilot comes into play! This is going to be an amazing tool and strong marketing platform that will take your firms’ lead generation to the next level.

6. Pivot if Necessary

It is important to understand that even the most well thought out plan can have bumps along the way. and that’s okay! By being prepared for that possibility ahead of time, you can better correct course and pivot as needed throughout the year if you discover any bumps in your plan as the year goes on.

7. Evaluate and Analyze

Now that the year is coming to a close, it’s important to figure out if what you did actually worked – the fun part! Take a deep dive into all of your analytics and compare them to the previous year to see if your blog experienced any upticks in traffic, or your organic search rankings improved or your engagement rate increased.

8. Celebrate and Repeat

If you have seen an overall improvement in your performance and the amount of traffic, then that’s great news! Take some time to celebrate your hard work, recognize the team that helped you along the way and reward yourself with an incentive if you feel like it…after you all, you have earned it. Don’t too much time off, however, because it’s a constant work in progress, so find what worked for you and repeat those steps for the upcoming year. If something needs some finetuning, now is the time to get that together as the year kicks off.

Let’s Bring It Back Together

We hope these simple steps will help you and your team get started when it comes to creating a strong marketing plan. You need to remember that it’s a work in progress and not something that will happen simply overnight. It can also be intimidating to get started, but once you do, the benefits will be worth all of the effort and hard work that you have put in to make marketing a part of your firm.Related: The Only Two Questions Your Lead Capture Form Should Ask For Higher Conversions