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The financial advisor industry is rapidly growing. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is predicted to grow 15% percent between 2016 and 2026. With that being said, it is more important than ever to grow your business and what better way to do this than marketing? While the pay off is worth it, marketing as an advisor does not come without its challenges. These are 6 of the top marketing challenges that advisors face plus ways to fix them.
6 of the Top Marketing Challenges Advisors Face plus How to Fix Them
It’s not always smooth sailing when it comes to marketing, so if you notice yourself running into the problems below, make sure you fix them for the highest lead generation.
1. Generating Traffic and Quality Leads to your Advisor Website
In a world that has gone almost completely digital since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s become more important than ever to generate leads for your website. Lead generation can be difficult for many, however, and according to HubSpot, 61% of companies say that lead generation is their biggest marketing challenge that they face. It can be difficult to keep up as the industry is rapidly changing, and there are so many different tools and platform options, so it can be hard to figure out where to focus your efforts and what will work best. On top of that, how are you expected to produce top-quality content on a regular basis?
HOW DO YOU FIX THIS?
When it comes to doing this, it’s important that you are doing three things, and that is:
- Produce high-quality content regularly
- Produce content that your audience wants to read
- Produce different types of content in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.
PRODUCE HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT REGULARLY
At Twenty Over Ten, we try to blog every day, on both our Twenty Over Ten website and our Lead Pilot platform. While we understand that is can be difficult for many people to do this, especially if you are a smaller business, just ensure that you are doing so regularly.
If you are a smaller business, then blogging one to four times weekly is a good strong number, but maybe sure that whatever the number is, then it’s done regularly so that your readers can come to expect some time of schedule. When done in a routine, it helps to:
- Build brand awareness
- Grow traffic organically
CATER TO YOUR NICHE
For point number two, it’s crucial that you are catering to your niche. What does your audience want to read? It’s best that you are putting out content that will solve a pain point, provide answers, inform your readers, whatever it may be.
A good idea is to utilize Google Trends in order to see what most people are searching for at the time, therefore you can cater your content to more readers.
In the above, blog you can see that we found what was the most highly searched for topic for Investors, so then you could cater your blog content to answer their questions, therefore showing up in more searches and providing useful information.
PRODUCE DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTENT
While blogging is obviously a great way to drive leads, put out content in other forms, as well. Did you know that 87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool? Video is a great way to put your content out there in a different form and with video, you can fit a lot of information in such a short amount of time. Additionally, you can get a lot of legs out of a video, utilizing it on your:
- Homepage
- Blogs
- Landing Pages
You can create different types of them, such as an “About Us” video where you briefly give visitors a rundown of your business. There is so much that you can do, and you can create them easily too! Find out how in the blog below.
How Financial Advisors Can Record Marketing Videos
On A Shoestring Budget
Podcasts are another great way that you can get a lot of great information out there, broadcast it to thousands of people all while speaking conversationally and in a relatable way.
DIY Podcasting For Financial Advisors
4 Steps to Get Started
2. Keeping Track Of Your Marketing Budget
There is a lot that goes into running a successful advisory firm, so when you are trying to maintain a budget, as well, this can be difficult. If you are a smaller business with a smaller marketing budget, then it can be difficult to get a larger budget approved while also bringing in enough money to warrant more money. However, there are a lot of awesome marketing tools that you can use that are free or at least very low in price.
HOW DO YOU FIX THIS?
Here are six amazing tools that you can start utilizing right now to boost your firm’s marketing.
CANVA
Canva is an incredible graphic design tool to help you make graphics to share on your blogs and social media. Additionally, you can also establish brand guidelines to help you remain consistent with your branding when making visual content.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Google Search Console is a free tool that helps users discover so much great information about your website and the audience that is visiting your site. You can find out things, such as keyword searches the websites that are linking to your website, how the mobile version of your website is performing, and a lot more!
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is a free tool that will give you insight into how your website is performing. It provides important information on over 10,000 metrics, but some that we recommend checking out are:
- The number of visitors to your site
- Where visitors are coming from
- How much time they spend on your site
- Bounce Rate
- Why they came to your site
HEADLINER
With Headliner, you can easily integrate video marketing into your overall strategy. It makes it very easy to create video captions, format your videos, and transcribe them.
LOOM
With Loom, you can capture your screen, voice, and face and quickly share your video. With this tool, you can record and share videos with your leads. Once you have recorded your video, you will be taken to their website where you can download or edit it to share it.
There are so many amazing tools out there and many more than the above mentioned, but when they are used, you can easily boost your marketing strategy for very little extra cost, and the ROI will pay off in dividends, making it more than worth it.
3. Having Enough Manpower
If you are a smaller firm, then having enough people on your team to help with marketing can be a challenge. It takes a lot of time and effort to continuously create strong content and when you have other aspects of a firm to manage, it can be difficult to maintain this. However, there are tools that can drastically help with this!
CONTENT ASSIST
Content Assist that has a one-click integration, is completely customizable and is tailored to your unique niche. It serves as a starting point and from there you can tailor the content based on niche, geography and just however you feel it will cater best to your audience.
There are hundreds of articles in Content Assist that you can choose from with many different topics, such as family, retirement, home buying and more. The great thing about the content being editable is that you don’t have to start from scratch but rather can add in keywords, your own tone, take out or add in additional work, whatever it may be, the process is seamless. It helps you to better keep up with creating content regularly, therefore boosting your lead generation tremendously.
LEAD PILOT
Lead Pilot is an all-in-one solution for content creation and distribution for financial advisors. One of the aspects of Lead Pilot that’s great for advisors is that it offers a completely customizable library of editorial-style content.
- You can infuse with your unique voice, add in SEO keywords and promote your expertise in the industry.
- The blogs are optimized for the reader and current SEO standards.
- There is a full-size featured stock image and social media image for each topic.
- Identify content unique to your target audience with persona filtering for business owners, high-net-worth, millennials and more.
As you can see in the image above the title is “Best Tools To Keep Your Small Business Organized,” and the author changed it to say “In Kansas City’ to make it location-specific and also added in his name as the author, showing that he is the thought leader. The body of the blog is completely customizable, as well, as you can really make this content your own, however, it’s much easier to start with this rather than just staring a black sheet.
When you have an all-in-one platform like this Lead Pilot, it easily streamlines your marketing, your content creation, segments your lists, and so much more.
4. Managing Your Website
This has gotten better with the number of tools and technology that is available, but in 2020, 63% of marketers are looking to make a website upgrade. A strong content management system (CMS) is necessary to seamlessly manage your website information and allows you to create and manage all of your website’s digital content. Having a strong CMS is crucial because it:
- Offers security for your website
- It’s cost-efficient
- There is instant maintenance
- Your site becomes more SEO friendly
- You can make simple changes without coding or web experience
- They are cost-efficient
Having a strong CMS is one of the best things that you can do for your website or to boost your online presence. This can all be done when you work with Twenty Over Ten making your website management efforts incredibly efficient and simple.
5. Finding and Showcasing a Unique Value Proposition
In a survey from Practical Perspectives, around 60% of advisors say attracting clients is their toughest marketing challenge. This can be done if you better understand your firm’s unique value proposition. With all of the competition in the industry, if you can’t figure out what makes your business unique, then it will be difficult to maintain strong sales efforts.
SO, HOW DO YOU CREATE A STRONG USP?
There are four steps that you should take and those are:
- Survey the competition and see how you can differentiate yourself from others.
- Clearly identify your niche and target audience.
- Figure out what sets your firm apart from others.
- Write it down and hold yourself accountable!
Once you figure out what sets apart, convey this on your website using content and keywords so that people know what they are searching for and help to boost your SEO rankings.
Twenty Over Ten client Meridian Special Needs Planning caters to a very specific niche, and that is made evident as soon as you land on their homepage. They provide financial advice to individuals and families that care for loved ones with disabilities, which is an incredibly unique firm that serves the entire country.
6. Increasing your Revenue
If you are having a hard time attracting new clients, then it is going to be difficult to boost your revenue, as well.
HOW DO YOU INCREASE YOUR REVENUE?
There are some ways to do this, and one is to cater to a niche, as we have mentioned many times in this blog and then offer a more unique set of services to your clients and prospects. If you offer more of a variety of services to your clients, then you can increase your appeal as a financial advisor but boost your profit, as well.
Is your Advisory Firm Facing Marketing Issues?
Remember that your marketing strategy isn’t going to take off overnight. It takes time and effort, and trial and error before you figure out what works best for your business. As you can see, it’s common for companies to face marketing issues, so don’t give up or get frustrated, as there are solutions to all marketing problems. Implement the necessary tools and team and the payoff will be well worth it when your SEO rankings skyrocket.