Part I: Your Website, Your Blogs, and Your Social Media Content
As a financial advisor, you ask your clients to trust you in order to help them reach their financial goals. You have the certifications and experience to back it up. You’re an expert in your field.
But you aren’t an expert in content marketing. So how do you get new clients in the door? You need the help of an expert yourself. But, where do you begin?
Content Marketing is Not Unlike Comprehensive Financial Planning
Both content marketing and comprehensive financial planning are comprised of many moving parts—or cogs in the machine—that work in conjunction with one another to produce maximum results.
A holistic financial plan is comprised of investment management, tax drag management, life planning, estate planning, and asset protection, to name the heavy-hitters. In content marketing, your main players are social media, email marketing, your website, paid advertising, and publishing fresh content.
In both financial planning and content marketing, the highest ROI is achieved when all the cogs are set up to work together. You can invest all day, but if taxes or investment fees are putting a significant drag on your returns, you’re leaving progress on the table. You can post to social media all day, but if you aren’t driving website traffic or collecting leads, you’re leaving progress on the table.
Sometimes, though, the budget isn’t always there to get all the pieces in place at the same time.
- So, how do you decide which content marketing tasks you should outsource now and which you should add later?
- What is the order of relative importance?
- Which tasks can you handle and which should be left to the professional?
We break down our recommendations in this blog.
1. Website
Your website is the foundation of your content marketing presence. It needs to be working and set up properly before you do anything else! What does this mean exactly?! It needs to be clearly written, SEO optimized, and set up to collect leads at the very, very least.
Clear Content
Is it clear who you serve and what you offer? How does a prospect contact you? Where are you located? Do you have a minimum AUM? These are all questions your website needs to answer. It also needs to do so in a way that is easy to read, free of technical or grammatical error, and optimized for search engine results. Hire someone to write your web copy. This not the place to skimp. To save a little money, you may consider writing the copy yourself and paying an editor to review and refine what you’ve come up with.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO involves a number of “behind the scenes” tasks such as including appropriate keywords in your content and using the appropriate H tags and meta descriptions on each and every page. Getting this done requires navigating the back end of your website. Do yourself a favor. Save yourself the headache and a ton of time by outsourcing this task to a professional.
Lead Collection
You’ve done all the work to get visitors to your site. Now what? If your website isn’t set up to collect leads in one form or another, your SEO and social media efforts are being wasted.
The ultimate goal of the advisor website is to have the visitor book a call. In reality, this rarely (I mean hardly ever) happens on the first visit. So, the site must also be set up to keep the prospect engaged and moving down the sales funnel. This can be achieved with other lead collection vehicles such as pop-ups or embedded forms that ask the user to subscribe to your email list or to download a lead magnet.
For a list of the essentials, check out our recent article, “9 Elements That Every Advisor Website Needs to Capture Leads.” Some of the items on this list can be done yourself depending how technically savvy and familiar with your website you are.
Bottom Line: Your webpage is your home base. It needs to be clear and it needs to be functional. Fix this before you do anything else!
2. Blogs
Next, consider handing off the updating of your blog to a copywriter who knows the wealth management industry. Blogs take hours to research and write in order to be optimized for search engines and easily digestible for your clients and prospective clients at the same time.
And because blogs have many uses outside of just being published to your website — social media posts, links in emails, article submissions for third party industry sites — and generate compounded views over time, you will get a lot of bang for your buck.
3. Social Media
Social media might seem like one of the tasks you can handle yourself to save money, but carrying out a social media strategy for lead generation can be very time-consuming.
Social media for business promotion (and not personal entertainment) is an entirely different animal. You can’t just post selfies or endless links and call it a day.
· You need a consistent publishing calendar that takes into consideration when your audience is most likely to engage with you on each social media channel.
· You need posts that link out and standalone posts.
· You need posts that provide financial value and posts that appeal to the lifestyle of your clients.
· You should incorporate some personal narrative in your timeline, as well.
· And always, always, always, ask the reader to engage in some way. Ask them to like, share, or subscribe. Or ask an open-ended question that they can respond to in the comments.
Pro Tip: You’ll also need to know which posts each social media platform is favoring. For example, is LinkedIn pushing video posts in their new algorithm or standalone posts? Are longer posts or longer comments being favored? The rules change more frequently than tax law. It can be exhausting to keep up.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of Part I.
If you need a break, don’t worry. It’s a lot to take in. That’s why I’ve broken this piece up into two parts.
Now it’s time for the fun part. Time to choose your own adventure!
You can (1) wait for Part II to come out, (2) email us for a copy of Part II today, or (3) or schedule your complimentary Discovery Call with us here now.
Related: The Difference Between Advisor Marketing and Traditional Marketing