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For many business owners marketing is tough and likely not the reason they started their business in the first place! As a Financial Advisor, your work is primarily focused on money management and building client relationships, not marketing. Having said that, a proactive and well-planned marketing initiative can go a long way in improving and growing your practice, so you can do more of what you love.
To ensure that marketing does not end up on the back burner, you can take advantage of technology and automate as much of it as possible. Marketing automation can also help in making you more productive, and ultimately giving your clients a better service.
Automated marketing can be anything from setting a calendar reminder to using a chat bot to interact with prospective clients for you.
Here are five steps you can take to improve your Financial Advisor practice through automated marketing.
If you want to outsource your marketing efforts to an agency and focus on honing your soft skills to ignite your performance and take your business to the next level instead, check out our learning center Don Connelly 24/7.
1. Have a plan
Understanding your target market and having a plan of action will help you schedule out all of your tasks and deadlines, as well as keep you on track for your goals. A marketing plan will look different for each target market, and will likely look different each year as you continue to grow, learn and improve.
Ask yourself the following questions to get the marketing plan started:
- Who are your ideal clients?
- What do they care about the most when looking for a financial advisor?
- Where do they “hang out” or where can you find them?
- Who/what influences their decision making process?
- How do they want to engage, and eventually hire you?
This will help you choose where you should focus your marketing efforts the most, in what way, and using what content. When you have these basic guidelines to follow, it becomes a lot easier to decide what aspects of your marketing you can automate to save time and increase efficiency.
2. Set up an email auto-responder
Email marketing is still a powerful communication channel and autoresponders are a huge time saver. Most email providers offer this feature and some tools even allow you to further segment your audience and filter the content depending on the contacts’ behavior. For example, it will stop sending out emails if the person receiving the email hasn’t opened any of them in a while, or alternatively, it could send them extra content if they engage with you a lot.
You can start by setting up a thank-you email for everyone who signs up for your newsletter. Next, you can set up a welcome series of emails for new subscribers, send automatic emails around certain times of the year to wish clients happy holidays, and don’t forget the birthday e-cards.
There are a lot of creative ways to use email to stay top of mind with prospective and current clients without having to spend time every day to reach out.
3. Use a social media automation tool
Social media can be a huge time suck both in our business lives and personal lives, so using a social media automation tool can help save so much time. These tools allow you to schedule your posts throughout the week or month, and will then post them automatically for you. Most of them will often give you insights into your posts performance so you can check which posts are doing the best in terms of engagement, click-throughs to your site, and demographic breakdowns of who is interacting with your content the most and how.
Furthermore, scheduling your regular updates will allow for more time to personally interact with your followers – replying to comments, personal messages, reaching out to new contacts, to name a few – a proven strategy to help increase engagement and ultimately generate leads and open new accounts.
4. Take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence is creeping its way into all areas of business and can be a huge helping hand when running your Financial Advisors practice too. Setting up simple AI tools such as a chat-bot on your website will allow potential clients to get answers to their questions quickly and efficiently. That’s especially handy now that people are keeping their social distance and trying to find out as much as possible on their own, without any kind of human interaction or commitment for a meeting.
AI can also use user behavior to estimate and make suggestions for what services they would more likely be interested in next, or create a pop-up window when the client goes to close the website and offer them an incentive if they sign-up for your newsletter. This will help you capture more leads than you otherwise would, and means you don’t have to sit by your phone constantly responding to inquiries that only require a simple answer.
Of course, there is only so much AI can do before we all prefer the human touch, but it can take a lot of work off of your hands so you can focus on more important aspects of your practice.
5. Automate your marketing analytics
No marketing effort is worth it if it doesn’t translate into brand awareness and opening new accounts. But how do you know what works and what doesn’t?
With today’s technology, we can track almost every interaction that a potential client has on our website, emails or social media. It is important to look through the statistics and evaluate your performance on a regular basis so you can use the data to improve your marketing efforts and not waste any money.
There are many services that can help automate your marketing analytics – the most popular maybe being Google Analytics. Setting up regular check-ins to review your analytics will keep you on track with your plan, make changes if you are going off track, and stay up to date and connected with your audience.
In summary, automating whatever you can within your business, marketing especially, can help you provide a better service to your clients, have extra time on your hands for key tasks and even grow your business.
Related: 5 Skills You Need to Work Entirely Online as a Financial Advisor