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Let me talk you through one of my favourite movie scenes in recent times. In doing so, I’m going to share with you a marketing technique that could quite possibly double your lead flow and cost you pennies.
It’s that powerful.
The scene is from the recent Will Smith movie Focus. It’s called the ’55’ scene.
After a series of foolish bets with jetset Chinese millionaire at an NFL game, Smith’s character makes his most foolhardy move. He’s $1.1m in the hole, but his anger drives him to stake double or nothing.
His opponent can choose any football player in the stadium, simply choosing a number. Smith then has to guess the number cold.
That’s over a hundred possibilities, with only one right answer.
The jetsetter says no. Will sweetens the deal. He’s not even going to be the one guessing. That responsibility will fall to his sports-agnostic female partner.
It’s anger-fuelled madness. The Chinese millionaire reluctantly accepts.
Of course the jetsetter picks 55, Margot Robbie picks 55 blind. They clean their opponent out and, in the car trip back to the airport, Smith reveals the mechanism of the subterfuge.
It’s been an exercise in subconscious messaging.
All throughout the day the jetsetter has been seeing the number 55. On his room key, walking down the hall, on the t-shirts of people walking by. Even the music in the background – Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil – has been primed. The chorus “woo-woo” happens to sound like the Cantonese for 55.
The jetsetter has been primed, triggered to choose the number 55 by numerous, consistent messages present but not always fully noticed.
I think something similar may have happened to you.
It may be that time you visited a certain website. It might have been when you went to buy something on Amazon but decided not to. Or perhaps you were checking out how much tickets were for the next Tony Robbins event but chose to leave and think about it.
Whatever it was, you checked something out, made the decision not to buy on the spot and went about your merry way.
Then something odd happened. You started to notice adverts for this thing on a number of different websites you visited, manifested as banner adverts and other reminders in your line of sight.
“Wow”, you may have thought. “They must be spending some serious marketing dollars”
The truth is quite the opposite.
What happened is in that moment you were visiting that original site, a small piece of code was added to your computer. Much like a traffic warden marking your car tyre with chalk, your interest was noted.
From that point on, Google or Facebook applied it’s marketing muscles to sell advertising space on the websites you later visited with the aim of reminding you of your original interest.
You were stalked around the web, and each time you saw that advert you were gently reminded of your initial interest.
The best bit is this whole process wound up being fairly inexpensive for the company who wanted your business.
It’s a process called Remarketing and it’s amazing.
Let’s talk about why it matters to your advice business. It boils down to the fact that most decisions to get advice don’t happen in an instant.
Sure, some of your prospects may wake up to the need to do something different in managing their financial affairs quickly and easily. Some are hurting so much with their problems they really have little choice.
For most though, it might take days. Possibly weeks. All too frequently it’s not until years later the tipping point is reached.
Perhaps the catalyst for prospects suddenly realising that doing nothing is not the answer may be later contact from your business.
Maybe you reach out to them a few times a year. Finally at the seventh or eighth attempt your latest newsletter, blog or LinkedIn post triggers the decision reaction.
Maybe it’s a phone call, or chance meeting at the gym.
Perhaps it’s something a friend of theirs says one day that has nothing to do with your marketing efforts.
Finally, they engage.
The downside however might be months have passed before this happens. The power of compounding (in Einstein’s appreciation of it) has become a little less powerful. It has made your longer-term job slightly less simple.
What if you could speed the whole process up, initiating the same number of touchpoints in a fraction of the time, without the manual marketing work required to make it happen?
That’s the power of retargeting and why you as an advice business, if you have even a half decent web presence, need to get on it.
When a prospect visits your website, they are responding to a need.
When they leave, they are relegating that need back into a state of procrastination. It isn’t dead, merely on hold, ready to be reactivated.
By employing retargeting, you have the chance to cheaply trigger the opportunity for them to come back in a far shorter space of time than your manual marketing could possibly.
You still need to make sure you have a compelling offer and strong value story – this won’t work if you’re weak in these areas – but this is just one of a number of ways technology and digital marketing present fresh opportunities for helping advisers find less labour intensive ways to attract more great clients to their business.
It’s one of a number of topic areas I’m helping advice firms embrace and get ROI from as part of our The Leveraged Advice Firm coaching program. We’ll even be going as far as building the campaigns for our clients. It’s that kind of program.
Client referrals and strategic partnerships remain avenues that no advice firm should ignore if they want to grow. However, when you’ve got an already-strained workload and you’re facing a noisy marketing and media mix, if you’re not looking at smart opportunities like this, enabled by technological innovation, it’s only a matter of time before the strain of keeping your funnel filled will begin to tell.
Why wouldn’t you let the tech do the hard work?