Online marketing for financial advisors is critical to succeed in the industry, in an ever evolving internet world. People are more connected than ever before, so the old school strategies of finding leads for your financial advisory business or job just don’t work anymore.
The wealth industry is needed more than ever before as more and more people will not have enough funds to sustain themselves when they reach retirement age.
Jobs are no longer as secure as they were before and many people are aware of this.
Which is why there is actually an increasing demand for wealth creation and financial preservation products and services.
But how do most financial advisors generate leads?
Most use referrals, cold calling and perhaps some form of generic advertising.
Cold calling is a hard process to find clients and leads to lots of frustration. It is however one of the most common ways to find clients for most financial planners.
Referrals have typically been a better option to find clients but you’ve probably received those phone calls, where the sales agent says to you that your friend Bob gave them your number?
How often do you actually buy the product or service?
In this article we focus on how to use online marketing to ATTRACT TARGETED leads as a financial advisor
Online Marketing For Financial Advisors: A Winning Formula
In the online world, TRUST is the keyword when it comes to attracting clients. Your audience must feel like they KNOW you and that you can satisfy their financial planning needs.
The winning formula to achieve this is:
B+E=S
BUILD an audience + Add value through ENGAGEMENT to that audience = then SELL to that audience
Identify Your Target Audience
Before you can build an audience, you need to be very clear about who it is you serve.
Most financial advisors would say “I serve everyone”.
Now this is fine but it also makes it harder to Attract clients because all financial advisors do this. So there is nothing to make you stand out from the crowd.
Instead, focus on a particular type of client initially and those clients will eventually refer other clients to you.
How does this work?
Let’s assume that we have a mutual friend called John.
Let’s also assume that John does skydiving as a hobby and as such he understands the risks and needs of people who do skydiving.
This is simply an example to help you understand the marketing concept. But you can easily replace the skydiving example with cyclists, or artists, or personal trainers, stay-at-home-mums, construction workers or IT specialists.
The idea is to choose a particular audience out of the universe of all potential clients and then focus on becoming The Best at serving the specific needs of that audience.
If John chooses the skydiving community as his ideal client for example, these people have very specific needs and chances are that many will also be high net worth individuals given the nature and expense of their chosen hobby.
Being this specific in targeting your audience means that John could become the specialist financial advisor to skydivers.
In time you can be sure that these people will begin referring their other “extreme sports” buddies to John because they feel that he really UNDERSTANDS THEM.
So you go narrow in the beginning, so that you can go wider later on to acquire even more clients. A much more profitable strategy than trying to target “everyone” don’t you think?
Create A Brand
This ties into identifying your ideal customer. Once you have identified your audience, you want to become a known Authority / Brand for that audience.
Online marketing will become much easier for you once you build your name in the minds of your audience.
Nobody remembers the financial advisor who was like all the others. But everyone will remember John, the financial advisor who specializes in servicing people who are skydivers and really understands their needs.
Start A Blog
Once you’ve decided to build a brand around a certain audience, your next step is to ideally start a blog/website where you provide useful information to your target audience.
Sticking with our sky diving example, John could write useful articles on the financial considerations for various extreme sports. Because he understands this market he will be uniquely placed to provide very curated information for his market.
This will help John build his name and authority with the audience that he serves.
John could take this a step further by adding a Podcast or Youtube channel that complements his blog. Some people prefer consuming written content but others might prefer audio or video.
By embedding a video and podcast onto your blog post you could satisfy the needs of the viewers and the readers.
Your blog, if set up correctly and optimised for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will generate visitors from Google and other search engines
Within your blog posts you can add links to set up a free consultation with you to learn more. This is a non-spammy way of generating leads.
Remember these people found your website and are enjoying the helpful info you provide, so it would be a natural act to request further info.
Compare that to spammy cold calls that feel very pressurized and you’ll see that content creation is a much better option when it comes to online marketing for financial advisors.
This is how you ATTRACT the right client
Use Social Media To Drive Traffic
Once you have your foundation set up, which should ideally be your blog, you can then drive further traffic to your website from the various social media platforms
This does not have to be difficult or time consuming either. You could simply take the same content you delivered on your blog and Youtube, cut it up into smaller chunks and release it as bite sized chunks of information that is easier to consume for social media.
Most financial advisors either dont know about this or simply dont make use of it, so you will likely stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Pour Fire on Traffic Generation
Now it’s time to really send your traffic generation into overdrive
One of the best uses for your money is to invest in Paid advertising, where you can now tell the various online platforms what type of clients you are intrested in and they will send those people to you, for a fee.
This is what makes platforms like Google and Facebook multi billion dollar companies. They have collected the information on billions of people and will give you that info in exchange for money.
Tell Facebook you are interested in Executives, who like SkyDiving and are between the ages of 35 to 55 and located in the USA or Australia (or wherever you operate from) and Facebook will show your advert to only people who meet thESE criteria.
That is the power of paid advertising. It is extremely targeted and very profitable if done correctly.
Once you run the ads, you will lead these people to your blog where they can get more info and get in touch with you for a consultation.
Final Thoughts: Online Marketing For Financial Advisors
Cold calling strangers and being frustrated in your job does not have to be your reality. With a well planned online marketing strategy you can turn your online presence into revenue using tried and tested marketing principles that have stood the test of time.
As a financial advisor, you might find that this works so well, that you could eventually start your own financial planning firm that services your group of people. The money is in narrowing down your focus and becoming that special solutions provider to your audience.
There is no real secret to getting leads and clients online. It is just a matter of building online relationships with a specific group of people and providing them with solutions to their most pressing problems.
Now that you have this valuable insight, it’s time to launch your online marketing plan
Good luck
Aslam Du Toit
