5 Stages Every Marketing Strategy Needs for Financial Advisors
Hey, financial advisors. Today we are talking through the top five stages of any successful marketing strategy.
As we start the new year, make sure that these five components are a part of your vision for how you're going to grow your business through marketing. Let's get into it.
Align with a clear view of your ideal client.
Make a plan to expand your audience of ideal prospects.
Actively and responsively engage your audience.
Provide genuinely valuable CTA’s to convert your audience to leads.
Nurture those who have taken action to build trust and familiarity.
1. Make Sure You’re Aligned with Your Ideal Prospect
Before you go anywhere, you have to make sure that you know who your ideal customer is. You need an articulate perspective of what they're like as people and what critical questions they need to be solved. From there, you need to connect the two with your branding, ensuring you are aligned with them on those points.
Now, if you've been in business for a while, you probably have a pretty good grip on this already, but I like to encourage our clients actually to articulate this persona. You may find that in actually getting the thoughts out of your head and onto paper, you get a sharper view of the kind of person that you're trying to reach.
I also encourage you to do this with your team. Your client base is not all one personality. More importantly, they probably don’t all share your personality. So have a collaborative session with people on your team to help you form that view of the kind of client you want to work with. What are their top needs? What are their top concerns? This will give you a fuller sense of your ideal client, AND it will give your team a common vision of how to serve your current clients better.
Action Point: With this re-sharpened brand vision, review your “permanent” marketing resources – your website, your welcome kits, and other things you use repetitively. It will add power to every major touch point your brand has.
2. Expanding Your Ideal Audience
If step number one is alignment, step number two is expansion. Now that you know who your ideal client is, one of these questions we also ask is where do you find them?
More importantly, how do you expand the number of ideal clients you are engaging with and reaching out to?
Marketing usually isn’t a matter of if you build it, they will come. This is aggressive – how can we actively take steps in our marketing strategy to expand our audience of ideal prospects?
You can do this on just about any platform or any medium. You can do this on many different social media platforms. You can boost pages, you can sponsor posts that have performed specifically well. You can build your email list by using a lead magnet like a webinar or an ebook to help offer people value in exchange for their contact.
These are all simple things. They're nothing new, but they’re not accidental. Make sure that expansion is a specific part of your marketing strategy this year. If you don't have an expansion element of your strategy, you're probably still talking to the same friends, family, and clients that you've been talking to for years. While referrals are great, you’re leaving a much larger audience share on the table.
3. Creatively Engage Your Audience
Now, stage number three: engagement. In my opinion, this is what most people usually think of when they think of marketing, or at least content marketing.
Since you’re now aligned with your ideal client, and you have identified ways to expand your audience of ideal prospects, you now need a plan to engage them. This is where you focus on warming the relationship with the new audience you’re building. You can’t skip warming – “Trust me with your life savings” is not the first question you ask a person, right?
My number one tip for getting started in content marketing is this: consistency gives data and data gives insight. Great content marketing is not just your best guess. It’s being responsive to what is working, and to know this, you need a sample size (consistency leads to good data!).
I know a lot of advisors that when they sit down to create content, they focus on what they find interesting. To put it another way, it’s tempting to talk about what people should care about instead of what they do care about. Data helps us cut through the guesswork and understand what actually works:
What messaging and topics
What times and days on social media or email
What platforms
What CTA’s
Etc….
So a piece of advice here. Build a KPI dashboard. If you're not sure what platform to use, shoot us a message. We'll get you pointed in the right direction. Build a central dashboard where you can see a high-level view of these kinds of questions. That data will help you fast-track your trial-and-error marketing and make you far more efficient.
4. Create (and Optimize) Your Conversion Strategy
I’ve gotten to listen to the “true thoughts” of many frustrated advisors when it comes to their marketing. They put renewed time, effort, and money in to their content marketing but still have little to no new business at the end of the day.
A word that comes up a lot is “disconnect” - as in, “We can’t find the disconnect between our marketing and our results.”
Advisors in this spot try a variety of different things:
Spend a ton of money on a website (with no plan to use it)
Spend a ton of money rebranding (and again…)
Blast out a ton of pre-written articles that don’t reflect their brand
Drop a bag of cash on print or digital ads they don’t really understand
Pay for marketing upsells from their corporate umbrella that are underwhelming
It really is a “try anything” mentality, but it rarely works. That’s why when advisors come to Evergreen, we focus on a different answer. Your marketing strategy – no matter the platform – needs a clear set of calls to action (CTAs) to invite your audience to move from spectator to participant.
We usually recommend a rotation of resources like eBooks, webinars, and in-person events – things that are genuinely valuable to your audience. (Don’t take your word for it. Ask some of your best clients if it would be worth their time.)
When you have an audience you’ve been warming via content marketing, these CTA’s align with the value they’ve come to expect from your brand.
One quick note on what you use to drive these conversions. As a financial advisor, this is a relational business. While low-hanging fruit like an eBook or worksheet is helpful, we tend to find that new clients generally need a higher-quality interaction with you the advisor.
They’re not just hiring a commodity – they’re hiring a person.
They need to see your personality, your philosophy, your character – things that matter when someone is choosing a financial advisor. If you want to close higher quality clients, give higher quality interactions.
5. Nurture Your New Leads
Once someone has converted into a lead, they give you contact information. Especially if this is via a lead magnet, one of the worst things you can do is miss the opportunities created by steady follow-up.
I know I’ve downloaded eBooks only to forget to read them or forget the brand that provided them. More importantly, it’s rare that someone will download an eBook the same day they’re ready to become a client. They need time to think – or even time to get around to the topic – and you need to stay top of mind during that window.
You can easily do this with tools like email sequences or retargeting ads. Make sure that once they become a lead, there is a clear follow-up process (including automations!) to keep them engaged or at least aware. And the best part of creating workflows with automation? You can examine your funnel’s performance step by step and optimize it to improve your opportunity conversion rates.
Step 6 (Kind of?) - Take Action. Prioritize Your Growth.
These are the actual pillars we build around in our client strategies. The result is a reliable (yet improvable) marketing system that produces results. But. It only works when you put it into practice! Remember:
Align with your ideal client
Expand your ideal client audience
Engage and warm that relationship
Create opportunities to convert to a lead or the next stage of your funnel
Continue to nurture them and stay top of mind after you have that step in your relationship.
If you’re looking at this list nodding but not sure your team will stick with it, marketing help is easier to find than you might think. Our team at Evergreen specializes in building relational marketing strategies for financial advisors and advisor organizations. Our system is simple, but our results are powerful. We invite you to follow along!
