Last Updated on July 20, 2020 by Phil Rogers
One of our recent blog posts demonstrated how high growth financial advisors are growing their businesses by making a prospect feel like a client and delivering value even before they are signed up.
The challenge that remains is how to attract the right prospects and get them to make the initial contact.
After referrals, the most cost-effective way to attract new clients today is digital marketing. To be successful with digital, you need to grow relevant traffic to your website and get these visitors to opt-in to an offer. The best way to do this is to develop a coherent marketing campaign. You can do it relatively quickly using free or low-cost tools.
Here are the 3 steps that you need to take.
Step 1: Create a persona for your ideal client and identify your target keyword
Start by interviewing some of your best clients and ask them what they value most about your service. Capture the language that they use. Their words are very important. You can use this language in your copy.
Use the Persona App tool to sketch out at least one profile or persona. The app includes some suggested questions.
Your persona work should also help you identify the words that your ideal client may use to search for your service. Google offers their free keyword planner to help you evaluate these search terms. You have to sign up for a free Adwords account to access it. Here’s a video to show you how to use the Keyword Planner tool.
The focus keyword should be a top search term that your ideal customer would use. The keyword should have high search volume and low competition. We are going to use “financial planner” even though it is very competitive because of the potential to rank in local search.
Step 2: Create a landing page
A landing page is a webpage with a single objective. It does not have the normal navigation since you want the visitor to complete a form, and submit their information. There are a number of landing page builders. We used Unbounce. We created this page with their simple drag and drop tool for the fictitious “Blueleaf Advisors”.
You can use the copy for inspiration and right click to get the image. This offer assumes that you are using some kind of account aggregation software. This is a “bottom of the funnel” offer because it targets people that are ready to seriously consider either changing their advisor or getting started with one. Refer back to your persona model to help adjust the language to best fit your ideal client.
You can set up a simple notification in Unbounce to let you know when you get form submissions.
Step 3: Promote the offer
You have your core asset for the campaign in place. Now you need to promote it. Your strategy depends on the strengths of your promotional channels.
Here are some options.
a. Homepage
The home page of your site will get the most traffic. Most home pages have a lot of distractions and many do not have a clear objective. Simplify your homepage and focus on your “lead magnet” offer only.
The home page should be optimized around your target keyword. Here’s a guide on how to optimize a web page. How you do it depends on your website software.
b. Web page
A dedicated web page on your process will help define your onboarding process and also provide another opportunity to rank on a different but related target keyword. Financial planning or retirement planning might be good targets.
c. Blog post
A blog going into more detail on initial steps and your approach. It provides another opportunity to rank for another related keyword. Remember to include a call to action (CTA) at the bottom of your blog post. A call to action is a link or button stating your offer (“Let’s Start Our Discussion”) that links to the landing page. Check out the bottom of this post for a CTA example.
d. Email
Email continues to be the most cost effective digital marketing channel. If you have built a list of potentials with a newsletter, promote the offer directly to help move the potentials to prospects.
e. Social
Social media can be a promotional channel if you have built a following. Consider creating visual posts to get more engagement. Think about creating a Slideshare to provide a short visual overview of your process. You can add a lead generation form to Slideshare (currently $4 per lead) and include clickable links to your landing page.
f. Paid advertising
A good place to start is LinkedIn advertising. You can either promote your blog post linking to your offer page or advertise the offer directly. LinkedIn allows you to target by title and industry. It has a relatively high price per click, but the traffic will be very targeted. Here’s how to get started with LinkedIn advertising. LinkedIn only gives you a couple of days to achieve their required click through rate. They stop the ad being seen after that. You will most likely need to create a few different ads campaigns until you come up with an ad that performs well.
Adwords is another option. Here’s a guide to help with setting and running your Adwords campaign.
g. Center of Influence (COI) marketing
Remember to work with your COIs to get increased exposure to the offer. Access to their audience might double or triple the number of people that you can reach.
Next Steps
You can now use the steps outlined in high growth financial advisor secrets post once you get some sign ups.
Bonus tip: Testing the effectiveness of your digital assets is vital to increase your conversion rates. A conversion rate is simply the number of sign ups divided by the number of visitors to a page. Increasing your conversion rate from 2% to 4% will double the number of prospective clients for you. Optimizely is a free tool that allows you to send up tests without any coding. Check out Optimizely’s overview of AB testing or split testing and their tool.
