Digital Marketing Strategies for Financial Advisors | Financial Advisors

In today’s online world, digital marketing is essential and is an effective way to promote your business online. No matter your company size, it’s one of the best ways to grow your business, and you don’t have to be a 100% online business to take advantage of it. To build your company and revenue, however, you need the best digital marketing strategies on your side. What I’ve observed from elite advisors and teams who want to grow, is they have adopted a strong digital marketing strategy.

Firms can use a mixture of strategies to attract ideal clients across different channels. The opportunity presented by COVID-19, almost three years later, has shifted the world into a virtual space. This has lowered the visibility of advisors relegated to only serving clients in their local areas. Consumers are savvy, and outside of asking friends and family for referrals, they are using Google and other search engines to find an advisor.

Here are four digital marketing strategies to use to your advantage and grow your client base. Compliance rules differ depending on your situation, so check with your own compliance team to understand what you can or cannot do as it relates to digital marketing platforms.

Search Engine Optimization

When you optimize your website for search engines, people can find you based on commonly used phrases. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a form of inbound marketing because it helps people find your website through search engines. It brings people to your business without you having to find them. Inbound marketing is less intrusive than outbound marketing – which includes TV commercials, radio and cold calling – because people interact with inbound marketing content exactly when they want.

SEO can be broken down into a few pieces. There is on-page SEO, which has to do with keywords you target and other elements you control on your website. Off-page SEO focuses on earning shares and links to the content on your website. Technical SEO deals with how your website functions and determines whether search engines can crawl and index pages. SEO is a long-term strategy, so you won’t get immediate payoff, but if you stick with it, it will pay off in time when you see your business grow.

Content Marketing

Creating valuable content online that gets people to interact and engage with your business is at the heart of content marketing. The content you create doesn’t always have to be written: It can be a video, a blog post or an infographic for people to share. The key word here is “share.” The more people that visit your website, share your content and link to it on their websites, the more you’ll see higher rankings in search engines.

In your content marketing strategy, wrap your personal story and “why” into your content so consumers have a chance to get to know you and what you’re about. Only share information that you’re comfortable sharing, but keep in mind that advisors who show their personal sides stand a better chance of connecting with prospective clients faster.

Email Marketing

With email marketing, you use email to engage with email subscribers or current and past customers. How do you get said subscribers? You can start by having an email opt-in on your website. Email marketing ties into content marketing because you can use your emails to engage and share content.

Send a monthly newsletter with an update on your blog, new promotions or what’s new at your firm. Just don’t spam people by sending out too many emails in one day. Encourage others to subscribe to your newsletter via social media posts and offer an incentive, resource or tool they would be willing to trade their email address for. Use platforms such as Mailchimp, Mailerlite or Constant Contact to set up your email marketing system.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing uses a variety of social media platforms to communicate and engage with your target audience. There are several social media platforms advisors can take advantage of, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. Your business should be wherever your target audience is. If you’re not getting traction on one site, you should find another where you can get access to your target audience.

Just like email marketing, social media marketing also ties into your content marketing strategy. It’s another outlet for you to share the content you create. Social media posting and management can be a full-time job, so pick one to two platforms to master first. Unless you have a dedicated staff member or outsourced provider to do the work, it can quickly become overwhelming. At this point, many advisors tend to stop and this can be avoided if you create a strategy and plan to get the heavy lifting done.

Aligning Strategies

Each of these growth strategies work together and here’s how: You’ve got an idea for a new article and you share this piece on your website about how this topic can affect your prospective clients. You then create an attractive infographic to get people’s attention. You take time to research key words, which you include throughout the content. It starts to rank in search engines, and you share this content in your email newsletter and post your infographic on social media to drive traffic to your website. Your content starts to rank even higher, then you catch the attention of a major publication. They write about your article and link to your website. Then more people find you from that publication. Now you’re at the top of the search engines for your target keywords and sales can spike from your hard work.

Once you find the right mix of effective strategies, seek to document and then duplicate the process for maximum results.

Keep the End Goal in Mind

It’s important to identify your goals for any digital marketing strategy. Is it brand awareness? Finding more prospective client leads? Expanding your digital footprint? More engagement? Whatever the end goal – and it doesn’t have to be a single reason – use the best tools to achieve your ideal outcomes. Understand that digital marketing doesn’t stop. You must continue to create, optimize and share content to see consistent growth. If you do this, you’ll be able to reap significant growth in your advisory firm.

https://money.usnews.com/financial-advisors/articles/digital-marketing-strategies-for-financial-advisors