Financial advisors have a lot of work on their plates. Besides staying on top of financial trends and regularly meeting clients, they also have to keep their eye on the markets, create financial plans, and watch for new laws and regulations. Despite all this, financial advising is its own small business, and advisors have to carry much of the marketing work in order to find new clients.
In a word, advisors have an awfully long to-do list, so adding “digital marketing” into the mix sounds like a recipe for overload. However, with a few key marketing tactics, advisors might actually find that their to-do lists are more manageable by incorporating these tips. Let’s delve into what financial advisors can do to achieve marketing success.
Understand Your Audience
The first step towards any strong marketing plan is to identify your target audience. This is easiest to understand in terms of demographics. For example, advisors who work on retirement plans are probably serving adults in their 35s and up. Others might specialize in advising younger adults, so their core demographics are Millennials and recent college graduates. Additionally, where you’re located can influence factors such as socioeconomic status, race, gender, education level, profession, and other elements that make up your clientele.
Think about the core group of active clients you help, and sketch out what kinds of backgrounds they come from. It’s common to serve multiple demographic groups, too, so you might have several archetypes! Once you’ve sketched these out, let’s get into how this can reform your marketing plan and workflow.
Craft Your Marketing Plan
In many ways, your customers determine your marketing plan. Where you push your content, the words you use, and the ideas you implement are all determined by the customer base you appeal to, so your marketing is a conversation between you and your clients.
This might sound constraining, but it’s actually great news! For one thing, it saves you loads of time. Let’s say you’re a retirement specialist who’s trying to market on Instagram, but you notice that your account hasn’t gained much traction. That might be because the base you’re trying to appeal to is for adults in their 50s and 60s, but the majority of Instagram’s users are 18-49. So, you can save yourself the trouble and focus your social media efforts on Facebook or over email – two mediums with an older, more evenly spread out demographic!
Or maybe you don’t have any social media accounts quite yet, so this sounds like extra work. Sure, it adds things to your to-do list, but it also helps you figure out how to reach out to your core demographic. The skills you gain by writing for your core customer base translates to better relations in person, so while you might find social media work tedious, you’re actually building upon the interpersonal skills that translate to being a better financial advisor.
Market across channels
Social media is one part of an effective social media campaign. In addition to this, having a well-designed website that features your services, community impacts, and offers articles for potential clients to read could create a huge payoff. Here, you can blog about financial advice, changes in the financial world, or other ways to improve financial literacy. Not only do you create content that can rank high in search engines, but you also give your clients – and yourself! – something to refer back to.
Email marketing is also a great way to keep both current and potential clients engaged. And, let’s be honest – people love freebies. Offering a free consultation, credit check, or budgeting worksheet can help clients remember your name – and create opportunities for clients to recommend you in casual conversation.
Show customers what you can offer
At the end of the day, your marketing plan should enhance what your customers already know: that you’re awesome at what you do! Utilizing a mix of digital marketing strategies, you can ensure that the right clients see you at the right time and develop a lifelong connection in the process.
Not sure where to start in your marketing plan? Looking for a virtual assistant to handle the workload? You’re already talking to the experts. Summit Collaborations has years of experience marketing for financial advisors, and we want to help you too. Learn more about us, or schedule a call today, and let’s get started on crafting your best year yet.