(Video) Is Your Marketing Foundation Solid?
Video Overview
Is Your Marketing Foundation Solid?
Taking a closer look at seminars, referrals & other legacy marketing strategies.
Tucker Advisors CMO Justin Woodbury is joined by Director of Advisor Marketing Missy Lechuga to talk about how to market your financial advisory practice. In this presentation, you’ll learn a step-by-step process to take your marketing process from a crawl to leaps and bounds. Whether you are in the 10th year of business or your 1st there is an offering that will help you bring in more leads and do more business. Justin also talks about your online presence and what it means to be found online.
This presentation was given at the Tucker Super Conference XVI in January of 2021 and is only for financial professional use. Insurance-only agents are not licensed to offer investment advice.
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Video
Video Synopsis
As a financial advisor it is crucial to separate yourself from the competition and present your practice in a positive and professional light. Getting started on marketing your financial advisory firm can be an arduous task for even the most astute businessmen and women. So, where do we start?
Crawl
To market your business, you need to start with professionalizing your customer experience. That means having a professional email address without Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo in it. This creates trust that you are a real start-up and not a side project. In finance and insurance, it is crucial to instill trust in your brand because people are trusting you with their savings. If they don’t trust you, they won’t work with you.
The second piece of the crawl is your personalized website. Usually this goes hand in hand with creating the professionalized email address so you can knock out two birds with one stone. Your website is an online representation of your business that is viewable 24/7/365. You need to be sure that it is representing your business in a positive light and with accuracy. When it comes to marketing, the best image wins. That means we need to work on your image with professional photography and brand design.
Professional photos and a sharp logo will not only build trust with your prospects, it will improve the performance of your website. Everyone has seen a website and immediately disconnected after seeing how little time and care was spent on the user experience. Using selfies from your phone as your avatar or website photo is a quick way to tell someone that you are using whatever you’ve got instead of what is your best. Show your audience your best! This could mean using a tripod and a well-lit area of your office to take professional-looking photos. It could also take the form of using a local photographer looking to build their portfolio. The bottom-line is that when people look you up, you want to be found in a positive light.
Now that you have your email addresses, website, and a professionalize visual appearance its time to think big picture about your website being found online. That means having local search-engine-optimization and a user-focused strategy to take people from viewing your site to contacting your for help. This is where we transition from crawling to walking.
Walk
The walking process includes having a customer relationship management platform, an email marketing platform, lead magnets to draw in website visitors, and a content marketing plan.
For your CRM, you want a system that allows you to store customer information, identify sales opportunities, and manage your marketing campaigns in one location. Coordinating your day-to-day operations over time leads to a more efficient and customer-centric process. Additionally, it will help your team avoid duplicated efforts. While a customer relationship management platform will help you with 1:1 communication, you’ll also want a way to blast out your message. This is where having an email marketing platform can help.
To create effective email marketing campaigns you’ll need some tools. First, you’ll need an email list of contacts that have opted in to receive your communications. You can build this list by having a call-to-action on your website and using incentives like lead magnets to draw in prospects. What is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is a piece of content, tool, or mechanism that your ideal perspective audience wants. In return for providing them with what they want, they give you the opportunity to market to them by providing some contact information.
Now that you have an email marketing platform and something your audience wants its time to talk about what you’ll send. Coming up with a content marketing plan is crucial in coordinating your marketing efforts. Whether you are writing content on topics relevant to your audience or outsourcing pieces of the content creation process you need to provide value to your users. If you are providing value, users will click, share, and continue to open your messages. The thought here is that over time you will position yourself as an expert on a topic they’re interested in and eventually choose you for their needs.
As a result of your work to establish your online presence and provide value to users you are now able to run with your marketing spend because your foundation is solid.
Run
So you’ve made a brand experience that is presenting your practice in a professional light and now you have communication tools to help you navigate interpersonal and mass communication. It’s now time for you to dive into creating great content while targeting your ideal audience. This can include video marketing, radio or podcast marketing, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization. For each of these mediums, there are different skillsets and strategies to succeed.
Video marketing continues to grow as millions of users search Google and YouTube for assistance everyday. Creating audience-relevant videos on topics they are searching for and wanting to learn about are a great way to pull in more eyes to your practice. Using video allows for a more human experience and a much faster intake of information. While video has a lot of upside, you can also engage prospects verbally through radio and podcasts.
Voice marketing continues to grow with many working adults listening to the radio or podcasts throughout their day. Using radio can up your profile with prospective clients and reach an audience in key demographics for financial planning. Whether you’re talking shop with an industry professional or making an ad for local radio it will build your profile and network. Part of creating effective content is presenting the content to your audience in an easily digestible way. To do that, you’ll want to explore the written marketing power of blogs and articles.
Blogs and articles are a great way to pull in organic searches to your website and build domain authority. We live in a time where anyone can start a website. How can we position your website to pull up for your ideal perspective audience? One of the ways to do this is by having an active blog and doing blogs for other sites that will link to your site. Sharing your knowledge through content is a tried and true way to pull in eyes and ears to your message. To do this, you’ll need to optimize your content for search engines to find. That’s where search engine marketing and optimization come into play.
Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are vehicles to put your materials in front of internet searchers. Using Google and social media is a great way to measure the efficacy of your messaging. It is crucial to setup website analytics and tracking codes to understand what users are doing on your website and how they found you. This information informs your strategy when trying to funnel users from a prospect to a lead. Creating systems that will yield high-value prospects could be a game changer for your bottom line. Now that we are up and running with campaigns that are driving leads and providing ROI it’s time to leap!
Leap
Now that you have all of your preliminary bases covered, it’s time to scale your efforts. Using Geo-fencing, remarketing, television, and social media you are trying to take your voice and content to a bigger audience.
Geo-fencing allows users to target people in a geographic area and send them an offer they can’t refuse. You can develop a strategy with this tool to drive user actions when they are close to one of your physical locations.
Remarketing is when you use advanced analytics to target people who have already interacted with your online content. These people are warm leads who have already heard of you and can be shown more advanced messaging to drive their topic interest to your front door. This strategy requires your previous search engine marketing and social media marketing to have engaged someone. Your next message to them should pull them in using a lead magnet or something valuable and relevant to why they interacted with your brand.
Television and social media are vast categories of advertising with countless strategies to take into account. For these pursuits, you want to be sure that your efforts are sustainable, measurable, and budgeted for. There is no silver bullet to succeed in these arenas but at this point in your marketing you should have an idea of what your strengths are and play to them in your pursuit of more business.
Last but not least, seminars are a great tool to the modern financial advisor. We have seen countless examples of seminars outperforming previously mentioned methods of marketing. Seminars provide a unique, high-class experience that builds seamlessly through the appointment process and helps referral marketing. Follow along as Missy Lechuga details the numerous ways a seminar can help your practice.
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Call 720-702-8811 or email COO Jason Lechuga at Jason.Lechuga@TuckerAdvisors.com
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