(AssetMark) How do you attract new prospects and convert them into new clients? You can’t help people with wealth management or financial planning if you can’t reach them. Financial advisors should create a strategic and measurable marketing plan designed to increase their reach and drive small business growth.
However, before you can start to ramp up any marketing initiatives, you need to establish a firm foundation with an outlined strategy. Let’s look at what a marketing plan should look like for RIAs and financial advisors. Then, we’ll provide some helpful tips to help you get started.
What is in a Financial Advisor Marketing Plan?
A financial advisor marketing plan is a comprehensive, written document that outlines the steps you and your staff will take to build brand awareness, socialize your value proposition, engage prospects, and retain clients over time.
A detailed marketing plan establishes a strategic starting point essential for success by defining your vision, strategy, and goals. Your financial advisor marketing plan should support your overarching business plan. Well-rounded marketing plans include both in-person and online (digital) marketing campaigns, materials, and events designed to increase brand recognition and build trust with specific audiences.
This plan should outline your value proposition; explain how, when, and where you’ll deliver it; identify current gaps, issues and opportunities; and define your target market. Importantly, a marketing plan must include a method to track progress (metrics) and the flexibility to pivot if needed.
Why Is Marketing an Important Component of Financial Advisor Business Plans?
Your long-term business success depends upon your ability to build and maintain an active client pipeline. Building a steady stream of clients doesn’t happen overnight—or by accident.
The process of converting leads into clients entails telling your target audience why you are the one they should be working with. Offering the best products and services isn’t enough if clients and prospects don’t know about you.
Marketing includes the strategies that help you connect with, engage, and capture clients. These promotional strategies are an integral part of your overall business planning efforts. To achieve sustainable business growth, you need a strategic marketing plan in place that helps guide your outreach actions.
3 Financial Advisor Marketing Strategies to Consider
Any marketing strategy you consider must be part of a comprehensive marketing plan. Starting your marketing efforts without a guiding plan is perhaps one of the biggest financial advisor marketing mistakes you can make.
Your marketing plan is your blueprint for success, encouraging teamwork, improving focus, and aligning resources with outcomes.
There are several common marketing strategies that should be considered for your plan. Here are three popular strategies that companies use to strengthen their online presence and remain top-of-mind with clients.
Digital Marketing
Most people look for information on digital platforms like search engines, websites, and social media. Digital marketing uses complex online advertising tactics that continually evolve, including search engine optimization (SEO), search engine results pages (SERPs), pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and more.
At its core, digital marketing is all about getting your message into the hands of your on-the-go, sometimes impatient, audience. Business owners use digital marketing strategies to target select audiences that are most likely to contain qualified leads.
- Understand your audience. Don’t assume you know where your audience spends their time—ask. Choose your ideal clients to establish as your target client personas and get to know what motivates them and where you can target more prospects like them.
- Narrow down your audience. Don’t advertise to everyone; target your audience with ads on the platforms where they spend the most time.
- Make the instant connection. Don’t make your visitors search for the value you promised. Create landing pages that align with your ad so the visitor lands on a page that perfectly aligns with the offer or targeted marketing message they saw in your ad.
- Use a call to action. Calls to action (CTAs) are what marketers use to prompt their audience toward a conversion of some kind. Your CTA could include signing up for a newsletter, reaching out for a quote, reading another blog, downloading a resource, and more. Set a goal for every ad or page you design and use a CTA to support that goal.
Email Marketing
Email marketing offers a more intimate opportunity to build stronger relationships with existing clients. On average, over 21% of business and finance emails are opened.
Clients like to get emails with deals, timely reminders, or important insights. Your audience might also appreciate getting messages that acknowledge important events, celebrate holidays, or offer interesting information. Helpful newsletters with an impactful message can help build trust with potential clients as well, especially if you are trying to engage prospects who may not be familiar with you or your services.
The goal of your email marketing strategy should be to provide value to the client—not just sell your products and services. Here are some tips to make your email marketing more effective:
- Create an email distribution list that will have the most impact. Buying a contacts list is not a good use of your money or time. Purchased lists tend to have a lot of uninterested leads that aren’t a good fit and could mark your messages as spam, hurting your brand reputation. It takes time to build a quality list, so start now.
- Segment your contacts. Not every client is going to have the same interests, needs, or values as your other clients. Segmenting your email list helps you send the right message to the right audience. Your list can be broken down by location, AUM, services, age, and more.
- Be sure you have a strong subject line. Entice your audience to open the email by crafting an interesting subject line and preview text. 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone.
- There is a “right” time to send your email. Be sure to measure your results to maximize your outcomes by posting during the best viewing window for your business.
- Reuse what works. Email templates can save a lot of time. Choose your most effective emails and use them as structures to help speed up email creation in the future. Many emails (like reports, thank yous, and account reminders) can be based on a template and automated to save you even more time while increasing your responsiveness to clients.
Content Marketing
Creating or sharing online materials—like videos, blogs, guides, and social media posts—for your website or social media platforms is called content marketing. You don’t necessarily have to author the material, and some professionals do more content curation than creation.
Content marketing should address your audience based on where they are likely at in the buyer’s journey—those who are just considering a need for a financial planner or exploring an interest in financial services may have many questions before they are ready to consider contacting you for a quote. Much of your supportive content should promote your solutions and show your expertise without a “hard sell” message.
You can post articles on your site to build up available resources, or submit articles for publication on other financial professionals’ sites to reach a broader audience and increase brand recognition. You could also provide a quote to be included in an article or get invited as an expert guest on a podcast to provide financial advice to a niche market Professional exposure establishes you as a knowledgeable and trusted professional.
- Make a solid first impression. Your website is often a prospect’s first impression of you and your business. Invest in a professional graphic designer and craft messaging that promotes your value proposition.
- Explore video marketing. Filming yourself might feel intimidating at first, but video content can be extremely convincing and help humanize your practice. 88%of people say they have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Additionally, podcasts, seminars, and webinars are great vehicles for creating trust, establishing your expertise, and building your brand.
- Be more social. Be active on the right platforms, focusing your efforts wherever your ideal client spends the most time as part of your social media marketing strategy. If your target client skews older, use Facebook or LinkedIn. Targeting younger (Millennial and Gen Z) prospective clients? Try Twitter and TikTok.
- Create for organic search. Google provided over 270 million unique search results in 2022. Write content that answers questions your audience most frequently asks or searches for. Many people forget YouTube is a search engine for video content, with over 122 million people visiting every day to watch content.
Building Your Financial Advisor Marketing Plan
Building a well-thought-out financial advisor marketing plan takes effort but is well worth it for the results an organized strategy can produce.
Ideally, begin using your plan at the beginning of the calendar year or your firm’s fiscal year. Most plans cover a period of one year. You can also create a more long-term plan that examines a broader outlook to help shape your results over time. You should establish a clear marketing budget that works with your bottom line and realistically covers the marketing tools, creation process, and advertising you need for an effective strategy.
Below are some best practices and marketing tips to get you started.
1. Know Yourself
Do you have a mission statement prepared? What is your value proposition? These elements are the foundation of your marketing plan, conveying who you are and what you do. All else flows from them.
2. Know the Competition
Your plan should reflect your marketplace and your position within it. Conduct competitive analyses on your rivals and an internal analysis to uncover your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). Use this SWOT analysis to inform the elements of your marketing plan and differentiate your practice.
3. Know Your Clients
Define your target audience and ideal clients, so you can engage them in a meaningful way. This can involve surveying a selection of your current clients and developing personas that help guide your marketing tactics. Learn what interests your audience, the values they share, the concerns that keep them up at night, the characteristics they have in common, and the differences that set them apart as defined audiences.
4. Determine the Resources You Have to Commit to Your Marketing Plan
Developing and implementing your marketing plan takes time, money, and resources. Also consider the skillsets needed, as well as the time commitment involved. How much can you realistically commit to your plan? What kind of Return on Investment (ROI) can you expect over time? One study showed companies that have bounced back most strongly from previous recessions usually did not cut their marketing spending and, in many cases, increased it.
5. Know How—And When—You’ll Measure Progress
Set up checkpoints to assess your progress on a regular basis. When you are creating your client/prospect engagement calendar, also create an internal calendar to check the impact of your plan. Don’t be impatient. It can take a year or longer to notice a measurable difference caused by marketing impact. Give your plan time to succeed.
6. Get the Buy-In From Key Stakeholders
Be sure to include your staff members and key stakeholders in the development process. Not only will your team bring diverse insights to the process, but they are also your “on the ground” force and implement your plan’s elements.
7. Set SMART Goals
Use SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals to set yourself up for long-term success. Clearly define how you will measure your success to determine what is working and what is not. Then make sure you are able to gather the data that you need for your KPIs.
Financial Advisor Marketing Solutions
Ultimately, the goal of any marketing plan is to build brand awareness, retain clients, and attract prospects. Effective solutions require both a detailed analysis and a bird’s eye view of your practice to give you a balanced perspective.
An honest evaluation of where you are, an insightful understanding of where you want to be, and a commitment to seeing the plan through will help your practice thrive.
Now is the right time to build up your brand and reputation with a solid marketing plan. Check out other marketing articles in our blog, explore AssetMark's Marketing Advantage offering, or request a consultation to get tailored solutions from our business consultants.
