With more financial advisors than ever moving onto online platforms, making your services stand out is becoming difficult. This fact is why a financial advisor marketing plan is more important than ever! Don’t waste your time on unstructured or unproductive marketing strategies any longer!
In this digital era, creating a niche marketing plan is the best way to make your efforts more effective, but do you know where to start? Do you know what marketing plans consist of and how to create one that will work? Do you know the fundamentals of effective digital marketing?
If you want to learn the basics of creating a marketing plan template specifically targeted to financial advisors and finally understand what all the essential acronyms mean, you’re in the right place! We compiled a list of the six most important things you should know and some expert tips to help you make the most of your marketing objectives. Read on to learn more!
Financial Advisor Marketing Plan Fundamentals
The best marketing plans are focused on creating great content that your clients will want to read. It doesn’t matter how many ads you post or how many social media accounts you have; it won’t work if the content is lacking. To avoid this common blunder, it helps to start learning the fundamentals of marketing plans to better comprehend how all these pieces fit together to create a winning approach that will win.
So, how do you create marketing strategies that will help you build a business and obtain more clients? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all marketing plan template, but learning these fundamentals can help you create a powerful strategy that will help you achieve your business goals.
Step One: What is Your Niche?
When it comes to standing out amongst your competition, identifying your specific niche is crucial. While it may seem like choosing a niche will limit your capabilities, it will create more value with your target audience and give you more power behind your chosen keywords. As the competition in the financial service industry continues growing, potential clients will most likely lean towards specialists in their field rather than selecting generalists.
If you’re unsure what your niche is, take some time to define your ideal client or target audience. What language or jargon will help you connect with them? What type of content would be most relevant to them?
Take some time to identify what steps you want each client to follow when they arrive at your site, and make it easy for them to follow the process organically. State your niche on your website, your blog, your social media profiles, and all other marketing plans to create a cohesive vision for each visitor.
Step Two: Create an Impressive Website
There’s a common misconception that financial advising is a drab, tedious job that’s all about numbers and data. While that isn’t entirely false, your job is also about helping people make the right decisions with their money to grow their businesses and reach their dreams! But, if your website is bland, you could be making a bad first impression and buying into the illusion that you’re just another lack-luster button pusher.
97% of consumers search online first when they want to find a new business, so that first impression is crucial! You don’t need to have a ton of experience with coding and design to obtain a powerful website because there are plenty of resources available for you to use to create an impressive website.
The key factors to remember when redesigning your website are:
- Create an impressive homepage and landing pages
- Clearly define your services and avoid complicated jargon and acronyms
- Humanize your business by creating an “About Us” page
- Make it easy to find your contact information
- Make sure you include your Form ADV but don’t make it a focal feature
Step Three: Invest in SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a vital tool to help your services stand out in an overcrowded industry like financial advising. Your website is a crucial tool to help you connect with potential customers, but you could get lost in the sea of your competition without optimized content.
When looking at your SEO, focus on:
- Localized search terms
- Targeted keywords
- Internal and external links
- Fresh content
When you keep your terms local and targeted and regularly post fresh content that has links to internal and external content, your posts will actively work to help you rank higher on SERPs or search engine results pages. While the process of learning SEO can be intimidating, the benefits of an optimized marketing plan are incredible.
Step Four: Focus on Useful Content
While it can be tempting to focus all your efforts on making the sale and getting the client to commit, you should shift your focus to creating useful content for your visitors. People are more conscious of sales tactics and can often be turned off if the focus is always about getting their money. If you shift the focus to educating and helping clients, they will learn to trust you and know that you’re genuinely an expert in your field.
But creating useful content is a multi-tiered process. Consider choosing multiple options, like:
- Blog posts
- Social media
- Case studies
- Press releases
- Videos and Webinars
- Podcasts
- Infographics and photos
Choose the content that fits your niche and keep it informative, engaging, and encouraging. The more frequent consistent your posting is, the more impact it will have on your visitors. Creating a marketing calendar can help you create a schedule to remind you to release new content regularly.
Step Five: The Power of Social Media
It’s estimated that over 240 million people in the U.S. currently use social media, which means you definitely shouldn’t overlook this tool when creating your marketing plan. Social media is a useful tool in creating a more approachable view of your business and allows you to create different content in a format most people are familiar with across the country.
So, how can you make the most of your social media marketing to nurture a connection, generate more sales, and drive more traffic to your website?
- Choose the right platforms for your target audience, and keep in mind that the top trending platforms change frequently
- Create a profile with engaging summaries, professional but personal photos, and find a consistent voice for your content
- Post frequently
- Share third-party posts that are relevant to your business, valuable to your clients, and reliable sources
- Engage with comments, answer questions, and be present
- Find a unique voice that you can use in all your content
- Include your social media profiles in your marketing calendar to remember to post and remember that your content can often be reformatted to fit different platforms easily
Step Six: Track Your Data
As a financial planner, you know how crucial monitoring data is to ensure your investments are performing optimally, and your marketing plan is no different! Use tools like Google Analytics to stay on track with your goals and identify top performers across your marketing campaigns.
If you’re not monitoring your data, you run the risk of wasting precious resources, which is frustrating. Keep testing different campaigns and platforms until you find the right fit. Popular social media platforms change, and Google regularly updates their ranking factors, so it’s essential to check in with your strategies to maintain your momentum over time.
Where to Start
When it comes to developing a financial advisor marketing plan, it’s best to view it just like starting your business. You’ve got to build it from the ground up!
Take some time to figure out what marketing strategies you might have tried out in the past and what worked and didn’t work. After that, work through the fundamentals listed above to fine-tune your plan and develop a plan that will elevate your business to new heights! Talk to your current clients to see what drew them in and test out different strategies until you find the right fit.
Digital marketing is similar to financial planning in a lot of different ways. Both require a trial period to develop a strategy that works and tracking data to identify key players. Both are also necessary to growing your business, reaching new clients, and achieving your goals!
Reaching new clients is not only possible but easy when you have an expertly strategized plan in place. To learn more about us and to get a FREE private business evaluation, contact us. To learn more about marketing and to check out our other informative articles, visit our blog.
