Digital Marketing (In Finance) Without Blowing Your Budget
As a financial advisor, do you sometimes struggle to find potential clients? Are referrals not bringing you the same quality of business as they used to? Eventually, your practice may grow beyond your network, meaning you may need to attract clients from the outside.
It’s time to start marketing your practice online (if you aren’t already)! There are many ways to get your marketing efforts started. You may be thinking of putting a banner ad on the front page of the Financial Times, but after looking at the price, you realize that is a lot of money for one Ad…. It’s important to get a good ROI on your marketing efforts, especially if you don’t have the mountain of capital the big banks have.
So, how can you have a successful financial digital marketing plan while staying on a budget? Here are 6 ways you can use digital marketing to grow your brand and increase your leads, without breaking the bank.
1. Create High Quality Content
One way you can get the word out about your advisory business is by producing and distributing high-quality content. Use your expertise as a marketing tool. Giving out small snippets of advice about a variety of overarching topics that will interest your potential audience, for free. Education is a key marketing tool in 2017. Educate your followers, with the goal of establishing yourself as a thought leader among financial advisors.
Now, creating high-quality content can be time consuming; writing a blog post, webinar, ebook or some other form of content takes time. You can spend a lot of time writing or producing other forms of content (audio, video, interpretive dance (please don’t try this, it doesn’t work very well when selling financial advice)) but besides the time invested, it has low costs and can generate a high ROI. There is another benefit of creating high-quality, unique content. Search engines favor high-quality sources that add value to the reader. Blogging is an effective way to rank higher in search results because they are continuously updated with fresh, useful content. As we mentioned in a previous article:
“Search engines love websites that are constantly being updated with unique and fresh content. When Google spiders come to audit your site, they report back whether your website is of high quality (or not) as a result of whether it is constantly updated with new, unique, and quality content.”
Well-written, unique content is seen as a high-quality source, and will help you rank higher in search results. This will lead to more traffic to your website, at no additional cost.
Remember, content marketing costs less than outbound marketing, but generates up to 3 times the number of leads. This is done by producing and distributing high-quality content on your website, blog or other digital properties.
2. Email Marketing
In today’s digital age, email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing in terms of ROI. A study by Campaign Monitor found that for every $1 spent, email gives back a whopping $38 in ROI, while also offering the broadest reach. Email marketing is subject to regulations, such as CASL in Canada, meaning that everyone has to sign up for your newsletter individually. This can mean that building a respectable email list can take some time. Even with the new laws and regulations, email marketing is extremely effective.
Some key aspects of email marketing are: having an eye-catching email template, on-topic subject lines, an interested audience (email list) and a personalized feel for the reader. Remember, people get hundreds (thousands? millions?) of emails per week. If value isn’t provided in your newsletters they will unsubscribe. Nobody wants their time wasted. A piece of advice: spend some time making your email look and feel perfect, and making sure it adds value to the reader. It will be worth it. The ROI of email marketing is astronomical, you will regret not putting the extra effort in.
One method you could use to create interesting emails, is to reuse content from other inbound marketing efforts. A newsletter is a great place to share your blog posts, articles, or podcasts for a second time.
3. Location Targeting
Most people want to do their shopping, errands, and business conveniently, near their location. As they say in real estate: location, location, location. It matters, especially when it comes to digital marketing. According to Hubspot, 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store within five miles. Local searches also lead 50% of mobile visitors to visit stores within one day. These statistics are very telling and significant, and should be taken into account when crafting your digital marketing strategy.
Use location data to show the audience things such as: where you’re located in relation to them, your contact info, business reviews, and more. To be able to properly target locally, you should put your business on “Google My Business”. It is a service by Google that allows companies to appear in search results filtered by location. It allows people to see where you are located (on a map) when they Google you. To learn more about Google My Business, check out our article on it here.
People, especially those on mobile devices, are increasingly willing to share information about their location with you. They do this thinking that by providing more information they will be provided with a more personalized, relevant experience using the website. Location targeting is quite cheap and easy to implement but can be scaled up to deliver more expensive, complex solutions, such as sending content and promotional material to your audience, depending on their location.
4. Great Landing Pages
Landing pages are an extremely cheap, yet effective way to increase your number of leads and get the most out of your digital marketing efforts. Any solution you can use to host your website will have an option to create new pages. This means you can (and should) have a personalized landing page for every campaign you are running. Having dedicated landing pages will ensure your audience is only presented with information (and a call-to-action) that is relevant to the reason they are visiting your website in the first place.
When you send someone directly to your homepage, (or blog page, or any page with information) they may feel overwhelmed and unsure where to navigate to next. Create landing pages geared towards an audience coming from a specific source, stripping out all non-essential features and focusing your message on what is relevant to that audience. People can recognize a well-designed website and they WILL remember it, and hopefully, return. Remember, a professional website is the difference between a client calling you, or a client calling your biggest competitor. Landing pages are easy to create, will improve your user’s experience will help improve your ROI (seeing as they don’t cost anything to create except time).
It will be many people’s first (and only) impression of you. According to Hubspot, 55% of people spend 15 seconds or less on your website.
5. Effective Calls-To-Action
Having an effective call-to-action (CTA) on your digital property is one of the most important (and inexpensive) ways to generate ROI using digital marketing. A CTA is a prompt to get the audience to complete a specific action, a goal at the heart of any digital marketing strategy.
If you don’t ask people to do something, they won’t do it. That’s a fact of life. Calls to action motivate people to complete actions that can help you meet their needs.
Take for example, the call-to-action from Netflix below. The CTA is very clear: “Join Free for a Month”. It is nearly impossible to miss that giant red button. It screams for attention. The messaging is also very clear: “Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.” They present their full value proposition within the CTA (and within the first few seconds of arriving on their site).
As an advisor, you should have at least one call-to-action on your website. You might not be able to entice people with an offer as tempting as Netflix, (who can pass up free movies for a month?), but there are other options for your industry. This could be a unique and valuable eBook, offering them insights and advice related to your expertise. You could also offer a “Free Consultation” and tempt them with a clear value proposition such as: “Discover the reality of your financial situation.” “Subscribe to my blog”, or “Contact Us” are other examples. Any action you want your prospect to take can be encouraged with a well placed, persuasive CTA.
Whatever you choose, ensure your CTA is motivating and actionable. CTAs don’t inherently come with any additional costs. They can be as simple or as complex as needed. Whatever solution you use to host your website, it should have an easy way to add a call-to-action.
6. Paid Search
Another way to generate strong ROI in financial digital marketing is through Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM involves using paid search ads to ensure that your offerings are the top results for a particular search topic. The issue with SEM is that some terms, especially financial service keywords, can be extremely expensive. In fact, the most expensive keywords, in general, are related to finance and legal services. For example, “insurance”, “attorney” and “mortgage” are the top 3 most expensive keywords.
To save money and generate a better ROI, you can use paid search to creatively target local customers. What’s the point in having someone located in Moscow find your website via search if you’re located in Moose Jaw? They won’t be interested in a financial service provider that they can’t meet in person. To avoid targeting too broad of a geographical range, use long-tail keywords such as “Financial Advisor in Moose Jaw”.
To gain the most value from SEM, use lesser known keywords and geographic targeting. Ensure people are directed to a page that has relevant information that is related to the search topic, with compelling calls-to-action.
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