Category Archives: Financial Services

The Financial Advisor’s Guide To Digital Marketing And Prospecting – Part 2

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Part 2: Search Engine Optimization

To improve your website ranking, here are a few free tips:

1. Sign up for a free Google Business Profile. A Business Profile will build validity with Google and control what results appear when someone searches for your business.

2. Index Your Site on Google. Using Google Search Console, plug your homepage into the URL Inspection tool, and hit “Request indexing.” Then Google will be able to find and index the pages on your website.

3. Share fresh content. Updating content on your website, including your blog, is one of the best ways to improve your site’s SEO.

4. Create Backlinks (also known as “inbound links”). Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. How can you get backlinks?

The Financial Advisor’s Guide To Digital Marketing And Prospecting – Part 1

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At this very moment, everything is changing in financial advisor marketing. Digital marketing and virtual prospecting are some of the newer ways to market your valuable services. However, these newer marketing methods can seem a bit overwhelming.

In this 6-part series you will learn the most important elements, best practices, and unwind the complexities.

As you begin, take inventory of your current digital assets. These assets typically include your website and social media presence. Are you presenting a strong value proposition, consistent messaging, and a powerful brand?

Part 1: Improve Your Website Presence

There are two major upgrades you can make on your website without doing a complete overhaul.

1. Upgrade your Website Messaging:

Does your website messaging speak to your target prospects and their challenges? If not, consider adding messaging on how you serve clients – front and center on the website. Be bold!
Is your value proposition clearly identified (why you)? If not, tell the visitors to your site how you and your team are different and why. Think about why your current clients chose you.
Do you have attention-grabbing videos? A video is one of the most powerful ways of personally messaging your value.
Could you make the case for your business with LESS words and pages on your site? Consider getting rid of long paragraphs and using more headlines to attract readers.

2. Add a Call-To-Action to Your Website to Engage Prospects:

Add an offer for a report or even a planning session that is compelling to your target audience. These could include:

How Financial Advisors can use AI in their Marketing

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AI can be a powerful tool for financial advisors to enhance their marketing efforts and better serve their clients. Here are some ways AI can be utilized in marketing for financial advisors:

Personalized Content Creation: AI can help generate personalized content such as newsletters, blog posts, or social media updates tailored to interests and needs of clients. Try asking ChatGPT for something like this: “create a blog about interesting ways to enjoy retirement” or “write a blog about unique ways to save money on travel in retirement.”

Predictive Analytics: Many of the large firms are now incorporating AI into their CRM programs to predict future market trends and client needs. Salesforce and HubSpot are off the shelf programs that have AI options to help predict behavioral trends. Financial advisors can use this information to proactively offer relevant services or products to their clients like retirement income planning, financial planning, insurance, estate planning and specific tax mitigation strategies.

Lead Generation and Qualification: AI-powered tools incorporated with CRM programs can help financial advisors identify potential leads from various sources such as social media, websites, or email campaigns. These tools can also assess the quality of leads based on predefined criteria, allowing advisors to focus their efforts on prospects with the highest potential. Check out the power of programs like ActiveCampaign.

Contrarian Networking Strategy – Part 4

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Check out the entire Red Zone Marketing Guide, “The Contrarian Networking Strategy”
Contrarian Networking focuses on the principles of networking that do work – and they are almost always the opposite to what we may believe about networking.

Part 4: Create a Contrarian Networking Plan of Action
Have a plan of action before you go to any event. The goal – to meet connections and future advocates – not to make immediate sales.

1. Find out who’s attending.
Ask the host or organization for a list, ask others, check emails for others attending.

2. Who do you want to meet at the event?
Make a list of the top 5 (don’t avoid the big names).

3. Research people you may be attending by searching on Google and LinkedIn.

4. Find The Meeting Organizer.
If you can’t find out who will be in attendance, when you get there, find the meeting organizer. Introduce yourself and ask who he/she thinks you should get to know at the meeting. Oftentimes they will take you to someone and make the introduction for you (it’s a lot better than standing by the drink table or door all by yourself).

5. At the event, let them do the talking (You ask the questions!).
Once introductions are made, you can move on to more in-depth business questions:

Contrarian Networking Strategy – Part 3

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Contrarian Networking focuses on the principles of networking that do work – and they are almost always the opposite to what we may believe about networking.

Part 3: What To Say When Someone Asks About You?

Every firm needs to have a refined firm story to assist in marketing and client acquisition. But there is a serious need to have a compelling opening line for your firm story – probably several of them. Without something compelling (to them), you may never get the chance to share your story. Even the classic elevator pitch is too gimmicky for an informal initial introduction. In a world of ever-decreasing attention spans, less is definitely more.

A solution for compelling others to want to listen to you is to develop a 15-20 second Simple, Repeatable, Statement of Value (SRSV) for each target audience. An SRSV is a statement that is easy to remember and shares some value directly for the person you are speaking with. Below is the 4-step formula for building your own SRSV. Your SRSV may not include the answer to every question, and it doesn’t have to be compiled in this order.

Develop your 15 second simple, repeatable statement of value (SRSV).

Answer the following questions:
1. What are their needs, wants, challenges, problems, questions, and interests?
2. What you do?
3. What is your memorable differentiator?

Here are some financial advisor examples: