Part 5: Content Marketing

Bringing it all together! Every day we are seeing more financial advisors venturing into content marketing. Why? Well, it’s a complete, albeit slightly complex, proven way to generate new, qualified prospects. So, let’s go over the basics of what you need to know and how to get started.

Learn how to use content marketing to attract your best clients:

1. What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. Its purpose is to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action. It is a way to use content like blogs, articles, whitepapers, guides, videos, podcasts, webinars, infographics, ebooks, and social content to relay valuable ideas and create relationships – rather than explicitly selling a product or service.

2. What are Common Objectives of Content Marketing?

Content marketing uses a marketing funnel method for moving your prospects through six stages of engagement. You begin by gaining awareness, increasing exposure, driving people to your website, building your list, building your pipeline of qualified prospects and ultimately, generating new revenue.

3. Getting Started with Content Marketing

Here are some of the basics for getting started with content marketing.

Specifically Define Your Target Audience: What are their needs, wants, challenges, problems, questions, and interests? Where are they on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and what may be interesting to them?

Generate Interesting Content Ideas: Using keyword research tools like SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool, Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (there are many more as well), determine the longtail keywords that your target audience could be using in their online searches. Longtail keywords are very specific and usually drive highly targeted visitors that are likely to be interested in your content. Then, write or record content and design offers using these longtail keywords.

Promotion and Action: Where will your content appear and how will people be able to take action? Will you use paid advertising on social media or search engines, or will you try to engage organic traffic to your content? Do you have an email list to share your content? And, finally, what call to action will you have to lead them further into your funnel? A report, whitepaper, checklist, etc?

Content Workflow: How will you manage the content you are planning on, what has been written or recorded, and how can you keep track of everything? We use a Content Workflow & Calendar in Smartsheet. You can create your own. It could look something like this:

Part 4: Social Media Marketing

If you want to stand out in the sea of financial advisors, social media marketing should be a core component in your marketing strategy. 

Here are 3 critical tips: 

1. Improve the Content You Post to Social 

Content is relevant if it is timely, and/or of particular interest to a group of people or niche audience. You will know it is relevant and interesting if people like, click and share your content. 

The content could be… 

Lifestyle oriented 

Motivational 

Topic oriented to a particular segment for example: 

Getting ready to retire 

Saving for college for child or grandchild 

Widows 

Divorcees 

Charitable or philanthropic oriented 

Event oriented – either a local event in your community or something you are hosting 

Related to people in your office 

2. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator 

One of the most profitable ways to reach new prospects is to use the vast resources of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Part 3: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC, or pay-per-click, is an online advertising strategy where you can run ads on a platform such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, X (Twitter) Ads, etc. You only pay a fee when someone clicks on it. 

A good ad should have a strong call to action. That does not mean sharing a list of your services but sharing information that connects to the needs and wants of your target audience. For instance, the call to action could be to sign up for an interesting webinar, receive an interesting report (i.e. “The 5 Things You Need to Know When Retiring In Volatile Market Conditions”), or receive a free consultation with a particular outcome. 

Within each platform there are different ad formats including: •

SearchAds 

DisplayAds 

VideoAds 

Regardless of the platform and ad format, the way that PPC works is mostly the same and is a fairly simple process: 

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?