4 Steps to Successful Inbound Marketing for Financial Advisors
This post is about how there is a simple, repeatable process for driving online leads to your insurance agency or financial practice.
Financial advisors must be willing to adapt their sales and marketing to meet their prospects where they are using inbound marketing. And where they are is online.
Here are the 4 steps:
Each of the different steps has several sub-categories that need to be executed regularly to make phase successful.Each phase serves as a building blog for the next step. The success of each subsequent step is dependent on how well the previous one was done.
The first step is the attract phase. Here, we’ll focus on the tactics that get more of our target audience back to our site.
They include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Blog marketing and guest posting
- Social media
- Email marketing
The key is to create content that is compelling and incentivizes people to learn more about us. Here is a brief description of each one.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
This is the process by which we earn better rankings on Google search. (Sites like Bing and Yahoo also fall under this topic, but they account for only a small part of all search.)
We could devote an entire blog series to SEO and still not cover all the ins and outs of the process. Check out this video from Search Engine Land that explains it all in a nutshell.
Blog marketing
Consider the blog your main marketing hub. This is where you publish content and position yourself as an industry expert. Focus your writing on problems that your audience is experiencing. Give answers to commonly asked questions. Give value through education.
Blogging also plays an important role in SEO.
Google puts a great deal of effort into returning helpful answers to searchers’ questions. Be one of those answers.
Posting on other blogs is also a great way to send traffic from other places back to your site.
Social media
This is another topic that has an entire sub-industry all its own.
Posting your content (and that of other relevant sources) is a good way to build an audience. Also, by showing that you are willing to interact with followers make you look more trustworthy. After all,you’re asking them to trust you with their money. They need to see that you’re a real person.
Email marketing
Email gets a bad rep. Perhaps because there was so much SPAM for so long that many advisors abandoned the practice. It’s unfortunate because email marketing has the highest ROI of any of these activities. The more relevant your emails (and subject lines) are to your audience, the better your results will be.
Once they are back at our website, the second phase begins. We call this the convert stage. A mobile-optimized website is vital if we want to capture that new traffic.
We need to tell them 3 things right away:
- Who we are
- What we do
- How a user can interact with us (get a quote, schedule a consultation, visit our store, etc.)
Visitors become leads when they fill out a form on our website.
Use well-placed calls to action (CTAs) that point to landing pages. These landing pages help get permission to do further marketing. We get that permission by offering more helpful content in exchange for contact info.
Forms and landing pages also alert us to a lead’s level of qualification. Based on the answers they give, we can decide if they fit your ideal client profile.
At this point in the process, we’re getting new leads and they’re showing interest in what we do. Next, we have two options.
Option A) pass the lead off to sales
If we deem the lead is qualified, then perhaps it’s time to go in for the close. To qualify, measure the info gathered from your forms against your ideal client profile.
Option B) create drip campaigns/workflows to nurture the leads
For those that aren’t quite ready, nurture those leads using email marketing drip campaigns.
Segment your list to deliver the right marketing messages at the right time. The goal is to drive interest and qualify leads until the final conversion point.
Once we’ve closed those new leads into customers, it is time for the final phase.
It is imperative that this phase gets just as much attention as the first three. Here, we’re going to turn our customers into referral engines.
Over the course of the customer journey, we’ve learned a lot of ways in which we can add value to our audience. Now, use the tools from the first three phases to add as much value as possible to your clients. Plain and simple.
Make this so good that they can’t wait to tell others about you.
Bonus: referral programs are extremely effective as a part of this phase.
Putting it all together
We are passionate about helping advisors do awesome digital marketing that grows their businesses.
This post originally appeared on the Advisors 2 Inbound blog.
