John Galego, the founder of Atlas Wealth Strategies, has found the ideal balance between marketing that works without requiring a lot of extra time or expertise. In a recent interview with FMG Suite’s Greg Woodbury, John went explained step-by-step how he established his marketing routine.
(If you’d prefer to watch this conversation via a webinar, click here.)
John watched first hand as the industry changed during the last decade, and made the necessary marketing changes to adapt. “We’ve evolved from just doing seminars and cold calling. Now, the world is online all the time,” John said.
To respond to these changing conditions, John has created a content calendar that keeps his entire team on track month after month. By providing quality content on an ongoing basis, he’s been able to engage his prospects and clients in a meaningful way that builds strong relationships.
Read on for more of his tried and true approach to marketing for advisors:
1. Focus on a Niche Market
When John became a financial advisor, he didn’t set out to work with a specific type of investor. However, part of his motivation to become a financial planner was to help out people like his own mother, who became a widow and the sole financial organizer at a young age. Over time, John looked around and realized 95-96% of his clients were female head of households who were very active in investing but wanted guidance and someone to help them.
While this niche was accidental, it has made it easier for John to create marketing that speaks directly to his target clients. When they brainstorm topics to cover in their blogs or other marketing content, they ask themselves, “what are the things that keep our clients up at night?” Due to their specific group of clients, they know exactly how to answer those questions.
2. Create a Content Calendar
At Atlas Wealth Strategies, the marketing strategy revolves around a content calendar (which he bases on this free template). John and his team create a four-month rotation with topics including long-term care, financial planning, women in investing, and estate planning––all catering directly to their clients. When it comes to choosing topics, John emphasizes that it’s easiest to find a topic that really interests you if you want it to really interest your clients.
On a monthly basis, they go deep into one of those particular topics. They write and schedule one blog every month around that topic, plus a variety of social media posts and email newsletters.
3. Rip Off the Bandaid and Start Blogging
John admits his initial reluctance to blogging. He and his team wanted to take advantage of blogging, but they weren’t sure how long the blogs should be or how many hours it would take.
“We realized we just had to rip the band-aid off and try it,” John said. And that’s exactly what he did. He tasked his Client Services Associate, Michelle, to do research and write these blogs every month.
Now that he’s started blogging, he’s gaining a sense for an ideal length. “We try to be a bit short because we realize nobody wants to read six dense paragraphs. People want to see images and have links embedded. We’re learning this in real time,” John explained. Today, John says he puts a blog together in just 15-20 minutes.
He adds the blogs to his website through the FMG Suite portal and is able to complete the task in one sitting. Then, he emails them out to his contacts and schedules them to post across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
4. Don’t Forget to Add Links
John and his team have seen some tremendous return on their blogs, which they are able to track by linking back to their website throughout the blog. If the topic is “long-term care,” then he’ll add links to other pages on his site that talk about his services in that category.
Not only does that keep people on his site longer, but it has also helped his posts go further than he imagined. Though they only have seven blogs on their site right now, some of them have even been picked up by other bloggers and content sites nationally. This has increased his firms’ credibility, as well as driven more traffic to his site and improved his SEO.
5. Watch the Analytics
Through his journey with marketing, John learned one of the most important lessons of all: “At the end of the day, you can get really busy and dive into all this stuff and just pump content out. But if no one’s consuming it, then it’s not really worth it.”
Every week, John and his team go onto Google Analytics via the FMG Suite dashboard to see how the traffic to their website has increased thanks to their emails, social media, and new blog posts.
They’re able to look at what town someone is reaching their site from, the duration of their visit, and what pages they visited. They’re able to take that information to inform their content plans for the next month.
John has been with FMG Suite for some time, and has steadily moved his way through different offerings and has found the right one that fits him and his business.
“As FMG Suite has evolved, we’ve evolved with them. We’re now using the Attract package and we really believe it’s helped our digital marketing.”
John’s conversation with FMG Suite was chock-full of other great insight on how you can drive traffic to your website, improve your blogging, and create a marketing strategy that works. If you’d like to learn more, watch the replay today, and see how others are improving their marketing with FMG Suite.
