Imagine you’re a taxi driver. If you leave your car parked in your driveway, what are the odds someone is going to knock on your front door asking for a ride?
It isn’t going to happen.
Taxi drivers need to take their cars out and drive through town. They have to put themselves where the people are. For financial advisors, websites are very much like taxicabs. If you don’t get the website in front of clients and prospects, how will they know it’s there?
Let’s bring this closer to home.
Imagine you were putting together a seminar. You book the venue, prepare the presentation, pay the deposit, dry clean your suit, and set up the equipment. The waiters set up the tables, print custom menus, and close off a whole room just for you.
The event time comes and goes. No one shows.
You went through the trouble of setting up a valuable educational event that would have helped many people, so why didn’t anyone show up? At that moment, you realize you forgot to send out the invitations. What good is an event if no one knows about it?
With that, what good is a website if no one knows it exists?
Inbound marketing is all about telling the digital world your business exists. From a fundamental perspective, it puts prospects into a marketing wheel that will take them from casual investigator to loyal client, provided that you have the right elements in your strategy.
To keep things simple with inbound marketing, here are two elements to consider:
1. The Quality of the Content on Your Site
A website without good content does not provide an incentive for users to stay and engage with it. Do you think your clients and prospects will take the time to read or reread outdated or irrelevant material? Here’s a better question: Would you take that time? Not likely.
Great websites need more than great static content (the stuff that never changes, like bios, processes, and services); it needs fresh and new content to keep the site from getting stale.
Good content is all about providing education and delight. It answers questions that have long been on people’s minds. It shines light onto areas people might not have considered. It entertains, delights, and allows people an escape from reality (if only for a few moments).
But that’s just the start.
Content needs to be available in the ways people prefer to get it. Think videos, blogs, downloads, podcasts, etc. (Don’t forget the social content either. Think event videos, photos, quotes, and client stories).
Engaging and relevant content is the answer. The trouble is people often don’t know that answers to their questions are out there. Building a fantastic website with great content is only part of the equation. It’s one thing to know how to build the car, and it’s another thing to know how to drive it.
2. The Effectiveness of Your Communication Strategy
Communication strategy is like taking the taxicab out for a drive around town. To see the great content on your website, we have to let people know it’s there. We must create a journey for them and make it easy to get to your website.
Think about all of the ways advisors communicate with clients: emails, social media posts, printed letters, event invites, face-to-face, newsletters, etc. Use these channels as a way to announce when you’ve posted something new on the website.
To make the traffic happen, there must be a clear call-to-action. Give people a reason why they would want to go to your site. Articulate the value clearly and succinctly.
Here are a few call-to-actions to help drive traffic back to the website:
- RSVP for a new event!
- Download our free newsletter!
- Check out our latest event photos in our gallery!
- Watch our latest monthly market update video!
- Read our latest blog!
Stay Relevant with Content Marketing
Strategies vary from office to office, but the trick to inbound marketing is staying relevant to your audience and true to yourself.
The more relevant ways people can interact with a website, the more likely they won’t get bored and abandon it. After all, Google notices how people engage with websites, and they give an SEO boost to sites with more interactions.
So, how does your website stack up? Is the content updated continuously with fresh material, or has it gone stale? What ways are you using to drive traffic to your website? Do you even know what the traffic is to your website? If not, we need to get in touch.
* * * * *
This article is Part 3 of The Modern Advisor’s Guide to Content Marketing series.
Want a demo of our award-winning digital marketing software? Let us know.
