Learn new tricks to engage your clients and generate new leads by learning from your peers. Our past webinar, Engaging Audiences Digitally, featured three great panelists; Rob Schultz, Founder of NFW Advisory; Christine Lazo, Director of Operations at Hedeker Wealth; and Elizabeth Leventis, Founder of Arrow & Bow Wealth Management. Learn what marketing strategies work for them to generate new leads.
We took the creative marketing ideas from the webinar and put them together in this article, along with extended, updated content we hope you find valuable. Read on to learn about lead generation ideas you can use with online and offline marketing.
Become a Subject Matter Expert
Establish yourself as an expert on a relevant subject that fits your niche. For example, Rob Schultz of NFW Advisory serves physicians, and hosts regular webinars and in-person lectures about student loans. Add something to your website that advertises that you can speak to schools, local clubs, etc. Reach out to target groups and offer your speaking services for free. If you used to do in-person speaking, you can now pivot to webinars. This also opens you up to presenting to other communities that would normally be too far to travel to.
“I do a lot of public speaking, and I know that’s not for everyone, but it’s just how I got started. You know, smaller groups of about 20 people at a time and sometimes online meetings. For the last 20 years, I’ve been doing talks for physician groups. I get asked to come and speak about areas of financial services that are relevant to their needs. They’re not always areas that we create revenue from, we just want to get a relationship built.”
How can you claim your own unique niche and become an expert? Look at the services you already offer, for starters. Are there certain services you provide where you have a particular interest and extensive knowledge? Are there unique qualities about your services that could appeal to a niche audience? If you don’t find inspiration for lead generation ideas in the financial services you provide, take a look at your ideal clients. Who do you enjoy working with? What services appeal to them? Start researching services and financial topics that interest you, and your clients, and position yourself as a go-to resource.
Get Your Clients Cooking
While traditionally, advisors‘ offline marketing included hosting dinner seminars about financial topics, why not consider hosting an event that is just for fun? Christine Lazo, Director of Operations at Hedeker Wealth, hosted a baking class for her clients. Clients love the opportunity to do something different that helps connect them to their advisor.
“We normally do fun activities, and one of the things that was very popular was their cooking class. With this pandemic, I thought, how would we do that? I saw something online about Williams Sonoma Baking School, so I tried it and loved it. It was only $15.
“So we called a list of clients we knew loved to cook and bake and enrolled them. You get a recipe card ahead of time, so you can bake at the same time, or you can just watch and then bake later on. The next day, I got emails from clients about how it was a wonderful experience, how it took their mind off the pandemic, because they missed activities like that.”
Another creative marketing idea, a spinoff of the dinner seminar, is a wine tasting event with hors d’oeuvres. You can enjoy the camaraderie of a fun event, still provide the traditional free food, and engage your prospects and clients in a relaxed environment. You can check with local restaurants to see if they offer a wine-tasting package or set up an event at a local winery.
In addition to networking events, consider hosting or supporting an event that promotes social responsibility. Hosting a charity event is an opportunity to get prospects and clients involved in something that helps local causes. These events can be just as fun as a cooking class or wine tasting, and the added meaning can go a long way toward building strong relationships across the community.
When you step outside the box and use creative marketing ideas to connect with your clients on a more personal level, you become more than a financial advisor. You become someone your clients can relate to and even have fun with. Don’t be afraid of stepping away from business sometimes. Remember, financial services is a relationship business, and when you create enjoyable and memorable events, those relationships become deeper and stronger.
Or Get Them Walking
Arrow & Bow Wealth Management has a specific program called Wealth & Wellness, and to support that mission, began hosting Wealth & Wellness Walks, where they invite the community to come and walk with them. Elizabeth Leventis, Founder of Arrow & Bow, has found that this casual environment encourages clients to bring friends and to ask questions about finances they wouldn’t necessarily pick up the phone to ask.
“We actually got the idea from a local physician who had asked us to walk with her. It’s an activity that anyone can do, because they could drop off at any point. It’s a small community that we’re in, and it’s nice to get to know people that way. What better way to have a conversation than to get a few CPAs out there, because we encourage them to ask questions. We get our advisors out there, get our attorneys out there, and start walking with community members
“We’ve had a lot of great responses from that because we had it running every month. We would host it and promote it on social media. Even if no one showed up, we were still out there. But if people did show up, it was a great way for them to bring friends, get to know us, and get healthy while they’re doing it.”=
Another way to mix healthy activities and the personal interests of your clients is to host a sports clinic event. Golf is popular with retirees and other demographics, for example. Set up a clinic at a local course with a pro and promote the event on your website and social media. You can also invite members of the golf course and create an opportunity to introduce your financial advisory to a new audience.
It’s important to remember that these events are about your clients, with business being a secondary focus. Choose events that let your clients have fun with low-stress, relaxed activities that leave time for getting to know each other. Invest time building meaningful, personal relationships and the business relationships will take care of themselves.
Write Blogs — And Turn Them into Videos
Are you constantly answering the same questions for your clients? Or, do you send out the same link to a third-party article explaining a financial topic? Why not try writing your own? Creating blogs helps you customize content that is specific to your niche and your clients’ unique needs. You can send it to your clients and prospects to address any of their specific questions. Here’s how Rob Schultz, Founder of NFW Advisor, puts content to work for his firm:
“One thing I’ve used lately is when I write a blog, I am talking to a client about a specific task. When someone needs student loan refinancing or help accessing their student loan file on the government database, I just send them a link to the blog.
“So instead of writing out an email with all the instructions for them, I’m just sending them the blog link. Basically, I’m giving the instructions there, writing it once, and I can use that for multiple clients. To make it more efficient in terms of using it as a teaching tool, I add video as well for those who want to access and consume the information in a different format.”
Creating content for prospects and clients in multiple formats like text and video is not only more convenient for an audience, it saves financial advisors time. Using video as a part of a financial advisor marketing strategy is a necessity, and explainer videos are an easy way to present services and products quickly and creatively.
Explainer videos are short, typically about a minute or two, and use animation and illustrations to get a message across. These short videos can be fun, entertaining, and informative in one easy-to-digest package — and they’re perfect for social media and other platforms where you need to make a quick, but memorable, impression.
Try Paid Advertising
Boosting posts on Facebook can cost very little but have significant results, and it’s just the beginning for reaping the rewards of online advertising with paid ads. Particularly for events, you can reach a lot more registrants by spending just a small amount of money. Elizabeth Leventis with Arrow & Bow talks making the most of Facebook ads:
“We did workshops last year, and we received a lot of response when we boosted those posts on Facebook. Moms of college-age students are all over Facebook, so it was amazing to me how much response we got just from boosting a Facebook event post. It cost 20 bucks, and we ended up getting more people to the events, because women like to bring friends. So we always encourage them when we’re boosting posts on Facebook.”
While boosted posts are a form of paid advertising on Facebook, they don’t come with the advanced customization found with Facebook ads. To take your online advertising to the next level, you’ll want to check out the powerful tools available with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
If you want to hear more from these financial professionals, watch the webinar in it’s entirety:
Get creative and discover more unique marketing ideas for financial advisors and spend some time browsing FMG Suite’s extensive library of marketing guides.
