Are You Making These 5 Financial Advisor Marketing Mistakes?
Many financial advisors tackle marketing budgets as an afterthought. If there’s enough in the budget after expenses, they may spend some money on marketing. However, marketing is critical for growing assets under management (AUM) and should be a priority for advisors. The first step for making the right marketing moves is to set aside a specific dollar amount each month for your marketing efforts. Then once you commit to being proactive and budgeting for marketing, the challenge becomes figuring out where to spend those valuable marketing dollars.
There’s no shortage of marketing platforms, strategies, and tools for creating an effective campaign. Conducting research on the most viable marketing tools, analyzing your marketing efforts, and tweaking your strategy is just part of the process. It takes time to fine-tune your marketing efforts and find the best solutions, but there are common marketing mistakes to avoid to minimize the learning curve.
Tangible and Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
- Buying Followers or Likes
One of the worst social media marketing mistakes an advisor can make is using applications and websites to give their pages thousands of “likes” and follows. While this may seem like a quick way to get things up and running, you aren’t going to get much traction with this method. Social media is, after all, social. Your targeted audience will likely catch on that your account is filled with fake followers if they spend time engaging with your brand. Plus, you run the risk of weakening your reputation when you have a large follower count, but low engagement numbers.
Instead of buying likes, focus on targeting your ideal market and clearly conveying your unique value proposition. While this organic approach may not generate the numbers you can buy with the above strategy, it will be more effective and less expensive in the long run. It’s better to have 10 followers who have deeply invested in your brand than 100 followers that don’t interact or engage.
- Investing in SEO Gurus
You’ve likely been contacted by SEO companies promising high search engine rankings, increased traffic, and optimal results overnight. While harnessing the power of SEO requires research, insights, and skill, passing on all your SEO work to a third-party isn’t the best solution. Optimizing your website and content is an endeavor requiring in-depth knowledge of your industry and brand. All the moving parts of your marketing strategy, from SEO to email campaigns, must work in harmony. A better solution for maximizing your SEO is to collaborate with industry-specific SEO pros who can make all those parts work together.
When you invest time to understand all the little things you can do to impact your SEO and work with a marketing service that understands the challenges of financial advisors, there’s a lot you can do to boost your SEO yourself. With our FMG Suite Local Search tool, for example, you can make sure all your business listings are accurate and optimized. Optimizing your business listings ensures your brand gets the most exposure and is especially important for local search.
Most prospects visit your website via a referral or find you through your content. High-quality content is one of the most powerful tools for driving website traffic, whether it’s automated or created in-house. While SEO is a critical component of any marketing strategy, relying on SEO to do all the heavy lifting is one of the biggest content marketing mistakes advisors can make. No amount of SEO can make up for sub-standard content.
- Overspending on Large Runs of Tangible Marketing Materials
Marketing materials such as brochures and sales packages can be invaluable tools, particularly for financial services. However, it is common for advisors to order thousands of copies of a piece, only to have them pile up in the office. While you may pay more per copy, it is better to work with a local printer and only order as many as you need.
Even better, consider offering the material digitally. One of the worst digital marketing mistakes to avoid is NOT using digital marketing! Most of your prospects and clients have constant access to smartphones and laptops, so promoting your brand digitally saves time and money and allows you to fine-tune your message with minimal effort. Learn how to stretch your marketing dollars with digital materials and other aspects of your marketing strategy with our Marketing Tip video.
- Not Investing in a Professionally Designed Website
Your website is your prospects’ first impression of your brand. You likely have a website, but can you honestly say it represents your unique brand in the best light and is fully optimized to convert prospects into clients? Is your site easy to navigate and provides the very best user experience? Does your website include engaging content like video, infographics, and other resources proven to attract visitors and build strong relationships?
Your website is the foundation for your marketing strategy and should give visitors a clear picture of your brand while providing real value. It should be equipped with strong calls-to-action, gated content to intrigue prospects, and work seamlessly to support all your other marketing components. If you aren’t sure your website reflects the image you want to promote and works hard to build your brand, it may be time for a change.
- Not Communicating the UVP
UVP stands for “unique value proposition.” Also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), your UVP is a clear statement describing the benefit of your financial services, how you solve your clients’ needs, and what distinguishes you from the competition. Your UVP should appear prominently on your website, landing page, and in every marketing campaign.
Ibis World estimates that financial advice is a $56 billion industry and the industry is projected to expand through 2022. How are you going to differentiate yourself from the other financial advisors in the marketplace? The answer is your UVP. You know what makes you uniquely qualified to guide clients along their financial journey, but your prospects probably do not.
Your UVP needs to be prominently featured across all your marketing efforts. Not focusing on UVP in email correspondence is one of the most common email marketing mistakes made by financial advisors. Dissect your marketing and make your UVP a core focus of every piece of content and correspondence. By clearly communicating your UVP and providing insightful content for your prospects and clients, you can go a long way toward securing your market share in this growing industry.
Bonus Pro Tip: No Written Marketing Plan
With all the marketing tools and solutions available for financial advisors, it may not seem necessary to sit down and write out a marketing plan. It might seem like enough to set up social media marketing, work on building a blog or work on your Facebook page.
Successful financial advisors who use written marketing plans find that there is as much value in the planning as there is in the plan itself. When they invest time in mapping out and documenting their marketing plans, they learn invaluable information about their prospects and clients, as well as about themselves and their services.
Learn more about financial advisor marketing mistakes to avoid with this insightful video and find valuable resources for growing your AUM with these marketing tips.
Avoid costly marketing mistakes and find the tools and solutions you need to succeed with a trusted marketing partner like FMG Suite. Request a demo and learn how we can help put your marketing strategy in high gear.
