Get Serious About Marketing

DIY marketing

You can do a lot of marketing yourself with a minimal budget.

Being active on social media is a good start. I find LinkedIn to be a very useful forum for sharing content. The mistake many advisors make is posting about themselves and trolling for business. Instead, give away helpful content, which can be unrelated to your expertise.

Here’s another tip. “Like” or comment on postings by others. You’ll be amazed and how easy it is to engage by complimenting the author of a post you find interesting or insightful.

Content marketing is another DIY possibility. It’s a great way to make an emotional connection with prospects and clients. Read this post by Rubin Miller, an advisor at Perspective Wealth Partners. Of course, not everyone has such a compelling personal story to share, but we all have experiences that may be of interest.

Extend the reach of your posts by hyperlinking to them on social media.

Avoid those who claim to have systems or processes for mining social media to generate leads. It’s possible some are effective, but I have never found advisors who have had a positive experience.

Podcasts and YouTube channels are activities you can engage in with minimal investment. Most of us are happy to be interviewed when we’re contacted by podcast hosts. It’s also a great way to reach out to COIs and others, who are unlikely to respond positively to other overtures.

Getting serious

There’s no escaping this fact: Serious marketing requires a realistic budget.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses (revenues less than $5 million) should allocate between 7% and 8% of total revenue to marketing.

Other experts believe financial advisors should be spending 4%-10% of revenue on marketing. At the lower end of that range, you should prioritize your website and content marketing. At the upper end, you can consider a well thought out SEO campaign, which is underutilized by financial advisors, often with good reason.

I’ve heard many examples of advisors spending thousands of dollars on unsuccessful SEO efforts. The reasons for these bad experiences almost always fit into these categories:

1. The SEO firm did not have the resources to implement a proper campaign. It takes a significant infrastructure and considerable expertise to launch a successful SEO initiative. Many SEO firms are small operations. They don’t have the bandwidth to do it. Our strategic partner has 160+ employees. We rely heavily on its strategic content marketing team to tell us the topics to write and the keywords to feature. We also make extensive use of its online PR team to generate backlinks, which increases the domain rating (DR) score of our clients and helps them rank higher for critical keywords.

2. The SEO firm doesn’t understand the financial services industry so it can’t generate the original, high quality, compliance-ready content critical to a successful campaign. If you are pitched by an SEO firm, ask them to show you content they’ve written. Would you be proud to put it on your website?

3. The advisory firm didn’t have the patience to realize the benefits of SEO. It’s not a quick fix. I spoke recently to an advisor whose firm was generating 35 leads a month from SEO. It took 10 months before the leads starting coming in. If you can’t fund an SEO campaign for 6-12 months, don’t do it.

4. They don’t have the budget. Depending on whether you or the SEO vendor is generating the content, expect to pay monthly fees ranging from $2,000-$4,000. Paying less may seem like a bargain, but you will likely find you’ve wasted your money.

Dan trains executives and employees in the lessons based on the research in his latest book, Ask: How to Relate to Anyone. His online course, Ask: Increase Your Sales. Deepen Your Relationships, is currently available.

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