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5 zero cost marketing activities to complete this summer

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With the explosive growth of digital marketing in the last decade, one important dynamic has changed. Marketing has shifted from being a bottomless pit in relation to your financial resources to offering many low cost or even zero cost opportunities. However the flip side of this coin is that marketing now draws on another scarce resource…your time.

With business possibly being a bit quieter over the summer months, you now should have a bit of time to dedicate to some marketing activities that will set you in good stead for a strong finish to the year. So here are 5 marketing tasks to complete over the next 5 weeks that won’t actually cost you a cent.

Update your Website

As part of my work with financial advisers across the country, I too often see great work going into the development of new and exciting marketing activities while ignoring one of the business’s main marketing assets, the company website. Yes I know that updating your website is certainly not the most exciting work that you can be doing, but it is very important. Perceptions of your business will be built, based on your website and there is nothing worse than out of date and poorly written content. So go through your website page by page, make sure there is no out of date content and look for opportunities to make the content more engaging for the reader. This is your key online shop window.

 

Review your LinkedIn presence

In a similar vein to the above, your LinkedIn profile is your most important personal digital asset from a business perspective. To my mind, a presence on LinkedIn is not optional for financial advisers any more, it is too important a marketing opportunity to miss. And it doesn’t cost a red cent.

Starting in next month’s newsletter, I’m going to do a series of 3 in-depth articles in relation to LinkedIn, covering the following;

  • Building a winning profile on LinkedIn
  • Using LinkedIn to build a valuable network
  • Using LinkedIn to add value and build your business.

So for now, get to work on improving your LinkedIn presence and then hopefully over the rest of the year, you’ll pick up a few more tips from the 3 in-depth articles.

 

Tidy up your data

There are 2 specific areas in relation to data that can add significantly to your marketing efforts. The first is to simply (but religiously) record where every lead comes from, is it from a referral, from a specific marketing activity or from whatever source. The importance of this is that when you look back a year later at where your leads came from, this data can hugely influence where you put your marketing euros and hours in the future.

The second area is in relation to email addresses. Spend some time over the summer ringing clients to ensure you have their current email address. Email is still an extremely powerful marketing tool, but can’t be carried out without email addresses. Lack of this valuable data is the single biggest blockage I come across, preventing advisers from carrying out effective email campaigns. I might be stretching it a bit but the cost of these calls is covered under your phone package!

 

Develop an introducer’s presentation

So many advisers recognise the enormous opportunity that strong links with potential introducers such as accountants or tax advisers can offer them. However many don’t give themselves the best chance of building strong relationships with these introducers.

This starts at the very first meeting with the potential partner. This should never just be a chat. This is one of your most important business meetings, where you are trying to convince the potential partner to entrust you with their most valuable asset, their clients. At the end of the day, the main reason many accountants don’t enter into partnerships with financial advisers is because they are afraid that as a result of having recommended you to their clients, that this will reflect back badly on them if something goes wrong between you and the client.

So you must be able to clearly articulate why you are the only adviser that they should consider working with and how you are going to actually enhance the partner’s relationship with their client, rather than potentially damaging it. The starting point for this is a professional, engaging presentation that clearly articulates your value proposition to both the introducer and to their clients. Work on this over the summer.

 

Hone your referral approach

Referrals sit at the heart of many advisers’ client acquisition strategies. Many “just do it”, without any thought to method or process. While this is fine if it works, there are ways to support your natural talent to improve your success rate. One way is to use the likes of LinkedIn to research your client’s network. Now rather than asking your client to refer “someone” to you, and pushing the work on to them to think of who and how you might help, instead you can suggest actual contacts that you would like to meet. This keeps you in the driving seat.

Also develop a series of case studies of innovative solutions you have designed for clients, portraying your value. Make your clients aware of these, with the aim of helping to trigger in their mind some contacts that your solutions / approaches might suit.

 

And one more…

Finally, if you want help with these or any other activities, I’d be delighted to talk through your challenges with you. And I’ll buy the coffee!

 

I hope these ideas help. Put a bit of time into your marketing activities over the summer, and reap the rewards over the remainder of the year.

Is inbound (or content) marketing relevant for financial advisers?

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You bet it is!! In fact inbound marketing, often called content marketing has become one of the key elements of the marketing mix for financial advisers today.

First of all, to explain what is meant by inbound or content marketing… Most importantly it is not about selling, instead it is about creating engagement with your target audiences. Marketing has evolved, the days are over of only trying to hit people over the head with a constant stream of sales messages through advertising, sales campaigns and other traditional sales methods. While these methods still have a place, consumers today want to be engaged, to be warmed up and to be made aware of why they should deal with you. This is where inbound marketing comes in.

The aim of this engagement is that your audiences will view you as someone worth listening to and in time, will ultimately seek you out for your professional expertise. This is done through inbound marketing – providing your target audiences with insights, ideas, tips and commentary in relation to personal finance matters. In time, this will make them far more open to your sales messages that will follow at the appropriate time.

This approach delivers a number of benefits for financial advisers. First of all, it enables you to stay in touch with existing clients by putting interesting insights in front of them and keeping them aware of the breadth of the product range that you can advise them about. It also helps you to establish yourself as a thought leader and someone to be listened to, among both prospective clients and the wider public at large. Finally fresh content on your website is a critical component of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

So what are some of the elements of a great content marketing strategy?

 

Know your audience

Know who your target audience is. Is it local business owners, particular occupations or particular age groups? Who are you actually writing that new website page, blog or email newsletter for? Write for this audience about topics of interest to them. Try to put yourself in their shoes and think about what they will want to read. If your audience find it interesting, they’ll view you as someone to listen to and will seek out your content…and hopefully in time your advice in relation to their personal finances.

 

Make sure it looks good

First of all, your content has to look engaging. Use a solid design and layout. I always tell financial advisers to “Think Apple”. For any of you who have bought an Apple product, you’ll know what I mean – the excellent quality, yet simple packaging that really impresses you as you unpack your phone or iPad. Your blog / newsletter should have the same impact. It should look very professional, enticing people to read it. At the end of the day, you want to portray the professionalism of your business in every single touch point with your clients, both online and offline.

 

Have a plan

I know from talking to some advisers (and from my own experience too) that lack of time to update the website or write a newsletter is often just an excuse for a lack of structure or ideas. There’s nothing worse than relying on your brain kicking into action every month or so when you’ve no idea what you’re going to write about! So what happens is you find something else to do and satisfy yourself that you’re just too busy to write the content.

The way to deal with this is to develop a content calendar for the year. Spend a few hours at the start of the year brainstorming ideas that you’ll write about, either as new pages on your website or as newsletter articles. Once you get a few ideas down, I promise that the creative juices will start to flow and more topics will come to mind. As potential topics come to mind now and at a later stage too, drop them into the calendar with a few bullet points of what the article might cover.

Now you’ll have a structure to ensure you don’t lose potential content ideas as you go along and it will also give you a starting point every time you sit down to write that article. You’ll actually find after a while that you’ve too much content and now can actually start being selective in what you write about.

 

What do you write about?

You’ll be glad to know that everyone sees this as one of the biggest hurdles! However, with a bit of thought, you will quickly realise how relatively easy it is to overcome this particular challenge. You absolutely need a helping hand to come up with the topics to write about. So here are a few sources that will help prompt some ideas for you.

First of all, listen to your clients. Probe them about areas of interest to them and areas where they they’d like more information. Are there particular challenges they face in relation to their personal finances where they would like some general advice? If you ask a number of customers, I’m confident that themes will start to emerge for you.

Secondly, keep your content schedule at the back of your mind when you go to a presentation, read the newspapers or indeed just go online.  These are each great sources of ideas, which can be used by you as prompts for you to develop your thoughts and position on – not to copy and paste but for you to set out your viewpoint and flavour on these topics.

Some financial advisers take a short cut and rather than writing their own content, they only share out links to other websites through LinkedIn and Twitter. This type of shared content has its place, however I think it can only sit alongside some original content that you are writing yourself. It’s great to share content that is of interest to your audience but they also want to know what you think! Using the content of other people, while better than doing nothing, is not enough on its own.

So yes, content marketing needs to be an integral part of the marketing plans of financial advisers today. Once you start to really engage your prospective and existing clients, they will soon realise your expertise and the added value you offer. In time, some of your audience will hopefully want to talk to you about their wider financial affairs…and their product needs.

Have you any thoughts in relation to content marketing? If you do, please leave them below.

How mobile is your financial advice business?

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This article was prompted by a trend in the very readership of this newsletter that on average is now read on a phone or tablet by one third of the readers. That figure in turn is divided almost 50/50 in terms of readership on a tablet as opposed to on a phone.
Should this be any surprise? Well not really as screens get bigger on phones and the functionality improves all the time on tablets, which are now becoming a genuine alternative to laptops. While the day of replacing your PC with a tablet is probably still a bit away, it’s getting ever closer. This move towards mobile devices creates both challenges and opportunities for your financial advice business.

Getting found
According to Search Engine Land in January 2013, 26% of searches on Google are now carried out on mobile devices. Research has also shown that in general, people searching the web on a phone are seeking out specific information; a phone number, other contact details, product information or maybe a price. They are not usually idly surfing the web. So what?

Well, this creates a real challenge for you. If a potential client searches for a financial adviser on their phone and clicks on a link to your site, let’s say looking for your contact details, what will they find? Will they find a web page where it’s not that easy to find what they are looking for, as it is your normal website “in miniature”? Are they likely to scroll around, resizing the page in order to be able to read it, to eventually find what they are looking for? Or are they likely to go to a more mobile friendly site?

To demonstrate the point, I’ve included screen grabs below taken from a phone, first of all of my own full website and then my mobile equivalent of it, that you actually see when searching on a phone. While the mobile site is not as attractive, the aim of it is to provide an easy route to the likely information being sought; an overview of services provided, my phone number etc.

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 16.13.15


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you landed on the full website, are you likely to bother resizing the page and searching for what you want? A growing number of advisers have recognised the need for a mobile friendly version of their website, or at a minimum a very large and clear phone number on the homepage of their website that make it easier for clients to contact you.


Present yourself professionally!
Tablets are great for presenting to clients in 1:1 meetings. They are so much better than laptops as they they can be put on the table between you and the client, and a presentation can then be flicked through. This is so much better than both of you huddling around a laptop screen! I strongly suggest that you prepare a short, visual presentation demonstrating how you add value to your clients and load it onto a tablet. This is a great way to introduce yourself to prospective clients at that all-important first meeting and gives you the opportunity to demonstrate how you are different to other advisers.

The process of doing this is very straightforward. Most people prepare the presentation on their desktop and then transfer it to their tablet, which is very easy to do.


Apps to engage your clients
A growing number of financial advisers have recognised how a well-thought out app can help you to engage your clients and establish yourself as a fixture on their phone or tablet. Some have developed great calculators to show for example pension shortfalls or amounts of protection benefits needed. These can be delivered with news feeds of relevant personal finance news. Others are using apps that provide policy information for clients. There are a range of ways in which apps can be used to support a financial adviser’s proposition.

One of the challenges to consider here is how you distribute your app with over 700,000 apps available now for both Apple and Android devices. It’s very easy to get lost. As a result, there is a growing trend in the development of web apps, which are apps for your mobile device that can be downloaded from your website.


Apps to help you work better
There are hundreds of apps that fit this category. Obviously a good place to start is with the the Apps developed by a number of the product providers and fund managers. These offer you useful calculators & good information at the touch of a button. I know advisers who swear by the Bloomberg app too. Other apps that are worth checking out are Retirement Dashboard Plus or the whole range of apps developed as loan calculators or present value of money calculators. Also check out goalGetter. It’s a bit raw but a very simple concept of working out how much you need to save to cover future expenses. Could you use this to help get clients thinking about future expenses?

In terms of more general apps specifically for business, there are probably 6 apps that make life a lot easier for me. These are,

  • Dropbox: I use this to sync all my files across all devices and store them in the cloud. This makes life so much easier. However you need to be very security conscious using this, to ensure you keep your data safe.
  • Pages: the iPad equivalent of MS Word. This article was created in Pages.
  • iBooks: I use this for all my presentations which I save in iBooks as .pdf files
  • iMindMap: I use this a lot, particularly when brainstorming and planning with clients.
  • Reeder: I use this to quickly flick through all the content feeds that I monitor on the web.
  • Pocket: I use this to store all the articles I want to keep for later to read – or to include in the “Around the Web” section of my newsletter.

I hope this article gets you thinking about the impacts mobile devices might have on your business. If you’ve any thoughts in this area or indeed have found any great apps for business, please leave your comments below.

Use expertise to build stronger client relationships

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It’s a competitive world out there. New clients are very thin on the ground and holding on to existing clients is a big challenge with other advisers and banks nipping at your heels. So how do you stay one step ahead of the competition?

Well obviously your client proposition has to be very strong, this is a given. Today, not only to remain compliant but also to remain competitive, the quality of your advice has to be first-rate. You have to fully understand your clients’ needs and recommend the right solutions for them. This is critical, but to my mind not the complete answer, as there are many other excellent independent advisers who can also do this.

In a previous lifetime, the way to gain access to clients was to beg, bug or buy your way in, to constantly hit people over the head with sales messages. However people today are becoming immune to these messages, they expect more from businesses than just being sold to all of the time. They expect more than a simple, transactional relationship with you and they expect you to add more value to them. How do you do this? It’s not easy for financial advisers to stand out, but one way you can significantly add additional value to your audience is through engaging them with your views and useful observations in all matters relating to financial services. The opportunity is there to successfully position yourself as a thought leader in the eyes of your clients, both prospective and existing and to create influence among your audience.

The plus side of this is that the days of having a limited set of tools available to you and having to spend vast sums of money through expensive advertising or direct mail campaigns to get in front of clients are over. However on the flip side of the coin, while potentially not costing a red cent, this engagement of your customers will eat into an entirely different scarce resource; your time. Know this before you start down the road of creating influence or you will almost definitely fail and as a result, you may even damage yourself in the eyes of your clients.

So what are the keys to building a successful engagement campaign with your prospective and existing clients by sharing your views and observations with them?

First of all, develop a structured content schedule. Avoid the headache of every month trying to dream up content ideas by instead investing some time up front in developing out a list of potential topics. I promise you that once you develop an initial schedule of content, your schedule will constantly grow and the days of last minute brain freezes will be over!

Then think about where you’re going to host your content. Are you going to post the content to your website each time? Or are you going to complete a blog or email newsletter? Maybe you’re going to post your content in a few places? Develop your strategy and then put time in your diary each month to both write and post the content.

I’m often asked how long a blog post or newsletter article should be. The optimal length is probably between 750 and 1,000 words, so it’s not particularly taxing.

The next area is to identify your channels through which you are going to actively share your content. It’s not enough to just post content to your website and hope that your audience will pay a visit to read it… Are you going to email your content too? Are you using social media? As some of you will have picked up from previous articles, I’m a big fan of the power of LinkedIn (in particular) and Twitter for financial advisers. They offer great opportunities to engage a wide network of both potential and existing clients.

When you then start to share your content, it’s really important to measure the success or otherwise of it. The beauty of online communication is that unlike the “snail mail” communications of old, there are so many metrics available to you. Spend some time thinking about the most relevant measures for you and then set some targets for yourself. Will you measure website hits, newsletter open / click rates, new subscribers to your content or the amount of “likes” and “shares” that your content attracts?

Finally, be committed to your engagement efforts. You won’t see immediate benefits, but if you stick with it and really try hard to produce content that’s interesting to your audience, your efforts will be rewarded.

What will the benefits be? Well first of all, influence helps you to build credibility among your audience. It also helps you to build trust through the constancy of your presence in front of your audience. Your audience want to have favoured leaders – this is your chance to become one of them! If done well, you can also expect that this engagement with clients will reawaken some relationships that may have been dormant. The end game is that your audience will start to seek out your views, not only in relation to general financial services topics, but also in relation hopefully to the advice that you can offer them in relation to their own financial affairs.

What are the biggest challenges for you in creating influence? Is it knowing what to write about or finding the time? All comments are welcome!

Enhancing Financial Adviser Websites

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I’ve spent the last year since leaving corporate life behind me working with Financial Advisers on delivering some really interesting and exciting marketing activities. Of course the online world plays a significant role in these activities. I’ve found that Financial Adviser websites today differ widely in terms of their levels of quality and also their ability to engage the target audiences. So to help you, here are a few thoughts that could help you to quickly and easily enhance your website.

Understand the importance of your website

Your website at the end of the day is your most valuable digital asset. It can inform your audience, engage them and indeed be a key source of leads for your business. So view your website as the hub of your online activities. All your activities online in relation to your business either through social media or indeed lead generation through advertising and search optimisation should lead back to your website. It’s really important as a result that your website shows your business in the best light possible.

Be Clear on your Goals

What are you trying to achieve with your website? Are you trying to establish yourself as a thought leader in financial services or are you simply trying to inform the readers on your site of the products that you sell? Or maybe you’re trying to generate leads through your website?  You need to be very clear what you’re trying to achieve as this should impact the structure and layout of your site and the content that you place on it.

Spend time thinking about this, don’t just dive in and start writing content! Get very clear on your objectives and then constantly “sense check” your content against these objectives to ensure you’re delivering what you’ve set out to achieve.  Otherwise the audience won’t be clear of your message and what you’re trying to say to them…..and will just leave the site.

Talk about what you actually do!

This is quickly becoming a big bugbear of mine….. There are too many financial adviser websites out there that to my mind miss the biggest opportunity of all.  And that is to tell the readers of your websites what you actually do and how you do it – that is of course giving advice! So many adviser websites are like mini brochures for life assurance companies, talking about all the products of theirs that you will sell to everyone. That’s all well and good but it completely undersells the real value that you bring to your clients – the excellent advice that you give them to help them plot their financial course. The products are of course a very important part of the overall equation, but at the end of the day, they are simply vehicles to help you and the client reach their financial goals. So tell the world what you do!

Keep an Eye on your Layout

There are some Financial Adviser websites out there that hide away some of their real nuggets! Make it easy for the reader to get to the key messages that you want them to see. Have a sensible navigation menu structure that will lead people easily through the site to your key messages. If people can’t get quickly to the page they want, they’ll just leave the site.

When the reader finds themselves on the correct page, make sure the key messages are easily found. Have your key messages high up on the page, “above the fold”, so that the reader doesn’t have to scroll down to reach the key message. Often people just won’t bother scrolling, and will leave the page or even the site without reading that all-important message.

Have Clear Calls to Action

What do you want the reader to do when on your website? Do you want them to pick up the phone and make an appointment with you or do you want them to fill out a form on the site to make contact? Maybe you’re trying to establish yourself as a thought leader and you want them to share your content? Well make sure you ask them to do whatever it is that you want and give them the opportunity to carry out that action……again and again. Make the call to action very obvious, very clear and very easy.

Make sure your Content is Current & Accurate

When prospective or existing clients look to explore your views for example on recent market turmoil, they will probably check out any links you have to pages that contain “News”, “Blogs” or “Newsletters”. If you have old content here, this may suggest to the reader that you don’t have your finger on the pulse. Don’t be afraid to take content down if it is old or out of date! Sometimes “less is more” – this is certainly one of those instances!

Also, read and then re-read your content for accuracy. Are all spellings correct and is there good use of grammar? Lack of attention in this area can send out a signal of shoddy practices which is very damaging for Financial Advisers as your clients expect the highest levels of attention to detail in relation to their finances. So don’t undermine your business offering by not putting in a few extra minutes checking the quality of your content.

I hope these pointers are helpful to you. Coming into the summer might offer you the opportunity to catch your breath and review your online presence. I would of course be delighted to discuss this area further with you, please give me a call! Or indeed, please feel free to comment below this article.

Regards

Eamonn

5 Tips about Social Media for Financial Advisers

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In this article, I look at the phenomenon of Social Media. These points are worth considering by financial advisers who haven’t as yet ventured into this new world and indeed are useful reminders for those of us who have!

1.            It’s a conversation, not a presentation

Social media is very different to your website – compare both to a client seminar. Your website is like your presentation – this is your opportunity for you to showcase your business and products to the audience, it’s your sales pitch. Social Media however is the days before the seminar, the morning of it, the coffee break and after it’s all over! Social media is your tool to attract both existing and potential clients to attend, to converse with them about your content and then to follow-up afterwards with the key points from your sales pitch! It then offers you the opportunity to stay on their radar as they potentially consider other financial decisions in the future.

Social Media is growing, very rapidly. It’s not going to go away!

2.            Which Social Media platform is right for you?

I’ll consider the 3 main platforms. Facebook, which now tops Google for weekly traffic, originally started out as a platform for friends and family to share photos, stories and gossip! But now businesses see the opportunity to both advertise to and engage with potential customers on Facebook because of the huge numbers spending significant amounts of time on it! There are not many examples as yet of financial advisers gaining great leverage from Facebook. However some are bravely trying and good luck to them!

LinkedIn is really a must for advisers now. Think of it as Facebook for professionals at work. LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to network, meet potential customers, interact regularly with existing customers and remind all of them why they  are glad that they know you! LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to share useful information with a wide group of people that you want to transact business with. Talk to someone who knows what they’re doing and start building your personal online profile!

Twitter is a medium that allows you send messages of up to 140 characters only. However this can include links to your website, video, blog of other interesting online content. It’s very quick and easy to use. It is definitely worth considering but not as critical as LinkedIn for financial advisers at this stage. Some of your peers are tweeting (sending messages) very effectively already!

3.            Should you get rid of your website in favour of Social Media?

Definitely not! Social Media will help you to engage your customers, to want them to learn more about you as an adviser and the products you sell. However to find out this information, they are likely to look at your website. This then becomes your opportunity to really draw them in and to encourage them to pick up the phone to talk to you about their pension, investment or insurance product. Now you’ve got to make sure that the content on your website is 100% up to date and displaying the sales messages that will ensure the customer picks up the phone to meet you!

4.            Are there any pitfalls?

Yes there are. Remember what goes online, stay online – forever! So don’t update your LinkedIn status at 2am after a long night in the pub! Once you send out an update, you can’t take it back….. Also LinkedIn is for networking with other professionals. If you start using it to chat with friends and arrange social events, the people in your network will get tired of getting updates from you. They may go as far as to block any further updates from you. Now you’re just doing yourself damage by effectively pushing clients away from you. You wouldn’t do it offline, so don’t do it online!

5.            So, where should you start?

I suggest you start with LinkedIn and take it slowly. Get some assistance to develop your LinkedIn profile to a point that you are really proud of it. Get very clear about your objectives and how you will achieve them through making connections with people and then communicating with them. Some LinkedIn users have lots of connections but never converse with them. That’s like having a very full address book but never contacting anyone…..Then start making connections with people. At this stage it is best to sit back and see what others are doing. This will give you a sense of how some people are using LinkedIn effectively. Once you decide to join the conversation, commit to it and like a normal conversation, the more interesting you are, the better! Once you get comfortable, you’ll enjoy it. Best of luck!