The Essential Digital Marketing Guide for Financial Advisors

What is Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors?

Digital marketing is the hottest trend in our online world. This digital movement includes various marketing tactics you can use to grow your reputation online and expand your clientele.

Based on where your ideal client is on the , you can separate your digital marketing efforts into three primary stages: top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel efforts.

Top of funnel content is for consumers who are just beginning to look for a solution to their problems. Materials in this stage are usually educational, aiming to inform readers about their problems, how to solve them, and how to act as an authority on the topic at hand. For financial advisors, this is a great stage to share your knowledge of the industry overall. 

People consuming middle of funnel content are starting to truly explore the solutions they’ve found. For example, they might be comparing you with several other advisory firms to look for a match in values and/or problem-solving capabilities. They might also look for an independent methodology, such as a course or workbook created by an expert advisor. Publish with two goals in mind: to build brand awareness and to cultivate trust with consumers.

At the bottom of the funnel, you’ll find people who are almost ready to consult with you. At this point, you’re trying to spread information and make sure that potential clients know exactly why they should work with you over other advisory firms.

In this article, we’ll explore why digital marketing for financial advisors is essential and share the top four strategies to draw clients to your firm. 

Why Should Financial Advisors Invest in Digital Marketing?

You can equate having an active digital marketing initiative to planting your online presence. allow potential clients to find you, get to know you, and give them all the information they need to make a decision with minimal hand-holding from your side.

Implementing online marketing strategies helps you reach a wider audience every time. Inbound marketing capitalizes on showing value so that leads will come to you. Outbound marketing is where you’ll need to chase after potential clients a bit more.

A combination of both is possible to grow your business efficiently, but inbound marketing, in particular, is often more effective. Outbound marketing doesn’t translate as well in the digital world since brands tend to push information less targeted to the audience’s needs.

Events and cold calling, while still a great and proven method for getting new clients, require much more work compared to inbound marketing strategies. To get great results, you need to put in a lot of effort, but often the pay-off isn’t as good when compared to an inbound marketing strategy. For example, personalizing cold calling scripts or creating tailored events takes a lot of time, and you won’t reach the same audience level as with an effective online inbounding strategy.

4 Digital Marketing Strategies To Try

Here are four of the most sustainable ways to invest in digital marketing. All of them are fairly easy to do and have a good ROI when done right.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Instagram, are great places to interact with real people who need your services. Social media is more commonly used to attract top-of-funnel audiences. As such, the content of social media posts tends to be more educational and interactive.

Here are a few social media marketing tips to get you started:

• Make sure that you’re targeting the right audience. For instance, if you’re targeting B2B companies, it’s more likely that the people you’re looking for are active on LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you’re targeting personal brands, there are more of them on Facebook and Instagram. The type of content that you post also needs to be tailored to your target audience, the topics they want to hear about, and what you want them to do.

• Interact with your audience. While posting consistently is definitely helpful, remember to comment or reply to your target audience on the platform you choose, too. Interacting makes you more memorable, and you can start forming relationships through these small connections.

Email Marketing

While the core point of email marketing is to keep in touch with your customers and new prospects, you can do even more with your email campaigns.

Use your email list to stay top of mind with your target audience who aren’t yet ready to make the leap. When engaging customers and/or potential customers with email marketing, remember: 

• If you’d like to grow your reach, you can focus on list building. However, you can also grow your relationships by sending relevant emails that spark a discussion. Rather than looking at the usual metrics, such as open rates or click-through rates, try to engage your subscribers with actual conversations.

• Grow relationships at scale using automated sequences. Note that although these emails are automated, they still need to be personalized to your subscribers’ interests. Segment your list by audience type and make sure that you’re sending emails that they’re interested in.

Content Marketing

Content marketing consists of not only blog posts but other forms of informative content, such as videos, webinars, podcasts, and downloadable ebooks.

There are two goals to a content marketing campaign: creating your brand as a trustworthy firm and getting traffic to your website by improving your page ranking on search engines like Google.

Creating great content is an investment, so you need to make sure that it’s seen — and by a lot of people, at that — to actually see ROI out of a content marketing campaign.

Here are a few methods you can use to get better results with content marketing:

• Approach content marketing intentionally. Instead of pushing out whatever you want whenever you want, have a consistent content schedule and a content strategy that caters to what you know your audience needs to see. Additionally, make sure that your target audience has access to the content you published. This brings us to our second point…

• Produce a variety of content. In doing so, people across all stages of your funnel have something to consume. For example, an ultimate guide blog post on how to manage your personal finances is great for newer audiences, but they’re not really valuable for people who are already in the middle of your funnel. For those farther along in the funnel, you can produce a checklist on how to choose the right financial advisor for a specific purpose.

Website Marketing

Your website is one of the few mediums you actually own online. Unlike borrowed platforms, such as your social media accounts, you have full control over what you can do to your website.

Additionally, you can set up a whole journey to take your prospective clients from onlookers to potential buyers right through your website. Improve their first impression of your business with an interactive and engaging website. 

Beyond that, having a fully optimized financial advisor website makes you look more credible than those who haven’t updated their websites since 2011.

So what does a fully optimized website look like?

• Update your website messages to make sure they’re what potential customers need to see. For example, address their hesitations and objections on a FAQ page or identify their pain points right on the homepage to signal that you understand what they need. Support claims with proof, such as testimonials or case studies.

• Include a click-to-action (CTA), usually introduced in button or link form, when you think your audience is ready to take the leap. Your clients need to know what to do next, but make sure that they’re ready to take the action. Otherwise, the link just acts as a distraction to their experience on your website.

Upgrade Your Marketing Strategies with Asset-Map

If you offer financial services, such as financial planning or wealth management, chances are you’ll be able to use Asset-Map as one of your marketing tools.

For one, visual maps like those created through Asset-Map are easier to consume online.

Additionally, if you’re already using Asset-Map during your consulting sessions, you’re familiarizing potential clients with how you work so they know what to expect in the future.

and learn how you can make your client conversations easier when you use Asset-Map!