Editor’s note: Jeffrey Briskin is a columnist with Rethinking65. To read more of his articles, click here.
Your financial planning and wealth management clients face different financial challenges as they progress through life. Hopefully, you’re aware of what they are and can offer guidance and assistance to address them. Ideally, you’re discussing these issues during client meetings. But if you have 100 or more clients, you may not be able to meet with them more than once or twice a year. A lot can happen during that time, so it might be useful to apply more indirect ways to identify topics they’re interested in.
You could invite them to participate in online surveys. But only a tiny percentage of people typically agree to take them, so the participation rates may not be high enough to provide the intelligence you need.
A better way is to leverage the power of online content and digital marketing to deliver insights into their interests. There are several ways to achieve this.
Create a Content-rich Website
If the content on your website only markets you and your financial advisory firm, then it’s little more than a glorified virtual brochure people will only visit once.
To encourage clients and prospects to come back, you need to constantly add new and relevant content, such as market commentaries, investment insights and educational articles, videos, podcasts, infographics and ebooks on various financial planning topics.
Building a content-rich site can also raise its profile in search results, generating greater visibility for you and your firm among potential prospects.
You don’t necessarily have to create this content in-house. There are dozens of companies that produce ready-made educational content for advisors to post on their websites under their own brand.
Digital Marketing: Capture Eyeballs and Measure Results
You can have the best content on your site, but it will sit there gathering virtual dust unless people know it’s there. That’s where digital marketing comes in.
When conducted effectively, digital marketing not only drives traffic to your content but can often tell you who’s behind the wheel. Here are some basics that are important to know about:
Social Media
Promoting your content through social media posts drives awareness and can help generate greater visibility for you and your firm.
LinkedIn has become the preferred social media platform for financial advisors, since members use it mostly for professional networking purposes.
Facebook offers similar benefits, although you’ll probably want to create a standalone “professional profile” to establish connections with clients and prospects, rather than your personal profile.
Social media platforms are good at identifying individuals who are interested in your content. While you won’t necessarily know who viewed your posts or clicked on your embedded links, you will be able to see the names of people who liked, shared, reposted and commented on your posts.
Using social media as a digital marketing tool has its limitations, however. Your posts might only be seen by clients and prospects who are in your network. Some retirees no longer feel it necessary to log into LinkedIn, and many seniors simply avoid jumping on the social media bandwagon. It’s also important to familiarize yourself and comply with the regulations.
You can get a much more expansive view of the popularity of your advisory firm’s online content by using web analytics tools.
While there are many paid web analytics tools, Google Analytics is the most prominent free platform. It can tell you how many people visit your website, where they’re located, how they found your site, which pages they’ve viewed and how long they stayed there.
Unfortunately, Google Analytics can’t provide detailed information on individual visitors, so you won’t know whether that person is a client, a prospect, or someone who found your website through a Google search. Or, more likely, one of hundreds of bots that access websites and collect content for inclusion in search engines.
These bots may account for 50% or more of all visits to your site, and it’s extremely difficult to exclude them from Google Analytics results.
Email Marketing
The most targeted way to promote your website content to your clients and prospects is by using email. Briefly describe the content offering in a message and provide a link to it.
While you can use Outlook or your CRM system to send these messages, you won’t know who actually clicked on the link unless these applications are integrated with a marketing automation platform such as HubSpot.
A less expensive alternative is to use a dedicated email platform such as Constant Contact or Mailchimp. These services have robust engagement reporting capabilities.
You can see the names of everyone who opened a particular email and who clicked on each embedded link. This can provide valuable intelligence for future conversations, or help you figure out which topics might be of interest for future educational client events and webinars.
One risk of using email to promote individual pieces of content is if you send too many messages it might result in email fatigue among your recipients — or, even worse, opt outs.
One firm I work with avoids this issue by sending one monthly email digest that promotes all of the new content we’ve added to the site that month. This approach gives recipients a menu of choices and results in extremely high open and click rates.
Insights Often Defy Expectations
When you can measure the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns at the individual client level, you’ll sometimes learn surprising things about them.
For example, there’s a common misconception among many advisors that high-net- worth retirees aren’t particularly concerned about reducing household expenses.
“When one firm I work with posts and promotes articles offering tips for reducing energy costs or finding the best online deals, they consistently find that the wealthiest clients of all ages are just as interested in this content as those who are merely ‘affluent.’”
Yet, when one firm I work with posts and promotes articles offering tips for reducing energy costs or finding the best online deals, they consistently find that the wealthiest clients of all ages are just as interested in this content as those who are merely “affluent.”
Likewise, many advisors don’t talk about financial aid and scholarships with their wealthier younger clients because they assume that these parents will pay for their children’s college education entirely out of pocket. But this firm has found that many of their clients routinely engage with articles or videos explaining how the college financial aid application process works.
Making the Most of Digital Intelligence
The key to getting an optimal return on investment from your content and digital marketing efforts is to make sure you’re tracking and documenting the “client intelligence” they generate.
In your clients’ CRM records, document each specific content piece each client engages with. That way, when you’re preparing for your next meeting or conversation, you’ll know which topics are on their minds.
Don’t specifically bring up these issues, however, because while they’re probably aware that your firm is tracking their online interactions with your content, you don’t want them to think that you’re digitally spying on them.
Instead, ask leading questions that may encourage them to discuss these concerns. For example, if an older client who is about to retire from a full-time job is viewing articles about Medicare, you might want to ask them in general terms if they’ve been thinking about their long-term healthcare needs during retirement. Chances are, they’ll probably bring up issues like Medicare or long-term care insurance on their own.
Likewise, if your analysis of digital engagements reveals that significant numbers of your most important clients are interested in specific topics, such as charitable giving or estate planning, this intelligence may motivate you to plan future clients or webinars around these topics.
Developing an effective, integrated content and digital marketing strategy may require a significant investment of time and money. But when executed effectively, it can deliver insights that can lead to deeper and more rewarding client relationships.
Jeffrey Briskin is director of marketing at a Boston-area financial planning firm and the principal of Briskin Consulting, which provides content and digital marketing services for asset managers, TAMPs, trust companies, and fintech firms.
