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Marketing strategies for financial advisors can be tough. In such a relationship-centered industry, every minute you spend marketing is a minute you aren’t spending strengthening your relationship with an existing client. You’re constantly walking the fine line between advertising your value to new potential clients and delivering that value to current clients.
With how hands-on a lot of the most effective marketing strategies are, it gets even harder to maintain the right balance. That’s why building in automation from the get-go is one of the best ways to scale your business sustainably without sacrificing the quality of the service you provide.
Here are the best practices for automating your marketing strategies so you can generate leads in the background as you focus on serving your current clients.
Automated marketing typically can only take you as far as a lead. After all, not many people are going to all the way through onboarding with a financial advisor they’ve never spoken to yet. So, if your automated marketing is generating hundreds of unqualified leads, any time you saved earlier in the marketing process will be lost when you spend hours following up on leads that will never convert.
By defining your target audiences, you can improve the quality of the leads that come from your automated marketing channels so that the time you do have to spend on following up is limited only to those leads most likely to convert.
Targeting specific audiences can also improve the performance of the marketing campaign itself. With a clear image in mind of the prospective client you’re hoping to onboard, you can tailor the messaging to be more relevant to them. For even better results, identify a few distinct segments to create custom messaging for each type of prospective client you want.
Certain channels are easy to automate than others. With social media, for example, there are a ton of tools out there that let you schedule posts in advance, track audience engagement, and identify potential topics for future posts. You still have to create the posts, of course, but these tools can eliminate a lot of the prep-work involved like keyword research and data analysis.
Email automation tools exist, too, but they’re generally tailored to users who already have an email list. So you’d still need to do the leg work of capturing email leads. That’s not a deal breaker, but you’ll need to figure out what your goal is and what you’re starting with as you decide what channel to use.
If you already use Redtail as your CRM, it might be worth checking out their newer product, Redtail Campaigns, powered by SnappyKraken. It’s a marketing campaign management tool tailored specifically to financial advisors. For example, it comes with a library of FINRA-reviewed materials so that you can build a campaign with already-compliant content. For the content you do create on your own, it has a compliance workflow to help you ensure your campaigns are FINRA compliant before you launch.
All that along with the scheduling tool and the fact that integrates with your current Redtail CRM will save you a lot of time across the campaign management process.
Other software you’re using might have some useful features for marketing, too. Salesforce has its data cloud for automated segmentation and marketing analytics, for example. Finally, check the list of integrations for whatever software you use to see what kind of marketing tools would pair well with your existing tech stack. The better integrated your tools are, the more automation and time-saving you can achieve.
SnappyKraken also can be used without Redtail. Check their site out: https://snappykraken.com/
In addition to automation tools, another time-saving ally for financial advisors is the low-maintenance marketing channel. Where social media and email require a lot more engagement and personalization, a lot of digital advertising like Google Ads or Facebook Ads require little effort once they’re up and running.
Of course, they don’t generate as many results as the more engaging options, but they’re so low-effort and affordable that it’s still generally worth it. With both Google and YouTube Ads, for example, you get to set your maximum budget, your target audience, and other parameters of your campaign from the outset. Once you set them, the platform automates the campaign to run itself according to your parameters. So the only active effort here is the process of creating the content of the ad itself.
Other options that are similarly low effort include paid listing databases and display ad campaigns—those banner ads that show up at the top or side of a website.
