I hope you get value out of this blog post.
Webinars for financial advisors are a great tool for generating and converting leads for your practice. The low cost, convenient format gives you an opportunity to showcase your expertise and build trust with potential clients. Let’s take a look at why webinars can be such effective marketing tools for financial advisors and how you can host one yourself.
Webinars are basically a digital version of the seminar that financial advisors have been using to generate leads for decades. It’s a chance to spend an hour or so demonstrating your expertise and fostering relationships with a group of potential clients.
Unlike seminars, though, hosting a webinar can be done at a fraction of the effort and cost. There’s no need to find and book an event space and pay for food. You can record the webinar in your own office without any special equipment.
In addition to being relatively cheap and easy to organize compared to a seminar, webinars also come with some other perks:
The biggest tradeoff is the quality of the leads. Someone who makes the effort to show up to an in-person seminar is also more likely to be seriously interested in working with a financial advisor. Plus, if they can get to that location, you already know they’re local whereas webinar attendees can tune in from all over.
But even with that tradeoff, the value of a webinar as a lead-generating strategy is still high—especially compared to how little it costs to host one.
Here are some best practices for getting the most out of your webinar marketing strategy.
People attend webinars to learn something, not to be sold something. So make sure you’re creating something with genuine educational value rather than a thinly-veiled sales pitch. To do that, pick a narrow topic like comparing the most popular retirement plans or how to transition smoothly from working to retirement.
To entice attendance, the topic needs to be specific and relevant enough to make people feel like they’ll learn something valuable that they couldn’t get from a quick google search.
Once you have a narrow and relevant topic to cover, create some useful visual aids and consider jotting down some rough talking points. These tools can keep your audience engaged while also helping you stay focused and organized.
Webinar marketing can be done one of two ways. The first way is to host a live webinar and then record it and use the recording to reach a wider audience beyond those who attended. The second way is to skip the live event and just create a pre-recorded webinar to use across your digital marketing efforts.
Both have their perks. A prerecorded webinar is good for financial advisors with tight schedules who might not be able to host a live event during a reasonable hour. It also gives you the power of the do-over if you stumble or lose track of the topic. You can edit and rework until you’ve got the perfect webinar.
A live webinar, however, gives you a chance to engage directly with your audience. You can open up the session to questions. You can invite attendees to share their financial goals or concerns. Not only do you create a more personal connection with those attendees, you’ll show those who watch the recording later what it’s like to talk to you about these topics.
Whether live or prerecorded, you’ll need to spread the word to get people to actually tune in. Facebook and Google ads are an effective, low cost way to reach a wide audience. But if you’re doing a live webinar, you should also look at sending out direct invites to your email list or your social media followers and creating a registration page for people to RSVP.
Inviting lawyers, CPAs, and other experts to guest host a webinar with you not only delivers more value to the audience but can help you grow your COI network. You can then choose a topic that allows both of you to approach it from your own field of expertise.
For example, invite a lawyer to join you to discuss an estate planning topic, such as setting up a trust. You can tackle the subject from a financial planning perspective while the lawyer can address the legal issues.
For a webinar to be effective, you need to have a clear ask or goal. If you’re generating an early list of leads, that might be just getting the audience to sign up for your weekly email newsletter. If you’re trying to convert attendees into potential clients, your goal might be to get them to sign up for a consultation.
Whatever the goal is, make sure you end with a clear and relevant call-to-action (CTA). Some examples of a strong CTA include:
Make your CTA relevant to the topic of the webinar and be sure it addresses the problem your audience members want to solve.
One of the perks of webinar marketing is that a single one-hour session can be recorded and repurposed across the rest of your digital marketing strategy. So don’t miss out on all the additional awareness-raising and lead-generation potential of that recorded webinar.
Post it on YouTube. Share it in an email newsletter. Cut it into clips to post on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media channels. Transcribe the audio and repurpose that into blogs for your website and social media posts.
