The technology explosion of the last decade has forever changed the way that investors grow their wealth. Subsequently, financial advisors are doing their best to adopt new approaches to attracting and securing new clients — while also improving the digital experience for their existing customers to ensure retention and continued growth.

Whereas financial advisors used to be able to hang their hat on their local reputation and word-of-mouth referrals, modern investors are eager for more immersive digital customer journeys, which means that financial advisors need to be able to meet them on their path to financial growth through holistic marketing initiatives.

And as the financial industry becomes more and more saturated with younger and younger investors, financial advisors must be able to capture their attention and make a compelling case for their firm’s skill and value. 

That said, developing and executing a robust digital marketing strategy aimed at financial investors is rife with challenges, especially if it hasn’t been a priority in the past.

Among other things, it requires:

• Updating your website and optimizing for search engines
• Building great content in the form of blogs, infographics, eBooks, and videos
• Delivering engaging demand generation campaigns
• Optimizing your sales funnel at every stage
• Improving brand awareness and customer loyalty
• Tracking, measuring, and improving the full suite of initiatives

That’s a lot, right? 

Luckily, you’re not alone. 

In fact, most of your competitors are well behind the when it comes to adopting a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that drives growth. So, focusing on the most effective and efficient tactics can help you quickly and significantly distance yourself from the competition, grow your brand, and exceed your business goals.

Today, we’re going to equip you with three easy-to-implement marketing tactics that will help you do just that. 

1. Adopt a Multi-Channel Approach

As we mentioned above, neighborly referrals aren’t enough to grow your financial advisory in the modern digital age. Today’s investors are accustomed to performing their own research and evaluating numerous options before choosing a skilled and experienced firm or professional to grow their wealth.

However, what modern investments own in terms of digital savvy and independence, they severely lack in financial literacy. As such, you should be focusing on the following channels to grab their attention and educate them about their options.

• Social Media Marketing Platforms: Whether your target audience’s social media platform of choice is LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, they’re likely spending a lot of time browsing and interacting on social. Use this to your advantage by distributing content and messaging that helps you build trust and brand awareness with your audience through this channel. You can also curate content from thought leaders in your space to avoid feeling overly promotional or sales-driven. 

• Pay-Per-Click Advertising Using Dedicated Landing Pages With Adaptive Forms: Creating search, display, and remarketing pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is a great way to attract your audience. And by sending this traffic to dedicated landing pages with adaptive forms, you can educate your audience about their investment options while collecting valuable contact information in exchange for informative and engaging content assets. Growing your marketing lists in this way will grow your sales funnel and nurture hot prospects into loyal clients. 

• Interactive Digital Events and Webinars: Online events, especially webinars, are an awesome way to identify new prospects and speak to them directly about their primary goals and challenges. A lot of investors would rather watch a webinar than read an eBook, so getting in front of them online can be more personal and more effective. Plus, it gives you the chance to speak to them directly during a live Q&A session after you delivered your presentation. 

• Event-Based Emails: Event-based emails are automatically triggered whenever a known contact completes a significant action – such as visiting a webpage, filling out a form, or purchasing a product or service. These automated messages allow you to immediately follow up with great prospects as you guide them through the customer journey and beyond. They provide an added layer of personalization and keep your brand top of mind at crucial moments.

We know this sounds like a lot, but marketing automation can streamline and simplify this process while producing far greater outcomes. That way, you can ensure you’re targeting the right audience with relevant messaging wherever they are without having to exhaust your time and resources.

2. Nurture Your Customers With Targeted Email Campaigns

Batch-and-blast email marketing is simple. It’s also ineffective because it’s a dated one-size-fits-none approach.

When you send messages that don’t align with your potential investors’ needs and interests, they’ll either unsubscribe or send your emails to the SPAM folder. Not only does this hurt your marketing efforts, but it also rapidly decreases your email reputation and delivery, which can be a death sentence for digital marketing initiatives.

To get more out of email, you need to segment your audience based on their financial status, investment interests, demographics, and how they’re interacting with your brand. Once they’re properly grouped, enter them into targeted email nurture campaigns and continue to update your segments, content, and messaging for consistent improvement. This allows you to send more targeted messages to your prospective and current clients. As a result, your engagement metrics and return on investment will skyrocket.

Marketing automation allows you to automate all of your lead nurturing efforts — from basic A/B testing to advanced segmentation with conditional logic and dynamic content. One thing to remember, though, is that these programs are never “finished.” Be sure to check in on your performance at regular intervals and innovate and iterate accordingly.

3. Develop and Distribute Relevant Content

Your investors want to feel confident in their decision to pick you to manage their assets. It’s up to you to build that trust and credibility by guiding investors through compelling buyer journeys that provide them with relevant information and resources. The right content can help you answer pressing questions, position yourself and your firm as real thought leaders in your space, and build your reputation as an effective wealth manager. 

If content development and marketing hasn’t been your focus in the past, don’t stress. You can’t build a full content library overnight, so focus on quality over quantity. Even one good asset for each funnel stage will put you in great shape for all of your inbound, outbound, and demand generation strategies. Be sure to gate the content and nurture the incoming leads while you work on building out additional assets.

Before even starting, though, you should map your various customer journeys to determine the information you need to provide to keep investors engaged. This will help you focus your time and resources on projects that will make the biggest impact and allow you to provide unique and useful content. 

Once you’ve developed some solid content, you can use marketing automation software to distribute all of these great assets using a multi-channel strategy from one centralized location. Act-On even has an entire media library that allows you to store and share your content with just a few clicks!

Streamline the Sales Cycle With Powerful Marketing Automation

At Act-On, we know our stuff, and we know your business. We work with dozens of financial advisory firms to help them revitalize their marketing and grow their assets under management by aligning their unique strategies with our powerful marketing automation platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how your financial advisory firm can overcome common industry challenges, please download our eBook, “The 4 Main Challenges Facing Wealth Managers and How to Overcome Them With Marketing Automation.” This valuable resource walks you through a series of coordinated strategies you can implement to develop a holistic digital marketing strategy that helps you attract and retain loyal and lucrative investors. 

And if you’re ready to see how Act-On makes it easy to align your strategy with the best marketing automation software on the market to deliver amazing customer journeys, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They’re eager and excited to show you how you can leverage our powerful platform to implement the tactics outlined in this blog — and many more!