Marketing is one of those disciplines that is ever-changing.
This can be a source of great frustration if you’re an IFA trying to learn how to market your brand. However, it also presents you with great opportunities to get ahead of your competitors, who, in our experience, are likely asleep at the wheel in the whole area of digital marketing.
As a provider of financial marketing services, we’re constantly monitoring the marketing landscape to find opportunities that increase revenue for our clients. As a result, we’ve compiled 4 prominent, financial marketing tactics we believe you should consider for your IFA firm in 2016. Enjoy!
1. Google AdWords
Have you ever looked at your website and wondered why on earth it doesn’t show up at the top of relevant Google search results?
The process of getting your website onto page one of Google is called search engine optimisation (SEO), and it takes considerable time and effort. However, with Google AdWords, you can pay to get your website appearing high up in, and often at the top of, Google’s search engine results for your targeted keywords.
So if you’re looking to rank at top position on Google for the keyword “financial adviser cardiff”, then it’s possible to do so quickly. It does come with a small cost every time someone clicks on your link in Google. However, if just one client is gained through AdWords, then it pays for itself.
Certain financial advisers in specific areas have started realising this, and so are beginning to compete for industry and area-specific keywords. However, in many parts of the country, the competition is still relatively low. This could, therefore, present you with an opportunity to get ahead of the game.
Whatever the level of competition, Google AdWords is difficult to manage and so we recommend getting a specialist in financial marketing services to help you.
With MarketingAdviser, for instance, we can ensure your negative keywords, bid optimisation, and ad extensions are up to par, whilst also developing the other crucial areas of your account such as your quality score.
2. Facebook Marketing
This one might seem completely avant-garde, and to a degree you’d be right. But hear us out.
An astonishing number of people still use Facebook – over 1.6 billion at the beginning of 2016, in fact. It’s not just young people on there. Older generations are actually increasingly establishing themselves on there. Indeed, lots of these Facebook users fall within your likely target market.
Business owners. High-income earners. People approaching retirement. You name it, they’re probably on there, and active.
The great thing is, you can advertise your financial services to these audiences via their newsfeeds, and also through targeted display advertising in the Facebook sidebar. In addition, you can target specific groups of people according to where they live, what job they have, their interests, how old they are. The list goes on.
In other words, you can be incredibly targeted as an IFA with Facebook advertising. The only occasion you pay for your advertising is when someone actually clicks on your ad, and the only people who will be shown your ad are those you’ve defined in the settings as your target market.
An innovative provider of financial marketing services will be able to help set this up for you, and then monitor and optimise your campaign afterwards to increase your leads-to-close opportunities.
3. Social Media Marketing
Some financial advisers see social media as a bit of a nuisance. They typically know they should do it to appear “active” and “up-to-date”, and they’re right to think that. Social media is a vital way to convey the quality and freshness of your brand.
However, as a marketing tool, social media actually presents unique opportunities to network with potential clients, and also to build mutual business partnerships.
In other words, social media can open doors for your business that wouldn’t have presented themselves if you had just relied on other marketing channels.
How could that be so? Imagine the following scenario. You post a link on Twitter to your latest blog post, which provides expert advice to those looking at taking out a mortgage. A potential client happens to look through their news feed, and stumbles across your article.
Impressed with what they read, they begin to follow your social account. As time goes on, they see more great content from your brand, which they appreciate, value, and even begin to look forward to.
Eventually, this client approaches the renewal of their mortgage and decides they need some financial advice. They remember your brand and pick up the phone. A good conversation transpires, which then turns into a face-to-face meeting, which then turns into a client relationship.
The difficulty lies in getting social media marketing right. It isn’t easy to build a following on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and most IFAs would actually benefit from outsourcing this to the expertise of an agency that provides financial marketing services.
We currently manage many financial advisers’ company social accounts, and we’d be delighted to speak to you about how we can help you with this.
4. Remarketing
Most of us are aware that we need to be exposed to a brand multiple times before we purchase anything from it.
It’s no less true in the financial sector. Indeed, people are very wary of trusting others with their money, and so many prospective clients will want to “settle into” your brand a little bit before they bring themselves to contact you.
Remarketing is a great way to nurture these leads through your sales pipeline towards a close. Remarketing is the process whereby a user visits your website, spends a decent amount of time looking at, say, your page outlining your services in pensions advice. After they leave your website, they later look at another website and your advert appears on there – encouraging them to visit your website again.
This is a great way to build brand awareness and authority amongst qualified, previous visitors of your website. As your financial marketing services provider, we can also set up goal tracking to determine whether someone clicks on this remarketing ad, and we can even track whether this leads to them filling out your contact form. In other words, this kind of marketing is totally measurable and allows you to determine your return on investment.
