How many times have you – a financial planner – signed up to something?
Perhaps you once installed Grammarly into your Chrome browser or downloaded Evernote onto your desktop and/or smartphone?
Regardless of what you might have signed up to, a call-to-action (CTA) would have almost certainly been involved – guiding you to perform the action the business wanted you to perform.
Financial planners have the potential to use CTAs in their own financial marketing and to great effect. Not all do, however. So we thought we’d put a guide together to give you some tips on how to use them.
CTAs: A brief overview of how they work
A call-to-action guides your target audience to perform some action which you want them to carry out. For instance, a CTA for a financial planner might try and make the user:
- Download a report/whitepaper or eBook from their financial website.
- Fill out the contact form.
- Subscribe to the company newsletter.
- Log into their online client portal account.
- Follow the company’s social media profile.
- Leave a Google Review.
- Book a meeting or reserve a place at an event.
What’s important to realise is that these examples of calls-to-action need to be positioned in the right place, depending on where your prospective client is in their customer journey.
For instance, there is little use inviting a prospective client to log into a client account. After all, they do not have an account yet!
Neither is there much sense inviting a current client on your email list to the company newsletter. They are already signed up to it.
So your CTAs need to make sense to the user, according to their current position in their customer journey. Beyond that, however, your CTAs also need to:
- Be prominent and noticeable.
- Be attractive and inviting.
- Be well-designed.
- Have a compelling copy.
- Offer something the user really wants.
In light of this, let’s look at some examples CTAs which you might want to use on your website, social media accounts and client newsletter as a financial planner:
Example #1: Book a Free Place
Are you the kind of financial adviser who runs events and seminars for prospective clients?
If so, then you could use a tool like Eventbrite on a dedicated landing page to advertise your event. Your social media adverts, Google Ads campaign, newsletter and latest blog can then direct your target audience towards it using the CTA above.
Naturally, people are intrigued when something is offered for “Free” – so this makes the CTA attractive. You could even increase the desire in your audience to attention by creating a sense of urgency below the call-to-action: “Limited availability – book now before spaces run out.”
Example #2: Stay updated, subscribe today
Lots of financial planners run a client newsletter, which is a great thing to do. Email is still a powerful marketing channel to engage with your clients, also increasing awareness and referrals.
Typically, financial planners and advisers will put a button on their financial website which goes something along these lines: “Join the newsletter.”
This usually puts people off. Not only is this text identical to many other financial advisers’ newsletter CTA, but it also does not actually offer the prospective client anything of value. How many emails do they get every day, which they do not want? Why would they want to add more to the clutter?
If you surround the CTA with immense value, however, and promise to offer more to your prospect, then suddenly they have more of a reason to subscribe.
For instance, suppose your blog offers live updates on financial planning in light of the current, ongoing Brexit negotiations. Lots of people might be interested to keep hearing about that, as things develop. You could, therefore, invite them to subscribe with a CTA saying: “Stay updated, subscribe today.”
Example #3: Claim Your Free Meeting
Financial advisers usually try to get new clients’ feet through the door by offering a free, no-commitment consultation. Whilst this is a great idea, the fact that everyone does this means you need to be imaginative with your CTA.
For instance, you could use the text: “Claim Your Free Meeting” rather than “Book a Free Financial Consultation.” Not only is the former shorter and easier to digest, but it also uses the word “Claim” which suggests that the offer might be time-limited, which creates a sense of urgency.
Example #4: Count me in! | No thanks, I don’t want £100
Want to know one of the quickest ways to build an email list? Offer something which your target audience wants, for free and for a limited period.
One idea would be to run a prize draw on your financial website, which you could promote through a social media advertising campaign. You might offer them the chance to win a free £100 John Lewis voucher if they sign up to your prize draw using their email address.
A quick exit pop-up might do the trick nicely here, which appears to visitors of your website just as they are about to leave. It could show them a preview of the voucher, the terms and conditions, as well as two options for the user to choose between: “Count Me In!” or “No thanks, I don’t want £100.” The second CTA is a useful way to encourage people to actually enter the prize draw – by reminding them what they are missing out on!