It’s the million dollar question isn’t it? How do you get a steady stream on qualified enquiries to your IFA business?
You’re not after just any old Joe either. Chances are, you’re not looking for streams of people to come knocking who need help with auto enrollment. Ideally, you want prospects with a a decent pension pot. Private pensions are often the gold mine.
Generating pension leads is not easy, however. If it were, few IFAs would be coming to us asking for help. After all, the marketing channels available to you are numerous. Which should you choose?
Should you rely on a telesales team to gather prospects for you?
Should you try and find people’s email addresses, and blast them with mail shots?
Is there any other way?
Pension Leads & The Tightening Noose
One interesting development in financial marketing right now is how the traditional, “outbound” forms of marketing business used to rely on are becoming increasingly difficult to use.
Take cold calling as an example. The government is currently holding a consultation on banning cold calling about pensions.
That’s arguably a good thing. This change, after all, was driven by financial advisers who wanted to protect the public from the scams people have been encountering about pensions during cold calls.
On the other hand, this closes a potential channel for IFAs for generating pension leads. It’s also unfortunate that those financial firms who use telesales staff to generate these leads are probably going to have to revisit the composition of their workforce as well.
However, just to step back a bit more. Despite these development, cold calling people to generate pension leads is a very arduous, scatter-gun approach to marketing and lead generation. Even if you can make 40 calls a day, the chances of catching the right person, at the right time with the right need are extremely small.
This is also the case with email blasts. Aside from the fact that gathering individuals’ email addresses without their permission and then blasting them is illegal, it’s also vulnerable to the same pitfalls. Except this time you have to also cross the hurdle of making sure your email actually gets delivered to your recipients’ inboxes, and then opened.
To summarise, outbound / traditional forms of marketing are becoming more and more difficult to use for generating pension leads. They can work, but the loopholes are closing due to tightening regulations.
The channels also suffer from being extremely untargeted, long-winded and often brand-damaging. Think about it. How annoyed do you get when a business you’ve never heard of phones you, or emails you, out of the blue with an offer you didn’t ask for? Most of us get extremely annoyed, and the grumpiest of us (myself included) put it in the junk folder.
So, is there another way? What’s the best way for IFAs to generate pension leads?
Generating Pension Leads Through Inbound Marketing
We bang on about it a lot, but that’s because it really works. Inbound marketing is the direction of travel for IFAs and other financial firms who are serious about generating a steady stream of qualified pension leads.
What does this look like? Well, no financial firm is the same. So it wouldn’t be appropriate to proscribe a universal marketing strategy for all IFAs to follow. However, there are some general insights we can share which you will be able to apply to your specific situation.
#1 Get Help
The simple fact is, digital marketing is a discipline in itself – one which you as a financial adviser do not have time to learn. SEO, PPC, social advertising and content marketing are each difficult skills to master, and require experience and knowledge in each subject in order to apply effectively.
If you want to try and manage your own AdWords campaign to generate pension leads, by all means, go ahead and give it a go. However, you’ll soon realise that you just spent 2 hours trying to get your head around click through rates and conversion rate tracking codes. That’s time you could have spent bringing a new client on board, or catching up with some pending tasks.
At MarketingAdviser, we’ve spent a lot of time honing our skills in these digital marketing fields, specialising within the financial sector. Why not run your campaign past us? At the very least, we are available to chat and give you some ideas and insights (01923 235383).
#2 Be Selective
As tempting as it might be to want to exploit every digital marketing channel available to you, this is generally a bad idea. It is very difficult to be a master in SEO, PPC, LinkedIn marketing, lead generation, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, content marketing and all the rest all at the same time.
Choose a marketing partner who has the capacity to deliver on the marketing channels you require, and then focus your time and resources on two or three of them. Often, a good combination for IFAs we recommend is PPC and SEO. The former is a good short term strategy for bringing in pension leads, and the latter is a great longer-term approach to generating further enquries down the line once you build up your organic search rankings.
Phil Teale is the Sales & Marketing Manager at MarketingAdviser, an agency specialising in marketing for financial services – and especially for financial advisers. Along with our sister company, CreativeAdviser, we also provide bespoke website design, branding, graphic design and video production services to financial clients.
Contact us on 01923 232840 or email me: phil@creativeadviser.co.uk
