A Financial Advisor Marketing Makeover
One of the toughest challenges for advisors to overcome is making the leap of faith to embrace a specialty. Narrowing your focus allows you to identify your perfect ideal client, do more of what you do best, charge a premium, and know where to find your prospects.
I speak with advisors all the time who are concerned about alienating current clients or pigeonholing their firm by embracing a specialty.
Why Do You Need A Specialty?
First I tell advisors that the riches are in the niches; it’s critical to know exactly the one urgent problem you solve for a specific group before you invest in your marketing. Getting lost in the masses is the best way to waste marketing dollars. But marketing to a specialty allows you to get the maximum ROI on your marketing efforts.
Then we balance the advisor’s specific niche with a broader niche so that almost everyone fits into either one or the other. For example: Intel Employees and Busy Professionals. Another example could be: Divorced or Widowed Women and Families.
Embracing A Specialty Without Alienating Current Clients
Finally, it’s important to recognize that embracing a specialty doesn’t mean that you can’t keep serving people who don’t completely fit into that specialty. It just means that you focus on your niche for your marketing efforts.
For example, I’ve gone to the same dentist for over 12 years. At some point during that time, he rebranded his firm to “Pomerado Cosmetic Dentistry.” That doesn’t mean that he stopped doing my cleanings and checking for cavities or that I felt that I needed a new dentist.
However, after a few years of seeing Invisalign promotions in his office, I spent an extra $5,000 to get my teeth perfectly straight. He didn’t alienate me with the narrowing of his focus; instead, he significantly increased his revenue on a per-patient basis. And when my two-year-old chipped her front tooth, I didn’t feel like we needed to find a new dentist to fix it, because I was confident in his specialization.
Embracing a specialty works the same way for many of the financial advisors we work with. Just because you narrow your focus to “helping parents of special needs children,” you are unlikely to lose current clients.
Instead, they will refer you to people who fit that demographic when they come across someone who needs your help. And you will be uniquely qualified to help that person and more likely to close the business.
Our Process To Tailor Your Marketing To Your Specialty
For this week’s case study, we’ll review how we helped one financial advisor embrace a specialty and do a complete financial advisor marketing makeover. Scott Melbrod came to us knowing exactly who he wanted to serve: Real Estate Investors and Business Owners Who Don’t Fit the Typical Financial Advisory Firm Model.
Branding
He knew he needed help with his logo, website, and then his marketing strategy. First we created a logo for his firm, Taxable Wealth:
Website
Next, we built a website for him that reflected his niche through the copywriting, photography, and content. Throughout his site are powerful calls to action to allow people to schedule a call online, watch a video, or ask a question.
Social Media Profiles
As part of our Total Marketing Package, we set up and optimize our clients’ social media profiles to make sure they show up consistently across all channels. This is important, especially because Google often returns your LinkedIn profile ahead of your website in search results. We know that 9 out of 10 people who are referred to an advisor will Google them before scheduling an appointment, so we want to make sure you look perfect across the Internet.
LinkedIn Company Page
LinkedIn Professional Profile
Twitter Profile
Facebook Business Page
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We also ran our powerful search engine optimization (SEO) package to get Scott’s firm to show up for the keywords that were most relevant, including:
- Financial advisor for real estate (Scott’s website has ranked as high as #3 in national searches for these keywords)
- Real estate financial planner
- Financial planning for real estate investors
Since the updates, Scott’s organic search traffic went from about 14% of total site traffic to over 21%. Our goal is to have at least 20% of traffic coming from organic search and at least 15% from social media. Those targets represent a healthy mix of website traffic from new people you do not already know.
Custom Content
Next, we created a targeted content strategy to speak to the most important items that Scott’s clients care about. We included posts like:
- What We Do For Our Real Estate Investor Clients
- Your Complete Guide To Financial Planning For Real Estate Investors
- Don’t Be A Spork: The Need For Specialized Financial Planning In Real Estate
Track What Matters
Finally, we send a marketing metrics report each month that shows important information like:
- Total traffic to his site
- Traffic sources
- Top-visited pages
- Social media performance
- Email marketing performance
By reviewing this data, we can continue to improve Scott’s marketing. For example, we can see that his report Your Complete Guide To Financial Planning For Real Estate Investors is the fifth most visited page on his site. This tells us that it would make a great webinar topic. We can also infer that we should create more similar content and make sure we’re maximizing the exposure for this page.
In his own words:
“I’m really happy with the work your team has done. I’ve been busy! Over the past few months I have been inundated with new clients, which is a good problem to have.”
How To Learn More
If you enjoyed this case study of a financial advisor marketing makeover, please review our other case studies here. To learn more about our Total Marketing Package, register for our webinar here to learn The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors. You can also schedule your free Marketing Strategy Call today.