Use my free marketing scorecard to find out how your marketing measures up!
Many of the financial advisors I speak with want to know how their marketing compares to other advisors. I don’t blame them—we all want to know how we measure up. In fact, it’s not uncommon for investors to want to know how their retirement savings compares to their peers’. But marketing efforts are complex and hard to measure. How can you tell if you’re doing better or worse than average? Well, I’ve developed clear-cut metrics and an exclusive marketing scorecard so you can see how your marketing metrics measure up to the average advisor.
I’ve broken down the metrics for the average solo advisor and the average small group of 2-3 advisors, since they tend to behave differently. See how you compare on the most important marketing metrics!
How Many Marketing Emails Do You Send Each Month?
Email is still the bread and butter of marketing efforts. (We’ve seen up to 70% of website traffic coming from our advisors’ email campaigns.) What’s more, failure to email on a regular basis can be harmful to your practice.
A study by Financial Advisor Magazine showed that failure to communicate on a regular basis was the top reason that advisors lost clients, well above failure to understand the client’s goals and poor investment performance. (1) If you’re not communicating on a regular basis, you’re not only missing the boat in marketing for new clients, but you’re letting your current clients down.
What should you be communicating? How about market updates, financial planning reminders, and updates about your firm? Now would be a good time to let your clients know what they should do when the market is up and how to prepare for a market downturn.
Top advisors are always communicating with their clients and prospects to stay top of mind. The average advisor sends one to two marketing emails per month. The average group of advisors sends two to four marketing emails per month.
How Big Is Your Email List?
The size of your email list is important, because it represents the pool of people who can refer you business. Your email list should include everyone you know; your clients, your prospects, referral partners, centers of influence, and even friends and family. Everyone on your list will come to understand who you are and how you can help, so they can refer you business when they come across someone who needs your help.
The average advisor has an email list of just under 500 contacts. Of course, if you’re starting out, your email list will be smaller, but if you’ve been in business for many years, you should be approaching that mark. The average group of advisors has a list of almost 1,500 contacts.
What Is Your Email Open and Click Rate?
The biggest email list in the world won’t translate to success if the list is of poor quality. Your email open rate and click rate give information about how engaged your email list is. What percent of people open your email and what percent click through to read your articles?
Interestingly enough, the average advisor has a higher open and click rate than the average group of advisors. This is likely because they have a personal relationship with their contacts and the emails come from their name, instead of from a firm name. The average advisor’s open rate is 27% and their click rate is 4%. The average group of advisors’ open rate is 24% and their click rate is 3%.
How Much Traffic Is Coming to Your Website?
Website traffic is a core barometer of your marketing success. This measures everyone who comes to your website each month, whether from searching online, clicking on your emails, or following you on social media. The average advisor sees about 280 visits to their website per month, and the average group of advisors sees about 550 visits.
How Engaged Is Your Website Traffic?
Beyond how much traffic your site gets, we want to know how engaged the traffic on your site is. Do they click through to read a single blog post, then go away? Or are they spending time on multiple pages of your site getting to know you? The pages-per-session metric tells us how many pages each user visits.
For an average advisor, average pages per session is about 1.9. For the average group of advisors, average pages per session is 2.3. This means that most visitors enjoy multiple pages on their site before leaving. The higher the pages per session, the better your website is performing to keep visitors engaged.
How Much Website Traffic Comes From Social Media?
If you’re wondering how your social media marketing is paying off, you’ll want to know how much of your website traffic is acquired by social media, which is easy to tell using Google Analytics. The average advisor gets about 50 visits per month as a result of their social media efforts. The average group of advisors gets about 80 visits per month from social media. These visits are important, since they often represent people who are not on your email list (potential new clients).
How Are You Doing on LinkedIn?
There are a few metrics to track how you’re doing on LinkedIn:
- Total connections: About 1,300 is average
- Profile views in last 90 days: About 50 is normal
- Average article views: 15 to 20 is average
- Groups to which you belong: About 20 is normal
How Are You Doing on Facebook?
Similarly, there are several metrics that can tell us how you’re doing on Facebook: how many people have liked your business page and how many views your average unpaid post gets. The average advisor’s business page has about 200 fans and their posts get about 20 views. The average group of advisors’ business page has about 800 fans and their posts get about 30 unpaid views. To learn more about the importance of Facebook and how to set up a Facebook Business page, click here.
What About Twitter?
Most advisors aren’t going viral on Twitter, so don’t worry if this is not your strong suit. However, I do have a few advisors with 20,000+ followers that get significant website traffic each month from their tweets. The average advisor has about 100 followers and the average advisor group has about 500 followers.
How Often Are You Posting to Social Media?
If each of your social media posts get 20 views, it may not seem significant. But if you’re posting on a daily basis, that’s 600 views per month. We recommend posting at least three times per week for a solo advisor and daily for a group of advisors. Remember: It’s important to post content that drives traffic back to your website.
Marketing Scorecard: Find Out How You Measure Up
Download this exclusive marketing scorecard to find out how you measure up. Fill out your information using metrics from your email provider and Google Analytics and see how you compare.
If your marketing scorecard shows a lackluster result, we’re here to help. Learn more about our Total Marketing Package today!
If you’re ready to take your marketing from dull and boring to shiny and captivating, we encourage you to schedule a free strategy session with our team. During this call, we’ll review your current marketing strategy and tell you how you can get some quick wins that will boost your business and attract more clients you love.
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(1) https://www.fa-mag.com/news/top-5-reasons-why-clients-fire-advisors-16238.html?section=43&page=2