How much money have you wasted on marketing tactics that promised good results and never delivered? Whenever I talk to financial advisors who are frustrated with their marketing, almost all of them have one thing in common: they don’t have a strong marketing foundation.
Building a strong marketing foundation is key to seeing successful, long-term results in your marketing. It’s what drives growth and consistently generates qualified referrals.
At Indigo Marketing Agency, we’ve developed a framework for helping financial advisors get more clients—and it starts with building a strong marketing foundation.
Here’s a closer look at why building a strong marketing foundation is so important—and the step-by-step process we’ve created to help financial advisors do it.
Why Is a Strong Marketing Foundation Important?
Have you ever heard the parable of the wise and foolish builders? One built his house on sand and the other built his house on a rock. The same is true for your marketing foundation.
If you cut corners and build it on “sand,” you may see results initially, but you’ll have to sink more money into maintaining it as time goes on.
But if you invest in a strong marketing foundation straight from the start, your marketing actually gets easier over time. You build a strong base that continues to generate high-quality leads and referrals for years to come.
How We Help Financial Advisors Build a Strong Marketing Foundation in 9 Steps
When an advisor decides to work with Indigo Marketing Agency, the very first thing we do is set up their marketing foundation. Here’s a closer look at the 9-step formula we use to do this:
Step 1: Have Your Strategy Call With Our Marketing Consultant
The purpose of this strategy call is to figure out which clients you love working with most. We start by defining your ideal prospect—who they are, what they do, how much money they make, what phase of life they’re in, everything! We then brainstorm marketing calendar topics that address the biggest doubts and fears they have right now.
Step 2: Gather Your Login Credentials
Our marketing is truly done-for-you, so for Step 2, we gather all the login credentials we need to fully take your marketing off your plate. This includes gathering credentials for your website, social media accounts, email marketing system, Google Analytics, Google My Business, and more.
Step 3: Create Your Marketing Calendar
A big part of our marketing strategy is creating custom content for financial advisors that goes out monthly to your website, email list, and social media followers.
We build all this content out ahead of time in a 12-month marketing calendar, so you always know what articles we’re writing for you and when. Want to see an example? Check out this sample marketing calendar for financial advisors.
Step 4: Set Up Your Social Media Marketing
Even if you already use social media, your profiles may not be optimized to connect and engage with prospects. That’s why for this step we focus on optimizing your social media pages. This includes:
- Creating background images for your social media channels
- Setting up your social media scheduling platform
- Connecting your social media profiles for automatic scheduling
- Getting compliance approval and making edits as requested
We do this for all your channels: Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, and your personal and company LinkedIn profiles.
Step 5: Set Up Your Email Marketing System
Did you know that email marketing has an ROI of up to 440%? It even outperforms social media! That’s why having a solid email marketing system is a critical component of your marketing foundation.
When you work with Indigo Marketing Agency, we take care of every aspect of your email marketing system. We set up your account through Mailchimp or Constant Contact, build your custom-branded email template, get it approved by compliance, and manage your email lists. We then email your contacts each time we create a new article for you.
RELATED ARTICLE: Email Marketing Best Practices for Financial Advisors
Step 6: Complete Your Full Website SEO Project
Fine-tuning your SEO is the meat of our marketing foundations package for financial advisors. It’s where we help you rank higher, look better in search results, and generate more traffic to your website. It’s a really technical step that includes:
- Performing keyword research and setting up tracking through Rankwatch
- Updating your site titles, page titles, and meta descriptions
- Conducting on-site image optimization
- Adding a Google My Business map to your website
- Connecting Google Search Console and submitting a sitemap for it
- Adding structured data and schema markups to your website
- Verifying and optimizing your Google My Business page
- Adding optimized images to your Google My Business
- Adding a blog page and social media links to your website
- Creating a video report that details what changes we made to your SEO and recommended next steps
Step 7: Create Your Databox Account
Your Databox account allows us to track your marketing metrics and gives us real-time insights into what’s improved. We set your account up for you, then connect all your data sources to it: Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn company page, Twitter, and Mailchimp or Constant Contact. We then send you a marketing metrics snapshot each month so you can see how your marketing is working.
Step 8: Create Your Digital Marketing Plan
We finalize all these steps by putting together a Digital Marketing Plan (DMP) that highlights everything we’re doing to help you grow your business. In this PDF, you’ll see snapshots of your:
- Target market
- Content calendar
- Company bios
- Social media profiles
- Email template
- Marketing metrics
- Marketing goals
- Upcoming checkpoints to watch out for
- Contact info for Indigo Marketing Agency
Similar to a financial plan, this digital marketing plan serves as your go-to resource for what we’ve done (and will continue to do) to build your marketing foundation. See a sample Digital Marketing Plan here!
Step 9: Get Started on Your Marketing!
It’s showtime, baby! By now we’ve built a strong marketing foundation for you—and we’re ready to start putting your marketing plan into action. Here’s where we hand you off to your dedicated Account Manager who will serve as your go-to contact at Indigo Marketing Agency.
We then get busy creating a custom article for you each month that improves your SEO and keeps you top of mind. We also post on your social media channels three times a week and perform one hour of website management each month. You can read more about our Total Marketing Package (which includes our marketing foundations setup) here.
Ready to Build Your Marketing Foundation?
At Indigo Marketing Agency, helping you build a strong marketing foundation is what we do best. It’s our bread and butter, our lifeblood, if you will.
A lot goes into building a strong marketing foundation. And we’ve spent years perfecting the process and developing a system that saves you time, money, and headaches.
If you’re looking for marketing that’s truly done for you, schedule a free strategy session with us now! During this one-hour call, we’ll talk about some of your favorite clients, identify what’s worked for your marketing and what’s not, and give our honest advice on how you can strengthen your marketing foundation today.
Ready to get started? Schedule your call here. We can’t wait to chat with you!