Top 5 Lead Generation Strategies for Financial Advisors
What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?
Lead generation is vital for the growth of a financial planning business — lead generation is a core marketing strategy to help you get new business. The main goal of lead generation is usually to receive a potential client’s contact information and earn buy-in for future conversations.
If you’re a new financial professional, growing your clientele is a top priority. If you’re a veteran in the field, even with a strong client base, it’s always worth the effort to continue getting new clients.
To keep a healthy financial services practice, it’s necessary to strike a balance between meeting the needs of your existing clients and bringing in new ones.
Employing the right lead generation strategies can keep new leads flowing without overdoing the effort and expenses. However, older strategies such as cold calling, direct mail, and newspaper ads are not as effective as they used to be, except in very niche cases.
Instead, focusing on more scalable strategies like email newsletters, leveraging your brand on social media, and updating your website can bring the results you’re looking for.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of lead generation and the newest strategies to grow your client base.
6 Lead Generation Benefits for Financial Advisors
The main benefit of lead generation is getting more qualified leads. But the process also helps your practice in other ways.
Lead generation puts your business “out there.”
Continuous effort will increase the exposure of your practice to your target audience, which means a lot more people will see you, compared to if you only rely on word of mouth.
Increase your brand’s awareness.
If your lead generation is done in a consistent manner with your message and brand image, prospective clients will be able to associate the two easier. Eventually, you’ll be able to stay top of mind when they need services like yours.
Help more people.
In the process of generating leads, you can reach more people. Depending on your strategy, you can also share useful information with more people who might need it. More exposure helps position your firm as the one to remember when they need your services.
Increase online visibility.
A lot of people these days consult an online search engine when they need something. Be it for goods like hearing aids or for a service like financial advisory. There’s a lot of competition in the online landscape. If you’re not actively trying to generate leads online, you might find yourself at the bottom of the pile.
Give more credibility and trustworthiness to your brand.
An active online presence is often associated with a more credible firm. For example, many people think that past page three of their online search, the pages offered by the search engine are no longer relevant and only filled with bots. Posting relevant, consistent content can help build your brand credibility.
Keep your practice relevant.
Posting authoritative content on your website, linking them to your social media, answering questions, and sending email newsletters regularly are some of the things that will keep you at the forefront of your target client’s mind. Keep things relevant and try to answer some of your prospect’s biggest questions. Ideally, you’d want to provide value at every interaction.
5 Best Strategies for Financial Advisor Lead Generation
There are a ton of ways to bring in more clients, but be careful about spending too much time and effort on lead generation. To make sure you get the best ROI with your efforts, we have compiled our top five tips for lead generation. In this case, we’ll be focusing on inbound strategies instead of outreach to populate your sales funnel.
Invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Understand that most people won’t get past the first page of a search result, so ranking higher up is definitely beneficial if you want people to find your services through search engines. Beyond that, you’ll also want to gain an authority boost when you rank for relevant keywords.
SEO is a big part of any content marketing strategy as it makes sure that your business can be easily found through search engines.
That said, there’s a lot of competition out there, and knowing what works best for your business is the key to climbing the search result pages.
If you don’t know where to start, you can always follow the best practices for now and tailor the strategies to work for your business as you grow.
Conduct keyword research. Decide the keywords you’d like to target. If you’re doing this on your own, aim for keywords that aren’t as competitive by checking the difficulty. For example, you’ll have a much higher chance of ranking on long-tail and specific keywords, such as “retirement planning for millennials in Dallas” rather than just “retirement planning.”
Understand your audience. Find out what your readers are curious about. Answer their questions and address their concerns. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can ask your current clients for insight, see what prospects are talking about on social media or forums, or use tools like Answer The Public to discover new topics.
Create quality content. And by this, we mean content that’s genuinely relevant and helpful to your reader’s concerns. Make sure that the content you publish is also designed to be easily digestible. Promote your content to get some high-quality backlinks to your website, and your SEO strategy will eventually pay off.
Encourage Client Referrals
Relying only on referrals isn't sustainable, but using it in combination with other strategies will give you a good boost. These referrals are like endorsements that help create a positive opinion of your services.
Start asking satisfied clients for referrals. Offer them a good deal or discount if they bring in friends, family, or other contacts to your client base. It's also good practice to remind them from time to time.
If you have a mailing list, you can also put a line at the bottom of your message that encourages members to forward your message to a friend.
Utilize Social Media Platforms
Depending on your target clients, you can use personal branding on social media as a way to generate leads.
Start by identifying which online spaces your niche tends to congregate in. Is it LinkedIn? Facebook? Twitter? Quora?
Then sign up for relevant platforms and familiarize yourself with how your target clients use them.
See if you can create authoritative content that's valuable and relevant to your niche. For example, if your niche is dentists nearing retirement age, a short video or an enlightening text post about what steps they can take to prepare for retirement might be interesting and worth the watch for them.
You can also answer relevant questions on that platform to interact with your niche.
If you reply to their questions or comments, people may see you as approachable and will be more likely to patronize your business.
Keep in mind that this is a constant effort, so make sure to post and engage regularly. This is where you’ll generate some of your leads, after all.
Pay Attention to Industry Trends
Evolving with industry trends is a good way to get endless ideas for lead gen.
However, rather than blatantly copying trends, you’ll want to analyze the strategy and make it your own.
With industry trends, you’re dealing with experiments more than anything else. Some tactics that are used by competitors, or even another industry, may or may not work for your business.
For example, a competing company might be amassing a great amount of traffic thanks to its new podcast. While you consider adding podcasts to your digital marketing strategy, you also need to consider if it makes sense for your business and target audience.
Podcasts help you build trust with your target audience because it positions you as the financial advisor to go to when looking for specific financial advice. But would in-person seminars or virtual webinars make more sense? They have similar effects, and you don’t have to commit as much effort compared to regular podcasts.
Finding this out and adapting trends to work for your specific goals and business needs is part of the strategy here.
Host Community Events
A lot of our top strategies rely on the online visibility of your brand, but that’s not all there is.
We’re not saying that you need to pay a handsome sum and get your ad displayed in the local newspaper. Rather, we’re telling you to reach out to your community — where your target clients are — and show that you’re invested in their well-being.
Reach out to relevant groups and see if they’d be interested in a presentation about what financial advisors like you can do for them or even offer a free workshop about how to manage their personal finances.
Afterward, you can ask them to fill out an exit survey evaluating how they feel after your event. Put in prompts for them to fill out their name, phone number, and email. If you want to go a little further, at the end of the exit survey, you can put a checkbox about whether they would be interested in a free session with you, along with their time preferences, whether they want to contact you or the opposite, and their medium of preference (face-to-face, online, or through calls, for example).
Another thing you can do to stay relevant is to sponsor something in your local community. People love it when local businesses host events, such as sponsoring a local sports team or contributing to raffle items for an auction. This will help your brand name reach more people and also gives you positive exposure.
Improve Your Financial Advising Lead Generation with Asset-Map
Inbound strategies like the ones we mentioned above are easier to do at scale using automation and templates.
However, if you’re a small advisory with no manpower to do all these on your own, you can always hire a lead generation service to take care of it for you.
Asset-Map not only helps you simplify ongoing client engagements, but we can assist with lead generation tactics. Use Asset-Map’s visual map to explain things clearly during your lead generation process and demonstrate how easy it is to work with you. Asset-Map also has a feature called Discovery, which allows financial advising prospects to make their own Asset-Map in your book of business!
Sounds like something you’re looking for? See it in action. Book a demo today, and we’ll help you figure out how Asset-Map can help you improve your lead generation process.