For this episode, we will answer the following question:

Where do financial services fall short in terms of marketing strategy?

1. Lack of Digital Marketing Footprint

Our marketing teams love talking about engagement, but your content will have a difficult time engaging prospects if it’s not produced consistently. Consistent, quality content is the holy grail of marketing not only because it increases online traffic and SEO, but it helps your firm establish its authority as a thought leader in the financial service industry and as a worthwhile place to invest.

Remember that digital marketing is all about building a relationship with your customer, and a relationship won’t last if there isn’t regular communication. You can be sure that your customer won’t feel very cared for if you publish blog articles frequently for a month, then decide to take a break for the next 2 months. For example, if we look at a TV show, new episodes are released on a regular basis in order to build a strong audience base. Similarly, you want to ensure your firm is regularly producing and publishing new content in order to attract customers and build a strong relationship with them.

2. No System in Place to Track Efforts

You may be spending a lot of money on marketing initiatives but are you tracking the results? Without some sort of system to assess the performance of your marketing tactics, you won’t know what you’re doing right or wrong, and you won’t have the closest idea on how to improve your marketing strategy for the future. For example, let’s say your firm has created a newsletter email campaign that you’ve sent out to some of your contacts. Are you tracking the opens, clicks, bounce rate, etc.?

How about if a contact new to your firm is browsing through your website? Are you tracking what pages they’ve visited on your website? Or if they’ve clicked on and read through some blog articles and maybe even downloaded an online offer like an eBook? 

If you’re using the traditional route of paper mail, do you have a system in place where you are notified when someone opens your letter and have methods to track their actions from there on out?

3. View Marketing as Important but not Urgent

Marketing efforts are not just an add-on to your firm’s overall operations, but help make up the core backbone of what your firm is. They are what first make your brand known to initial strangers, help you map out your buyer’s persona and key goals, and create a starting point to begin a conversation and hopefully, continue building a relationship with them through to sales. 

Because of how foundational marketing is to your firm’s success, time is of the essence and the planning and execution of your marketing strategy should be done with a sense of urgency.

Think of your firm, you can’t own a store expecting people to come in and buy things without getting the word out in the first place. Make it a priority to plan out your marketing strategy and the different tactics your firm will carry out to attract prospects with time-based deadlines.

4. Lack of Understanding the Buyer's Journey

When it comes to sales, it seems to make the most logical sense to present your solution first. Advisors like to unintentionally invest all their time and energy on the Decision Stage of the buyer’s journey    because they’re thinking this exact mindset: directly presenting a solution first will entice the lead to make a decision fast. 

However, as we’ve probably seen in the past sales we’ve done, this actually leads to the opposite result. When potential customers have a problem and are out there looking for a solution, it’s often because they are unfamiliar with the different options out there and would like to have a wider picture of their problem and how to approach it. If they’re presented with just one straight solution immediately, this will often overwhelm and narrow their thought process, leading them to take a step back to think about it more and maybe do their own research to gain that wider picture.

This is why it’s so important to recognize what stage your prospect or lead is in, in the buyer’s journey as one of the first steps. Ask yourself, what are the primary pain-points the individual is facing, and what kind of questions are they asking you? When you listen to their goals and challenges first before presenting your own solution, you gain credibility with the customer and a wider understanding of them, and can then have the means to provide a tailored solution that would help them reach their goals most effectively.

That is all for this episode. If you have any marketing questions that you would like us to answer related to the financial service world, please send them to podcast@bethinkmarketing.com