As a financial advisor, your clients always come first. But if you’re only focusing on the needs of your current clients, you could be jeopardizing the future of your practice. Without a fresh roster of prospects, you will find yourself scrambling to replace clients who leave.
Lead generation for financial advisors is the process of identifying and attracting prospective clients who are interested in advisory services. In the past, financial advisors heavily relied on traditional methods such as referrals and networking events to generate leads. Although these methods are still relevant and valuable, lead generation for financial advisors must include a strong digital component. In the digital age, advisors can reach a wider audience and engage with prospects in a more targeted way.
Broadridge’s Financial Advisor Playbook shows that the majority of advisors are actively looking for new clients, with younger advisors leading the charge. Despite that, only 43% of advisors are seeing an increase in new client inquiries. Growth-oriented advisors (defined as those that are actively adding new clients and spending more than $5,000 a year on marketing) are more likely to see an increase in demand because of their proactive lead generation work online.
How do financial advisors generate leads? We've compiled a list of effective lead generation strategies specifically tailored for financial advisors. From optimizing your website to leveraging social media, these tactics have been proven to drive quality leads for businesses just like yours.
Lead generation for financial advisors works best when it’s coupled with a consistent message and brand image. For instance, if you work with young professionals, your lead generation should tailor to their needs and expectations. When prospects visit your website, read your blog posts, watch your YouTube videos, or hear you on a podcast, they’ll be able to easily identify you as an advisor that young professionals can turn to for advice.
Findings from the Financial Advisor Playbook indicate that advisors with a defined marketing strategy have twice the number of leads per month from their website than those who don’t. Those with a defined marketing strategy onboarded 41 new clients in the last 12 months compared to just 17 new clients for advisors who don’t.
Start with a clear idea of your target audience. When you know what kind of clients you want to focus on, you can craft messaging and marketing tactics geared towards them. You can use our template to create an actionable marketing strategy across multiple channels.
Once a strictly local business, financial advisors are increasingly serving clients well beyond their neighborhood. Twenty-seven percent of the average advisor’s business now comes from clients outside their local communities, up from 24% in 2021. The pandemic has shown that wealth management can be effective through virtual meetings and digital advisory services, and that proximity isn’t everything for customers. Today’s technology brings the expertise of financial advice to anyone’s doorstep.
In a digitally distributed world, think of your website as your storefront. Prospects will first go to your site to validate their opinions and learn what you offer. They expect to encounter a clean, professional design that speaks to them. Your website should also be mobile-friendly, given that mobile is responsible for more than half of all global website traffic.
Savvy advisors are investing in their web presence. Seventy-one percent of advisors say their web presence is where they are directing marketing dollars.
Although web search is a staple of modern client decision-making, the value of word-of-mouth referrals hasn’t diminished. A strong referral network of other professionals that offer complementary services, such as CPAs, attorneys, insurance agencies, real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, and executive recruiters, can help you tap into the power of referrals.
For starters, a big referral network helps you deliver superior service. By working closely with these other professionals, you can position yourself as a financial quarterback who has access to the services your clients need. A referral network also acts as a lead generation engine: you can refer clients to each other as their needs arise. Better still, referred clients generated lifetime value is 16% higher than non-referred clients.
How do you build a referral network? You can ask your clients who their accountant, lawyer, or real estate agent is and reach out to them. Since you have clients in common, you’re likely targeting people with similar profiles. Another option is to join a business organization in your community where people from different industries come together, or by attending networking events.
One of the best ways to draw prospects is by demonstrating your subject matter expertise. By positioning yourself as a go-to source of valuable information, you will be top-of-mind when they need to make financial decisions.
For example, if you are an expert on a complicated topic like taxes or public employee pensions, your educational content can help readers understand these issues better. Great content increases the chances that your contacts will share it, leading to referrals.
To make the most of your high-quality content, consider gating it. Gating is when a visitor to your site must provide information like their name and email to access it. This can help you capture lead information for follow-up conversations.
Consider your social media presence as an avenue for attracting prospects. Prospecting on social media may not bring immediate business, but it can serve as an introduction to your practice.
Forty-one percent of the respondents in the Financial Advisor Playbook survey say they’ve landed a client through social media, significantly more than the 34% who said the same in 2019.
LinkedIn and Facebook are the top two places where financial advisors have found success. Other platforms are becoming increasingly important as well. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter all have a role to play, depending on your target market. That said, if your clients aren’t on a social platform, don’t establish a presence just to cover all your basis. Consider registering your name on each platform, however, so you can reserve the name you like if you decide to post content on a new channel later on.
If you feel that social media marketing is outside your skill set or is too time consuming, look into marketing automation, included in tools like AdvisorStream, to make the process easier.
Instead of giving all your clients the same level of service — which may not resonate with everyone — you can target specific content and solutions for that particular group through segmentation. Segmentation is a powerful growth strategy because it improves your efficiency and profitability. Segmentation lets you work smarter, not harder.
Financial advisors that segment clients have greater growth in assets under management than those that don’t, a Fidelity Investments research study found.
Many advisors aren’t focused on all the segments in their book. Half of advisors do not have a program in place to acquire female clients. Only 10% of advisors make the effort to acquire Millennial clients despite the $68 trillion wealth transfer to this generation is already underway.
It can be daunting to cater to a new demographic. AdvisorStream can do the heavy lifting for you by strengthening your client segmentation models. You can automatically post relevant content across all your marketing channels and schedule client communication in advance. These “set and forget” campaigns can push out new, FINRA-reviewed content the moment it becomes available, relieving you of the burden overseeing it.
Consumers want digital communication to feel personalized. Unless content is relevant to them, it may not resonate. In fact, 42% of investors want more personalized content catering to their specific needs according to the Dow Jones and Broadridge AdvisorStream 2022 State of Advice Study. Personalization can help companies grow revenues 10% to 15%.
One way to personalize your content is by sorting clients by a certain criterion — perhaps new parents or high-income executives — and create email lists with content that specifically addresses these financial pain points. Or you can create ads that will show up when at the top of the page when prospects are searching for specific keywords, such as “best financial advisors for retirement saving.”
Smart automation solutions can help you personalize at scale, recommending the next best piece of content to maximize your engagement. Our content marketing platform uses artificial intelligence to learn how clients and prospects engage with your marketing channels to identify client trends and areas of interest in real time. Those feed relevant content recommendations for greater personalization.
Manual lead generation is time-consuming, which means you should partner with a firm that can help you improve your existing practices (or even provide you with brand-new tools). Broadridge will help you develop an effective lead generation program and deploy AI-powered automation to turn prospects into clients. Our tools help advisors easily and affordably attract prospects and convert leads into clients.
Check out the guide and start generating more leads today.
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