In an increasingly connected world, digital marking is a vital tool for growing and expanding your business. Many financial advisors rightly see social media marketing as playing a big part in their marketing and book-building activities, but it’s by no means the only avenue to stay top-of-mind.

Digital marketing for clients is so much more and encompasses so many different activities. It can hard to know where to start. To make the most of financial advisor digital marketing, you need to know the basics.

What is Financial Advisor Digital Marketing?

Say you want to try out a new restaurant in town. What’s the first thing you do? Go online and read about it, of course. You might look at the eatery’s website, read reviews, download the menu, and maybe even grab a table through the online reservation system.

It’s the same for financial advisory clients. They want to learn about your business quickly and find out your value proposition. Websites, videos, content libraries, and social media are all examples of financial advisor digital marketing.

By clearly defining your target audience, you can speak directly to their financial pain points and demonstrate your expertise in helping them solve their challenges. You’ll quickly become a trusted source of information.

What are the Benefits of Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors?

With digital marketing, you can make yourself visible to a much bigger audience without the physical constraints of traditional marketing, such as cold calling or in-person networking. According to Broadridge’s Financial Advisor Playbook, financial advisors plan to make an investment in digital marketing because they recognize how effective it is. You can also use digital marketing to attract clients beyond your immediate community.

1. Start with a digital marketing strategy

Just like any market endeavor, digital marketing needs a solid strategy to drive its execution. But that may be easier said than done. Broadridge’s research suggests that developing and implementing a digital marketing strategy are two of the biggest obstacles financial advisors face. Without that, you might be wasting time and money.

A digital marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. But it must have at its heart two main questions: “Who do I want to reach?” and “What do I want to achieve?”

For example, if you want to reach Gen-Z investors, you might want to lean more heavily on social media marketing. This demographic is more likely to engage on those channels. Alternately, if you’ve identified people concerned with retirement income to be your target demographic, a robust content library addressing these challenges might prove more effective than focusing on social.

You can use this template to create an actionable digital marketing strategy across multiple channels.

2. Go old school with email

Social media platforms come and go. Search engine algorithms change. But email seems to stay the same. About half the world’s population has an email address and uses it regularly, making email a better way to reach more people than almost any other marketing method. According to Constant Contact, email offers the highest return on investment of any marketing activity.

The key to effective email marketing is an extensive list. The more robust your email list is, the more you can make out of your efforts. Your emails can leverage other content such as blogs, website, tutorials, and eBooks. You could also run a promotion, such as a chance to be entered in a drawing, to get email subscribers.

Once you’ve built a strong list, you can stay top-of-mind by producing compelling content that helps subscribers solve their pressing financial challenges. These followers won’t need to go looking on social media or other channels for your insights; they’ll be right in their inbox.

3. Get smart about search engine optimization

You might be producing important content aimed at your target audience, but if you’re not optimizing your website and other content for search engines, people won’t be able to find it. Did you know that 75% of people never scroll beyond the first page of search engine results?

There’s a lot of noise on the Internet and it can be hard to stand out—unless you have an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, that is.

SEO is a type of inbound marketing, which means that your prospects are coming to you, instead of outbound marketing like advertising or cold calling. By optimizing your content based on commonly used phrases that people are looking for, your clients and prospects will see you as someone who can help them with their financial needs.

You may also want to consider pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As the name suggests, PPC allows you to bid on keywords so your ads appear at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) or through social media.

4. Produce content people need and want (to share)

Educational content is more effective than promotional content because it helps people solve problems they’re facing. The more you can provide content that specifically addresses the issues that are on the minds of your target audience, the more they will see a source of trusted information. As one respondent in our Financial Advisor Playbook survey noted, “If I can educate clients, I never have to sell.”

Remember that content doesn’t always have to be an article: It can be a video, checklist, infographic, or quiz. For instance, 78% of businesses say that video increases traffic to their sites, underscoring how important different types of content are. The main criterion for effective content is that it be targeted, relevant, and insightful.

Your content program is an opportunity to demonstrate your unique selling proposition and let prospects get to know you on a personal level. For example, if you make a video about college funding, share a story about helping your own child apply to college and the financial aid process. This helps prospects make an emotional connection. By the time they meet you, they’ll feel like they already know you.

Finally, make sure to have strong calls to action throughout encouraging prospects to get in touch with you to learn more.

5. Keep it fresh

Give investors a reason to come back for new insights by having a consistent schedule for your digital marketing. Letting content go stale can leave a negative impression that you have nothing new to share.

What’s more, Google’s algorithm monitors content for changes in determining rankings. If a page idles on your site, the search engine ignores it. Making a change, on the other hand, is a signal to the algorithm to reevaluate your page.

Creating new content doesn’t have to be time-consuming. You can set up automated campaigns to post the most relevant topics based on investor engagement and feedback. In addition, you can leverage content curation tools and third-party media to share content your target audience cares about without having to spend hours creating it yourself.

6. Spend time on the right channels, not all of them

The sky’s the limit for the upside of financial advisors’ digital marketing, but it’s important to be smart about where you spend your time. This doesn’t mean you need to be engaged with every channel. Pick one or two channels to test.

Financial advisors should begin with LinkedIn and Facebook. That’s based on survey responses listing these channels as the two best places for obtaining leads that convert into clients. Make sure your profiles are professional-looking and include ways to connect with you. They’re also a great place to engage directly with clients and prospects and post new content.

7. Avoid common pitfalls

Although online marketing for advisors has enormous potential, it’s not without risks. Without a strategy to guide you and a plan to execute on that strategy, you can fall victim to some common pitfalls. Make sure to avoid these:

• Costs can soar out of control. Financial advisor digital marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing, but it’s not free. If you’re not converting clicks into clients, it can be hard to justify the cost.
• It can suck up your time. Quality online market for financial advisors take time and effort. But it shouldn’t take over your day. Don’t go overboard and let the hours rack up.
• Success can be hard to measure: At some point you’ll want to know if your digital marketing efforts are working and whether or not you’re reaching the right audience. Make sure you adopt key performance indicators (KPIs) to track to see how effective your digital marketing is, such as website traffic, click-through rates, and likes and shares for social media.

8. Use automated tools to lighten your digital marketing load

Advisors already have full-time jobs, they don’t have time for digital marketing. A manual process can easily get overwhelming and you might let your digital marketing efforts fall by the wayside. Automation is critical for success.

Artificial intelligence-enabled tools like AdvisorStream make the job easier. AdvisorStream gives advisors the ability to offer a FINRA-compliant library of over 3,000 unbiased, advisor-centric pieces of original content by a team of in-house financial subject-matter experts to help you showcase your expertise.

Email & Social Marketing allows you to increase your client touchpoints instantly by allowing you to:

• Find the right content for your clients and prospects
• Easily share content
• Schedule client communications in advance with future dated emails and social posts.
• Enroll in automated set-it-and-forget-it campaigns that push out new content when it becomes available

Digital Marketing: Get on board

Financial advisor digital marketing has become the go-to way for growth-oriented financial advisors to find new clients and grow wallet share. But it can seem like a heavy lift at first. With time and patience, you will learn to leverage online channels to get in front of your target audience. The time-saving strategies listed in this post can help you save hours without sacrificing the quality of your content. And if you need additional help, Broadridge can connect you with the resources and tools to take your digital marketing to the next level.

Check out the Financial Advisors Guide to Growth and start generating more leads today.