Digital Marketing Strategies for Financial Advisors
Financial advisors do valuable work, but in many cases, it’s flying under the radar. More than half (57 percent) of Americans are currently going without financial representation.
That’s a huge gap in the market, so how can you work to fill it? With effective digital marketing strategies and techniques.
In this post, I’ll introduce you to the need for digital marketing for financial advisors. I’ll then jump right in, showing you how to use data to find your target audience and, most importantly, target them with various digital marketing strategies. Finally, I’ll share the best marketing channels for financial advisors so you can get off to a running start.
Top Tips for Financial Advisor Marketing
Trust and credibility should be the focus of financial advisors, especially when using marketing to establish their brand and grow their clientele.
Topics like finance fall into the YMYL (your money or your life) page type, which receives greater scrutiny from Google.
Customer profiles are just as necessary for financial advisor marketing as any other industry.
Customer profiles enable you to narrow down the best marketing channels for you to target.
The best practices for marketing as a financial advisor include targeted client segmentation, a strong digital presence, consistent personal branding, online and offline networking, and regular performance data analysis.
Why Do Financial Advisors Need Marketing?
Like any industry, financial advising can benefit from marketing for a few general reasons: promoting brand awareness, building credibility, and growing your clientele, just to name a few.
Beyond that, though, marketing for financial advisors can help to establish them as trusted sources and thought leaders. This is important for such a client-centric industry, and one that requires significant trust and transparency.
If done correctly, marketing can position you as the authority within your financial advising niche.
What Makes Marketing for Financial Advisors Unique?
Perhaps more than any other industry, trust and credibility are crucial to the success of a financial advisor. If you can’t instill trust in clients, then you won’t have any clients to speak of!
Marketing for financial advisors, then, needs to focus heavily on those elements. You’re not only selling a service, but you’re promoting yourself as a trustworthy and knowledgeable advisor. The emphasis on trust, expertise, and personalized service distinguishes financial advisor marketing from other industries.
Of course, we can’t discuss financial advisor marketing without discussing YMYL. YMYL (your money or your life) is a type of content that can directly impact the readers’ financial stability, well-being, safety, or health. Financial topics are a part of this, but YMYL topics also include medicine, weather, current events, and more.
YMYL pages are given greater scrutiny under Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines. Hency, why trust and credibility are so important.
Customer Profiles for Financial Advisor Marketing: Our Data
Believe it or not, there is not one “best” target audience for financial advisors. You can have people from all walks of life interested in your services, but you must know how to reach out to them and meet their needs.
So where do you even start?
That’s where data can help.
The team at NP Digital, my digital marketing agency, sent out three surveys regarding finances and financial goals. We collected the responses of 1,000 people.
Each section below will highlight a different customer profile that I created based on the data collected. These are just a few examples of the audiences you may want to consider targeting. I will then go into detail on how that customer profile can be implemented as part of an overall marketing strategy for financial advisors.
Name: Sarah
Age: 35
Gender: Female
Financial Habits:
Sarah primarily uses her savings account as an emergency fund, a habit she shares with 71 percent of other survey respondents.
She has only one savings account and uses it for all her savings goals, reflecting 31 percent of the respondents.
Sarah is well-educated about financial terms like APY and uses it as a deciding factor when selecting savings accounts. This is similarly the case for 41 percent of women and 55 percent of men.
Her top uses for savings accounts include emergency funds, vacation or travel, and major purchases.
Sarah understands the importance of actively growing her savings and makes informed decisions about her financial goals. For 17 percent of survey respondents, that means using a financial advisor to help them manage their money.
Sarah is a dream client for financial advisors, as she has general financial literacy, and therefore understands the importance of working with a knowledgeable advisor. If she doesn’t currently have an advisor, she is likely to reach out on her own to learn more about financial advising services.
The goal is two-fold: First, she needs to know that you exist. Second, she needs to see the value of your service over your competitors.
How can you achieve that?
For general awareness, paid marketing campaigns can be of great help. Paid campaigns on Google and social media will plant the seed in Sarah’s mind. Once Sarah is ready to take the leap, you can implement retargeting campaigns to recapture her attention.
Name: Casey
Age: 28
Gender: Non-Binary
Financial Habits:
Casey is part of the 30 percent of people who can pay bills but have no savings, indicating a potential lack of emergency preparedness.
Casey’s financial goals include building an emergency fund and feeling more secure about their financial future, which is the most popular goal among respondents.
They acknowledge past financial mistakes, such as overspending and not having an emergency fund, and is eager to learn more.
Casey represents individuals seeking financial security and education to make better-informed decisions.
How can you target a potential client such as Casey? By focusing on financial literacy. Free resources like budget planners, blog posts, and how-to guides will bring customers like Casey to your website.
You can even host free webinars on YouTube or live Q&As on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
While customers like Casey may not currently be in the position to hire a financial advisor, these free resources can help to get them there. Once comfortable enough to hire an advisor, you can be sure that your brand will be the first one on their mind.
Best Marketing Channels for Financial Advisors
Once you have built out your own customer profiles or borrowed ours from above, it’s time to begin your marketing efforts. So, what are the best marketing channels for financial advisors? Take a look!
Social Media and Financial Advisors
Social media for financial advisors is an important piece of the puzzle. From Facebook to YouTube to TikTok, social media can reach potential clients of all demographics and backgrounds.
It’s often overlooked or poorly utilized as part of financial advisor marketing strategies, though.
Why? If I had to guess, it’d be assumptions on who is interested in financial advising and where they’re hanging out.
Don’t assume that your target clientele is 40+ and, therefore, more likely to be hanging out on Facebook. Within one of our surveys, 17 percent of respondents indicated they were already working with a financial advisor. Of that 17 percent, 92.5 percent were between the ages of 18 and 25.
So don’t be afraid to branch out to millennial and Gen Z hangout spots like Instagram and TikTok! Financial advisor influencers, like Delyanne Barros (@delyannethemoneycoach) and Tori Dunlap (@herfirst100k), have shown just how popular financial advising can be to a “younger” audience:
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