5 Ways Advisors Can Immediately Improve Their Marketing

No matter how great your products and services are, the success of your firm will be limited without effective marketing. Knowing your target market, reaching them through proper channels, and delivering the right message at the right time are essential to make sales. If you’re not getting the results you want, here are 5 tips to improve your marketing efforts:

Take Email Marketing to the Next Level

It can be difficult to know exactly how to make your emails stand out in increasingly busy inboxes. With dynamic content and targeting the right person, your email marketing will be successful. In a new report , HubSpot collected data that focuses on ways you can tweak your emails to lead to more sales.

Marketing Tip : Send emails during off-peak hours. Email open rates are higher towards the end of the workweek and on weekends. The open rate corresponds with the number of emails received on any specific day and is higher on days when less email is sent. Experiment with sending emails at different times, track the results, and determine which times produce the best results.

Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

On April 21, 2015, Google released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm designed to lower search rankings for websites that are not mobile friendly. Because your website is the first experience many prospective clients have with you, it’s important to ensure your site meets the mobile-friendly criteria.

Marketing Tip : Test your website to ensure your pages meet the mobile-friendly criteria at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ . The test will analyze a URL and report if your website pages are a mobile-friendly design. You can learn more about the mobile-friendly criteria and how it may affect search results for your site by reading Google’s official blog post .

Nurture Your Leads

Staying connected with new leads, prospects, and clients is vital to your selling strategy. Generally speaking, you can’t control the timing of a sale but you can control the extent to which your pipeline is aware of your products and services. When a need develops and your leads, prospects, and clients are aware that your services can help them, you have an opportunity to make a sale. This is why managing your sales funnel is so important.

Marketing Tip : Create a sales funnel. Segment each person in your funnel based on their needs, profession, and interests. Your sales funnel should have three goals; funnel more leads into your pipeline, increase the percentage of people who move through each level, and know exactly what steps to execute during each stage to nurture relationships. A simple sales funnel formula starts with leads at the top, followed by prospects, and ultimately clients.

Tailor Events to Small Groups

Effective event planning relies on your ability to address pressing pain points in your target audiences’ lives and create strategies to reach and influence them. Events, like marketing messages, must be carefully crafted for a select group of people to garner their attention. If your topic doesn’t resonate with them, it’s highly unlikely they will attend.

Marketing Tip : Limit your guest list. Client events should not be a “one-size-fits-all.” Trying to please all of your clients, who have a wide range of different needs, is rarely effective. The better approach is to hold more events that are smaller in nature and appeal to a specific group of people.

Establish Alliances

Advisors who take the time to invest in building strategic alliances generate higher revenues and profits. Coordinating the right mix of strategies to gain market share and improve client acquisition rates is essential to advance your firm in today’s economy. Strategic alliances help catalyze your firm’s growth because they empower each partner to serve clients better. Through the alliance, your clients benefit from the expertise of trusted professionals and feel satisfied knowing you are working together as a team to help them achieve their financial goals.

Marketing Tip : Structure your extended team. Start with other professionals; attorneys, insurance agents, and CPAs, whose efforts are symmetrical to the needs of your clients. Identify professionals that share your niche market and can provide solutions to your clients beyond your existing realm of services. Done correctly, it only takes a small number of strategic partners to have a positive impact. Download Ironstone’s workbook, “ Building Strategic Alliances – Best Practices for Financial Advisors. ” The e-book will guide you through each step.