As a financial advisor, you may have started to notice that traditional marketing efforts aren’t as effective for your business. Why? Because people are browsing for solutions online instead of being hard-sold on products and services they don’t even want. In fact, 80% of the online population has bought a product online. Eighty percent.

Even better, inbound marketing provides the perfect platforms for reaching your potential clients. How? Finances usually aren’t something that people just generally know. Rather, most people have to start Google searches before they even know what retirement investments are, but this is a great opportunity to implement an inbound marketing strategy. Why? Inbound marketing focuses on answering people’s questions, which ultimately leads them through the buyer’s journey until they buy a product or service. For the wealth management industry, five million affluent investors are using social media to research their financial decisions.

The trick to inbound marketing isn’t to hardsell. Instead, providing your expertise will build your business’ credibility, making it more likely for a client to buy your service. Whether this is your first campaign launched or your tenth, the following advice applies every time.

Start with SMART

After creating and understanding your buyer persona, you can implement SMART goals to map out your campaign.

Before you set a campaign plan into action, make sure you create SMART goals that will be the basis of your entire campaign.

  • Specific- Your goals should make it clear what is to be expected from a campaign. This is the focus of what you want to achieve.
  • Measurable- “Increase number of leads” isn’t a measurable goal. A measurable goal would be going from 10 leads a month to 15.
  • Attainable- Make sure that your company can reach these goals. If you normally have 10 leads a month, jumping to 2,000 leads a month isn’t likely to happen.
  • Relevant- Your goals should matter to your business and its core initiatives.
  • Timely- There needs to be a start and finish date for the campaign so that you can assess the success or failure of your actions. Analyzing data from the campaign is what allows marketers to see what worked and what didn’t.

Below is a detailed example of a SMART goal:

Before my next seminar, I will optimize my website and publish 4 blogs relevant to the seminar topic in order to start building a sales funnel to reach more of my buyer persona audience at various stages in the buyer’s journey.

I will send out two emails before the event, one immediately after the event to attendees, one to those who registered and didn’t attend, and one email a week after the event to nurture the leads.

Included in the blog posts and emails will be one relevant content offer related to the seminar topic. By adding these inbound marketing activities, I will increase my attendee-to-lead capture ratio by 20% and decrease my attendee attrition rate 45% by adding more attendees to the sales funnel at their various stages of the buyer’s journey. I will add those who don’t convert to leads to my email marketing plan and nurture through blog and offer emails once per month for six months.

Executing an Inbound Marketing Campaign

Now that you have laid out clear SMART goals, here are the three primary areas of focus for your inbound marketing strategy.

Social Media Strategy

Your social media strategy should contain a content calendar so that you’re regularly and consistently posting to social media platforms. The types of content you should be sharing are blogs, videos, infographics, and articles. All of these help to establish your business as an industry expert.

As for social media platforms, at the very least, you need to have a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ (Twitter wouldn’t hurt either). On these sites, you should be sharing content, including your own blogs. Blogs are important, mainly because they allow you to share your expertise and establish you as an industry expert.

Content Offers

There are few other industries that are as well primed for content offers as the financial industry. This is due to all of the information that you can provide to potential clients, and these potential clients probably don’t know much about financial investments (lucky you!). Since finances are clearly important, your target market is huge.

Here are a few types of content that you can offer your potential clients:

  • An eBook for millennials on the types of retirement savings, how much they should be putting away, and why they need to start saving now
  • A whitepaper about how the recession created current student debt and tips for how to overcome debt
  • A monthly newsletter on industry news and how it may affect your clients

At any stage of the buyer’s journey, help solve your clients’ problems by providing them with information.

Website and SEO Optimization

Finally, you need to make sure your website is fully optimized with SEO keywords and that it is easy to navigate. If your potential client can’t navigate your site easily, it affects your credibility, and the person might just leave the site all together. Sale lost.

Your website should have SEO-optimized blogs to share your expertise, calls-to-action that link to content offers, and landing pages for lead generation.

While this all may seem overwhelming at first, once you start setting goals for your business, you’ll learn how to share the right type of content with your potential clients, and in turn, you’ll start seeing results of your digital marketing efforts. If you’d rather focus on your business instead of your marketing plan, schedule an appointment with us for a free inbound marketing consultation.