Data-Driven Marketing Tactics for Advisers

6-minute read | 7.5 minute listen

“Marketing is a waste of my time. I spend so many hours on my marketing but get almost no new business from it.” If that statement sounds like something you would say, you’re not alone. Seventy-five percent of financial advisers report that they get fewer than five leads per month through their websites.

But we’re going to change that. Our members’ success proves that marketing doesn’t have to be a time suck that delivers little to no results. In fact, our advisers get an average of 6.8 leads per campaign, and our top-performing advisers boast 10.1 leads per campaign. And most of them spend less than four hours on their marketing per month.

Our blend of automation, personalization, and heavy reliance on data lets our members create marketing campaigns that bring them more results in one click. But even if you’re not one of our members, these tactics will help you generate more leads, reach more people on social media, close more sales, and build better relationships with your clients.

1. Nurture Your Leads and Clients Consistently

Nurturing your leads and clients means showing up for them whenever you can. It means sending emails asking how they’re doing and sharing information that is relevant and valuable to them. Most financial advisers spend $3,119 to acquire a single client—but you can save that money with automated nurturing campaigns that do that work for you (in a lot less time, too).

While you can manually send your leads and clients emails, when you set the emails on an automated campaign, they receive relevant emails without you needing to lift a finger.

Some great ways to nurture your clients and leads are:

• Sending your leads emails with information relevant to them based on the lead magnet they downloaded
• Sending clients a single email asking them how they’re doing
• Asking your clients what you can do for them that week
• Wishing your clients happy birthday

Showing your clients that you care about them increases both engagement and loyalty, which is why our top-performing landing page headline of 2020 was, “How are we doing?” When you nurture your clients, you build loyalty. And loyal clients refer other people to you, building your referral flywheel, guaranteeing you a steady flow of qualified leads.

2. Use “Campaign Thinking”

“Campaign thinking” means that—instead of relying on a single piece of content to get leads and turn them into clients—you build multichannel marketing campaigns that run over days, weeks, or months. These campaigns consist of social media content and ads, landing pages with lead magnets (i.e., your offer), and lead nurturing emails.

To start using “campaign thinking,” you need to set a goal and a target market. If, for example, you want to get more leads who are looking to retire in the near future, then you need to design your campaign to be attractive to soon-to-be retirees. You then need to determine which channels to use (e.g., social media platforms, events, etc.) and start creating content for each platform that builds on each other.

If you want to see how we build campaigns for our members, click here.

3. Automate Your Marketing

Marketing automation is using technology to handle repetitive yet important marketing tasks to save time and improve outcomes. For example, instead of manually sending 300 individually personalized emails, you can use automated email tools to add names to each of your emails and then send them out when the recipient is most likely to be online.

Marketing automation frees up time for you to do more productive things. It also increases the likelihood you’ll actually do your marketing since you can automate social media posts, monthly check-in emails, and more to let your clients know you haven’t forgotten about them and that you’re invested in your relationship.

To automate your marketing, you’ll need marketing automation tools or automated growth programs like Snappy Kraken. These tools give you ready-made campaigns and let you put your marketing on auto-pilot while still reaching more people, producing more leads, and keeping your clients engaged.

4. Use Thought-Provoking and Curiosity-Inducing Images

The average American spends 80 minutes on social media every day, and in that time, they are inundated with hundreds of pieces of content, all vying for their attention. So when you’re creating images for social media, emails, or even event promos, you need to make sure that your images make people pause, think, and click.

You can do that by using visual psychology or colors, icons, and formats that invoke curiosity and make viewers want to click on your lead magnet. It also means not adding photos for the mere sake of adding photos.

The images we give our members are surprising enough to “stop the scroll,” which is why our ads have a higher click-through rate (CTR) of 0.67% vs. the industry average of 0.56% and a higher conversion rate of 13% vs. the industry average of 9.09%.

5. Align Your Marketing Message with Current Events

Take current events into consideration when writing out your marketing message to show your clients that you’re in the same world as they are, experiencing the same problems and worries—and that you have the answers.

For example, 65% of millionaires (and a whole lot of other people) are currently worried about inflation. As the cost of goods rises, so do stress levels. Send them an email that explains what inflation means to them and how you’re dealing with it. And ask them how you can support them during this time of stress and worry.

You can do the same thing for other relevant events like during stock market fluctuations, the GameStop incident, and so on.

6. Don’t Shy Away from Being Controversial

Our top-performing email subject line in 2020 was, “Some thoughts on racism and inequality.” And one of our top-performing campaigns was “Retiring in Uncertain Times.” Controversial? Yes. Relevant? Even more so.

Your clients want to hear from you. They want to know your thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. And they also want your guidance in matters related to their finances, even if it might be a little controversial. Don’t stop showing up because a subject is a little touchy—in fact, lean into the subject and show your clients that you know what you’re doing.

7. Use Videos

Our research found that emails that link out to landing pages with videos have a 46.04% CTR—meaning, of everyone who opened your email, 46.04% of them clicked through to your landing page. That’s almost 7% higher than the average CTR of all other emails.

Determine which topics you would like to make videos for. It can be anything, so long as you’re comfortable making a video for it. For example, some of our top-performing video campaigns are about small business tax credits (41.84% CTR), cryptocurrency (58.76% CTR), and tax planning in 2021 (55.95% CTR). Then, upload that video to a landing page and link to that page in your emails, social media ads, posts, and wherever else appropriate.

8. Personalize Where You Can

Personalization means including your leads’ and clients’ names in emails, sending them information that is relevant to them, specifically, and generally making them feel like they’re your favorite client.

Nowadays, people want more personalized experiences all around. Forty-four percent of internet users in the U.S. are willing to switch brands to receive more personalized messages.

A couple of ways you can personalize your marketing are:

• Segment your audience so that they receive messages that align with their interests.
• Send your emails when your clients are most likely checking their emails (e.g., 8 am for professionals who are on the regular 8-to-5 schedule).
• Use social media targeting to show your ads and posts to the right people.
• Use an automation tool to personalize names in subject lines and email bodies.

Get Higher Returns on Your Marketing with an Automated Growth Program

Don’t feel like you have to start using all of these tactics immediately. Instead, take a few easy-to-do items from this list and start with that. When you’re ready, start doing more and building more marketing material that you can re-use and recycle.

And if you’re unsure of where you need to start, we’ve got you covered? Get your Marketing Opportunity Score to determine the exact moves you need to make to improve your marketing – in less than 5 minutes.