According to the traditional lead generation mindset, marketing is deemed successful as soon as you get a lead. But you can’t deposit leads in the bank.
To get real wins—i.e., loyal clients—you need a strategy that goes beyond traditional lead generation. Our Holistic Lead Generation strategy takes the whole client journey into consideration to help you generate more leads and convert more clients.
Let’s say you’ve got a big race today. You get up early, do your stretches, and get your blood pumping so when the starting gun goes off, you’re ready to run. Except as soon as you get to the starting line, you smile really big, thinking you’ve won, then head home.
That’s not how you win a race. Plus, you’ve probably confused the entire audience—why do you look so happy when you’ve not even started running?
That’s essentially what traditional lead generation does—tricks you into thinking that all you need is a lead, and you have business. We’re here to tell you loud and clear: A lead is only the beginning of the client journey. A lead doesn’t know if they want to do business with you yet; all they know is that you exist and might be interesting.
According to Salesforce, it takes six to eight marketing touches for a lead to become a conversation. If you follow up with your leads only once or twice, you’re missing out on the vast majority of potential clients. The strategy we’re about to show you will help you engage 100% of your target audience instead of leaving more than half of them on the table.
It takes seven steps to get someone from the lead stage to the loyal client stage. It’s important to understand these steps because a lead is only the beginning, and traditional lead generation only gets you to step two.
Step 1: Getting Noticed. Unless you’re Charles Schwab, not a lot of people know about you and what you have to offer, so the first step is to get noticed with social media ads, cold emails, or referrals from existing, happy clients. At this stage, your goal is to tell people you exist, whether they interact with you or not.
Step 2: Earning Contacts. When someone decides to give you their contact information, they become a contact. They’re interested in your content and want to learn more, but they might not be interested in your services or have a problem you can solve with your services.
Step 3: Qualifying Leads. Not all leads are created equal—some of them are great fits for your business, others not so much. A lead becomes a prospect when you’ve identified them as a great fit for your business with a financial problem you can solve.
Step 4: Building Credibility. Again, most of your leads probably won’t become clients, but you can foster interest and increase the chances of someone reaching out to you by building credibility. Finances are important. Establish that you’re knowledgeable and reliable so your leads see the benefit of working with you.
Step 5: Starting Conversations. You can’t expect someone to be interested in you if you’ve never talked to them. Starting conversations with your prospects and getting to know them on a personal level will help you further prime them to reach out to you and consider working with you.
Step 6: Winning Clients. When your prospects are finally showing interest in your services and want to chat with you about them, it’s time to sell. Tell them all the benefits of working with you over other financial advisers.
Step 7: Deepening Relationships. When your leads finally close the deal and choose you as their financial adviser, they become clients. At this point, they should trust you to handle their finances entirely. And if you’ve been nurturing them right, you should also have a great adviser-client relationship with them to understand their goals and interests.
Remember, the real work starts after you get leads. Luckily, we’ve developed the Holistic Lead Generation strategy to fill in the blanks traditional lead generation missed.
Holistic Lead Generation takes your prospects through the whole sales journey. By thinking of lead generation in a holistic way, you’ll remember to continue nurturing clients even after they’ve bought in. You have four ways to reach your target audience even when they’re still at the top of the funnel (TOFU):
The first step of the Holistic Lead Generation strategy is getting noticed. You need to attract people with different financial needs you can address.
Reaching people you don’t know is easy on social media. Just create interesting content. People follow accounts that either entertain them or give them answers. You need to give them answers.
Since your goal is to get people to click on your ads and posts, you need to create content that “stops the scroll.” Use loud, eye-catching colors to draw your audience in, then present a curiosity-inducing, thought-provoking graphic that makes viewers want to learn more.
All your social media ads should redirect viewers to a landing page that asks them for their contact information in exchange for an offer or lead magnet that interests them (e.g., an ebook on retirement planning for an ad targeting pre-retirees).
Another way to reach people who probably don’t know about you yet is through creating content your leads find interesting. When you write content people are searching for—that clearly answers their questions—you’ll rank highly on search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing.
You can also use that content to answer relevant questions on Q&A sites like Quora or forum sites like Reddit. For example, Adam Fayed, Founder of Global Online Financial Advisory Firm, answered a question on Quora and then linked to content the asker (and other readers) might find useful:
Make sure your article page also has a lead form, similar to your landing page, that prompts readers to give you their contact information to learn more.
Your clients remain clients because you’ve probably helped them in one way or another. And they probably know other people who could also use your help. A client referral is already a qualified lead or someone highly interested in your services because they know they need you, which is why your client sent them your way.
We’ve created some scripts to help you ask for referrals from your clients. Basically, you need to frame your request in an unselfish way that positions you as someone who wants to help people achieve their financial goals instead of someone looking for another client.
Now that you have people interested in your service, the real work begins. Most prospects won’t decide to become clients all by themselves. They need a little nudge from you. And that nudge should come in the form of content that interests them and encourages them to reach out.
The first thing you need to do to start conversations with your prospects is to find out what they want to hear about. Imagine talking to someone with a peanut allergy about the best peanut butter in the world—they won’t be interested at all. In the same way, if you talk to your pre-retiree prospects about raising children, they’re not going to want to find out more about your services because they think you don’t know anything about them.
Knowing exactly what information your prospects want goes a long way in getting responses, starting conversations, and building lasting relationships. We recommend categorizing your leads into five groups:
Lead nurturing and relationship building are a lot easier when your content is relevant, not canned. As Ari, founder, chief executive officer, and certified financial planner at a financial planning agency in New York, said, “Anyone can repost financial articles from CNBC or Bloomberg. To stand out you need authentic & personalized content.”
Now that you know what your prospects want to hear about, it’s time to cultivate those relationships by sending them relevant campaigns. Nurturing campaigns are a series of emails sent over a couple of weeks that aim to start conversations, establish your credibility, and keep you top of mind.
According to research by Salesforce, you need to get in touch with your prospects six to eight times for them to become viable sales leads. On top of that, 96% of leads who visit your website aren’t ready to become clients—if you try to close the deal too fast, they get turned off. Prospect Nurturing shows your prospects you care about them enough to ask questions and learn more about them.
Only one-fourth of our campaigns at Snappy Kraken are focused on lead generation because lead gen without follow-up is a waste of your time and marketing dollars. Ten highly-engaged prospects will always be better than 500 “meh” ones.
Educational content establishes you as a reliable expert in all things finance while also addressing your prospects’ pain points. But don’t just send random educational content to everyone on your list. Someone who’s interested in retirement planning probably won’t care about your email on saving for college tuition. Not to mention, specific content has a 14.31% higher open rate compared to non-specific messaging.
An example of educational content is our campaign on the cost of raising children: “Got Kids? Here’s How Much They Cost You Every Year and Why.” If you have a segment of parents on your list, this campaign is perfect for them. Segmented education content tells your prospects that:
Time-sensitive content addresses current events, like political and economic shifts, which might cause your leads to worry about their finances. Most people don’t really understand what’s going on in the financial world—all they know is something’s changed, and they’re worried.
Show your prospects you’re a reliable source of information who understands their worries, so they end up choosing to work with you.
Our most recent example of a time-sensitive campaign dealt with concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on the labor market. This email campaign was designed to explain to prospects (and existing clients) your perspective on the changes in the labor market and reassure them about the state of their finances. It also prompts prospects to book a call with you should they have any questions or concerns.
Lastly, you need to create empathetic nurturing campaigns that show prospects you’re a real human being with real human worries. Empathetic content starts conversations by telling a relatable story and asking questions.
For example, one of our members personalized our “Gratitude and Empathy” email by telling their prospects and clients that pandemic stress is real—even for them. They used a photo of Matt Damon from “The Martian” to illustrate how haggard and tired they are, with the caption, “But first of all, how are you doing? Are you and your loved ones safe and well? As an update, I took this picture of me this morning to start week 3 of quarantine.”
On another note, when you’re creating your campaigns, we recommend adding videos to some of them. We found that emails that contain video landing pages get higher click-through rates (CTRs)—6.51% higher than other emails.
It’s been two weeks, and your leads haven’t turned into clients. Surely you can stop sending your leads nurturing emails now, right?
Wrong. Here’s why:
One of our members, David, founder of a financial planning firm out of Florida, told us, “I met today with Scott who I met years ago networking in Miami. He has a net worth of $40MM with $10MM in equities. He has always done his own investments but told me that he was compelled to call me.”
It took David’s prospect ten years to set up a call. After six months, if your prospect still hasn’t converted, continue sending them relevant nurturing campaigns, but spend less time on cold prospects and more time on new leads. It can take anywhere from a week to three years for your leads to decide to start working with you. If you give up too early, you might miss an amazing opportunity.
After you get a client, you can’t just stop paying attention to them; you need to continue building that relationship. A good client relationship will help you retain more clients over longer periods of time and get more client referrals.
The best way to build a good relationship with your clients is to consistently show up for them. Reassure them during worrying political and economic shifts, ask them how they’re doing from time to time, and remember when their birthdays are.
You have so much information about your clients—their maiden name, their birthdays, their financial goals, their life goals. Use that information to build relationships.
With the traditional lead generation mindset, you can spend years on marketing and still have nothing to show for it. Holistic Lead Generation makes sure you get the most out of all your marketing efforts by generating business from your leads.
At Snappy Kraken, we use our Holistic Lead Generation strategy to build all of our campaigns—and it works. Hannah, Partner and Wealth Advisor at AmeriFlex® Financial Services told us, “I’ve only been using Snappy Kraken for 3 months and I’ve already converted two of my prospects into clients by using their [Holistic Lead Generation] system, and I’m getting great feedback on the content!”
If you want to start conversations and take your leads to the finish line, schedule a Snappy Kraken demo so we can find out where we can add value to your marketing efforts.