Imagine looking through a restaurant window and seeing a poorly lit dining area with dingy chairs and tables. Even if their food is amazing, you’ll never know because, from the outside looking in, the place looks sloppy.
Bad content makes you look like a poorly maintained restaurant.
No matter how amazing your portfolio management skills are if prospects look you up and find poorly written articles and a single social media post from 2015, they won’t give you a second thought.
Great content, on the other hand, makes you look smart, technologically advanced, and interesting. It differentiates you from your competitors who are probably posting watered-down, generic content—as most financial advisers do.
Don’t blend in. Stand out, establish your expertise, and get more clients with content that educates and empathizes.
Educational and Empathetic Content Builds Trust
Before someone hands you their life savings, they need to trust you 100%. This means that they’ll shop around, do the research, and then choose the adviser that suits them best.
John Anderson, managing director at SEI Investments, said it best when he said, “A friend or family member isn’t just going to call based on the referral. They’re going to check out an advisor’s website, social media, and any content they’ve created.”
Use content to show your prospects that they can trust you and that you’re the best (and only) option if they want an adviser who’s a perfect fit for their financial needs.
Educational Content Showcases What You Know
Even though giving away knowledge for free might seem counterintuitive, 77% of marketers say it’s one of the best strategies you can use to build trust. And the more your target audience trusts you, the more willing they will be to pay a premium for your services.
Anthony Thornton, global content director at Content × Ten, even said, “For high and ultra-high net worth individuals, storytelling that speaks directly to them is key. Storytelling starts the conversation. Conversation earns trust. And from that trust, you build conversion and, of course, retention.”
To create educational content, you have to first find out what your target audiences want to learn about by talking to your existing prospects and clients or going through online forums like Quora and Reddit to look for relevant discussions.
Once you have enough relevant topics, start creating content—videos, emails, articles, downloadable guides, and more. An example of educational content is our The Cost of Raising Children campaign. It uses a Pacman-esque art style to illustrate common expenses that new parents need to prepare for.
At the end of the article, our members can show their readers that they can help by saying, “If you’re thinking about how to balance the costs of kids with your personal needs and future, call my office.”
Empathetic Content Emphasizes That You Care
Apart from seeing how much you know, your target audience also wants to know that you will care about them beyond a strictly transactional client-adviser relationship. As Elise Pulver, director of wealth planning with TD Wealth Family Office, said, “Clients need advisers who are genuine and care about their best interests.”
And our data proves it, too. At the height of the pandemic, we gave our members campaigns that made them more human and relatable to their existing email list. At the end of the year, we found that our top-performing engagement campaigns were “Creating Gratitude & Happiness,” followed by “2020 Lessons Learned.”
Show your prospects that you will care about them and get them financial wins with different kinds of empathetic content:
- Current events content that addresses economic and political shifts that your target audience might be worried about
- Regular check-in emails that ask your prospects how they’re doing and if they need any kind of support from you
- Email greetings for birthdays and special events to show your prospects that you remember their important days
- Finance-adjacent content about your prospects’ hobbies and interests outside of finance (e.g., content about celebrity financial blunders)
Having both educational and empathetic content will show your prospects what kind of adviser you are and really encourage them to become clients.
4 Types of Content to Create Today (+ Tips to Save Time)
Get better results by creating content built to generate leads, nurture prospects, and convert both into clients.
1. Downloadable Guides
Downloadable guides are your “offer” for lead generation campaigns. They are usually housed on a landing page where users need to fill out a form before they can start the download.
Your guides don’t have to be fancy—just relevant. Create simple guides that your potential prospects are interested in, like a retirement guide for your pre-retiree target audience.
When you create downloadable guides, make sure they have:
- Compelling titles or headlines
- A graphic or photo that invokes curiosity
- Actionable suggestions and tips (how-tos, checklists, etc.)
- Questions that point your prospects back to booking a call with you
The key to downloadable guides is making sure that your content is relevant and interesting enough to get your target audience to give you their contact information.
2. Social Media Posts
Social media is powerful—and easy. It’s a storytelling tool that gives you the opportunity to reach a fraction of the 4.62 billion users worldwide.
On Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, a good post has three components: a thought-provoking photo, a relatable and informative caption, and one to two hashtags. While that sounds like a lot of work, we’ve got a 🔥 hot tip for you—repurpose your downloadable guides into social posts:
- Convert the cover photo of your downloadable guide into a social media post.
- Take some of the copy and summarize it into a few sentences.
- Link your social media posts to the landing page with your offer.
Here is an example of a Facebook post we created for our Retirement Income Teeter-Totter campaign:
In addition to repurposing your downloadable guides, you can also share simple posts about things that happen in your life or that you believe in. For example, Hannah Morando shared what impostor syndrome feels like and told her target audience that she feels it, too.
Showing your prospects that you’re human will make you more accessible.
3. Marketing Emails
Marketing emails keep the communication alive between you and your prospects and clients. An old study found that it takes six to eight marketing touches to qualify a lead. It takes even more marketing touches to turn those leads into clients.
Don’t let your prospects forget about you. Instead, create campaigns that you can send them on a regular basis. There are three kinds of marketing emails you always need to have:
- Prospect nurturing emails – a series of related emails designed to build your relationship with your prospects. The more you nurture your prospects, the more likely you are to stay top of mind.
- Finance-adjacent emails – a single email that covers a topic that your prospects are interested in. For example, we created an End of Year campaign to encourage prospects and clients to welcome 2022 with new goals and a better outlook on life.
- Current event emails – (note: we’ve covered this previously) a single email that addresses a current political or economic shift that your prospects or clients might be worrying about. For example, we created a campaign entitled “Ukraine, What Next?” to help our members reassure their clients about the effects of the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 on the economy and their financial state.
The goal of your marketing emails should always be to build relationships with your prospects, learn more about them, and establish that you are a reliable resource for financial concerns.
4. Videos
Over 80% of marketers said that video helped them improve lead generation, sales, ROI, and website traffic. Our own research shows that adviser emails with videos got a 20% higher open rate and 176% higher click rate compared to emails without videos.
When you can, create videos that grab attention and build relationships. The good news is you can do it in three steps.
- Create your video script, highlighting the topic of your video and the main points you want to hit.
- Record your video using a clear mic and a webcam. Your existing equipment will probably be more than enough—the video doesn’t need to look like it was professionally filmed and edited.
- Add your video to a landing page that you can link to on social media and in emails.
If you need some help getting started, we have three types of video scripts: educational scripts, current event scripts, and finance-adjacent scripts. All of our video scripts are designed to help you build a connection with your prospects and clients.
Create Content in Seconds With Our Content Library
The hardest part of creating great content that generates clients is getting started.
Snappy Kraken member Nolan Baker, founder of America’s Retirement Headquarters, used to spend over 40 hours a month just creating content. Another member, Michael Baker of Vertex Capital Advisors, shared an even bigger roadblock: “What’s harder to measure is the mental energy I used to spend on [content creation].”
They both found a solution that cut their content creation time by around 90%: the Snappy Kraken automated growth program. Our production team spends at least 80 hours and thousands of dollars researching, planning, and designing data-backed content so that you don’t have to. All you need to do is hit “publish,” sit back, and enjoy the results.
Book a demo with our team today.
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