As a financial advisor, a strong content marketing strategy will help you establish yourself as a trusted authority, foster online growth, and ultimately expand your pool of leads for future engagement.
A comprehensive content marketing strategy, involving blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, and infographics, is crucial for creating a lasting impression online and capturing magnetic leads that will one day turn into paying clients.
According to Broadridge's 2023 Financial Advisor Marketing Playbook, most financial advisors, 53%, actively share educational content with clients. However, despite recognizing the importance of content, many advisors find content marketing to be a challenge. In fact, according to the Broadridge survey conducted, 37% of financial advisors refrain from sharing content due to a lack of knowledge on the most effective content marketing strategies.
Whether you are part of the former, consistently sharing content online, or part of the latter, hesitating due to a lack of exposure to content marketing, this article is designed to help you refine your approach. By implementing these tips, you can establish yourself as a prominent leader within the financial advisor landscape.
5 Content Marketing Strategies for Financial Advisors #
Regularly Publish Thought Leadership Pieces #
Building trust is fundamental for financial advisors. For clients to trust you with their finances, personal data, and life goal fulfillment they must perceive you as knowledgeable and trustworthy.
Publishing thought leadership content on your blog or website, and sharing it on social media, not only benefits existing clients but also increases brand exposure and attracts new audiences.
To establish yourself as a thought leader, it is crucial to identify a specific niche within the financial advisory industry where your expertise and passion intersect, and regularly publish content that covers those key topics.
Key tip: Make sure the content you publish is fact-checked, error-free, formatted, and grammatically correct. Even if you have the best ideas in the world, disorganization or poor formatting can create negative perceptions.
Create lead magnets to capture contact information #
Create enticing lead magnet offers, leveraging items like research reports, free tools, discount codes, case studies, webinars, whitepapers, and more, as incentives to encourage people to share their information with you.
Hosting free educational webinars on social media around topics of interest is a valuable strategy for generating leads. This approach attracts individuals interested in the value you provide and also facilitates the collection of their contact information for future marketing campaigns.
Key tip: Choose the niche you would like to focus on, and then line up your thought leadership content with your lead magnet content. For example, you could publish a comprehensive blog article on retirement planning, then complement it with a webinar that delves deeper into specific accounts and investments beneficial for individuals planning retirement within the next 15 years. This strategic alignment enhances the overall value and engagement of your audience.
Take Advantage of AI for repurposing your content #
We get it, you’re a financial advisor – not a writer. So, the rise of AI and language processing technology is a useful tool for creating good content with low effort. However, always be careful. Relying 100% on an AI writing tool without doing your review and editing of everything it produces can result in content with factual errors, flat repetitive writing, and/or content that doesn’t dive deep enough into a subject to provide real value to the reader. Make sure to read and edit any AI-generated posts and tailor them to your own voice. It's important to maintain authenticity in your content, as it reflects your identity and professional expertise.
A great way to harness AI is to create assets that elevate your overall content marketing strategy. For instance, invest a couple of hours in crafting a compelling blog post and then leverage AI to generate diversified content based on that blog post. This could include multiple social media posts, concise articles, webinar material, and a brief email, all created by utilizing an advanced language model like ChatGPT to extract content from your original blog post.
Key tip: Never use the output directly from ChatGPT without editing first- your readers will be able to tell. Make sure to input your unique voice and personalize the content to maintain its authenticity and alignment with your brand.
Develop an email marketing strategy that leverages your content #
Email is a crucial distribution channel for maintaining top-of-mind awareness for your financial services and brand when leads are ready to take action. Despite the challenges financial advisors face in balancing marketing activities, business management, and service delivery, neglecting email as a channel can hurt your ability to convert prospects you worked hard to find into clients.
To overcome time constraints, leverage the power of repurposing content, recognizing that what may feel like repetitive publishing is likely to reach new members of your audience. Keep track of your content as you publish it and take time each month or quarter to put together summaries of each piece in an email newsletter that links to each asset.
The advantage of email lies in its trackability, allowing you to analyze open rates and clicks, gaining valuable insights into audience engagement and preferences. This data not only informs your content strategy but also shapes your overall business strategy.
Key Tip: If you’re currently an Equisoft customer, you can leverage our MailChimp integration. MailChimp will help you design professional emails with branded layouts and fonts and is great for analytics tracking
Personalize your content based on client data #
To publish insightful content, it’s imperative to understand the needs, concerns, and aspirations of your target audience. Identifying your ideal clients and understanding their specific financial challenges allows you to create content that gives them information they can use to make better decisions about their future.
Utilizing a CRM tool, such as equisoft/Connect, or taking a deep dive into your social media content, like LinkedIn analytics, provides a consolidated view of your clients and followers, enabling you to categorize them based on key criteria like demographics, location, age, or income level.
This data holds significant weight, influencing both your content marketing strategy and overall business approach. For those yet to specialize in a niche, this data can serve as a valuable compass in discovering your expertise. Use it as a foundation to develop a targeted content strategy.
Key Tip: equisoft/Connect is a great resource for collecting wisdom about your audience. It's a repository of all the information you have on each of your clients. Using equisoft/Connect, you can segment or filter your client base according to the type of audience you are writing for and scan the records to see what needs and challenges they have and what solutions they are interested in.
Through equisoft/Connect, you can find the people in your CRM who are best aligned with your target audience for your content and review their goals, needs, challenges and solutions. This will give you a good idea of the broader audience you are writing for.
Wrap Up #
Mastering content marketing is crucial for financial advisors aiming to grow their client base. By consistently publishing thought leadership pieces, creating compelling lead magnets, leveraging AI for content repurposing, implementing an effective email marketing strategy, and personalizing content based on client data, advisors can establish trust, capture leads, and drive business growth. These strategies ensure advisors remain relevant and competitive in today's digital landscape, ultimately leading to increased success and client retention.
