Make Marketing Data Your Best Friend in 2021

Marketing can be a tough nut to crack.

You know it’s essential to growing your financial advisory business and reaching new, potential clients. But the return on investment (ROI) for marketing activities can be difficult to quantify. 

Historically, “marketing” for financial advisors meant placing an advertisement in a magazine or sending mailers to promote a special offer for wealth management services, among other methods. Often, these largely print-based marketing pieces would disappear into the abyss, providing no real insight into who viewed or took action on them.

With the advent of technology, digital marketing has replaced traditional marketing efforts, opening up a whole new world of lucrative opportunities for advisors. But even though digital tactics — think social media and email marketing, among others — have made marketing easier, capitalizing on and measuring those efforts takes some forethought, which is why we’re making a bold claim:

Data should be one of the top drivers for your marketing strategy in 2021.

Data utilization pays off: 83% of marketers that employ data-driven campaigns enjoy more than five times the ROI on marketing spend, according to Invespcro.

What exactly does using data to your advantage look like? We take a deeper dive into the topic below and suggest some key questions to consider.

First: What Inspired the Outreach?

Leveraging data to propel your marketing strategy starts with this core question. Why are prospects reaching out to you? What problems do they think you can solve for them? There’s only one way to find out: ask!

Consider making this question a required field on your website’s “Contact” form or create a survey to send to new prospects who enter the funnel. For many financial advisors, there are three general reasons why new prospects request information for wealth management services:

– Life Events: Major life transitions can trigger a wide range of financial changes and consequences, from divorce, to the birth of a new child, to an impending retirement. If you find that most of your prospects are reaching out due to a life event, this can tell you a lot about what your marketing — everything from your website to the blog articles you write — should focus on going forward.

– Liquidity: Prospects who have just had a significant wind fall, whether it be an inheritance or a sizeable bonus, are confronted with a wide range of financial questions and concerns they may not be ready for. A financial advisor can be a valuable resource during this exciting, yet stressful time; you may find that new wealth comprises a large majority of the inquiries you’re fielding, presenting a viable opportunity for financial education.

– Market Activity: Market pullbacks can have short-term, negative effects on an investment strategy, and they may be the push prospects need to search for a second opinion. Conversely, market gains might make some prospects develop a case of FOMO (“Fear of Missing Out”) and could be the push they need to reach out to a financial advisor and start investing. Either of these cases could be a core reason for why new prospects are flooding your funnel, and if so, then you may decide to devote more of your marketing spend on investment-related content.

This information can help you establish more defined client “niches,” which essentially are fleshed-out personas that describe who your ideal clients are. Defining your niches helps you better tailor your marketing efforts and increase your chances for success by providing more relevant content, messaging, and education.

Boosting Your Data-Driven Marketing Program: Key Questions to Consider

Once you have a solid understanding of what prompted a prospect to contact you, use those insights to better direct your activities. Here are some key questions you should ask yourself as you build your data-driven marketing strategy:

1. Are you covering your client niches in your content marketing?

As we mentioned above, defining specific client niches helps you provide more relevant information and increases your chances of success. For instance, if most of your prospects are coming to you because they are preparing for retirement, then make sure your content reflects the topic areas those prospects would gravitate toward — such as strategies for maximizing Social Security benefits or potential changes to Medicare.

Creating more targeted content marketing helps position you as a thought leader who specializes in the areas your prospects care about and ensures you’re the first person they think of when a financial need arises.

2. Is your website optimized for your client niches?

Creating and delivering content for your target niches is just the first step in attracting them to your business; you also need to ensure your website is optimized for their viewing. For example, if the data tells you that most of your prospects are women in transition, make sure your website is SEO-optimized with keywords that specifically pertain to that niche (i.e., “financial planning for divorce,” “estate planning for women in transition”).

You should take care to devote sections of your website to your niches as well. Create specific pages of your website that are dedicated to talking about the services you provide your target niches and the challenges your services will help them solve.

3. Do you review Google Analytics for how you acquire visitors? What do they do once they get to your website?

Your website analytics can provide a treasure trove of valuable information, offering metrics for everything from how many people are visiting your website, to what they’re doing on your site, to how much time they spend on your site. The most popular, free platform advisory firms use to track their website data is Google Analytics. The tool can give you an insider’s look into how you’re acquiring website visitors, and consequently, what you can do to capitalize on what’s working well or change what isn’t.

At a more granular level, Google Analytics can show you a comparison of the traffic between various different webpages, as well as key demographics and geographies that can help you better understand who your visitors are.

4. Do you utilize Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is another important tool to add to your marketing data suite. The platform can give you insight into the specific keywords that are drawing visitors to your website. From here, you can analyze that data to determine the most popular keywords for your business and subsequently increase your usage of them to garner more traffic.

Data — and more importantly, analyzing and taking action on data — can be the catalyst your advisory firm needs to generate tangible results from your digital marketing efforts. If you need a third-party expert to help launch your data analytics program or interpret data you’ve collected so far, reach out to our team at Beyond AUM. You can get in touch with us here.