Ask Before You Hire: What Financial Advisors Need to Know about Digital Marketing Firms
Your financial advisory firm is growing; you’ve got a solid client base, and you’ve built an in-house team with a shared vision and the dedication to back it up. You’re ready to take your firm’s marketing efforts to the next level, and you want to hire an agency that can help you increase your brand footprint and widen your prospecting funnel.
But then you google “digital marketing for financial advisors” and you stare at pages and pages of results: everything from digital marketers touting their services to lists of various “must-haves” you should look for.
How can you sift through the results and find the marketing firm that is right for you? Here are some key questions you can ask to begin whittling down the field of candidates in order to find the digital marketing team that can help you achieve the most important goals for your financial advisory firm.
How much experience do you have with financial advisors?
This is pretty basic. After all, it’s pretty much the same question your prospective clients ask you: do you know enough about people like me to be able to help? But it’s vital, right up front, to establish that the marketing agency you’re considering understands the particulars of the industry. It’s one thing to design a logo for an auto parts retailer or a clothing shop, but in the highly regulated financial services industry with the need for adherence to compliance, it pays to have someone in your corner who speaks the language and understands the regulatory imperatives.
How will you help me build a marketing strategy that’s right for my firm?
As you know from working with your own clients, it’s all about asking the right questions and then listening carefully to the answers. A digital marketer who comes at you with a 1-2-3, out-of-the-box approach is probably not going to be able to develop the individualized, custom-built approach that is right for your unique client mix and growth strategy. Instead, look for a firm that begins at the right place: by getting to know as much as possible about you and your clients.
What kind of analytics do you provide?
In today’s digital space, it’s not enough to just have a blog or crank out a monthly newsletter. You need real-time, dependable feedback on who is seeing your online output, how many of them are actually reading your content, and what percentage are converting from “browsers” to actual prospects. Your digital marketing partner should be able to deliver the data you need, along with the knowhow to help you refine your efforts in order to capture the maximum number of qualified prospective clients.
Obviously, there are many other questions that you can and should ask before engaging a digital marketing agency to work for your financial advisory firm. But these initial queries will help you start focusing in on what is most important for YOUR firm.
At Beyond AUM, we’ve been helping ambitious financial advisors build winning digital marketing strategies for years. Led by a team with, collectively, more than a decade in the financial advisory/wealth management industry, we would appreciate the opportunity to get to know you, your firm, your clients, and your most important goals. If we can answer questions or provide more information, please get in touch. And to read our recent article, “How to Get Referrals Without Sounding ‘Salesy,’” just click here.