Do you find yourself feeling frustrated when your digital marketing efforts don't produce the results that you want? It’s understandable and unfortunately very common - but it doesn’t have to be this way.
The key is knowing what strategies are best for your unique business. Digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all and should be personalized to speak to your ideal client base. If you haven't already, we recommend reading Part 1 of this blog series, where we covered the importance of selecting a good niche and investing in website design and a content marketing strategy.
Keep reading for Part 2, to learn the top lead capture strategies with a proven track record to grow your client list!
The Most Successful Lead Capture Tactics For Financial Advisors
These days financial advisors face two significant challenges that often leave them without leads from their digital marketing strategy:
- They're overlooked by prospects because of an abundance of competitors online.
- Prospects visited their website but bounced off before converting (aka reaching out or filling out any lead capture forms)
The good news is that both of these challenges can be avoided by setting up your website to stand out from thousands of competitors online and using the right tactics and tools that draw your visitors in and convert them into new clients. Let's dive in!
| DID YOU KNOW? Only 19% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during the awareness stage of their buying process when they're first learning about the product. In other words, most people prefer to do their own research before speaking with an advisor, which is why your website is a critical tool for your business. |
First things first, to stand out from your competitors online, you must understand your audience and invest in web design that speaks to your target (We review all of this in part 1).
Once your website is built and designed with your business and ideal client in mind, the next step is having lead conversion tactics and tools throughout your website to capture leads at every stage of their customer journey.
Some of the most proven lead capture tactics that you can implement include:
- Targeted Landing Pages & Gated Content
- Creating an Email Newsletters
- Organizing Virtual Events
- Interacting on Social Media
- Offering Virtual One-on-one Consultation Meetings
But Wait…
Before we dive into the best lead capturing tactics, you need to understand your leads' journey from a prospect to becoming a happy client - their customer journey.
The typical customer journey, in general, goes something like this:
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Introduction ➜ Interaction ➜ Guidance ➜ Implementation ➜ Relationship |
Once you understand your customer's journey, it'll be easier for you to engage them with relevant content at each point.
You can make their experience more seamless and help them move along the journey faster by providing just what they're looking for at just the right time. It's powerful stuff.
Map out your customer journey with this (ASSET-MAP) Customer Journey Worksheet:
Access this worksheet HERE.
#1 Targeted Landing Pages & Gated Content
For example, if you click on a CTA (Call-to-action) button within an email, popup, website homepage, etc., offering a free ebook, that button will bring you to a new landing page where you can claim your ebook copy.
Their purpose is to draw visitors in by offering value, usually in the form of content or special offers in exchange for visitors' contact information.
More specifically, a marketing technique that allows audiences access only after providing their contact details is called gated content. The (ASSET-MAP) Customer Journey Worksheet is a perfect example of this. It provides a highly valuable and actionable piece of content in exchange for your contact information. Gated content can include a variety of assets like whitepapers, eBooks, video tutorials, and case studies.
| Your web forms are critical for the success of your landing pages! We have an entire blog on How to Optimize Your Web Forms for Lead Capture HERE. |
Pro Tip: For your landing pages and gated content to be most successful, they need to target your ideal client's needs and pains. If you're able to provide value or a solution to your audience's challenges, there will be less hesitancy for them to share their contact information.
Check out this blog to understand the importance of knowing your niche audience!
#2 Create an Email Newsletter
The 1990s brought email, the first banner ad, and the standard practice of using CRM for many businesses. Since then, the digital marketing industry has evolved at lightning speed. Today there are 43 different marketing categories, from Search Engine Marketing to Voice Marketing.
But only one category has continued to outperform the others year after year for the last ten years: email marketing.
| DID YOU KNOW? Email is more valuable than ever, with an average ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. |
Emails are a powerful way to get in front of a prospect on an ongoing basis and keep your financial advice top of mind. For example, you could send weekly or monthly newsletters with the latest information on market trends, current events, and new content personalized to specific segments of clients - delivering key information in a timely manner. Once in a while, you can send targeted information about your company and the services you offer.
The key though is to provide value without bombarding your subscribers with too much information - it may come off too 'sales-y', save specifics for the one-on-one sessions!
Email marketing is also a great way to generate referrals for your business. After all, social proof is one of the most powerful psychological forces in our lives. Whether it's a person, company, or brand that we're talking about, when someone has an abundance of approval and support from those around them, they will be more inclined to put trust in things that they would otherwise have had to investigate further.
Want to learn more about getting started with email marketing? Read this.
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Your email automation can be fully integrated with your website and easy to launch!
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#3 Organize Virtual Events
Virtual events offer the opportunity to get in front of a lot of people in a short period of time with minimal overhead costs. Not only do they allow you to start building relationships with prospects, but you can also crop out the best bits of recorded content and re-purpose them across other content mediums like social media and newsletters.
Virtual events are a phenomenal way to build rapport with your audience and add a human element to your digital marketing. Beyond that, virtual events are excellent at capturing leads online since prospects will need to register to attend!
Here’s an example of what event’s pages can look like on your website:
Pro Tip: You guessed it! A fail-safe way to generating the right leads for your business (AKA, the most qualified), is to center the event topic around your ideal client’s most relevant challenges or common questions.
#4 Social Media Interactions
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer the widest net for financial advisors to capture leads.
| DID YOU KNOW? 53.6% of the world's population uses social media.
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Utilize your social platforms to drive followers and engagement from your accounts back to your website, where they're more likely to reach out to you directly and move from their 'introduction' to the 'interaction' stage of their customer journey.
Don't just post about what's going on at your company or look for feedback on products and services (although this is important); remember to offer your followers valuable posts about industry news, helpful tips for the day, or even answer relevant questions. You'll go from commenting on other people's posts to having your own conversations. Plus, social media gives you a great way to learn more about your target audience.
It's essential to post a variety of content in various formats (aka, video, images, and copy). But most importantly, to capture leads, you have to share gated content from your website to your social platforms.
Pro Tip: Expand your reach with Advisor Websites Automated Social Media Sharing tool! This tool links your blog with your social media accounts and automatically posts your new articles. Each post allows you to reach thousands of potential clients with a click of a button. Learn more about this tool and others HERE.
#5 Offer Virtual One-on-One Consultations
One of the best lead capture tools you have at your disposal as a Financial Advisor is to offer personalized one-on-one discovery meetings.
These allow you to tailor your message with the prospect's needs and financial goals in mind and get feedback in real-time. Plus, the more time a prospect spends with you, the more comfortable they'll feel with your company and the more likely they'll become clients.
Since this is the most direct way for leads to contact you, it's best practice to have a visible CTA on your homepage like this, for example:
Placing very clear CTAs like this on your homepage or other high-traffic pages makes it as easy as possible for leads to get in direct contact with you!
If You Need Help Implementing The Fundamentals, You're In Good Hands.
It's not easy to find an all-in-one solution that works well for converting more website visitors into leads and then clients.
Advisor Websites Platform provides you with everything you need in one place - automated lead capture forms, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, social media automation - plus features like gated resources (whitepapers & ebooks), compliance engine, and ready-to-use personalizable content.
Our platform empowers you to work smarter so you can focus on what matters most financial advising and building relationships with clients!
