3 Tips for Advisors to Improve Their Marketing

Advisors stand to yield a lot more success from their marketing initiatives if they apply data, enhance their email engagement tactics and change their campaigns each month or more often, according to Snappy Kraken CEO Robert Sofia.

Applying Data

“Don’t just guess about your marketing or you waste a lot of money” for nothing, he said Tuesday during the webinar “Half-Time Report: 2020 State of Digital Marketing.”

Advisors should make sure to use data to gauge how effective elements of their campaigns are and they should be “research-based if you want top-performing marketing,” he said.

One specific suggestion he offered was that advisors use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to analyze the effectiveness of your headline, regardless of the medium they are using. Advisors should shoot for a score above 70, he said.

Enhancing Your Email

Advisors should use email to reach out to new prospects now as well as existing clients, Sofia said, noting how hungry investors are for information during the pandemic.

He provided three key ways to improve email engagement tactics. First, it is important to “humanize” your email marketing. One key way to do that is to “insert you into it,” he said, warning: “Don’t be stiff and formal all the time.”

Also important is to “localize” email by adding personalization based on specific markets, he said, noting you will get better engagement, open, click and response rates.

A third way to improve email engagement is to present “positive vibes,” he said, explaining that people are more likely to respond to uplifting stories and good news and it will “create a positive association with you and your brand.”

However, “none of that matters if people don’t see” your marketing content and never even open an email, he also said. Emotional, creative and empathetic subject lines perform better than straightforward or educational openers, he said, adding videos should be kept to under two minutes.

Changing Up Your Campaign

The top overlooked factor in marketing is that you should never rely on only one campaign, he said.

“To get maximum results … you’ve got to change your marketing on a monthly basis [or] even a weekly basis” based on what people care about now and what’s happening in the news, he said.

But firms should not have to start from scratch each time they want to start a new campaign, he said, noting how important it is to have a strategy on the shelf you can pull out when you need it.

2020 So Far

Sofia also discussed findings based on data for the first six months of the year. There was a 42% decline in the performance of advisors’ general educational content on “evergreen” topics including Roth conversions in the first half of the year, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

In stark contrast, the performance of timely content soared a whopping 370%, he noted. “Relevance is key,” so don’t rely on your normal marketing content during a crisis like this, he added.

In addition, he said, “producing great content is not enough.”

It is a great idea to turn any video an advisor has posted on YouTube or elsewhere online into a “lead generation tool,” such as by adding a form for people to submit questions to the advisor, he said.