The Coronavirus provides a new challenge for marketers and over the past few weeks, it has also really shined a light for advisors on the importance of relying on strategies outside of traditional channels and finally making the shift to digital. It’s true, marketing never stops. And especially during times of crisis like this, you need to keep in touch with your current clients or you may risk losing them. And on the other hand, one of the best times to be found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what expertise you have to offer.
So while marketing may be falling to the bottom of your priority list this week halting your firm’s marketing efforts now could have an even more crippling impact. Here are five things you should consider doing:
1. Check Any Pre-Scheduled Campaigns
2. Update Contact Information to Reflect New Remote Work Situations
Now more than ever it’s incredibly important that your clients not only hear from you but are able to easily get into contact with you if need be. Here are some essential things to update in the wake of a crisis:
- Website contact page – Focus on updating your contact page with up-to-date phone numbers. Secondly, include an email address clients and THEIR FAMILIES can use (An important point: Elderly clients may end up having families contact you if they become ill. Make sure the right info is easy to find). Additionally, if you only have a standard office phone number on your website currently, now is the time to add more contact options so clients can still get a hold of you if you and your employees are working remotely.
- Website homepage special message – Adding a call out right on your homepage that links to new contact information or a letter/blog post you wrote updating clients is a great way to make sure anyone landing on your site can easily find the most important and up-to-date information.
- Add a “Message from our CEO” letter/update as a blog post – Adding blog posts to your website with market updates for your clients can be a great way to stay in touch consistently during uncertain times. Consider uploading a letter-style blog post to your site (written by your CEO or leader in the first person).
- Google My Business – Update your hours of operation and contact information here so people can quickly get in touch with you if they Google your business.
3. Consider Hosting a Weekly Video Chat
How to Host a Webinar Using Zoom, Your Computer, and YouTube – That’s it!
4. Send a Weekly Email to Clients and Prospects
If you haven’t already, now is the time to get into the habit of weekly emails. You can share the video you recorded (see tip #3), a summary of news you suggest they read, or links to blog posts on your website. We also suggest putting at least one light-hearted or positive item in each email to lift people’s spirits. Maybe it’s a riddle or funny joke, an uplifting quote, or even a picture of you trying to work from home with your crazy kids – just share something to lighten the mood and bring a smile.
5. Increase Your Social Media Posting Cadence
If you haven’t adopted social media yet, now is the time to do it. With in-person communication grinding to a halt, everyone is heading online (just this week, my 82-year-old Grandmother created a Facebook account for the first time, so she could easily see pictures and interact with friends and relatives). It was reported that the video conferencing app zoom had over 600,000 app downloads in ONE DAY alone last week. We are a social species, and with our normal sense of in-person community taken away, we are flocking to social media as a replacement.
So, how often should you be posting on social media? You need to be posting optimally once a day at least. Why? That is just the nature of social media. The content you post can go stale pretty quickly. Because there’s a constant feed of new content being put out, what was posted a few days ago, last week, especially two weeks ago no one is going to see in their feed anymore. And so you always have to be pushing out new, fresh content. When you’re thinking about your own social media strategy, you want to make sure you’re using a social media scheduling tool to automate some of this because you do need to put out quite a bit in order to stay relevant. So you can use social media tools like CoSchedule, Hootsuite or even Lead Pilot.
Struggling With What Content to Share on Social Media or via Email?
We are offering access to our content for advisors to use via Lead Pilot for 7-days completely free (even on our month to month plans).
