We’ve officially hit the mid-year mark for 2019, and now that Q1 and Q2 are in the rearview mirror we were curious — are advisors year-end marketing goals coming to fruition?
To answer these questions, we conducted an industry-wide survey of 215 financial advisors — (disclosure: 166 were Twenty Over Ten clients and 49 were not) about their current digital marketing efforts and the impact of those efforts on lead generation and client acquisition.
The results revealed that if you’re serious about growing your advisor business you have to be serious about being active online and upgrading your digital lead generation strategies to ones that actually work in 2019. So, let’s dive right into the nitty-gritty details of our findings.
Key Findings:
- The large majority, 70% of advisors responded they receive only 0-1 leads per month through their websites. Only a small group, at 2% marked that they were contacted by 6-10 leads per month via their website.
- Of those leads 26% of advisors responded that 1-2 of those leads converted into actual clients.
- 39% said they are never posting blogs or other content to their websites, while another 31% noted they were making updates 1-2 times per month.
For any business owner, it’s important to know if your digital marketing strategies are effective and if your tactics are actually working to help you acquire new business. A strategy that is put together well can take a lot of time and effort. So, what’s working? What’s not? And what is everybody else doing?
If you’re in charge of digital marketing for your financial planning business you likely ask yourself these questions a lot. Well, you’re in luck! In our survey sent to hundreds of financial advisors, we asked four simple questions to try to get a pulse on what firms are doing to market their businesses. Here are the results:
A large majority of advisors with Twenty Over Ten, 62.65%, noted that they are contacted by 0-1 leads through their websites per month. The next largest group marked 2-5 leads per month. Only a small group, 3 advisors to be exact, responded being contacted by 11 or more leads per month via their website.
The name of the game in 2019 and beyond for advisors will be to have a website not only for brand awareness but for lead generation, and as a resource for your current clients. Those who are savvier are realizing that having a brochure website or a basic “yellow page” site (yep, we’ve heard that one before) just simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Looking at the number of leads you are getting, and how your website supports that is much more important.
It’s clear that advisors using the Twenty Over Ten platform receive more qualified leads than advisors who are using other website vendors. But what exactly is a qualified lead? It’s simply a prospect that is already in your CRM or lead-tracking system, that has expressed interest in buying your product and passes a set of lead qualifications in order to progress further down the sales funnel. So the big question is … how many of those qualified leads convert into actual paying clients?
It was actually a mixed bag of how many leads were converting into clients. However, we were incredibly pleased to see that a large majority of Twenty Over Ten users (21 respondents) were converting 11+ leads per year into paying clients – that’s huge! For advisors not using Twenty Over Ten, almost half (40.82%) were not converting any of their leads into clients. So what’s the bottom line here? A lackluster website, that isn’t set up to generate leads is hindering your firm from growing it’s overall AUM.
Almost half, 44.58% of respondents, said they are posting blogs and other content to their websites once or twice per month. More frequent weekly updates accounted for only 19.28% of the respondents. And sadly, a whopping 32.35% said they never blog or post other content to their websites.
It’s a close call but it does seem as if the majority of advisors do have a goal to get some content posted to their websites at least once a month. Which, is not a terrible strategy but for a little bit more benefit on the SEO side, we recommend advisors try to move closer to weekly updates if possible.
For those 32.35% of people that do not blog or produce any content at all, they were all most likely to have the least amount of leads, their leads were the least likely to be highly qualified and they had the least amount of leads convert to new clients per year.
When talking with advisors more about this we realized that the downfall is simply time and resources. In our interviews with firms, it was apparent that blogging and writing content takes the MOST amount of time out of any other digital marketing activity.
At Twenty Over Ten, we want to work on getting that number down, blogging and content creation is such a low-hanging fruit way to boost your site’s organic search rankings ultimately driving more prospects to your website. Content Assist can help you achieve your goals of generating a higher volume of quality content in a shorter period of time. This feature within our platform gives advisors the direction and tools necessary to effectively run and manage the content marketing for their financial firm in one place. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for advisors to publish unique blog posts that are tailored for their firm’s voice that also speak to their unique niche. The best part? The full library of content is available to you at no additional cost!
So what is the common thread? We took a look at all 215 advisor websites and found some striking commonalities among those who get 6-10 or 11+ more clients per year. They:
Sure, lead generation isn’t a new concept for 2019 but as the financial services industry evolves so does the way of accessing and connecting with new prospects. As more prospects use technology to seek out financial advice and guidance, financial advisors must use digital marketing to reach their ideal client base and stand out from the competition. Not only is it essential for firms to have a user-friendly website but it’s also critical they leverage a combination of social media, email marketing, video marketing and SEO to increase lead generation and ultimately sales.
The middle of the year is a great time to look at your overall marketing strategy with fresh eyes and determine what’s working and what’s not. The name of the game in 2019 is to make your website a tool for lead generation. Straight “web traffic” is a metric of the past. More importantly, take a look at the number of leads your getting and how your website and other digital marketing efforts support that.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our digital marketing survey!
