Five Little Things For Your Monday: July 17, 2017

Summer is heating up and so are our topics in this week’s Five Little Things. Today’s post features different perspectives on how to gain a better audience for your financial advising firm through the utilization of a PR firm, public speaking, content marketing, and dynamic email campaigns.

1. 5 Places to Listen to Ensure Your Content Marketing is Spot-On via Cision PR Newswire

Feedback is huge when it comes to developing a successful content marketing strategy. And yet with all the noise coming from every angle, it can be challenging to know what exactly you need to pay attention to. Susan Guillory identifies five sources that can prove invaluable to you in crafting your content: prospects, customers, competitors, employees and industry influencers.

If you’re willing to listen, you’ll find inspiration all around you. It’s what you do with what you learn that will determine how effective your content marketing strategy is.

2. FINANCIAL ADVISORS: SPEAK EFFECTIVELY SO PEOPLE LISTEN INTENTLY via Advisor Advertising

Public speaking can be very useful if done effectively. When financial advisors are able to establish themselves as effective public speakers, it’s often a powerful boost to their businesses, personal development, and professional opportunities. Embracing your voice, incorporating it into the way you brand yourself and using it as a platform to inspire, inform, or lead others allows you to set yourself apart as an advisor. There are many ways for you to utilize your voice and there are many opportunities to do so. Speak up, speak effectively and speak so that others will listen intently.

3. 6 ways to do a better job educating your clients via Advicent Solutions

Financial planning is no longer a static process. Education, marketing, and continued learning should not be either. Many clients look to their advisors as a source of information and financial life coach, rather than simply a person who manages their money. It is imperative, therefore, that advisors not take this role lightly and proactively provide access to a client’s financial plan as well as relevant, educational information to increase a client’s overall financial literacy. Here are six ways advisors can be better at actively educating their clients.

4. Should You Work with a Marketing or PR Agency, Or Go It Alone? Part I and Part II via ficomm Partners

Have you ever wondered, “Do I really need a Marketing or PR agency? Can’t I just do everything myself?” If so, these posts are for you. Part I discusses the three questions you should address before hiring a marketing or PR agency because not every advisor should work with a marketing or PR agency—just as not every investor should work with an advisor.

Part II teaches vendors and advisors which statements an advisor should watch and listen for when deciding if a PR relationship is right. Advisors could express perfectly legitimate sentiments—but they can also signal that the time isn’t ripe for working with an outside agency. Success depends on finding the right solution for your needs at the right time.

5. Custom, dynamic email is giving marketers and readers what they want: hyper-personalized messages via Marketing Land

How do we reach hyper-personalization? For years, email marketing has been circling around “hyper-personalization,” the sought-after email “segment of one”— the perfect email campaign. We have a long way to go before we can reach the segment of one. And even after we hit it, we still need the means of standing out from the crowd. That means you need to develop good, personalized content for your clients.

Columnist Scott Heimes believes building an email-based app, along with great content and timing, is key to earning email readers’ loyalty. We have the materials we need today to cater to our readers’ whims. Those materials are our data — little bits of information on past behaviors, intent and more — that we can use to capture eyes and clicks. Used well, this data can take your email marketing campaign far. It all comes down to two things: your relevancy and where you build your apps.

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You may also like: Public Relations 101: Wire Services, Roundup: Tech Tools for Financial Advisors, and 3 Steps to Creating Marketing Personas for Financial Advisors