Our guest blog today is from Bill McGuire, principal of McGuire Marketing a full-service marketing resource serving the Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) community. They help with every aspect of your marketing from developing a strategy to seamless tactical execution and maximizing your return on investment. They help businesses grow by applying common-sense marketing with a keen eye towards your budgets, deadlines, and results. Connect with Bill by email or on LinkedIn.
When launching a new website, too often RIAs take a Field of Dreams’ ‘If you build it people will come’ approach, meaning just by building it, somehow people will magically find your website. For those not familiar with the movie, here’s the clip.
This is not a good strategy.
In fact, directing quality visitors to a website takes planning, commitment and effort. Since the majority of your website content may not change that much once you launch it, what are you doing to bring people back? One of the best ways to ensure consistent and ongoing traffic is by creating and sharing relevant and authentic content.
Back to the baseball analogy, here are 3 ‘Spring Training Tips’ to start your season right:
1. Develop a Deep Bench
In most cases, a firm establishes one person to be the star player/thought leader. However, if you think of your firm like a baseball team, there are many stars with many strengths. Work with your employees to see whose perspectives make sense to include in the content development process. If you need outside help, consider hiring a copywriter. Think of them as your relief pitcher or designated hitter.
Don’t despair solo practitioners, instead find complementary business partners, like an estate attorney or accountant that you can interview for an article. This will also help with driving new visitors to your website through backlinks. Read more on this here.
2. Schedule Your Line-Up
Once you have your contributors, it’s time to develop and distribute your content. Start with an overall plan. I’d suggest going at least 3-months out and include a budget, logistics, and resource needs, schedule, and the goals you want to accomplish from this effort. Read more on this here.
There’s no one perfect mix of content but it’s more important to have an integrated plan. Think of your content as different types of base hits and then load the bases, For instance:
- Singles are social media posts, these can and should be done more often.
- Doubles are curate blog articles. These require a little more work but can provide more in-depth insight.
- Triples are media articles. Again, more work but are an effective part of the mix of any content marketing strategy.
- Home Runs are Whitepaper, Webinar, and Podcasts. These are larger initiatives that take more time and effort but provide a lot of useful content.
Finally, simply the process with technology. Shameless plug: Lead Pilot offers the perfect combination of content and marketing automation to efficiently manage this effort.
3. Know Your Stats
Baseball statistics play an important role in evaluating the progress of a team. For batters, it’s RBIs, for pitchers it’s ERAs. Get to know and understand the statistic and terminology associated with digital marketing: CTR – Click-through rate, CTA – Call to action, PV – Pageviews, SEM – Search engine marketing, UV – Unique visitor. Read more on this here.
Conduct monthly after-action assessments to see what worked, what didn’t, and what to needs changing. Analyze all aspects of your effort and set qualitative and quantitative goals for the next time around.
One final thought, always be looking for ways to improve your website to better serve your clients, prospects, and community. Like the NY Yankee legend, Yogi Berra says “It ain’t over till it’s over”.
