What is a financial advisor’s preferred marketing method? Most likely, the answer would be networking. Eager to network, advisors sponsor and facilitate professional seminars in various settings. Traditionally, they seek to meet as many clients face-to-face as possible. Some meet at their homes or at the advisor's office. Other venues may include restaurants, after-hour cocktail parties and conference rooms.
As standard marketing practice, when financial advisors greet, meet and present to prospective clients they effectively gain new business. Yet, research shows that advisors who continue this path usually hit the “AUM Ceiling.” Although primary referrals are derived from friends, family, and existing client base, advisors face the challenge to maintain a continuous flow of new clients. Client attrition can eat away at their book one client at a time.
During bull markets when most clients are profiting, many financial advisors find that it is difficult to line-up enough prospective clients. Conversely, during a bear market, potential clients are too scared to move.
Yet, recently with new marketing tools at their disposal, like, Zoom, GoToMeeting, email, webinars, Google Ads and social media platforms... all help to initiate a discussion without the commitment of an initial face-to-face meeting. Usually through an electronic meeting/event platform. But with the new medium comes a set of new problems.
How do financial advisors consistently bring in attendees to their presentation? And more importantly, how do they earn sufficient trust and confidence of potential clients through an electronic medium so that they feel confident enough to trust them with their life savings?
How do financial advisors strategically target, develop and continuously increase the size of this audience?
There are several ways to target your audience. Social media campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, etc.... email marketing, Google Ads, and direct mail campaigns... all have their pros and cons.
The best response will come from the financial advisor’s own database. The individuals, who have “opted-in” to receive emails from you, are most likely to become your clients.
However, in all marketing aspects, it’s the financial advisor’s ability to implement marketing funnels successfully when your target audience responds which is key. These marketing campaigns should effectively help increase participation, should build the attendee list and should a teaser about the message that will be discussed during the event.
Once individuals register for your event, don't expect everyone to attend. The percent of registrants who attend will depend on the RMF (Reminder Marketing Funnel). Yes, calendar invites and email/text reminders help increase attendance, but it's up to the registrants to remember to attend and to be in front of their computers when they do remember. So, for this reason, the ‘reminder marketing funnel’ is an important step, especially since attendees still need to log into their home or office computers and to click on the webinar link at the right moment.
There are too many steps and timing issues to bring many potential clients to sit in front of a screen at a designated time and date. Even after much effort to motivate them to attend, a number of attendees will sign off the webinar almost immediately. Today, an informative and informative presentation may not be enough. Financial Advisors need to be entertaining. They should offer incentives for attendees to stick around until the end. Electronic special reports or white papers help, but offering more tangible snail mail gifts can keep them to stay around long enough to receive the full benefits of your presentation.
At Savvy Investor, we have tested many different marketing approaches to significantly increase attendance, to keep attendees in their seats, to stay engaged and to set up an appointment with a salesperson.
Based on what we see in our consulting practice, webinars are probably the second-best way to address large audiences and to generate a constant flow of leads.
One of our most effective live events is the newly created ‘Phoneforum’ webinar. A Phoneforum is very similar to a webinar, except that it also occurs over a mobile phone or a landline. Phoneforums are set up as an educational event. Its content is to help the attendees with their personal goals and to help financial advisors promote their services.
There are some major differences between an ordinary webinar and a Phoneforum event.
The major difference is how we encourage registrants to attend the webinar. In a customary webinar, a registration request acquires their email address. If the request is for additional information, such as a telephone number, the response drops dramatically. Event email reminders are usually sent thereafter. Open rates are usually less than perfect.
With a Phoneforum, when prospects are invited to register we have them sign up with their best phone contact number. Otherwise, they cannot listen to the event.
It doesn’t matter if there are only 10 attendees or over 1,000,000 attendees. With today’s new Phoneforum technology everyone is called at the time of the event. It doesn’t matter if they are at home, in the office, on the road, or on the golf course because once they answer the phone they will automatically be connected to the Phoneforum. Phoneforums can increase participation by 50% over webinars. During the last decade, telephone technology has brought down the cost of calling tens of thousands to a pittance.
And, if you only have email addresses in your database, Phoneforum registrations are key to having potential clients add their telephone numbers for your sales team to follow up.
During a regular webinar’s Q&A, the participants can type their questions in a chatbox. In comparison, a Phoneforum’s Q&A resembles a radio talk show. Questions are monitored and heard live during the event. Participants ask questions on-air and receive live answers right away.
Phoneforums are structured for financial advisors to learn as much as possible about the attendee's market/economic view and personal investment goals. Interactive polls are used to survey the participant’s preferences and viewpoints. Participants simply push a number on their phones to express their opinion. The answers are matched with the attendee and passed along to the salesperson with the attendee’s telephone number to follow up.
For example, we pose several questions:
If you believe that the market will go up in the next month, push #1 on your keypad.
If you believe the market will go down in the next month, push #2 on your keypad.
If you believe the market will be flat press #3 on your keypad.
There is an art to running a successful live event, and if done correctly, financial advisors can generate a constant flow of warm-to-hot leads.
Creating multiple Phoneforums has a cumulative effect. With each Phoneforum, more and more new participants join in and are added to your existing attendee database. If done correctly, each new Phoneforum’s attendance should increase substantially. That increases the number of highly qualified leads that can convert into a higher number of clients each month, year after year. If the participant didn’t convert the first time and attended a subsequent Phoneforum, the probability of becoming a client goes up dramatically.
Click on the button below to learn more about our proven marketing strategies and campaigns. We have successfully built large high net-worth audiences, accumulated continuous lead flows, and motivated potential clients to ask you how they can move their investments over to your firm.
