Creating and sharing quality content is an essential element in successfully marketing your financial advisory business. My series The Ultimate Financial Advisor’s Guide to Content Marketing helps financial advisors understand how it all works so they can establish themselves as a financial expert by properly utilizing financial content marketing strategies.
Now it is time to dig deep into the various aspects of content and figure out why it is essential.
Personalize Your Financial Planning Business Brand
Financial advisors take pride in building, cultivating, and nurturing the relationships they have with clients. But, how do you form this type of connection with a person who is more than likely just researching you or your services online?
Creating content is a great way to put a face and name to your business and a personal touch to who you are and what you do. If you think strategically about the type of financial advisor website content you are producing, you will show people not only what services you can provide, but also a bit about your personality, expertise, and values.
Establish Yourself as an Expert Financial Advisor
This is such an important point that I have written an entire article about it, How to Brand Yourself as an Expert. By creating and sharing valuable and credible content on topics you know, you establish yourself as an expert in your field. When you write original content on a difficult subject that helps someone solve a problem, it builds the know, like, and trust factor.
People are looking to you to manage one of their most valuable assets – their money. They need to trust that you know what you are talking about, stay current on industry issues, and have dealt with situations similar to theirs. What better way to do this than to write about it?
Engage Your Customers and Prospects
Creating content is a way to engage an audience that may not be otherwise engaged. By speaking to your clients and prospects in a way that is less formal, you may make a connection with them to a greater degree than you can do from your website alone.
Ninety-five percent of website visitors are just researching and are not ready to be contacted. Good content lets them learn and engage in a low-pressure way. They don’t need to request a meeting or buy anything right away, but reading your content adds value to their relationship with you. If you do it correctly, prospects will be motivated to provide you with their contact information so you can keep engaging with them in the future.
Stay In Front of Clients
Content is the foundation that online marketing is based upon. It drives readers to your website and connects them to the information they need in order to make informed decisions about the financial advisory products and services you offer.
Adding content to your blog on a regular basis creates the opportunity for it to be shared on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, which in turn, drives more readers to your website. By blogging you keep your social media presence active without having to create a lot of other new content on a regular basis.
Improve Search Engine Optimization for Your Financial Advisor Website
Have you ever wondered how the pages that show up at the top of your online searches are selected? It boils down to search engine optimization (SEO). By making sure that each page you add to your website has the right keywords, you improve your chances of having your business show up at that top of that search list and increase the traffic to your website.
There is a direct correlation between blog posts and web traffic with abrupt growth at 300 to 500 pages, and a huge jump at 1,000 pages per month. Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which is one more opportunity for you to show up in a search engine and drive traffic to your site.
Content posted to your blog a month, a year, or three years ago, it is not out of date. Quite often website traffic is driven by people finding older posts in their search engine request. The content you post today will continue to work for you long after you have forgotten about it.
Make Your Firm More Visible
You are not the only financial advisory firm in your area. So how do you make yourself stand out from the competition and make important connections? In person, the answer is easy – you network and get involved in your community. But, how do you accomplish this online? Utilizing social media networks and social media content for financial advisors, you can share high-quality content as part of your strategy for staying visible.
When you post links to your original content or are share links to other relevant articles you are getting in front of people and letting them know about you. As long as you keep the quality high and the topics relevant you are continuously adding value to the people that see your posts. Hopefully, they will see this value and share it with their friends and family too.
Closing
Regularly publishing relevant and helpful content to your financial planner website and social media pages should be an essential component of your marketing plan. Good content establishes you as an expert in your field, engages and encourages your prospects to opt-in to receive future communication from you, and helps new prospects find you by keeping your website front and center on social media and in search engines.
To find out how to leverage your content and how to build the know, like, and trust factor you can read my series on Marketing Funnels for Financial Advisors.
Download a free copy of the Financial Advisor Content Marketing & Optimization Guide here. Sometimes content marketing can seem like an overwhelming task to undertake on your own. This is exactly what we do for our clients! We help create and select the right content, optimize it so it is reaching the right people, and handle the scheduling to ensure it is as far-reaching as possible.