How advisers can turn heads with digital marketing

Marketing online requires a different approach from marketing in person.

Marketing in person — whether it’s through seminars, referrals or on the golf course — allows you to immediately establish trust with prospects through a handshake, eye contact and countless other factors that humans pick up on when connecting with others.

When you’re marketing online, those trust-building factors are entirely absent. Not only that, but people tend to be more cautious online (rightfully so) in order to avoid being scammed or hacked. So, from the very beginning, you’re already working from a deficit.

The digital age has largely fulfilled its promise to speed up how we connect with others and how we do business — except in the realm of digital marketing. In fact, this trust deficit is exactly why digital marketing takes considerably longer to bear fruit than in-person marketing.

You have to be more patient with an online lead, nurturing it and cultivating it before it will become a revenue-generating client. This doesn’t mean it’s not a quality lead. It just means that your approach needs to be persistent.

If you use the same approach with in-person and digital marketing, then you’ll likely reach the faulty conclusion that digital marketing leads are bad leads. “They’re not as good as the referrals I get!”

Of course they’re not. When a client refers someone else to you, it means that a client loves you and trusts you enough to tell someone else (who already loves and trusts them) how much they love and trust you. If I have a choice between a referral lead and a digital lead, I will choose the referral lead all day, every day.

But it’s not a one-for-one. Digital leads exponentially outnumber leads from referrals. If referral leads were people at the beach on a busy weekend, digital leads would be the grains of sand.

Eventually, though, you’ll run out of referrals. You can’t only grow your firm through referrals — especially if you want to build a large firm. If you want to grow aggressively, you’ve got to fill your pipeline with more people who can then become more referral sources.

In this article, I’m kicking off a six-part series where I’ll be giving an overview of what we call the “Cold to Gold” framework for helping advisors build a predictable marketing system. The six steps of the Cold to Gold framework are:

1. Get noticed
2. Earn contacts
3. Build credibility
4. Start conversations
5. Win clients
6. Deepen relationships

If you’re thinking, “These are the same steps as in-person marketing!” You’re right. Whether you meet a prospect at dinner or on Facebook, you still have to go through every step.

The difference, as I said earlier, is that in-person marketing moves much faster than digital, so digital requires a more methodical approach.

Today, I want to talk about step one: Get noticed. I’ll show you how to do it predictably and successfully in your digital marketing efforts.

3 ESSENTIAL STEPS

Online marketing is crowded, people are distracted, and they have an infinite number of things vying for their attention and wallets, like competing advisors, wirehouses, and big firms with big pocketbooks and lots of money to spend on advertising.

In order to really turn heads, your digital marketing needs these three essential elements:

1. Bold

The amygdala is the part of our brain in charge of determining what we pay attention to — separating what’s relevant from what’s not. And your amygdala is working overtime these days: advertising experts estimate that we’re exposed to as many as 10,000 ads per day online. If that sounds like an insane number, thank your amygdala for doing its job.

In that world of “Click here! Do this! Go here! Do that!” you have to somehow convince your audience’s amygdala that you’re offering something important and worth noticing. You have to be the red berry standing out on the sea of green trees. You have to be bold.

Honest question: If you put your marketing up next to that of your competition, do you think it would stand out? If not, then it’s not bold enough to stop the scroll. If it’s not bold enough to stop the scroll, you’re not going to get the clicks.

How do you stop the scroll? Bright colors, big letters — or maybe it’s the opposite end of the spectrum and has the smallest letters on the page. Whatever the context, your material needs to be different from the status quo.

2. Unique

We’re wired to be interested in new things and want to explore them. If something isn’t unique, we won’t wonder about it, and thus won’t click.

Advisor marketing is overrun with stock images and phrases like “peace of mind.” The same style and templates as everyone else won’t make the majority of people want to explore what you’re offering.

They’ve seen it before and they know what they’ll find, so there’s no need to check it out.

3. Strategically designed

Lastly, your marketing must be designed with a purpose in mind. Tailor your message to where it’s being used and where it’s being seen.

Being bold on Facebook is different from being bold on Instagram, which is different than being bold on LinkedIn, which is different from creating a bold ad … you get the idea. No matter the situation, you have to know your framework, understand the context, and strategize accordingly to maximize your impact.

That’s it for today. Come back next week for the next piece in the “Cold to Gold” series, when I’ll be discussing how advisors can earn more contacts in digital marketing.

Robert Sofia is the CEO of the digital marketing firm Snappy Kraken.

Find this series on fintechforadvisers.com.

Related Topics: Digital Marketing, snappy kraken