(Video) Is Your Marketing Foundation Solid?

(Video) Is Your Marketing Foundation Solid?

Video Overview

Is Your Marketing Foundation Solid?
Taking a closer look at seminars, referrals & other legacy marketing strategies.  

Tucker Advisors CMO Justin Woodbury is joined by Director of Advisor Marketing Missy Lechuga to talk about how to market your financial advisory practice. In this presentation, you’ll learn a step-by-step process to take your marketing process from a crawl to leaps and bounds. Whether you are in the 10th year of business or your 1st there is an offering that will help you bring in more leads and do more business. Justin also talks about your online presence and what it means to be found online. 

This presentation was given at the Tucker Super Conference XVI in January of 2021 and is only for financial professional use. Insurance-only agents are not licensed to offer investment advice.

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Video Synopsis

As a financial advisor it is crucial to separate yourself from the competition and present your practice in a positive and professional light. Getting started on marketing your financial advisory firm can be an arduous task for even the most astute businessmen and women. So, where do we start?

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Crawl

To market your business, you need to start with professionalizing your customer experience. That means having a professional email address without Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo in it. This creates trust that you are a real start-up and not a side project. In finance and insurance, it is crucial to instill trust in your brand because people are trusting you with their savings. If they don’t trust you, they won’t work with you.

The second piece of the crawl is your personalized website. Usually this goes hand in hand with creating the professionalized email address so you can knock out two birds with one stone. Your website is an online representation of your business that is viewable 24/7/365. You need to be sure that it is representing your business in a positive light and with accuracy. When it comes to marketing, the best image wins. That means we need to work on your image with professional photography and brand design.

Professional photos and a sharp logo will not only build trust with your prospects, it will improve the performance of your website. Everyone has seen a website and immediately disconnected after seeing how little time and care was spent on the user experience. Using selfies from your phone as your avatar or website photo is a quick way to tell someone that you are using whatever you’ve got instead of what is your best. Show your audience your best! This could mean using a tripod and a well-lit area of your office to take professional-looking photos. It could also take the form of using a local photographer looking to build their portfolio. The bottom-line is that when people look you up, you want to be found in a positive light. 

Now that you have your email addresses, website, and a professionalize visual appearance its time to think big picture about your website being found online. That means having local search-engine-optimization and a user-focused strategy to take people from viewing your site to contacting your for help. This is where we transition from crawling to walking.

Walk

The walking process includes having a customer relationship management platform, an email marketing platform, lead magnets to draw in website visitors, and a content marketing plan. 

For your CRM, you want a system that allows you to store customer information, identify sales opportunities, and manage your marketing campaigns in one location. Coordinating your day-to-day operations over time leads to a more efficient and customer-centric process. Additionally, it will help your team avoid duplicated efforts. While a customer relationship management platform will help you with 1:1 communication, you’ll also want a way to blast out your message. This is where having an email marketing platform can help.

To create effective email marketing campaigns you’ll need some tools. First, you’ll need an email list of contacts that have opted in to receive your communications. You can build this list by having a call-to-action on your website and using incentives like lead magnets to draw in prospects. What is a lead magnet? A lead magnet is a piece of content, tool, or mechanism that your ideal perspective audience wants. In return for providing them with what they want, they give you the opportunity to market to them by providing some contact information.

Now that you have an email marketing platform and something your audience wants its time to talk about what you’ll send. Coming up with a content marketing plan is crucial in coordinating your marketing efforts. Whether you are writing content on topics relevant to your audience or outsourcing pieces of the content creation process you need to provide value to your users. If you are providing value, users will click, share, and continue to open your messages. The thought here is that over time you will position yourself as an expert on a topic they’re interested in and eventually choose you for their needs. 

As a result of your work to establish your online presence and provide value to users you are now able to run with your marketing spend because your foundation is solid.

Run

So you’ve made a brand experience that is presenting your practice in a professional light and now you have communication tools to help you navigate interpersonal and mass communication. It’s now time for you to dive into creating great content while targeting your ideal audience. This can include video marketing, radio or podcast marketing, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization. For each of these mediums, there are different skillsets and strategies to succeed.

Video marketing continues to grow as millions of users search Google and YouTube for assistance everyday. Creating audience-relevant videos on topics they are searching for and wanting to learn about are a great way to pull in more eyes to your practice. Using video allows for a more human experience and a much faster intake of information. While video has a lot of upside, you can also engage prospects verbally through radio and podcasts. 

Voice marketing continues to grow with many working adults listening to the radio or podcasts throughout their day. Using radio can up your profile with prospective clients and reach an audience in key demographics for financial planning. Whether you’re talking shop with an industry professional or making an ad for local radio it will build your profile and network. Part of creating effective content is presenting the content to your audience in an easily digestible way. To do that, you’ll want to explore the written marketing power of blogs and articles.

Blogs and articles are a great way to pull in organic searches to your website and build domain authority. We live in a time where anyone can start a website. How can we position your website to pull up for your ideal perspective audience? One of the ways to do this is by having an active blog and doing blogs for other sites that will link to your site. Sharing your knowledge through content is a tried and true way to pull in eyes and ears to your message. To do this, you’ll need to optimize your content for search engines to find. That’s where search engine marketing and optimization come into play.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are vehicles to put your materials in front of internet searchers. Using Google and social media is a great way to measure the efficacy of your messaging. It is crucial to setup website analytics and tracking codes to understand what users are doing on your website and how they found you. This information informs your strategy when trying to funnel users from a prospect to a lead. Creating systems that will yield high-value prospects could be a game changer for your bottom line. Now that we are up and running with campaigns that are driving leads and providing ROI it’s time to leap!

Leap

Now that you have all of your preliminary bases covered, it’s time to scale your efforts. Using Geo-fencing, remarketing, television, and social media you are trying to take your voice and content to a bigger audience. 

Geo-fencing allows users to target people in a geographic area and send them an offer they can’t refuse. You can develop a strategy with this tool to drive user actions when they are close to one of your physical locations. 

Remarketing is when you use advanced analytics to target people who have already interacted with your online content. These people are warm leads who have already heard of you and can be shown more advanced messaging to drive their topic interest to your front door. This strategy requires your previous search engine marketing and social media marketing to have engaged someone. Your next message to them should pull them in using a lead magnet or something valuable and relevant to why they interacted with your brand. 

Television and social media are vast categories of advertising with countless strategies to take into account. For these pursuits, you want to be sure that your efforts are sustainable, measurable, and budgeted for. There is no silver bullet to succeed in these arenas but at this point in your marketing you should have an idea of what your strengths are and play to them in your pursuit of more business.

Last but not least, seminars are a great tool to the modern financial advisor. We have seen countless examples of seminars outperforming previously mentioned methods of marketing. Seminars provide a unique, high-class experience that builds seamlessly through the appointment process and helps referral marketing. Follow along as Missy Lechuga details the numerous ways a seminar can help your practice.

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Call 720-702-8811 or email COO Jason Lechuga at Jason.Lechuga@TuckerAdvisors.com

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Social Security: Maximizing Your Client’s Retirement

Social Security: Maximizing Your Client’s Retirement

If you want to maximize your Social Security, you need to protect your assets.

There many reasons to consider indexed annuities as part of your clients’ portfolios. Research shows that if we can capture a modest portion of the market’s upside movement while still protecting against losses, there is a strong chance we can outperform the market over time. Not only does this bode well for the performance of the portfolio, but it is nice to do so while sleeping well at night. Warren Buffett famously said that the best way to hedge against inflation is to not lose any of your money. But where does the indexing conversation fit into Social Security planning?

When planning for retirement, it usually makes sense to defer as long as possible. Yes, there are benefits that may be available to a person early, but these typically only provide a small benefit before taking the maximum amount, which almost always comes at age 70. As people elect to wait to draw their Social Security, they typically either continue to work or live (to some extent) off of their savings and investments.

Retirement Scenario

Consider this: In traditional portfolio management during retirement years, a retiree typically lives on a fixed withdrawal percentage from their investments. In other words, if a person has a $1 million portfolio, they will pull 4% out of their portfolio every year to live on, giving them a $40,000 annual income. What happens if, during the course of a market downturn, the retiree loses a significant portion of their portfolio to market losses? Either one of two things will probably take place:

The retiree will continue with the same standard of living and will have to pull a larger percentage from their portfolio to ensure the same monthly income. This can have devastating effects on the portfolio if the losses are not recuperated in a timely fashion.

Due to a reduced amount of income from a fixed percentage rate within the portfolio, other sources of income need to be considered in order to prevent further damage to the portfolio. The most common areas to turn to are to get a job (less than ideal), deplete emergency funds (bad idea), use credit (worse idea), or take Social Security early.

Usually for a retiree not currently on Social Security, the most common choice (of the above options) is to take Social Security early. This is unfortunate because it reduces the person’s monthly income from Social Security for the rest of their life. Due to the inability to sustain their income level because of losses in their portfolio, they compound their income difficulties by shorting their guaranteed income stream for Social Security for the rest of their life.

Indexed Annuities

Enter the indexing solution! By not exposing your clients’ portfolios to losses in the market, you not only guarantee that they will continue with an uninterrupted income stream, but you also ensure that the Social Security plan you put together will be attainable. This will help you eliminate the need to tap into Social Security early due to unforeseen income reductions. This is just another reason to consider indexing as a strategy for your clients nearing, or in, retirement.

For more tools and training for advisors working with Social Security, be sure to visit our resources page.

Seminar Tips: Calling

Seminar Tips: Calling

Not Calling Seminar Attendees

One of the single biggest mistakes that you can make when it comes to making sure that your seminars are poorly attended is to not call your seminar attendees the day before they are to attend your seminar. The difference between a successful seminar and an unsuccessful seminar is taking that one additional step of calling the day before to remind them that they signed up for the following night’s seminar and that you are looking forward to seeing them there.

Most successful dental practices will call you to remind you about your appointment, mail you a post-card reminder, an email reminder and even call you a second time to remind you about your 6-month check-up. For the men and women in our industry who feel that they are above making those reminder calls or that they simply do not have the time and resources to make those calls, they will not be in our industry very long. Making reminder calls is one of the factors that separates MDRT members from the rest of the men and women that make their living in the financial services and insurance industry.

Not Calling Future Clients

Do not lose sight of the fact that before prospects become your clients, you need to first meet with them at one of your seminars. Between them attending your seminar and them meeting with you, you need to take advantage of several additional opportunities to contact them. These opportunities will come in the form of a reminder email, a reminder post-card and most importantly, a phone call reminder the day before their appointment with you.

It will be these simple, value-added steps that you take with them that will win them over and make certain that they attend your seminars and keep the appointments that they’ve set with you after your seminars. At the seminar, they are moved by what they see and hear, picturing their own financial realities and realizing that they need to talk to an expert about everything.

As the time between the seminar and their appointment with you passes, it becomes easy for them to lose their conviction in meeting with you. Your contact with them will often be the only difference between them keeping their appointments with you and forgetting about you altogether as they continue to receive additional seminar mailers from your competition every day between when they attended your seminar and when they are scheduled to meet with you.

For more tools and training for advisors working with Social Security, be sure to visit our resources page.

Seminar Tips: Pitfalls

Seminar Tips: Pitfalls

Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover

Many of the people that attend your seminars will be dressed comfortably in jeans and a t-shirt, worn-down sneakers, jacket that’s seen better days and a baseball cap that is missing more material than is left to hold it together.

Underneath those comfortable clothes are your future clients. It is easy to take a look at someone dressed casually verses someone that is dressed in business attire and decides that of the two; the better-dressed person will be the one that you land as a client. Subconsciously or intentionally, you rationalize that the better-dressed of the two is the only one that will have assets.

That line of thinking will cause you to limit your time to just a couple of audience members.

You will be missing out on a huge opportunity with the rest of your audience that do have assets to invest and are looking to work with someone just like you. Do not pre-judge anyone in your audience and you will avoid losing your opportunity with them because you assume they have no assets due to how they are dressed. I have met several doctors, prominent business owners and attorneys in the audiences that I present seminars to that are dressed like they just stepped out of a Sear’s catalogue…from 1987. In fact, one of the best clients that I was able to help one of our agent’s land, was a doctor who had just finished doing yard work and had no time to change before attending our seminar.

Exceeding An Hour

Leave your audience wanting more. For every second that you exceed your one hour presentation, you are removing appointments off your calendar. Leave them wanting more from you and you will be very successful in converting audience members into appointments and ultimately life-long clients.

Using Complex Explanations

Never pass up an opportunity to use a quick story to illustrate a complex concept. People love stories and most importantly, they remember them to the point that they will have forgotten all the details about the concept mentioned in the seminar, but will recall a story for you verbatim. You will never have a majority of your audience who are analytical and detail-oriented. Stick with simple and memorable stories to explain ideas, and when you do meet with analytical clients, you can drill down as much as you’d like beyond the stories.

For more tools and training for advisors working with Social Security, be sure to visit our resources page.