5 Marketing Funnels That Work For Financial Advisors

Typical financial advisors spend as much time searching for their next new client as they do meeting with existing clients from week to week.

Every minute spent on digital marketing such as crafting emails, writing blog articles, reviewing websites, and nurturing leads is a minute not spent on growing your business.

Your attention should be on increasing your AUM and revenue through product sales and financial strategies—you’re not a marketer guru, you’re a financial advisor professional.

Your skills are designed for creating wealth, not for building marketing campaigns.

Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions for designing and implementing marketing campaigns.

From digital marketing best practices to automation, you have a range of marketing tools available to you for marketing effectively without spending an inordinate amount of your valuable time.

Certain marketing tools and practices will be better aligned with your brand and industry than others, but there are three basic tenets for successful marketing:

Coordinating Inbound and Outbound Marketing for the Greatest ROI

Combining inbound and outbound marketing techniques in your marketing strategies is not always easy, but it's worth it.

By creating a balance between the pull techniques of inbound and the push techniques of outbound, you can combine them for optimal lead generation and conversion.

Creating an effective balance between inbound and outbound methods depends on how well you know your target audience, and how willing you are to attend to their needs along their funnel journey.

Both inbound and outbound marketing strategies should be a part of any financial advisor's marketing plan.

Using the right marketing tools like marketing funnels, you can integrate both inbound and outbound efforts in successful marketing campaigns.

The result is a better ROI for your marketing budget, more leads, and greater AUM.

How do you integrate your outbound and inbound marketing efforts?

Marketing funnels.

Marketing Funnels for Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Marketing and sales funnels' primary goal is to nurture leads through the buying process.

A well-crafted funnel brings in leads and converts those leads with enticing calls to action, valuable information, and guidance along the client journey.

You aren’t limited to using marketing funnels strictly for capturing leads and converting, either.

You can use funnels on your website or landing page to monitor the user experience whether you're promoting a newsletter sign-up, seminar registration, and more.

Using the data gathered from your marketing funnel, you can identify where you're losing potential clients' interest and optimize the funnel to strengthen the weak links.

Let’s take a look at some of the marketing and sales funnels that lend themselves to successfully marketing financial services. 

1. Webinar Funnels

Since webinars are in video format, they feel more personal to the prospects considering your product or service.

This "personal" aspect sets the tone for building those all-important relationships needed to move clients along their journey.

Webinars are more than just digital versions of traditional seminars—they are typically less expensive, less labor-intensive, and, if done correctly, better lead generators.

Here's the basic road map for creating a profitable webinar:

Start with Facebook Ads. It’s no secret that Facebook Ads are one of the most powerful marketing tools available. You want to target people who you think will be interested in your webinar and then reach out to them via a platform where they are comfortable.

When you’re getting registrations for your webinar, a critical step is to collect email addresses during the sign-up process. If you only have one piece of information you require your audience to provide, it should be their email.

The point of your webinar is to generate leads. Without their email, you can’t follow up to further nurture the relationship.

Some of those leads will convert right away—others will need some guidance. Those email addresses allow you to build a contact list for providing that guidance.

Don’t just host a webinar and think the job is done. Intentionally think through how you can most effectively guide someone from thinking about your product or service to making the buying decision.

Using these steps to construct your webinar funnel will convert traffic to leads and leads to customers. All you need to do is stay on course from start to finish.

2. Seminar Funnels

Even in the digital age of marketing, seminars are still a viable marketing tool in the financial services industry.

You can expect a 4.4 per cent response rate for a typical seminar campaign, but experienced seminar marketers know to expect fewer attendees.

Those low expectations are what makes digital marketing with seminar funnels so attractive.

You can reach a much larger audience with a smaller investment compared to traditional advertising campaigns.

The average cost to get a cold lead to RSVP to your live seminar is roughly $20.00 and with a 50% average show up rate, you can expect to spend about $800.00 to get 20 qualified buying units to your seminar.

So how do you capitalize on that much larger audience?

If you’ve used Facebook to promote your seminars, you know it isn’t as simple as putting up an ad.

The key to creating conversions with your seminar funnel is providing targeted content. If you don’t offer the right content at the right time, you’re less likely to get the conversion.

That's why you offer content at every stage of the funnel.

For people in the awareness stage of the funnel, you can offer engaging videos or insightful posts that help them identify a problem.

At the later stages of the funnel, you can highlight your seminar’s strengths and unique selling points.

Keep in mind that you’re building a relationship with each prospect with your funnel.

You’re not trying to sell them on your seminar right away. You’re trying to offer them a solution to a problem.

3. Lead Generation Funnels

You want your website visitors to take specific actions. You want them to make a purchase, sign up, or fill out a form.

You want to convert and move your visitors along the path to becoming a client.

A financial services consultant can help you create a lead generation funnel by offering white papers, lead magnets, and more to build your email list.

Your consultant will help move your visitors along the client journey with a proven game plan from start to finish:

Raise Awareness

Create awareness with email marketing, social media, SEO efforts, content marketing, and calls to leads.

This initial stage is designed to cast a wide net of awareness and drive traffic.

Gather Data

Compile and segment names and emails from the contacts made with the awareness stage.

This forms a database of potential contacts who may need a nudge with "next step" marketing efforts.

Engage Prospects

This stage is all about turning potential contacts into viable prospects.

From signing up for a newsletter to attending a webinar, the outreach done in this stage is critical for retaining leads aren't currently ready to move further down the lead generation funnel.

Score Leads

At this stage, establishing whether a lead has potential is important for tightening your reach with efforts focused on the most viable leads.

Using analytics of key metrics, lead scoring helps identify the leads that should receive the most attention.

Implement Direct Mail and Inbound Strategies

The final stage is to market to the leads that are most likely to convert into a client.

Marketing directly to this lead with marketing materials such as emails or other calls to action designed specifically for their stage of the client journey will produce higher conversions and higher-quality clients

4. Appointment Funnels

If you're tired of trying to keep up with prospects' and clients' appointments and other scheduling, a financial services marketing consultant can make the whole process easier.

An appointment funnel is a marketing automation tool that puts appointment tracking and other scheduling on auto-pilot.

5. IBB Funnels

IBB (Intent-based Branding) is a marketing approach based on prospects' intent to make a decision demonstrated by their behavior.

IBB funnels help you build your brand while simultaneously marketing products and services.

These funnels accelerate the sales process and help build relationships across a large audience by guiding a client from indecision to decision. 

An IBB funnel takes a prospect from a place where they are not getting the results they want to a place where they are—with the help of the funnel which gives them actionable steps to get where they need to be.

Here are the basics for creating an IBB funnel:

First you need to identify your audience's needs. You then align the products and services you provide to meet those needs.

Next, you provide content that is going to provide the most value to your ideal prospect. Your job is to educate them on how your brand can meet their needs.

With your audience's needs clearly understood and relevant content created, your final goal is to simply help them.

For free.

No strings attached.

The value you provide throughout the IBB funnel is what builds the relationships you need to convert more leads.

Providing your expertise to potential clients without asking for anything in return is a clear example of marketing with integrity—one of the most desirable traits to your audience.

That integrity will go a long way toward positioning your financial services as a trusted resource.

Understanding expectations along the client journey and conveying how you can meet those expectations is critical.

IBB funnels allow you to send the right message at the right time to capitalize on the intent of your prospect at a given point along the client journey.

Marketing Funnels + Automation = Next Level Marketing

Through automated marketing funnels, integrated analytics and other tools, a financial services marketing consultant can help you identify opportunities, eliminate poorly performing marketing efforts, and maximize marketing efforts that perform well. 

This analysis also identifies marketing avenues that might have gone unexplored for potentially higher marketing ROI.

When you automate your marketing efforts with the help of a marketing consultant, building your advisory brand, marketing, and converting are easier with faster results.

A marketing automation system is not only designed to be less labor intensive, it also does its marketing jobs more effectively.