Financial Advisor Seminar Marketing
What's working right now to get at least 20 qualified buying units to your seminars.
Why seminars?
Improve the wheel - not reinvent it
If you want to get in front of a large number of your ideal prospects on a consistent basis then seminars might be the best way to do this in 2020.
Financial seminars have been around for years and while in the past they involved shelling out huge sums of money to get people attend them, it doesn't have to be that way now.
With the inception of social media the old tried and true way of warming up a cold lead and getting them to come in the office as become more affordable compared to the old school marketing in the past.
After promoting numerous seminars across the country over the last 12 months using social media we've seen some trends and I'm going to share them with you in this guide.
So if you want to get at least 20 qualified buying units to your next seminar, then keep reading.
Results
Let's take a look at some of the results we've gotten for advisors
The top performing seminars
3 types of seminars
Now, if you've been doing seminars for any amount of time, you know now there's mainly three types of seminars that people are doing.
You have your educational seminars, you have your lunch and learns, and then you have your dinner seminars.
Obviously doing seminars have been around for ages in probably lunch and learns as well.
The educational seminars are somewhat kind of new, especially with the explosion of social media.
Let's take a look at how each seminar performs.
Educational Seminar
Average cost per registrant
$5.00 - $30.00 depending on the the topic of the seminar and venue.
Average show up rate
You can expect to see 40% - 50% show up rates for your educational seminars.
Top performing topics
Social Security
Taxes In Retirement
Retirement/Income Planning
Lunch & Learn Seminar
Average cost per registrant
$10.00 - $20.00 no matter the topic of the seminar and or venue.
Average show up rate
You can expect to see 40% - 50% show up rates for your lunch & learn seminars.
Top performing topics
Being that lunch is being served you can choose any topic and you will still fill the room.
Dinner Seminar
Average cost per registrant
$5.00 - $15.00 no matter the topic of the seminar and or venue.
Average show up rate
You can expect to see 40% - 50% show up rates for your lunch & learn seminars.
Top performing topics
Being that dinner is being served you can choose any topic and you will still fill the room.
Does direct mail still work?
Results from a direct mail vs social media campaign
Here are the results of a test where the advisor sent out a direct mail piece and we used the exact same mailer to create a social media campaign targeting the same geographical area.
The direct mail campaign was a 9,100 piece mailer and the Facebook campaign reached a total of 4,876 people.
Cost | $4,800 | $344 |
Registered | 57 | 50 |
Showed Up | 55 (96%) | 38 (76%) |
Appointments Booked | 11 (20%) | 18 (47%) |
Targeting
How to get qualified prospects to register
There's basically three ways that you want to target your ideal client on Facebook.
1
Geographical
If you are in an area where there is an affluent suburb, there's a large corporate center or any other factors that may contribute to wealthy people congregating; then you want to start there.
2
Personal attributes
In addition to targeting people who are interested in retirement, you want to layer on additional interest such as buying habits, educational background, and other attributes that would closely align with your ideal client profile.
3
Messaging
The ad copy that you write plays a big role in who's going to respond to your seminar. You want to make sure that you're writing ad copy that calls out the right avatar to get them to register.
Results
When you combine all 3 elements of targeting you get the following
This campaign was targeting corporate employees at some of the larger companies in the advisor's market.
We only showed these ads to those who were likely to fit the ideal client profile in two geographical areas.
The results were 6 appointments booked with average assets of $3MM.
The total cost of this campaign was $2,227.89 with a cost per lead of $28.20.
Closing only one of these prospects would more than 10X the return on ad spend for this advisor.
Sign up & show up
3 keys to getting prospects to show up
1
Optimized landing pages
The majority of your traffic will come from mobile and you want to make sure your landing pages load quickly with clear CTAs (call to action) or people will click the back button real quick.
2
Automated email & SMS
SMS is gonna play a huge part in getting people to show up to your event because half the people who sign up will not even check the email.
3
Human call confirmations
Having a human interaction is important in this process because people want to know you are real. This presents an opportunity for you to introduce yourself to prospect prior to attending.
$1MM in annuity premium
A testimonial from one of our partners
"I started using Eight Digit Media in an attempt to better my seminar results. I had worked with multiple Facebook advertising firms in the past in order to fill my workshops but had mixed results.
With the company Advisor Fuel I realized the number of registrants never seemed to match up with the number of people that showed up, and we had to do a lot of the legwork for confirmation calls etc. Prospect quality was also terrible.
I then switched to White Glove workshops where the results and quality of prospects were better, but the costs were outrageous. I was spending $15k+ per month to market 2-3 workshops. I would have months where I would close half a million in annuity premium, but with the costs, my profit was never what it should be, and if there were a couple of bad events, you still had to eat that large marketing expense.
Chris and Eight Digit Media have really been the best of both worlds. They have produced excellent registration numbers at incredibly low costs compared to direct mail, and companies like White Glove and the people that show up have been right in line with expectations.
Also, prospect quality has been excellent in my first couple of workshops, where I spent maybe $2,500 in advertising and closed over $1,000,000 in annuity premium. Just last week, I had a meeting with a prospect with $8M in investable assets, so I am extremely pleased with the results from Eight Digit Media. I would recommend them to any advisor looking to lower their marketing costs and get in front of more people."
Aaron C. - Financial Advisor
Seminar Marketing
Consultation
We only work with one advisor in each market and we have a limited number of spots available in each state due to the high demand right now.
Seminar Marketing
Flat fee pricing for monthly seminars
$2,500/month
+ $500 one time set up fee
* Ad spend not included
We do all of the work and you show up, do your presentation and book appointments.
Features
