email marketing Archives - Don Connelly & Associates

5 Essential Lead Generation Tools for Financial Advisors

/ by Don Connelly / Prospecting / 0 comments

A common mistake many advisors make is to look to lead generation as a short-term solution to a dwindling pipeline, with bursts of activities such as cold calls, direct mail, email blasts, or scheduling webinars. While these can sometimes work to fill the void temporarily, they can be very time-consuming, inefficient, and unpredictable.

To ensure a constant flow of qualified leads, lead generation must be built into your daily practice as a machine continuously attracting leads to your pipeline. Fortunately, with digital technology tools, generating qualified leads is easier than ever.

Here are the essential tools available to any advisor seeking to create a systematic process for generating non-stop qualified leads:

Niche Marketing: Narrowing Your Focus to Attract More Quality Prospects

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

In recent years, the commoditization of investment advice has forced an increasing number of financial advisors into offering more comprehensive financial planning as a way to add more value to the client relationship. As a result, the financial planning space is becoming much more crowded, making it difficult for financial advisors to stand out.

That is why many practice management consultants recommend that financial advisors establish a niche to more quickly build their businesses, focusing on a more targeted market they can dominate rather than a broader market they can vanish in. The key to differentiation in a crowded field is to become more focused and specialized to become recognized as the best-of-breed for a specific type of clientele that can be served profitably and effectively.

Successfully crafting a niche is not without its challenges, and most advisors avoid attempting it for fear of narrowing their field of prospects. However, any advisor who has found success in a niche will tell you that, while you may narrow your field of prospects, you increase the likelihood that a higher percentage of prospects in the niche will choose to do business with you.

How to Become Top of Mind with Your Clients and Prospects

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

As a financial advisor, you can’t always be there when a client or prospect has a need. You can only hope that you’re the first person they think of when they want to discuss it or when one of your clients is asked to recommend an advisor. That’s where top-of-mind awareness comes in. If you can develop it effectively, your name is more likely to be the first to come to mind when they have a need.

Chances are, when you crave a cola, you think Coca Cola. That’s because Coke spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising to ensure you do. You want that same reflexive thought to occur with your clients and prospects, but you don’t have to blow out your budget to create similar top-of-mind awareness. The objective of a top-of-mind strategy is to be remembered, and you can accomplish that with five easy steps.

Email Newsletters for Financial Advisors: 6 Tips to Engage Your Contact List

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

With the heavy emphasis on social media marketing, many have said that email marketing, and sending email newsletters in particular, is outdated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Why do I know that? Because the financial advisory business is a relationship business and there’s no better method for cultivating relationships in a digital environment than email marketing. Why? Because it’s inexpensive, easy to manage, gets quicker than most results, and it reaches your clients and prospects where they spend a lot of their time—in their inbox.

It’s also effective. According to Litmus, on average, for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you receive $42 in return. Can you think of anything else you could do to acquire more clients that generates a better return?

Of course, that also assumes that you are doing email marketing right, employing all the best practices to ensure optimal results. Executing an effective email marketing campaign is not rocket science, but it does require adherence to some proven techniques that involve some effort and resources.

Here are six critical elements of effective email newsletters and other email marketing campaigns.

Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors – Email Can Still Be Your Most Powerful Communication Channel

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

It wasn’t long ago when you were considered a marketing dinosaur if you didn’t use email campaigns. Today, you are obsolete if you aren’t using digital marketing to take advantage of all the digital channels available to you, including email marketing. A digital marketing strategy aims to push targeted content out to pull qualified leads in, and email marketing is core to that strategy.

The challenge is your target market is receiving so much content through the internet, email, social media, and snail-mail that the noise has become deafening. It used to be that marketers would create the message and push it out to anyone within range of their ads or mailers. In the digital age, consumers control the message, with the ability to determine what information they receive, how they receive it, and how they respond, if they want to respond. If any content manages to reach them outside that control, it is probably deemed irrelevant or a nuisance.

9 Must-Haves for Your Financial Advisor Website to Attract Prospects and Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

Most Advisors today have a professional website to represent themselves online in front of potential or current clients. In a post-pandemic world where even meetings are conducted online, it’s not really a matter of if you should have a website, but a matter of what website you should have.

Should it be one of those static pages filled with general information, serving as your online business card? Or should it be an engaging piece of online real estate to keep your prospective and current clients hooked and looking for the phone to call you for more? Or should it be somewhere in between?

Here are a few things you must have on your website if you want to stand head and shoulders above other Advisors.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 0 comments

An increasing number of financial advisors are catching on to the fact that most of their clients and target market reside in a digital world where, if they fail to connect with them there, they risk becoming irrelevant or obsolete. Email, the internet, and social media have transformed the way consumers conduct their lives, and their influence now surpasses all other forms of persuasion, including television and print media. The critical question financial advisors must ask themselves now is, “How much digital influence do we have over our target market?”

6 Tech Essentials for Financial Advisors

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

Unquestionably, the advisory industry has been experiencing a significant transformation. Through advances in technology and the democratization of investing, financial advice is quickly becoming commoditized, much to the detriment of Financial Advisors who continue to languish in traditional business models. Today, adopting the right technology is becoming table stakes for advisors who want to maintain the trust of their clients and stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

4 Challenges Financial Advisors Face in the New Digital Environment – And Solutions

/ by Don Connelly / Best Practices / 0 comments

There’s no doubt about it: The past six months have changed our business. It’s not just because those of us in the financial advisory business have changed. Our markets and our clients have changed, too. Their habits and behaviors are different.

Case in point: Those of us of a certain age remember closing lots of sales at the kitchen table – often late at night. But with the pandemic, few people are going to invite a salesperson into their home. That way of doing business was disappearing even before the pandemic. Now it may be gone forever.

Here are four communications challenges your peers are facing – and a few words on some possible solutions. We’ll have more in depth content on each of these topics in the future. But here are the basics to get you started.

5 Creative Marketing Ideas for Financial Advisors to Attract New Clients

/ by Don Connelly / Marketing Yourself / 4 comments

The biggest issue most Financial Advisors face is attracting a steady stream of new clients. In a post-pandemic world that could be even more difficult with seminars and networking events out of the question for a long time to come.

Here are five creative marketing ideas Financial Advisors can use to attract new clients without breaking the bank.

Remember to run any promotional or marketing activity by your compliance department before making any steps toward detailed planning or execution.

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