What Is A Financial Adviser Marketing Plan

A financial adviser marketing plan might not be top of your list of things to think about when it comes to lead generation. It may sound like a foreign or even needless thing to spend time on, but in the same way that you need to have an investment plan and strategy, in order to generate new leads and clients, you should be thinking about they way in which you’re going to do it.

In this article we’re going to run through what a financial adviser marketing plan is, what it entails and how you can build one yourself. As a bonus, we’ll be giving you two examples of plans that you can use in your own marketing, or if you really can’t be bothered, you can reach out to us and book an appointment to see how we can do it for you.

What Is A Financial Adviser Marketing Plan?

Ultimately, a marketing plan is a road map that outlines all the different directions you will be taking to try and grow your business. Think of it as a large overview of everything that will happen on a day to day level, and how you’re going to measure the success of the various campaigns you are going to run.

The purpose of creating a financial adviser marketing plan is to organise the strategies and tactics so that it is easy to understand, share and refer back to if needed. By having a marketing plan in place, it acts as a vault for each individual campaign your going to run. This means it is easy to break down all the steps and items needed, meaning you’re able to be focused and efficient in your delivery.

There are lots of different types of marketing plans that you could create. It really depends on what you want to do, but an example of these are:

• Quarterly marketing plan
• Paid marketing plan
• Social media marketing plan
• Content marketing plan
• Product launch marketing plan

Now, a financial adviser marketing plan is very different from a strategy. We will be covering this in the next section.

How Does A Financial Adviser Marketing Plan Differ From Any Other?

So, here’s the ultimate dirty secret about marketing. All marketing plans, strategies and tactics are the same. No matter what industry you’re in, what product you sell, or who you sell it to, the moving parts are the same. 

It’s important to understand that you can’t copy a campaign from one industry and paste it into another. There are variables that mean the wording, imagery, targeting and offer would need to be changed, but the mechanics of it largely remain the same.

The world of finance is an odd one. On the one hand, tech is moving finance forward at lightspeed, yet financial services firms are firmly entrenched in the 1980s with their dial for dollars attitude, huge sales teams and archaic approach to lead generation. We cannot tell you how many times we have spoken to heads of large financial services firms, only for them to say, ‘Our clients aren’t on Facebook.’

It is for this very reason that a financial adviser marketing plan is an essential element of any lead generation campaign. How does it differ from any other plan? Normally because there isn’t one! Realistically, a seasoned marketing professional will be able to put a marketing plan together that will focus on the core elements of your business, as well as deliver the benefits that a good online presence will bring.

Strategy vs Plan

We’ve covered what a plan is in the section above, but now we want to look at why a financial adviser marketing plan is different from a marketing strategy. As stated, a plan is a much larger overview of the objective of the marketing. 

A marketing strategy is the specific elements, goals and objectives of a particular campaign. It will talk about the buyer personas you’re targeting, the offer you want them to receive and then the steps after this to nurture them to becoming a customer. It will outline the tools you want to use (social media advertising, for example), the frequency of posts as well as the type of content that will be created alongside it. 

A marketing plan will contain more than one strategy. It will be the basis upon which all of your marketing strategies will be built, which in turn will connect everything back to the large business goal and company operations.

How To Create A Financial Adviser Marketing Plan.

Now that you understand the difference between a marketing plan and strategy, we’re going to give you a step by step guide to creating your own financial adviser marketing plan. If you want to skip this and dive straight into the strategy, you do that by downloading our ultimate 3-step marketing strategy here that will get you generating leads in no time at all.

There are 8 steps that you need to think about when creating your marketing plan. We’ll walk you through them as we go.

1. Create Your Business Mission
2. Set The KPI’s For Success
3. Identify Buyer Personas
4. Describe Your Content Approach & Strategy.
5. Clearly Outline The Plan Omissions.
6. Set Your Marketing Budget
7. Know Your Competition
8. Outline The Key Members Of The Team And Responsibilities

1. Create Your Business Mission

The first thing to do is to state the company mission. It’s really important as what you find is many people within the organisiation don’t really know what the overall mission is. This needs to be specific, but don’t go into too much detail just yet. 

An example might be, “to help expats successfully save and generate wealth in preparation for retirement.” As a result of this the marketing mission would be to provide honest, transparent advice about savings plans and investments, deliver high quality information and convert them into clients who trust and respect the advice of their advisers.

2. Set The KPI’s For Success

If you have no idea what you are looking for in terms of results, it will be impossible to identify if the campaigns are successful. These need to be set and agreed upon by everyone involved, but will generally break down into three broad types; traffic, leads and conversions.

If we use our example above, a KPI would be the volume of people who have downloaded guides about expat savings. We want to see this number increase month on month. If so, then we know we are on target.

3. Identify Buyer Personas

Knowing who you are targeting is a key objective of your marketing plan. This, really, should be one of the very first things you spend time developing as part of a financial adviser marketing plan. Without it, all the other hard work you are doing is useless. 

Define your ideal clients. What are their goals, plans, challenges and objectives? Think about how your product and service helps them achieve those things and how you can frame what you do as invaluable to them. 

We’ve written an awesome guide to building out your own personas, as well as a free template on this page.

4. Describe Your Content Approach And Strategy

In this section, you’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about your core marketing channels and strategies on each one. This will be informed by the information you uncover in your buyer persona development. 

There are so many options for you to use here. It’s vital that you choose the correct ones and explain how you’ll use them. 

For example, your content strategy should cover these points:

What types of content you’re going to create: Blogs, videos, infographics, the list is endless.

How much of it you’re going to make: Will it be daily, weekly or monthly? How many times within these time frames will you be creating it?

The goals you set for each content type: What’s the objective of creating this content? They need to be aligned with the strategy KPI’s so that you’re not just creating content for the sake of creating it.

The distribution channels: Where will this content be published? What channels will you be targeting to distribute your content on?

Paid advertising: Will you need to promote this content via paid methods? 

5. Clearly Outline The Plan Omissions

Whilst you want to be very clear about what you are focusing on, you also want to make sure everyone on the team knows what you are not going to focus on. There may be sections of the business that are not relevant to this marketing plan. As a result you need to make sure that no time and effort is wasted on trying to deliver something that is not part of the immediate goal.

6. Set Your Marketing Budget

A financial adviser marketing plan should cover all expenses that you will incur. Lots of channels and methods are indeed free to use, but you may need to spend money elsewhere on things such as freelancers, graphic design, or even a new marketing hire. 

The last thing you want is to find that your new marketing plan is missing the vital elements it needs to succeed because you haven’t accounted for them in the budget.

7. Know Your Competition

Knowing who the competition is and what they are doing is important. It’s not the be all and end all, but it certainly helps to understand their marketing campaigns. 

Review their marketing messages, look at where they are investing their marketing budget and get a key understanding of who they are trying to target. 

Don’t try and copy their campaigns, but do look at what is working for them and use that as information on how to fine tune yours.

8. Outline The Key Members Of The Team And Responsibilities

Lastly, everyone on the team needs to know their roles and responsibilities. You may not need to list their day-to-day activities, but you certainly should understand who’s responsible for what. 

If it’s just you, then make sure you are able to delegate to freelancers or your agency team for what they are required to do and when it needs to be delivered. 

Your financial adviser marketing plan should be reviewed on a regular basis so that you can refresh it according to campaign results and platform developments. You may find that one campaign needs more work than the others to produce similar results and it may not be viable to continue with it.

Ultimately, it should provide you with a clear direction on where you want to go and how you are going to get there. If you’re still a bit confused on what you should be doing with this, you can use this link to generate your own marketing plan in minutes. https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-plan-template-generator It’s super easy to use and does a lot of the leg work for you.

Now, once you’ve done this, you have to put it into action, and that’s where we come in. At adviser Leads we offer a FREE marketing strategy session (worth $1000) that at the end of you’ll have an actionable plan to start generating leads immediate. All you have to do is click the button below and book your session.