Webinar Lead Generation Campaigns For Financial Advisers

Webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers have proved, in the past, to be incredibly effective tools; delivering high conversion rates and the potential for evergreen content.

In this article, we’re going to dive into a complex topic. We’ll cover what webinar campaigns are, how they’re different from other lead gen campaigns and how you can build one out yourself (Of course if you don’t have the time or skills to do it, we can set one up for you. Simply go to our appointment booking page to set up your FREE strategy session with us now).

Webinar campaigns represent a method to generate leads that are highly qualified and highly motivated to secure your services as a financial adviser; when done right. They can also represent a lot of time and energy wasted if not managed properly, so it’s very important that the correct prior planning and preparation is done. 

What Is A Webinar?

A webinar, simply put, is an online meeting where multiple people register to an online event that is hosted by one party. It’s an online seminar. Usually this is an event that is hosted by an organisation or expert individual that offers insight into a single topic. Usually they won’t last longer than an hour.

The general format is that of an introduction to the webinar, the person or persons hosting, what the subject matter is about and then a Q&A session at the end. In more recent times, webinars have been used as exclusive selling events, meaning that those who attend get either early bird access to the product being displayed, or a special discounted rate for signing up within the hour after the webinar is finished. 

A webinar is not to be mistaken with a live feed from a seminar. Whilst multiple attendants can take part in the call, it is a much more interactive experience. Generally fewer people will attend, although some softwares will allow you to have upwards of 100 people on the weinar at the same time. Ultimately they are great tools and opportunities to directly interact with prospects and demonstrate value in a direct way.

How Are Webinar Lead Generation Campaigns For Financial Advisers Different From Other Lead Gen Campaigns?

A webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers is a bit more time intensive than regular lead generation campaigns. They have a lot more moving parts and require a great deal more time to put together. They generally are longer term investments depending on the approach you want to take with them. 

One of the beautiful things about webinar campaigns is that they can be evergreen, or at the very least, minimal maintenance. This is because almost all of the softwares that you can use for them to reschedule your event with pre recorded content that will auto play at set times. So how is this any different from any other campaign?

Webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers need to be more carefully thought out. There also needs to be, at least once, direct input and a live event that includes you as the host. It can be quite a challenge as it will require you to speak about a select topic that you have deep knowledge of, as well as present a deck for people to follow along with. You’ll also need to be comfortable answering questions that people will throw at you both during and after the event in the Q&A section. But don’t worry, these can be vetted in real time and no one else will be able to  see them, so you get to choose the ones you want to answer.

Aside from this, most of the campaign set up is the same. Assuming you are setting up your campaigns to attract your ideal prospect, provide them with something of value that they can use immediately and then nurture them towards a consultation. If you aren’t doing this, then your campaigns will be very different indeed!

Are Webinar Campaigns Worth The Effort?

Running webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers is a lot of effort. Not only for the person hosting the event, but the person or team putting it all together. They aren’t just something you throw together the day before. They require a great deal of planning and marketing beforehand, especially if you are hoping to use it as a direct customer acquisition tool. 

Let’s just take a look at the numbers before we dive into the effort required to put something like this together. Typically the average conversion rate of a webinar is 55%. So, assuming you have 1000 people on your email list, you can expect to have 550 of those people turn up. That’s a pretty good rate of return by any standard.

So what are the conversion rates of cold traffic? The numbers here are pretty good too. In fact, assuming you have done your targeting properly and are hitting all the right buttons in terms of what your ideal prospect is looking for (how to retire with $1m by the time you’re 45 as an example) you can expect 30% of people to convert. Now, this is where things get really interesting. Paid advertising is cheap. This means, for roughly $100 (depending on your chosen advertising platform) you could generate anywhere between 1000-10000 clicks to the landing page. 

Even at the low end of the traffic scale, that’s still 300 additional people who have registered for the webinar. That’s 300 new people who want to learn more about your subject matter. Even if one of those people converts as a client, you’ve made your investment back many times over. The numbers simply get better the more you spend; double it and you now have 600 interested people and so on and so on.

That’s not even the best part. Many people would look at getting webinar registrants as the win as you have to assume that some will sign up to become clients. The really awesome bit about this is that you now have the contact details and data of your ideal customers and they freely gave it to you, as well as the information that they are interested in a particular service you have. 

You can then leverage this data in Google and Facebook to find other people who are interested in those services, meaning you have a never ending supply of increasingly fine tuned data. Whilst this is great, we need to look at the time and money investment needed to run webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers. 

First of all, you’re going to need time. Time to create the webinar, time to build out the marketing tools and strategy and time to host the event. This is no small feat, especially of you don’t have a high level of marketing skill sets needed to execute this quickly. Fortunately, softwares like webinarjam manage most of this process for you. They will even host the event of their servers meaning you don’t need to spend any further money on websites, domains or hosting. The downside of this? They aren’t exactly cheap.

If you’re looking to generate new leads from a cold audience, then you’re going to need to invest further time, effort and money into some paid advertising campaigns. Again, if you haven’t got the skill set to do this, learning how will far outweigh the benefits of the result. It can take a long time to get good results and you may end up spending a lot of cash to find out how (Alternatively, you can book in a free strategy session with us at Adviser Leads with $1000 and we will help to get you started).

Ultimately, you’re going to have to invest some money somewhere along the line but the payback from it will likely be pretty good. Considering that these types of campaigns can be left running for months at a time with minimal management and constantly bring in a fresh stream of clients, it’s worth the money. 

How much money, we hear you cry?! Well, expect to be spending around $1500-$2000 ongoing.

What Should Your Webinar Be About?

This really is the crux of the matter. Your webinar should be about something you a) are knowledgeable about and b) something that your audience is interested in. We’ve said this before many times, but try running a dog training course to cat owners. No matter how good you are at it, if your audience doesn’t care, it will be a flop.

Realistically this shouldn’t be too hard to come up with. You, as an adviser, should already have a key area of expertise that you deal with and a particular type of clientele that you work with. If you’re really struggling to come up with something, why not ask your clients? Ask them what they would like to learn more about and create something from their feedback. This is one of the key tools we use when helping to build out client buyer personas. If one person wants to know more about a particular subject, then you can bet that there are others’ out there who want to as well.

How To Build Webinar Lead Generation Campaigns For Financial Advisers?

There are two ways in which this can be done. One is more cost effective, the other is exponentially faster. We’ll cover the cost effective way first.

You’re going to need to have several things in place before anything happens. These tools will be as follows:

• Email client (mailchimp, aweber etc…)
• Landing page tool (lead pages, instapage etc…)
• Paid conference call tool (zoom, team viewer etc…)
• Paid advertising account (Facebook and/or Google) but this is optional

Setting Up Your Landing Page

You’re going to need at least two different landing pages. Your registration page and your thank you page. On your registration page you will want to have all the specific details about the event, such as time, subject and speakers. You’ll also need the most important part of the page; the registration form. 

Once people have filled out this form, you should redirect them to your thank you page. This is where you will let them know they have successfully registered for the event and what they should expect next in the upcoming days or weeks leading to the live event.

Sending Out Emails

This can be tricky if you haven’t linked your mail client up to your landing page form. However, it isn;t impossible. Ideally you will have set up an automation emailing list that auto emails out certain information, based on timings and actions taken by members in the list. If you haven’t done this, then you’ll likely need to add these members and email out manually. 

The types of emails you’ll need to send are:

• Registration confirmation
• Follow up information with event info
• Week before notification
• Day before notification
• Sorry we missed you email
• Event wrap up and offer link email

If you haven’t got these set up to be automatic, then you need to be really organised with your timings to ensure everyone gets the right email at the right time. If you are planning on running this event again, it’s going to be really tough to reuse these emails as the data should be auto populated when people subscribe. 

Hosting The Event

Webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers need to look professional. What doesn’t look good is having personal accounts with free time limits connected to them. Make sure that your chosen provider allows you to do the things you need it to and has good security and connectivity options. You’ll also want to be familiar with all the settings. Accidentally turning yourself into a kitten during the call is going to score you no points with your potential new clients. 

If you want to reuse the event later, then make sure you know how to record the call. Without it, you will have to sit through the event and do it live again. 

Running Ads

These are optional, but a great way to drive new traffic to your landing page quickly and cheaply. Really, if you don’t have the skills or time required to develop a proper advertising campaign, either pay someone to do it (lots of cheap pros on fiverr.com) or ignore it entirely and leverage your own database. 

Final Thoughts

Webinar lead generation campaigns for financial advisers are excellent ways of generation high quality leads as well as new clients. They’re powerful tools once operational, but they do come at a high investment cost in terms of time, resources and money. They’re a commitment and not a short time, quick results kind of campaign.

Once up and running though, they will repay the investment many times over and for a long time into the future. If you want to learn more about how the team at Adviser Leads can manage this for you, click the banner below and book a free strategy session (worth $1000) right now.