How Much Money Should You Spend On Financial Services Marketing?

Spending money on financial services marketing is something that a lot of firms and advisors are starting to do these days. Financial services companies have always had marketing departments, however, they have usually been seen as a luxury and labelled as the ‘colouring in’ department by those on the sales floor.

When recession hits and the market is down, the marketing team is normally the first thing that is sacrificed as they are deemed to be non-essential. This just goes to show how far removed from the real world that companies within this sector are. Far too much emphasis is placed on traditional ways of lead generation. Dialing for dollars and non-stop power hours on the phone are simply archaic ways of doing business.

The problem is, that’s the way it was done 25-30 years ago and the top brass are those that were on the floor when it worked. It worked then, so why change things? Well, because that’s the way it’s always been done is the most dangerous phrase in business. People are resistant to change but if you don’t adapt, your business will go the way of the dinosaurs. 

So, we’re going to take a realistic view of how much you should be spending on financial service marketing and if it’s really worth investing in.

What Are Your Financial Services Marketing Goals?

This might sound like a bit of a stupid question, however, many advisers as well as the firms don’t really understand what their marketing goals are. The obvious answer is more leads, and that’s fine, but what kind of leads? We get the answer of pension leads quite a bit but it’s not quite as simple as that.

Whilst getting pension leads, for example is a viable marketing goal, they have to be a bit more clearly defined than that. How many pension leads do you need? Are we looking at British expat pension leads or are we looking at nationals who have worked in the U.K. and paid into a private pension plan? 

These subtle differences make a big impact on the campaign type, targeting, messaging and imagery of the campaigns you want to run. 

We also need to think about the volume of leads needing to be generated. Is 1 a day enough or do you need more than that? What’s your capacity to speak to these people and how long is it going to take to see a return from these leads? All of these should be taken into account when thinking about what you should be spending on financial services marketing.

What Channels Should You Use?

Traditionally in marketing there are 3 main channels. Earned, owned and paid. What we will be focusing on primarily is whether you should be looking at paid, owned or a combination of the two as part of your financial services marketing.

It really comes down to how quickly you want to see results. Depending on if you are the decision maker or you are simply running your own campaigns as an advisor your approach will be usually one or the other. Single advisors will generally want leads as quickly as they can get them, which means that paid channels will generally be the best option. Using social media advertising or Google ads are usually cost effective and efficient ways of generating traffic and leads.

There is a caveat on this though; ad bills can get quite high quite quickly if not managed properly, so the money you end up spending on your financial services marketing campaigns might outweigh what comes back to you in the short term future.

Owned, or organic traffic is really the holy grail of financial services marketing; indeed of all marketing. It means you are at the top of search engine results pages and leads are being created free of charge. 

SEO has captured the hearts and minds of many a finance company but can quickly become un-enamoured with it when they realise that results are seldom instant and a huge amount of work in content development is needed (Oh to go back to the glory days of only needing backlinks!).

There’s a real trade off when looking at what you should be investing in financial service marketing and that is time vs money. You really get what you pay for in the world of digital marketing and a handy way of thinking about it is this diagram below: 

If you are looking to make a long term investment into financial services marketing, then creating content might be a good option for you. There’s no immediate pay off and you could be looking at least 3 months before you start to see any movement, but once those leads come in, they will be highly qualified and more importantly, free.

Do You Need A Website For Financial Services Marketing?

Yes and no. We run lots of successful campaigns for our clients with absolutely no need for a website at all. We also have clients that our campaigns wouldn’t work without one.

Remember our marketing objectives? These will dictate the need for additional tools as part of your financial services marketing arsenal. If you’re looking to generate organic traffic, then absolutely. If you have a tool that you want leads to use before getting in contact, then you will need a website.

If you are just looking to get leads for consultations, then you probably don’t need one. Most people are happy to fill in lead forms on social media websites now and trust that they are going to find their way to the right person within the company that they are looking to get help from.

Cost can be a prohibitor when it comes to building websites with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to thousands. Factor in time and you well end up finding that your financial services marketing campaign is costing you a lot more than you bargained for.

Again, go back to the marketing objectives, how quickly do you need results? What type of leads are you after? How quickly can you get something moving to see results? These are all questions you can ask yourself before committing any money.

Are You Going To Be Doing It Yourself?

This may sound like a crazy thing to suggest, but many financial advisors are trying to learn how to manage their own campaigns. There’s so much information available that it’s not out of the realms of possibility that you could learn how to do this yourself. 

But we circle back to the marketing objectives once more. Have you really got the capacity for trial and error? Do you have the time to invest in teaching yourself and is the cost of educating yourself comparable to someone just doing it for you? 

If you do decide to take the plunge, there are several cost factors that you have to consider. Whilst your intellectual expertise in the world of finance may be second to none, finding the time to get it all down and add to a website could be lengthy. It could be worth investing in a person to manage this for you, which of course comes at a price.

If you don’t fancy being a content creator, you’ll have to find someone to create it for you, which of course, is not going to be done for free. (See the triangle diagram above).

Hiring For Financial Service Marketing

How much does it cost to hire someone to do your financial services marketing? There’s two parts to this. The agency service fee and the cost of advertising. Let’s assume that you won’t be focusing on the organic side of things and creating content as this would affect the pricing a bit. Mainly by increasing the service fee as out of this the agency will have to pay for writers, designers, outreach etc… We will give you a rough estimate of what you should pay for a high quality organic service, but we will come to that later.

Utilising paid ads your starting monthly expenditure just on ads should be no less than $500 per month. This is a low budget that will get used quite quickly but it will generate leads. Not huge volumes but you’ll get something you can work with.

The general rule of thumb is the more you spend on ads, the quicker you get results. A number of our clients will spend between $1000-2500 per month on ads alone.

As for agency fees, these can vary as well. Many agencies will have a set price they charge for standard services with add-ons that will increase the price. Each is different but you can expect to pay anywhere between $1000-5000 per month.

Going back to the organic spend on financial services marketing; there’s a huge gap between various services and many individuals and agencies have different offers according to their specialities. For a really good organic service, expect to pay around $3000 per month.

How Much Should You Really Be Spending On Your Financial Services Marketing?

The first thing you need to be clear on is your goals and objectives. Once you understand who the people are you’re targeting and what products or services you’re offering them, you will be better placed to understand how much you should be spending.

A good bet of getting some skin in the game without really investing too much is a starting point of around $1500-2000 per month. 

Incidentally (or not), Adviser Leads charges a flat rate service fee of $1000 per month four our specialist financial service marketing services. 

Want to learn more about how the Adviser Leads team can start helping you to generate leads?

Fill out the form below and one of our team will reach out to you.