A marketing campaign can sound intimidating, mysterious and even unnecessary to the hears of many financial advisers and planners. Yet it could be the very thing your business needs to grow in 2021.
In brief, marketing campaigns are focused, organised and strategic efforts by a financial firm to shepherd an audience towards a selected action. They are crucial for making your financial brand more recognisable, memorable and trusted – whilst bestowing it with a greater sense of purpose, emotion and identity.
This might like a lot of effort – and it can be. It can be tempting for some financial planners and advisers to simply coast along as they have done, slowly building their business through referrals. Yet, in our experience, this slower progression can lead to missed opportunities and eventually hits a wall.
To break into the next level of financial marketing, therefore, it’s a good idea to look at how to start and grow your marketing campaigns. This guide will help you with inspiration on how to get started.
Defining a “financial marketing campaign”
Certain images might spring to mind when you hear this phrase. Perhaps you imagine a U.S. Presidential candidate on the campaign trail, visiting key “swing states” to hold public rallies. This is unlikely to be the style that most financial advisers will take!
Mirriam-Webster defines a campaign as a “Connected series of operations designed to bring about a particular result.” This broadens our understanding somewhat. On this understanding, a financial marketing campaign could take a number of forms:
- An email marketing campaign to a specific email list (e.g. offering them a free pension webinar).
- A Google Ads campaign to draw particular web users to your landing page and enquire.
- An SEO campaign (search engine optimisation), whereby you gradually draw in higher numbers of qualified organic website visitors who perform various “conversion actions” (e.g. downloading a PDF guide).
- A short advert placed by your firm on local radio or in a local newspaper.
- A direct mail campaign to accountants, lawyers and other B2B target clients within a geographic area.
As you can see, some of these ideas may be classed appropriately as “advertising” – i.e. putting your message in front of an audience, interrupting what they are doing in hope that they will take notice and follow your desired course of action.
However, many of the other financial marketing campaign ideas here are better categorised as “inbound” marketing approaches. Here, the emphasis is, instead, on positioning your brand in front of specific people who are already looking for what you have to offer (e.g. search engine marketing).
Which financial marketing campaigns should I be running?
Reading this as a financial planner or adviser, you can probably see that there are many possibilities for running marketing campaigns. Yet choosing the right ones can be difficult to discern. After all, it is not realistic for most IFAs (which are typically small firms) to run all of the above at once – and certainly, it isn’t possible to do this well.
As such, financial firms need to be strategic about when and how they will run their marketing campaigns. Many factors will play into your choices in this respect:
- Cost. How much marketing budget have you allocated to your campaigns for the year? Which types of campaigns are likely to be more costly than others, and can you justify this cost?
- Time of year. Might certain types of marketing campaign be more suitable depending on where you are in the calendar? For instance, perhaps a direct mail campaign to clients might work best at Christmas, whilst an email marketing campaign might be appropriate towards the end of tax year.
- Target audience. Depending on who you are trying to reach with your marketing, certain types of campaign may be more appropriate than others. For example, is your audience especially active on Facebook? If not, then allocating a large budget towards Facebook Ads campaigns may not be the wisest use of resources.
- Return on marketing investment (ROMI). How many enquiries can you realistically expect a particular campaign to generate over a certain period of time, given X amount of budget? How many of these are plausibly going to turn into clients, and what kind of revenue might that represent? Here, digital marketing campaigns hold an edge over traditional advertising (e.g. radio and TV) since it’s far easier to measure performance.
Implementing a plan & monitoring success
Once you have a clearer idea of which marketing campaigns may be most suitable for your financial firm in the months ahead, it’s time to get practical. How, exactly, will you put these campaigns into motion and ensure they move in the right direction?
Many firms are in the strong position of being able to do this themselves. Perhaps you have an internal marketing person who has the experience and capacity to set up these campaigns properly, giving them the appropriate level of attention they need over time. Yet many financial advisers and planners simply do not have the time or inclination to do this effectively (and consistently) themselves.
This is where it can help to approach a financial marketing agency which understands the space you operate in. Of course, this represents an added cost which you must take into account. Yet this must be balanced against the cost of not doing anything at all, or trying to do it yourself – perhaps poorly (if you are completely honest with yourself).
A good agency will understand that you are trying to weigh all of this up. That’s why at CreativeAdviser we start with a “fact-finding” exercise to make sure we fully understand your marketing goals. From there, we can put a proposal together – completely free and without obligation – to outline how we can help, the kinds of results we’d be aiming for and how this translates into a return on investment.
Interested? Get in touch today to discuss your own campaign with us!
