Financial Services Marketing
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The process of marketing your wealth management services can feel tedious, especially if you’re using a manual approach to data collection, follow up and nurturing your new leads into the customer phase. On top of that, staying compliant with the extra regulations that guide your industry can make the stakes feel pretty high. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Many businesses just like yours have turned to wealth management marketing automation to solve for efficiency and effectiveness.
There are several important aspects to using marketing automation in wealth management or other financial services companies. These include tracking behavior to get the data you need for segmentation and personalization, and developing automated upselling and cross-selling programs to keep your business growing.
Track Customer Behavior to Gain Insights and Deliver Better Experiences
One of the best benefits of using marketing automation as a wealth manager or financial advisor is the data. When you’re tracking your efforts correctly, you’ll have data on how people use your website, landing pages, emails, video content, sms messages and even social media. You’ll be able to supplement that with knowledge about ad performance, phone-or-event-based outbound efforts or other parts of your marketing strategy to get a more accurate picture of what is working. You’ll also see what’s not working, and begin to find more and more insights about your customer base. These insights will help you improve your customer journey, and deliver a better experience with your brand.
Ok, But How Do You Implement That?
The best part is that it’s actually fairly easy to do once you’ve implemented your marketing automation solution. Simply create and paste a small piece of HTML or JavaScript code on every page you want to track. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, you can paste the tracking code in one location, and the system will automatically add it to every page on the site. Once that’s done, install Google Tag Manager and add it to your web browser toolbar to ensure that all of your tags are working properly at all times.
How is That Different From Google Analytics?
You’re probably asking yourself how this is any different from your Google Analytics account. Whereas Google Analytics does allow users to measure the behavior of anonymous users, marketing automation tracking allows you to understand exactly who is doing what on your digital properties at all times and in real-time so you can respond to these actions with personalized messaging and offers.
And remember, marketing automation can also help you track how your potential investors are interacting with your social media content, email messaging, and digital advertising. With the right system, you have complete and transparent insight into actual key performance indicators that are unique to the individual user. And you can take things a step further by implementing lead scoring based on these behaviors, which will help you better understand how to treat and communicate with the lead as they progress (or regress) through the sales funnel.
Retain Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management
Marketing automation provides the foundation for personalized marketing campaigns that drive asset management growth. That’s because your marketing automation platform is the means by which you segment your audiences and make specific offers at just the right time.
Retaining your clients, and then growing them into other services and products is the secret to serious revenue. Focus on keeping your current clients educated, excited and engaged with an automated nurture sequence, or special customer marketing initiative like investor stories, surprise bonuses and even live appreciation events.
With marketing automation for the wealth management and financial industry, you can properly scale your client roster and assets under management with more efficiency. And the best way to do this is through personalizing your content and messaging via segmentation and automated email campaigns.
How Can You Do That Efficiently?
You don’t have the time to send hundreds of individual emails to each and every prospect and client every single day. Even if you did, there’s no way you’d be able to keep it all straight and never send to the wrong address or insert the wrong link. With marketing automation for the wealth management and financial industry, you can group all of your contacts into specific segments based on their demographics, behaviors, financial goals, and interests. Once everyone is placed in their proper faction, you can then deliver more targeted messaging that is uniquely suited to their personal characteristics and attributes. This way, you can get super specific about different investment opportunities or services depending on who you’re speaking to.
Reach the Next Generation of Investors
According to Forbes, roughly $30 trillion in assets are about to be passed from the Baby Boomers to younger generations in “the great wealth transfer.” To take a bit of a scary stance, that is a lot of money to move from an educated, successful, and experienced group of investors to an unproven and inexperienced group of upstart beneficiaries. But, that’s where you come in, right?
And, Where Do You Do That?
The good news is that what Millennials and Gen ‘X’ers lack in financial literacy, they more than make up for with digital savvy. According to the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), “Approximately 80 percent of Millennials use their smartphone for transactional purposes like paying bills and depositing checks, and 90 percent use their phones for informational activities like tracking their spending. However, the GFLEC report also says that smartphone usage for financial services management doesn’t correlate with individuals improving their financial practices. Therefore, it’s up to wealth management firms and financial advisors to deliver the right content to the right medium to help these upcoming generations of investors better understand their responsibilities and opportunities.
Of course, the best way to establish and foster trust is through education. Long before these green investors inherit their parents’ and grandparents’ wealth, you and your colleagues should be grooming them for financial maturity through long-term lead nurturing.
Ok, But Like, How?
Here’s an example of what a digital-first customer journey might look like.
- A young professional receives a promotion at work and begins exploring more advanced financial investment options
- After searching “financial literacy for Millennials,” she clicks on your website
- She does some light research but doesn’t request any further information or content
- Over the next 30 days, she receives your retargeting advertisements as she browses online
- She clicks on an ad and is redirected to a landing page with a gated asset titled, “Improve Your Financial Literacy in 5 Easy Steps.”
- She submits her details, reads the content, and begins to sharpen her financial knowledge and skills
- Meanwhile, now that you have her contact information, you can place her in a custom segment and begin sending automated email campaigns
- Tracking her behaviors and interactions, you’re alerted when she hits a certain lead score (indicates she’s moved on in the buyer’s process)
- At this point, you begin more direct and personal sales outreach with the hopes of securing her as a client early in her career
- Once your new client has begun her investment journey, you continue to provide relevant and regular content and messaging for potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities
Once you turn on all of the switches, you simply wait for the data to roll in and A/B test and optimize as necessary. Everything is simple, streamlined, and efficient.
Marketing Automation Helps Wealth Managers Cut to the Chase!
By streamlining your processes using marketing automation, you and your team will have the time and resources you need to develop and distribute more personalized content. The efficiency you gain helps you get time to refine your brand messaging and external communications, and provide the tailored support your prospective customers and current investors so desperately want and need. Since a lot of your competitors are still fumbling around with an ESP (or worse, an Excel Sheet), the sooner you start combining great strategies with great technologies, the sooner you’ll be able to distance yourself from rival firms and appeal to your target audience.
If you’re ready to learn more about Act-On’s marketing automation solution, please contact us today to schedule a free demo with one of our marketing automation experts.
If you’re not quite there yet, we think you should download our eBook, “The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors.” It’s full of great marketing automation stats, key terms, and information about how to overcome major obstacles facing the wealth management industry with this dynamic software.
