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April 27, 2012 at 02:41 PM
As the financial planning world continues its journey into the digital age, marketing and growing a financial planning practice faces new challenges. Some firms suffer as methods no longer work the way they once did, while others struggle to implement new strategies like blogging and social media without any clear strategy or understanding of how to do it successfully.
Yet through it all, recent marketing research on advisory firms has shown a new category of marketing that has quietly emerged as the marketing method with the greatest growth on an absolute and relative basis: online search, where the firm attracts clients through Google, Bing, other search engines and social media sharing. While the rise of online search is still in a nascent phase, its prospects are bright as the world goes digital.
Accordingly, the best firms are beginning to take the key actions now that will be necessary for success, from better defining target clientele, to creating relevant content and distributing it, to beefing up the raw aesthetic quality of their websites so they leave a good impression—so that in the future, they won’t have to find new clients, because the new clients will find them.
The inspiration for today’s blog post was a recent survey by Rydex|SGI AdvisorBenchmarking that was shared on AdvisorOne, which evaluated the marketing methods being used by RIAs in 2011 versus 2010. The survey found a notable decrease in advisors’ recent use of social media – as many early adopters have seen only limited success thus far—as well as a decline in the use of blogs and newsletters. Many categories held relatively stable, such as seminar marketing, client appreciation events, and direct mail. Yet the one surprising category with the biggest rise from 2010 to 2011: online search.
Inbound Marketing and Online Search
