Using newsletters for drip marketing has long been a cornerstone of marketing for financial planners. However, the newsletter process itself is relatively inefficient—costs of production can be high if it’s printed, the process of building a distribution list is slow, the content often cannot be effectively shared, and there is no means for someone to find and access the content if they aren’t already on the mailing list.
By contrast, operating a digital blog has no printing cost, has content that can be distributed on multiple digital channels, can easily be shared by readers and prospects with others, and can even be found by search engines without any further effort from the planner.
The challenge, of course, is that a blog requires content—yet the reality is that for firms already producing a newsletter, the content is already being created. In which case, the blog is simply a more efficient way to get the content out there and drip market to a growing a list of prospective clients.
The inspiration for today’s blog post was a recent conversation I had with another financial planner, who was struggling with the decision about whether or not to begin blogging and adopting social media. “I’m just not sure I have the time to add another channel to our marketing,” he said, “on top of the newsletter we already produce and mail out each quarter.”
“But if you’re already sending out a newsletter,” I replied, “then blogging and social media are just an alternative means for what you’re already doing, but taking it to the next level.”
At the core, producing a newsletter or a blog are simply different ways to accomplish the same thing—distribute content and information to a target audience. With a newsletter, articles are produced (either written internally or obtained from external sources) and distributed out to a list of readers. With a blog, articles are produced (again written internally or obtained—”curated” —from external sources) and made available to readers.