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Advertising
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Keywords Are Crucial To Marketing For Advisors And Most Of Them Don’t Get It |
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Thursday, July 19, 2012 00:50
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Tags: business strategy | marketing | niches | prospecting | Search Engines
Earlier this week, Bob Powell highlighted how advisors do a poor to average job of marketing. The problem, in practical terms, comes down to keywords.
Rarely do advisors have a strategic marketing vision, and an actual written plan is even more uncommon. Getting down to keywords is even more unlikely. Yet keywords are crucial because they are the substance of a strategic marketing plan, the end result of carefully designed marketing strategy.
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Keywords are the words and phrases people use to find you on the Web.
For example, say you are an advisor in Abilene, Texas who specializes in using options and ETFs. You would want to post content on your website and blog about options and ETFs and that mentions you’re in Abilene. The more content like that, the better.
Maybe you would write a blog post about how rare it is for an advisor in a small town like Abilene to be hedging ETFs with options. Or maybe you would post about how ranchers in west Texas understand and like to use options because of their ties to commodities markets.
Another example: an advisor in a suburb of Cincinnati who focuses on serving senior executives at Procter & Gamble might want to post about P&G’s deferred compensation plan, or maybe address the financial planning angles on an early retirement offer made by P&G to middle managers.
By writing content that is so specific, so directed to a particular market, your site will be more likely to get found on the Web by people searching for answers. The beauty of this is that people who find you that way are seeking exactly what you do. They are great prospects.
Most advisors simply do not know that writing content targeted to well-defined niches over the long run enables prospects to find them. I speak with advisors all day who do not know how this works or are unclear about how it works.
For the record, if you do not explain your specialties and what makes you different on the Web, you will sound like everyone else.
Writing content on your website that says “we personalize each client’s financial plan to their unique goals and risk tolerance,” guarantees that your site will not be found by prospects searching for answers to their personal financial problems.
It’s ironic that saying on your website that you provide personalized advice without being specific about the nature of the engagements ensures that the people who want personalized solutions will not find you.
Put another way, nobody searches for “personalized investment advice” and if they did they would not find you. Esoteric, highly specialized informaton about specific financial problems of people in your town is what works.
How do you know what your keywords are? It takes some thinking. But it’s not rocket science. It’s common sense. While there is a lot of hype and nonsense being told and sold to advisors about search engine optimization, success is largely based on good strategic thinking.
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Seven Tips For Responding To A Personal Attack On The Web Against You Or Your Business; A Practical Guide For Unfortunate But Inevitable Online Disagreements |
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Wednesday, June 13, 2012 02:18
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Tags: client communications | client feedback | integrity | Social Media Writing a blog or tweeting regularly about what you think invites disagreement. Saying anything of substance publicly puts you at risk of someone disagreeing with you.
Fear of detractors probably keeps many of financial advisors from blogging or participating in social media. Some advisors are undoubtedly haunted by the fear of a former client flaming them in a review on a Google local listing. Understandably, it's scary to think that someone could post a comment on Google like, "You lost thousands of dollars of my money on a bad investment!." But for the most part human decency prevails. I don't know of a single incident like that that.
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Still, if you are blogging, commenting, or frequently active on social media, it’s likely you will eventually get into a spat. Here are some rules for handling such unfortunate incidents:
1. Don’t Lie. If you have a problem with telling the truth, social media is not for you. If you have no problem with always telling the truth, you’re fine. It’s that simple. Always say only what you know is true.
2. Respond. It won't go away if you ignore it. Worse still, if you do not respond people will think you could not defend yourself because what was said is true. Address a heckler head on. Set the record straight by aking your case. Do it once and then drop it. Move on. As long as you have told the truth, you have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
3. Be Humble. Empirical evidence shows that 20% of the time you absolutely, positively know you are right, you are indeed wrong. It’s a phenomenon known as the overconfidence effect. “In a series of experiments where subjects made true-or-false responses to general knowledge statements, they were overconfident at all levels,” says Wikipedia. “When they were 100% certain of their answer to a question, they were wrong 20% of the time.” We’re all idiots. So do the opposite: keep open to the possibility that you might be wrong, and that will reduce your chances of actually being wrong. It’s the “under-confidence effect.”
4. Take The High Road. Don’t resort to tactics your detractors use. People are emotional and behave badly. Don’t fall into that trap.
5. Be Thankful They Care. When people vehemently disagree with you or even ridicule you, be thankful they care enough about your work to become so enraged. They care about what you do and say. Try to keep that in mind when their barbs are making your blood boil. Keep in mind that for every outlier that attacks you, there are many people who agree with you -- especially if you're actually right and have a history of doing the right thing.
6. Don’t Overshare. Don’t say anything in social media that you would not want on the front page of the newspaper. When you post content to a website, even a private website or one only open to your Facebook friends from elementary school, expect that it will be made public. It’s wise to adopt this policy in emails as well.
7. Forgive. Don’t hold a grudge. We all make mistakes. It’s not that big a deal.
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How To Add Icons For LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Or Your Logo To Your Outlook Email Signature |
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Wednesday, May 23, 2012 21:40
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Mike McCall, an advisor in Los Angeles, asked me yesterday how he can add a Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn icon to his email signature. I've searched for apps for doing this in the past but never could find anything simple. So I did it myself. Here are step by step instructions for doing it. This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
Below is a picture of what my email signature looks like. The LinkedIn icon links to my LinkedIn profile and logo images links to my advisor marketing company's website.
Adding an icon to an email signature takes about 10 or 15 minutes and below is a 4:45 slideshow explaining how you can do it.
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iPad Offers A Great Way For Private Wealth Advisors To Make Marketing Videos And Save About $3,000 By Eliminating Need For Touch Screen Monitor |
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Friday, March 09, 2012 16:40
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Tags: client communications | differentiation | marketing | niche management | prospecting | Social Media | target marketing | videos The new iPad, when combined with the new Apple TV solution, provides a great way for investment advisors to make their own marketing videos.
I spent about 10 hours in recent months researching big touch-screen TVs and touch screen overlays. The idea I was chasing would help advisors make cool marketing videos. You would video yourself standing in front of a 50- or 65-inch touch screen LCD delivering a PowerPoint based on Fritz Meyer or Bob Keebler presentations. You’d be like CNN’s chief White House correspondent, John King, pushing slides and on your TV and clicking links on the screen—like Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report. This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
Such a video is far more interesting to watch than a slide show because it shows your face and body language. This Web marketing idea is powerful for strong communicators, especially photogenic ones.
If you put yourself out there in Web videos with sensible financial planning and investment ideas, you’ll get an audience from search engines.
Touch screen TVs aren’t cheap, however. The one I was eyeing costs about $5000. Touch screen overlays seemed like the better way to go. With an overlay, you can do all the same things as a touch screen. Touch screen overlays have an advantage, however: big touch screen TVs are commercial grade. They're built to take a licking. But they don’t match the technical specifications you get on a much less expensive consumer TV model. But if you won’t be shipping the TV frequently or rolling it around your building, you could get a less durable consumer model with much higher contrast ratio, better color, and even 3-D.
I've waiting for the new generation of OLED TVs to come out this spring and summer to make my move, and then I bought an iPad and figured out a way to eliminate the need for a touch screen or overlay. That’s a way to save $3,000!
The new iPad comes with a new version of Apple TV, which costs $99. This appliance enables you to stream any content on your iPad to an HDTV. Instead of needing a touch screen to control a slide show or Website on big screen, you use your iPad to control what’s displayed on your HDTV. For aging athletes like myself who may not always look very graceful moving items across a big screen, this is good.
Picture yourself all dressed up in a well-lit room getting videoed while delivering a presentation on an income tax strategy for Silicon Valley executives with stock options. Or maybe you’d talk about cash-flow challenges faced by young doctors. Or you could do a 10 minute video targeted local CPAs about the current economic environment. You're using an iPad to control the presentation while you're being videoed. Mostly you're talking into a camera standing in front of a big screen, and every once in a while you're using you're iPad to move the preentation forward. You can do this!
Videos with targeted content indexed by search engines should improve your chances of getting found by your target clients. Also, if you’re friendly and mean to do good for people, it will show up in your videos. The camera does not lie, and the Web will help you get found.
I’ll be getting my iPad in about a week and will let you know how it works out.
If you’re doing this already, let us know.
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Authenticity Is Key To Success For Advisors Using Social Media, Giving Fiduciaries A Natural Edge |
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Friday, February 24, 2012 20:20
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Tags: client communications | differentiation | fiduciaries | marketing | niche management | Social Media The din from social media experts telling advisors how to tweet, blog, and create other content is at high pitch. The one thing I would add is a call for authenticity. People will read if you are authentic. You need to speak from the heart and you must be willing to call things as you see them. For advisors, that means writing blog entries and creating other content that explains why you practice the way you do.
For an advisor to be successful with social media, you must write what you are passionate about -- your values -- and how they are reflected in the way you counsel clients. (And when I say “write,” I mean creation of all kinds of content: webinars, Slidecasts, videos, status updates, or forms of content.) This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only
Write a blog post about why you don’t use a particular type of financial product. Post a Slidecast explaining why you choose to work with a particular institution. Post a video of you speaking to a group about why you beleive in financial planning, use an indexing strategy, and the riders on different long-term care insurance policies. Your candor on “inside baseball” issues where you are the expert would be appreciated and draw an audience.
If you blog regularly about your professional passions, you are also likely to find they are excellent keywords. It will draw those searching the Web for information about the professional issues you care about deeply. That's a good meeting of minds.
If you start telling people about the dirty little secrets of getting financial advice, they will find it valuable.
Which is why fiduciaries have a real advantage over private wealth advisors not practicing as a fiduciary.
To be a fiduciary, you have to be willing to blow the whistle on all the nonsense that goes on in the industry, in charging excessive fees or commissions or other common practices with which you disagree. You have to be willing to be totally transparent. Totally authentic.
If you write about wealth management issues from this perspective, from the angle of always doing the right thing, the Internet will entrust you with people who care about your opinion on financial matters and may one day give you call and hire you.
Authenticity isn’t easy. But what’s even more rare is to be authentic and great at creating Web content.
People on the Internet will find you if you create great content. You don’t need to be a professional writer or videographer—although being able to produce well-written, easy-to-consume content is important an strength that can make success much more likely.
But if you simply say what you believe about your professional passions in advising on wealth management, you are likely to find success with social media marketing.
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