3 Essential Inbound Marketing Elements For Financial Advisor Websites
Inbound marketing, also known as pull marketing, is a system of marketing activities that draw in prospective clients and convert them into leads.
I often speak with advisors who have never created or converted an inbound lead. The thing they all have in common is that their websites lack the following three essential lead generation elements that should be the foundation of an advisor’s inbound marketing strategy.
Newsletter Sign Up
Email newsletters are a terrific tool for keeping your clients, prospects and business associates updated and engaged with your latest news, insights and offerings. For newsletters to be effective, however, they require a growing subscriber base. Your website should have a simple subscribe form on the homepage and throughout the site.
To add one to your website, see if your CRM or email marketing program has a plugin available. It almost certainly will. In the unlikely scenario it doesn’t, create a simple form on your site that allows you to collect and manually add subscribers to your newsletter list.
Downloadable Resources
Downloads are a great way to leverage content while collecting visitors’ contact information. The most popular downloads are often e-books, whitepapers and infographics. While many advisors are wary of the time and resource commitment such projects require, working with a creative agency can make the process simple and produce excellent results.
Once the content is created, it should be featured on the homepage and include a download form for access that includes name, email and whatever additional information will help you qualify the lead.
Call To Action
A website lacking a call to action is a joke with no punchline. Too often I see advisors rely on a small “contact” tab as the only way for visitors to get in touch. A contact form with a call to action, such as a “free consultation” offer or other complimentary service, is a convenient way for visitors to express their interest. Also growing in popularity are consultation booking forms linked to the advisor’s calendar, where prospects can book their own initial phone consultations.
A call to action should be prominent and to the point. It should include a verb, personal language and urgency to maximize results.
Your website, if designed with lead generation in mind, can be a powerful tool for growing your business. For growth-driven brands and financial advisors, it’s important not to neglect any of these simple features on your site, or else you risk forfeiting otherwise promising leads to your competition.
Brian Hart is the Founder & President at Flackable, an award-winning public relations agency representing financial and professional services brands nationwide. To learn more about Flackable, please visit flackable.com. Follow Brian on Twitter at @BrianHartPR.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on 3/20/2016.
