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AdvisorDeck Marketing Success Starter Guide Share this guide 1
AdvisorDeck
MarketingSuccess Starter
Guide
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1
AdvisorDeck is a softwareasaservice (SaaS) online marketing suite
to help financial professionals save time, nurture communications with
clients and generate new business. The AdvisorDeck platform includes
many of the steps necessary to lay the groundwork for a successful
online presence for small businesses in the financial services industry:
easy domain registration, mobilefriendly business website, blogging and
social media management tools, FINRAcompliant archiving options,
professional content writing services and more. For more information,
visit www.getadvisordeck.com.
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IntroductionSetting up an AdvisorDeck account opens up a world of possibilities in
the digital marketing space. We created this guide to help you navigate
digital marketing and help you get the most out of your online marketing
strategy. For those of you that are totally new to online marketing, this
is the guide for you!
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Chapter 1:
Differentiate Yourself with Online
Marketing
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What is marketing andwhy do you need it?
“Giving the right people the right message withthe right offer at the right time”
– Matt Bailey, founder of SiteLogic, an online marketing agency
Marketing covers the way a business communicates with people,
whether those people are customers, prospects, partners, or even
company employees. Online marketing includes a number of
approaches.
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Here at AdvisorDeck, our tools aid you with the following:
Content Marketing
Content marketing includes multimedia content such as blog posts,
videos, eBooks or webinars that establish your business as an industry
leader and provide helpful resources to prospects.
AdvisorDeck provides a platform for publishing all of that content.
Social Media
Social media includes intimate social networks like Facebook, Twitter or
LinkedIn that provide clients with a direct line to communicating with you
in the public sphere. Answer questions on the fly and strike business
conversations that can lead to new clients!
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To market oneself, know thyself
Review your business model so that you can develop an overall
marketing strategy. Make sure you can answer these questions so that
you disseminate the answers to these questions across your various
marketing channels. Find a whiteboard or a conference room and review
these questions with everyone who will be involved in your marketing
strategy.
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Part 1: Who are your customers ?1
Who do you want to talk to and what kind of traits do they have?
What’s their age group?
Are you working with a particular gender?
What kind of hobbies do they have?
What kind of financial situation are they in?
Based on your own strengths and traits, how would you describe
your ideal client?
1 Don DeBold via Creative Commons, Jogger and his two dogs at the Palo Alto Baylands,http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddebold/3233888722/ (January 17, 2013).
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Part 2: What problems do your customers have? What
solutions do you offer?
When working with clients, what common questions do you tend to
answer? When meeting with clients, keep a notebook nearby to jot
down these questions.
What products do you provide and how would a particular product
or service help your target?
Answer these questions with everyone on your team. This will make it
easier to carry out a marketing strategy with consistent messaging from
your contributors.
All marketing communications should focus on your target audience and
how your business can provide solutions for their needs. Use the
answers that you culled from the exercises in the previous two pages as
source material to add to your website.
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Chapter 2:
Getting Started With Your Website
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What information needs to be on your
home page?
Your home page is the first thing that prospects will see if they’re
looking for your business online. Your home page should be focused on
the prospect’s needs first and foremost. Mention credentials and
experience only in the context of discussing solutions for clients.
Briefly describe each solution that you provide as a business. Link
to a formal web page with more information for prospects that want
to read more about a particular solution. It’s good to have an
overall summary and then separate pages for describing solutions
in detail.
Emphasize your credentials and experience while describing each
solution.
Treat your home page as a jumping off point and include calls to action
on the home page. For more details on CTAs, read about prompts in
Chapter 3.
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What information needs to be on yourAbout page?
The About page is where the prospect clicks to learn about your
business and the people that comprise of your business. Usually it is
titled “About Us” or something similar to that.
Make sure your About page answers the following questions in
this order:
1. What do you do?
This question goes beyond stating your job title; instead you
should briefly discuss what you do for your clients in actionable
sentences and in layman’s terms.
Example: I work with clients to create retirement plans that
accommodate their current level of savings.
2. Who are you?
3. How long have you been in business? How long have you been in
business at your current location?
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On top of answering the questions in the previous page, be sure to
include the following information:
Helpful links to specific business pages for prospects that want to
read more about a particular service you provide
Any relevant credentials that you have
Client testimonials or a link to a page with client testimonials,
particularly if you don’t have a compliance policy
A link to your LinkedIn profile with your full resume if you choose
not to post it on your website
NOTE: Keep your About page organized. Break up your page into
digestible subheadings if you have a lot of information that you want to
include. This will make your page more legible and increase the
likelihood that people will read through it.
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Chapter 3:
Landing Page Boot Camp
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An exciting feature of AdvisorDeck is the ability to create custom offers.
Offers provide incentives for prospects to provide you their information,
with a specific call to action that essentially tells a prospect why they
would benefit by connecting with your business. The way to present
these offers are with “landing” pages.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is where the user “lands” or ends up in order to submit
contact information to your website.
A user can land on a landing page through
an advertisement from a search engine like Google.
a promotion on a company’s Facebook page.
a company tweet.
an email.
Sometimes, a user lands on a landing page in order to submit their
contact information and have your business reach out to them for a
phone or email consultation. Landing pages are also for prospects to
sign up for an event (such as a webinar) or download a piece of media
(such as an ebook or white paper).
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Why are landing pages important?
Landing pages are important because they are your chance to give
people a reason to reach out to you. Landing pages give prospects an
opportunity to commit a specific action. What do you want somebody to
do on your website? Think about what your target demographic is
looking for and use those as opportunities to provide them what they
need.
Two examples of specific “calls to action” that financial advisors can
provide on their website:
Download our white paper on 10 tips to get your expenses in
order ASAP
Sign up for a consultation to figure out the best retirement solution
for your budget
When people browse through your site and see calls to action such as
the two examples above, they are “called” to do a specific “action” – in
this case, download a white paper or sign up for a consultation. If their
interest is piqued, they know exactly what to do: fill out your landing
page and submit their information to get what they want.
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Your website and your website’s landing pages should clearly dictate
what actions you want prospects to take. There’s nothing wrong with
announcing this directly if the benefit to the prospect is clear. Prospects
that are looking for help to reign in expenses, for example, are happy to
see that you announced a solution for their needs. Create landing pages
that clearly express how your target demographic will benefit from
submitting their information to you.
1) The Prompt: Your Value Proposition
People who visit your website need an introduction to what you offer.
Your target demographic needs to be persuaded why they should click,
and this is done with the right prompt.
You have a good idea of what your value proposition is based on your
client relationships.It’s your pitch. Landing pages can work in the same
way. For your landing pages, use the value propositions you bring to
offline client discussions.
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Be solution oriented
The prompt should be a sentence that immediately explains why a
prospect should do a particular action. Offer something of value to the
prospect. Be solutionoriented. Induce your target demographic to do
something in particular. Your prompt needs to “prompt” your target into
completing a particular action. In marketing terms, we call that a “call to
action” (or CTA).
Examples:
eBook: 10 Ways to Invest in Your Small Business
Want the scoop on the best retirement plans for the
selfemployed?
Strike the right balance between college tuition and retirement with
these 15 tips
Get a hold on your finances with this free quote
Your prompt needs to speak to the needs of your target demographic. In
the example above, the example is about the prospect, not you. This
first sample connects small business owners looking to invest their
assets with an eBook that provides information on exactly what they’re
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looking for.
2) Content
A compelling prompt will persuade your target of the benefits that
submitting information will provide.
Make your content easy to skim through by using bolded text and bullet
points whenever possible. When done properly, one should should be
able to get the main ideas from reading just bolded text and bullet points.
Of course, don’t bold everything.
When writing and formatting your content, avoid the following:
Big blocks of text – These are intimidating and difficult to read. Space
out your text so it’s easier to skim through.
Using multiple fonts – Within the body of the content, you should not
have more than 1 font.
Gimmicks – Blinking or flashing text is not acceptable. It hasn’t been
acceptable for over a decade. Avoid neon colors or any color
combinations that can come off as unprofessional.
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Content overload –Your landing page is not an essay. At most, the
whole thing (including any images you’ve inserted), should be 2 pages.
Multiple calls to action – At most, one main CTA and a smaller
secondary one, but your landing page shouldn’t ask your reader to do
everything. For example, don’t offer a consultation and an eBook all in
one go. Provide one calltoaction with greater weight and a smaller one
as the secondary one. An example of this would be to pair an offer of a
consultation with a reminder to follow a social network.
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3) Image
Images that you attach should be relevant to what you’re offering your
prospect.
Consider using:
Relevant graphs or charts that illustrate what you’re offering
Photos relevant to your target demographic
Any relevant illustrations
(If you’re sourcing your images from Creative Commons, be sure to
give proper credit. It’s not okay to steal images.)
Use a reasonable amount of images. For a landing page, 1 or 2 images
should be sufficient. Your landing page should focus on getting
prospects to fill out the form, and too many images can distract them
from the goal you want them to achieve. It also increases page load
times, which may turn off prospects using a slow connection on their
smartphone. Make the points you need to make with only the amount of
space you need.
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We’ll work with two examples to illustrate the types of image quality you
can aim for, although this is very subjective.
Example 1:
What is going on here? The use of money in the image seems to imply
some kind of financial issue at hand, but the composition has unknown
objects crowding in on the corners. It’s not clear what’s happening and
what the reader should conclude from it. Try to pick a professional photo
to represent your business.
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Example 2 :2
This photo of a couple watching the sunset together can line up very
well with the aspirations of certain types of clients. Try to pick a
professional image. Use images that leave a neutral or positive
impression on prospects rather than a negative impression.
2 Keoni Cabral via Creative Commons, Financial Planning, http://www.flickr.com/photos/keoni101/5636667285/(January 17, 2013).
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4) Contact Form
The contact form refers to the fields of information that you’re asking the
prospect to fill. There are two philosophies that marketers have
regarding the number of text fields to include:
Option 1: More text fields!
Pros: Higher quality, more specifically targeted leads
Cons: Fewer leads and more dropoff from impatient prospects
Longer forms are more timeconsuming, so fewer people will be inclined
to fill them out.
Option 2: Fewer text fields!
Pros: Takes less time to fill out and may result in more leads generated
Cons: Leads are less targeted, possibly lower quality
For small or new websites, we recommend the second philosophy.
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5) Call to Action Button
That little button that prospects click to submit information is a pretty
important one. By default, these buttons usually say “submit”, but
inserting a specific call to action can make a huge difference in
persuading prospects to click.
Use a specific call to action to make it abundantly clear what you want
the prospect to do.
Examples:
Download Free eBook now!
Request a Free Consultation
Your CTA must be a verb in the perspective of the prospect.
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6) Confirmation Page
After a prospect fills out a landing page, usually that prospect is
brought to the “thank you” page. Use this page as an opportunity to
thank the prospect for submitting their information, always. Make this a
personal “thank you”, a full sentence.
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Offer the prospect other relevant prompts or blog posts that may be of
use to them. Whatever you offer needs to be related to the prompt that
incited your prospect to submit their information.
Ask them to follow your social media pages. Use this as an opportunity
to ask them to share an eBook they just downloaded from your website
or to follow your social media networks for
more materials related to what they retrieved from your prompt.
How can I brainstorm ways to come up with
landing pages?
Step 1: Take a look at all of the materials you already have.
Brochures
Any marketing materials, offline and online
Example: Savings Guide for Recent Graduates
Step 2: Think about questions that clients frequently ask you.
For specific questions you can consider, take a look at 4 Great Ways
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Advisors Can Brainstorm Writing Ideas.
Example: As a young person, what’s the best way for me to save
money?
Step 3: Figure out questions that prospects ask and answer those
questions on your landing page.
Example: “The Savings Guide for Recent Graduates” answers
questions on how to save money while working with a limited
budget and ample time for longterm investments.
Step 4: Explain how the user will find the answers they need by
submitting their information to your website. Compile all these
questions from Step 2. Each question can be the opener to a body
paragraph within your landing page.
Example: As a young person, what’s the best way to save
money? Download our short, 30page eBook for tips on saving
money, including worksheets to figure out your budget and learn
about different investment and savings options available, from
CDs to a Roth IRA.
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Chapter 4:
Building Out Content on Your Website
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In Chapter 1, we went over important business questions. With the
answers culled from that exercise, it’s time to make sure these answers
are available on your website.
Your website should make it clear who you are and how you can help
your target demographic.
Write in a tone that’s appropriate for your target demographic. Go into
more detail by building pages that focus on specific solutions that you
provide.
Build expert topic pages on your website
Demonstrate knowledge and expertise in your field by curating pages of
content. Grow your credibility and sales by providing a goto resource
for topic including retirement, estate planning, and other areas.
For ideas on what topic pages to create, turn to the results of your team
exercise in Chapter 1 and look at what questions your prospects have
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asked you. From there, make the pages necessary to answer those
topic questions.
Let’s work through an example together.
For example, say you pick Retirement Planning. Make “Retirement
Planning” your title, and write a biography about yourself or your
business and the relevant experience you have to offer in this specific
segment.
In AdvisorDeck, you can do this by clicking on the Pages tab and
clicking the “+ Page” button to add a new page.
1. Fill out your page with the topic of your choice and a description.
a. Consider including client testimonials (if you’re not worried
about compliance) or anonymized scenarios that you’ve
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assisted with in this topic.
2. Add Marketplace content as you so choose.
a. Adding content provides opportunities for prospects to stay
on your website longer and engage with your site.
3. When you're ready to publish, click Publish or save a draft.
When your page is published, decide where you want to put it.
By default, it will show up as a link inside the Resources page, but if you
want it to show up on the main menu of your website, be sure to
checkmark your page in the "Show in Menu" column on the far right of
the Pages overview page.
One way that you can establish yourself as an industry expert is by
curating relevant articles and posts from knowledgeable resources. This
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will provide opportunities for prospects to visit your website frequently.
AdvisorDeck can help you do this through the AdvisorDeck Marketplace.
Content such as informative evergreen articles, financial calculators and
quizzes can flesh out your prospects’ understanding of the specificities
of finance. Add different types of interactive content on your page for
your prospects. A variety of materials will accommodate different styles
of learning for your prospects.
For example, you can add financial calculators as a means to make
your site interactive and more engaging. To do this, go to the Pages
tab, find the topic page you want to add a financial calculator to, and
click “Add Marketplace Content”, just as you did when you added
relevant blog posts.
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Click the “Calculators” tab to add any calculators that you think would be
relevant to your topic page.
You can also add quizzes that prospects can take to test financial
knowledge. These quizzes are shareable on social media networks and
can inspire a wider network of people to stop by your site as a
result. Add relevant articles to your topic pages to increase the amount
of content that your prospects can peruse while reading through your
site.
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Chapter 5:
The Case for Creating Content
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Is blogging really that important for business?
Yes.
Blogging can help your business quite a bit. To make the case for
blogging, let’s consider your customer demographic in broad strokes, or
even just the way that you go from Point A (wanting something) to Point
B (obtaining that thing).
Countless individuals around the world turn to the internet when they
want something, especially something that takes some wellthought out
research. People depend on search engines like Google and Bing to
research and find the best outcome. We see examples of this everyday.
New restaurant? Let’s Yelp it. Let’s see if they have a Zagat rating.
Have friends eaten there? Let’s ask, or see if they reviewed it on Yelp
themselves.
How about traveling to a particular city? Travel sections of the paper,
TripAdvisor, all sorts of stuff.
Latest tech gadget? Of course you have to sift through reviews on
Amazon or Newegg.
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According to a recent survey , 47% of adults surveyed say they3
turn to to the internet to find out news and information about local
businesses (NOT including bars and restaurants).
This makes perfect sense because the internet is a resource for
vouching for whether a particular local business is wellliked or if it’s a
scam.
People research to make sure they’re getting the best that they
deserve. This applies to finding the right financial professional
too.
Your business blog is a platform for demonstrating your business
expertise. Having a blog (and a website at large) also makes it easy to
find you online and to get to know you as a professional. Host and
maintain a blog over time. The blog will make it easier and easier for
people to find you online and read about your knowledge of the
industry.
3 Search Engine Watch, Most People Rely on Search Engines to Find Local Businesses [Study],
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2133538/Most-People-Rely-on-Search-Engines-to-Find-Local-Businesses-Study(Dec. 19, 2011).
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Blogging is a prescreening. It’s the consultation before the
facetoface or phone consultation.
Showcase your knowledge on your blog so that people can read about
you online from the comfort of their smartphones, tablets or computers,
without any pressure whatsoever. Demonstrate your expertise in your
blog so that prospects are persuaded to find you a great fit and reach
out to you.
It’s important for your business to be online, continually proving
business expertise. Blogging serves as evidence that you know your
stuff. This can be the clincher to persuade prospects to turn to you for a
solution, especially from cold leads that don’t have referrals.
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Sample Blogging Plan
Coming up with a posting or blogging plan may seem intimidating. Don’t
worry: Here’s a sample structure that you can work with to break it up
and begin generating your own ideas.
Day 1: Write a post about your business. Why do you do it? How did
you start? Don’t make it exhaustive; you can always come back to it.
Day 3: Write the answer to this question: Why work with me?
Day 5: Write a post about the industry you’re in. What are the trends?
Day 7: Write a post about a local event, or share/link a story about a
local happening.
Day 9: Share a link about Baby Boomers, retirement, or sound investing
(try Google News search). Write up short commentary within the post.
Day 11: Share a story/link about an Industry or General News Update.
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Day 13: Talk about the way you helped a particular customer (not by
name!) and show your value.
Day 15+: Return to #1 and repeat, if needed. Consider creating series
of posts, such as a “top 3” or “top 5” topics of the week.
Tips:
Be clear, even obvious with language: both your readers and
Google like this better
Give yourself a writing window: 20 or even 10 minutes can be
enough
Quality over quantity: posting many short snippets is fine, but
search engines and readers prefer a couple wellformed
paragraphs
Be realistic about your "bandwidth" and ease into making time for online
marketing as your schedule will allow. Establishing an online presence is
first a matter of making it easy for potential leads to find you. With
keyword phrases such as your business name, specialties, and location
prominently placed inside your website, those first few very very
important steps are covered by the AdvisorDeck platform so that it’s
easy for people to find you.
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Maintaining an online presence is a matter of connecting to your
customers as well as informing them that you’re an active business
that’s wellembedded into the financial industry and keeping up with the
latest news. If you find that making posts daily is a little much, it’s easy
to presume that your closest customers are probably busy people as
well. Start off slow with 1 post a week or even 1 post every 2 weeks,
and adjust your schedule as time goes along.
Add variety to your blog posts by embedding media such as video or
other types of online materials. The AdvisorDeck platform gives you the
opportunity to embed all sorts of media with MagicPost. MagicPost
makes it really easy to create dynamic blog posts that incorporate a
variety of media into your post without your readers having to leave
your website to enjoy a video, slideshow, or tweet that you’re showing
your readers or referencing to them.
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In the screenshot above, the magic wand icon representing MagicPost
is in the menu bar of the blog text field box in the “Create a Post” page.
Upon clicking this icon, you can embed YouTube videos, Flickr pages,
and more.
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The screenshot in the previous page is what you see if you were to link
a YouTube video. Just paste the URL in the field next to “Link URL”,
click “Preview” to the right of that field and you’ll see just what you
wanted to add to your blog post. Click “Insert” at the bottom if you’re
sure that this is the picture, video, audio or whatever piece of media
that you want to add to your post. With this feature, you can more
dynamically engage with your customers and incorporate resources
from all over the Internet to convey the points you need to make.
While working with your mediaembedded post, this is how YouTube
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videos would look while you’re building out your post. The magic wand
icon indicates the video you embedded with our magic blogging feature.
Not only can you embed pictures and video, you could also embed
tweets directly from Twitter into your blog post. This is great for if you
want to start off a lengthy discussion regarding a recent tweet, typically
a link (such as a news article) you might’ve seen in your Twitter feed.
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You can also embed any slides from presentations that you upload onto
Slideshare. Add it to your post as a followup post after a talk at a
seminar or conference.
These are just some of the things you can do with MagicPost blogging.
When you click the magic wand, there’s a link in the preview window
that’ll show you all of the websites that our magic blogging can embed
from. With your readers focused on staying inside your website,
MagicPost makes it easier to turn readers into clients.
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Chapter 6:
Repurposing Offline MarketingMaterials for Online Use
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How to Add Offline Materials to Your
Website
If your business has been running for a number of years, chances are
you have created and accumulated a number of marketing materials to
pass to prospects and existing clients. These materials can easily
populate your website. Here’s how:
Pamphlets
Pamphlets can be used as custom offers or broken up into
blog posts.
If a particular pamphlet stems from a recent event,
crosspromote within your blog post by including a call to
action for prospects to register for an upcoming event or
request a consultation.
Presentations
Handouts and slides of presentations can be embedded into
blog posts or offered as custom offers. You can also attach
them in topic pages or spin off the content into several blog
posts.
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You can also record your presentations and upload them as
videos to incorporate into custom offers or blog posts.
Mailers
Copy from mailers can be integrated into the About page or a
topic page.
Newsletters
Content from newsletters can be reused as a series of blog
posts or compiled into an ebook.
If you choose to compile an ebook from past
newsletters, create a custom offer from your ebook.
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ConclusionOnline marketing is not a quick fix and takes a consistent effort over an
extended period of time to pay off. That said, there are a number of
ways that investing in an online marketing strategy can benefit your
business. By regularly producing quality content, your business can
acquire more clients, gain recognition in search engines for relevant
keyword phrases, and more. The sooner you start marketing yourself
online, the better off your business will be.
To learn more about AdvisorDeck’s online marketing suite for financial
professionals, request a demo here.
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