financial advisor marketing

The Amount Spent on Marketing by Financial Advisors

By: Frank DePino | March 15, 2024

Marketing is a crucial investment for any business, especially financial advisors. This isn’t something that can be an afterthought in your company’s budget. You have to make the proper investment in this service to ensure optimum results. 

How much do financial advisors spend on marketing?

A financial advisor should anticipate spending 4-10% of their revenue on marketing. If you are spending closer to the 4% end of the budget, your biggest investments should be on your website and your content marketing. Don’t overlook things like digital ads or non-digital methods of advertising. But make sure you are strategic with your investments. If you are spending the full 10% (or more) then you can look at other marketing techniques like SEO, marketing events, and more. 

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What Aspects of Marketing Should a Financial Advisor Invest In?

Marketing is an expense that can suck a business in and cause them to overspend if they aren’t careful. Even if your budget is bigger than the standard, you still shouldn’t waste money. These are the places that you must invest no matter the size of your budget.

Optimize Your Website

Your website is what can be called “a silent salesperson”. Everything a potential customer needs to know about you should be on your site. It should have links to your social media, how to contact you, relevant content, and so much more. It should speak for you when you are not available.

However, the best website in the world won’t do any good if you don’t take the steps to make sure people can find it. 

You have to optimize your website so web traffic will make it to your site. Including proper keywords on your site and in your content is one way to drive traffic to your brand. Another way is by linking to quality sites to establish your authority on a subject and making sure all title tags and metadata is accurate. Also, make sure all of your content is up-to-date and free of misspellings and errors. 

Don’t forget to make sure your website is also optimized for mobile. Mobile searches account for nearly 60% of search traffic on the web. 

Mediaboom enhances its content marketing by constantly publishing articles on the blog.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is often an overlooked piece of a marketing plan when it should be one of the largest pieces of your plan. The mistaken notion is that content only refers to written words. 

Content is anything you create for a marketing campaign. This can include infographics, videos, blog posts, social media posts, and anything in between. 

Invest in a solid strategy that connects each of your elements to the message you want to deliver. 

SEO

SEO, also called search engine marketing, is crucial for any business. 

While the web may be full of people looking for a specific business or interest, the question is will they find you during their search? SEO is a way to help cut through that noise and get a business more organic traffic. By optimizing their website, a financial advisor can boost their ranking on Google. The average person doesn’t go past the first page of search results, so it is important to make sure your business can land on that page.

To properly invest in SEO, make sure you have conducted keyword research for your industry

To know the terms people search for when looking for a financial advisor, it’s important to sprinkle those keywords throughout your website and all channels you share written content on. Additionally, optimizing your website with the proper code will ensure search engine crawlers find and index your site.

Don’t overlook the importance of local SEO.

Local SEO will help searchers find you in your immediate area. Local SEO also helps a business populate in Google searches and their “snack pack” results. Include local terms and your location in your content and search engines will make sure people in your area can find you just as easily as someone who lives on the other side of the country.

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Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most successful methods of contacting a client and generating an action.

At their best, digital ads have a click rate in the two percent range.

You can reach more people, drive better results, all while spending less money. Of all digital marketing techniques, email marketing has the best ROI. In some industries, you get $42 back for every $1 spent. It is also one of the least expensive marketing techniques to deploy.

Some marketing platforms can be used for free if you have a small customer list and send minimal emails each month. 

Social Media

Social media is a gigantic part of peoples’ everyday lives. Some individuals spend 2.5 hours or more on their social channels each day.

If you aren’t on social media, you will miss customers and lose sales.

The first thing a business needs to recognize about social media is that they don’t need to be seen over every channel. If you are a financial planner who specializes in couples approaching retirement, Snapchat is not the place you need to be. Don’t waste your time and money on channels that your customers don’t frequent. It’s a waste of time and money.

Another thing to remember with social media is that while advertising is important, so is using these social channels to be **social** with guests. This is a chance to earn goodwill and trust as well as engage in conversations with them.

Ads won’t have as much impact as positive consumer interactions will.

Marketing experts are providing additional marketing advice to a financial advisor

Other Important Tips

All of the points above are vital things that a financial advisor needs to invest their marketing dollars in. However, there are a couple of other items that should not be overlooked and would serve as amazing enhancements to any marketing plan.

1. Claiming your Google My Business Listing

Google offers powerful tools for companies and many of those are free. Google Business listings are one of those tools. These listings allow companies to be found by more customers and it gives businesses a chance to make sure they have accurate information populating in Google searches. If you don’t claim your listing, you won’t appear in Google’s “snack pack” results. 

2. Using A CRM To Compile All Of Your Customer Data

The great part of using programs to program your social media postings is that they can track who interacted with your content and when. But to get that data you would have to go to each individual program and then compile the information.

Using a CRM (customer relationship manager) brings all of that together into one place for you and lets you better target customers with content that matters to them.

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Final Thoughts

Now that we have answered the commonly asked question – how much do financial advisors spend on marketing?… it’s time to get started on putting that marketing plan together.

Financial advisors do not have the luxury of having new business just walk in the door. They have to work for it and bring customers to their brand. Investing in marketing is vital for a financial planner to have success.

Implementing these tips into your marketing strategy will ensure that your budgeted dollars are well spent and achieve the desired results for your company. 

Contact now Mediaboom to boost your marketing for financial advisor.

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and Founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has led Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals, building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.

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