Lead Generation For Financial Advisors – The Complete Guide

Lead generation for financial advisors is crucial for business growth. Word of mouth from existing clients is helpful, but it won’t generate enough new business for a practice.

To keep new qualified leads coming in, you will need to take steps to generate them. Using a combination of organic and paid strategies will keep qualified leads coming your way.  

There are a variety of strategies to consider when looking to increase lead generation for financial advisors:

• Brand awareness and consistency
• Having an effective local SEO strategy
• Using social media to generate additional leads for your business
• Paid advertising campaigns
• Email marketing campaigns
• Creating a high-converting website
• Networking strategies

These techniques can quickly generate leads for your firm or business. We’ll go over them all in depth in this article.

But first, does financial advisor lead generation really work?

How Does Lead Generation for Financial Advisors Work?

Increases Your Trustworthiness

Many people these days will do an online search to discover the reputation of someone they would like to work with.

In the case of a financial advisor, there is a lot of competition. That’s why showcasing your firm, your self, and your portfolio can go a long way in beating out the competition.

Increases Online Visibility

More and more financial advisors are upping their online visibility.

Will you be left behind?

Establishing a solid online presence means you are giving yourself a much higher chance of being seen and contacted.

You are much likely to be found by a local consumer when you have a local-optimized website, a Google Business Profile, and helpful social media posts.

Fills Up Your Funnel

Are you still chasing leads when you need work? That should never be the case.

When you have some extra time or room for more clients, you need a funnel full of potential clients ready to work with you.

With the power of lead generation for financial advisors, this could be the case. You will be reaching more and more consumers than ever before.

Therefore, you will always have people waiting for your services, and you can pick and choose clients that will be best for you.

Brand Awareness And Consistency

Leads are important for your brand, but any lead generation for financial advisors must be done in a manner that is consistent with your current message and brand image.

Consistency is crucial for building trust with both existing and potential customers. 

For example, if you portray your brand as a financial advisor for high wealth clients, any lead generation you do needs to reflect your existing brand image.

All your marketing content needs to back up this message as well.

Your focus should be on how as a financial advisor you can help these high wealth clients achieve the extra things in life, i.e. second and third homes or boats.

Show how you can help them reach those goals. 

The Importance of Local SEO

Local SEO is one of the most important things you can do.

Local searches have experienced exponential growth. Searches that include the terms “open” or “near me” have exploded by over 200%. 46% of Google’s searches are for specific items within a person’s local community.

If you don’t have your site optimized for local SEO, you are missing out on countless local clients. 

To ensure that you are ranking high in Google’s local searches, your website isn’t the only item you should be concerned with. Your business listing with

Google is also crucial for ranking in local search results. Forbes has shown that 71% of searchers will click on results shown on the first page of their Google search results. Without effective local SEO, you won’t land on this page. 

Here are some simple tips you can take to make sure you are optimizing for local SEO searches. 

• Make sure your Google Business Profile listing is optimized.
• Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Almost 60% of searches happen on a mobile device. 
• Make sure your website has all applicable alt tags, along with search optimized URLs, headers, title tags, and keyword-based content. 
• Have your website evaluated and incorporate a linking strategy. 
• Make sure the business name and address on your site match the business name and address on your Google listing. 

Using Social Media to Generate Leads For Your Business

Social media is now one of the largest platforms for digital advertising. Using these platforms is another chance to put your business in front of thousands of prospective clients.

Each platform has business services that can help you structure your experience on that platform to meet your needs. 

To have success in lead generation for financial advisors, it will require the use of social media. There are more social media platforms today than most people can keep up with.

The key for any business is to be on as many that make sense for their company. You also want to utilize platforms that are the most popular with your core client. 

Professional marketers can help firms make these decisions based on multiple demographic factors. 

Biggest Platforms for social media in the us

The biggest platforms for social media in the US are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• LinkedIn

Out of these platforms, Facebook has the largest reach and the largest number of daily users.

Instagram rivals Facebook in terms of the size of its audience. Since this network is also owned by Facebook, there is a lot of cooperation between the two platforms. Snapchat has the youngest demographics. Pinterest users are predominantly female. 

LinkedIn often gets overlooked as a social network, but in terms of lead generation for financial advisors, it could bring a business a larger pool of interested leads.

Unlike other networks, people come to LinkedIn to hear professional things. It is a place for people to network and connect to others with the same careers and interests.  

This also makes it a great place to offer your services and feature ads about your business. Behavior on this channel is more focused on celebrating work accomplishments and promoting the services of companies.

These reasons make it a terrific place to interact with people and find more leads.

Paid Advertising

Digital advertising is so precise that ads purchased on companies like Facebook can be customized for and only shown to your ideal audience.

The timing of the ad and how it is shown to a potential customer is all part of the package. From a cost perspective, paid digital advertising is one of the least expensive ways to promote your business. 

Digital ads can be features almost anywhere.

But Google and Facebook are two of the most visible places for a digital ad. Google uses a pay-per-click model which charges you based on how many users click on your ad.

Facebook charges a fee per day based on how many users you want to reach with your campaign. Based on your budget, your ads can reach thousands of people each day. 

You can also use digital ads on virtually any online platform. YouTube has banner ads that appear on videos. Instagram and Twitter also use digital ads. Pinterest has sponsored pins.

Once you know where to best connect with your audience, you will have countless options for a digital campaign. 

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for traditional advertising in lead generation. Marketing companies study what works best for each demographic.

Some subsets of the population still respond to direct mailers. If that demographic comes up in your lead generation, create brochures or other paper advertisements that can be mailed to your leads.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies any company can use.

Almost everyone has an email address (the estimate is 92% of the population has an email address). Many individuals now have multiple email accounts, including an email just for mail from businesses.

If marketers and businesses listened to conversations the general public has about the volume of email they receive daily, it would seem like email campaigns are not a good idea.

In reality, email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media according to research from McKinsey & Company.  

email marketing statistics

Additionally, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any form of marketing. That may seem mind blowing when you think about how many emails you delete each day without opening them. But the statistics back up the effectiveness of this marketing technique. 

• On average, people click one out of every 1000 online ads they see. On Google, that average is 1 out of 250. On Facebook, it is one out of every 1967 ads they see.
• Emails have an ROI of $42 per each $1 spent on the email campaign.
• Companies with the highest open rates send two emails or less per month.
• There are many techniques that can increase open rates even further, including short subject lines and the use of emojis, when appropriate.
• A company is 6 times more likely to get a click on a link in an email than a tweet.
• The click rate on a Facebook ads is .08%. In math terms, this means an ad with 8000 impressions/views would get 100 clicks.

This doesn’t mean that a business should cancel social media marketing and put everything into email marketing only.

A complete digital campaign requires both. All this means is that email marketing shouldn’t be written off as a form of lead generation.

Where To Generate Leads For Your Business

There are many platforms and forms of marketing that can promote lead generation for financial advisors.

But the most important place is your own personal website. Your website is crucial not only for branding but so potential customers can find you.

When your existing customers talk about you to their friends, they need a place to send these potential customers. Your website is that place. 

You can also use your website to showcase your abilities and what you can do for your customers. Testimonials are critical for any company.

In financial services, these testimonials can be even more important. Immediately, these stories help build trust with visitors to your site.

How A Website Can Help With Lead Generation

A website can do more than just be your online voice. It can also help you bring in more business if you use it its fullest potential. Items like a blog or videos help speak to incoming clients.

Including all the links to your social media is another great use for your website. Don’t forget to include a signup form for brand emails on your website. 

Additional Places To Generate Leads

Your website should serve as the central place for future customers to learn about you and what you can do. But your website works only when visitors come to it and click around for information.

It’s your job to bring customers to your business and your site. Here are some additional lead generation tips for financial advisors. These ideas will be a mix and match based on your brand, core guest, budget, and messaging strategy. 

1. Community networking groups

Multiple options exist for finding local groups. The app Meetup can help you find likeminded people or groups to join. Facebook also can help you search for groups in your area. There are groups for recent grads, alums of your school, your profession, and many more. Search for ones that you can join and attend their gatherings. Most of these groups are designed for networking and some allow members to present on their business. 

2. Interface with local groups

Reach out to groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis Club, Lions Club, League of Women Voters, etc. See if you can schedule a time to come in and do a presentation for their members on what financial advisors can do. 

3. Contact newspapers or local magazines

You may find a reporter that wants to do a feature on the various aspects of financial planning and advising. Offer your knowledge and pitch an article to them.

4. Look for ways to elevate your name and brand

Read local journals and periodicals to see if there are opportunities for you to get your name into their publication. Is there a chance you could do a Letter to the Editor on a topic related to your business? Any opportunity to put your name out in the local community is a chance to raise your profile and generate a lead.

5. Sponsor something in your local community

There are always local entities that are looking for businesses to help them in some way. It could be sponsoring a Little League team or contributing raffle items for an auction. If it makes financial sense, sponsor a billboard or ad at a sporting event. All of those things elevate your profile within your local community and give you positive exposure. This puts your business in front of many people who may not have heard of you otherwise. 

6. Use paid lead sources

Organic leads are great and leads that come from your marketing efforts are terrific. However, to make sure that you always have potential customers coming in, paid lead generation sources are excellent tools to use. These firms have already vetted clients and will provide you with a list of people who are looking for the types of services you provide.

Final Thoughts

Lead generation for financial advisors requires the right strategies, time, and effort to start seeing results. It is the best way to keep new business flowing into their company.

There are many ways to generate these leads, both paid and organic. To make sure you have a strategy that is working for your business, you can turn to Mediaboom.

Our experts will create winning campaigns that will bring you the leads you need for your financial firm.