In my travels and face-to-face meetings with advisors, I spend a lot of time listening how they are generating leads.
Again, this is the #1, hot-brand issue for most financial professionals, so any insight here is extremely powerful.
- Via advisor’s website: This is just effective, blocking and tackling. It’s not enough to just have a website or blog. Advisors who are good at generating new leads know how to effectively give-away content (whitepaper or presentation) on their websites in return for an email address.
- Online ads: Ken Fisher, massive $40B+ RIA is a well-oiled machine with its targeted advertising on search engines. Fisher uses small ads that have the ability to hyper-target an ideal prospect and get them to click. Again, you’ll need to send the user to a page on your site and give them something of value to get more of their details so you can follow up with them directly.
- LinkedIn: Many advisors completely miss the boat on the power of LinkedIn to help them grow their businesses. But, LinkedIn is perhaps one of the most powerful tools for identifying hot leads for your advisory practice (assuming, you can define who your target client is). Smart advisors are using the advanced search feature on LinkedIn to find those people in their network that fit their ideal prospect bill. Save this search and LinkedIn continues to monitor the results of your search and delivers any new hits, new names to you when they pop up.
- Online presentations: Slideshare (just bought by LinkedIn) is a really powerful platform for powerpoints, PDFs, presentations. There are other platforms for audio and video. Live webinars continue to work well to generate leads (you need an email to signup!) for advisors who can get people to sign up for them. Prospects interested in following the breadcrumbs back will find their way to the advisor’s website in the form of a qualified lead.
- Old school still works: The ROI of offline marketing has gone down but only an insane person would claim that old school techniques don’t work anymore. Seminars, direct mail, cold calling, effective networking — these things all still work.
What are you doing to generate leads? What’s working for you?
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I'm Zack Miller and I've been building and growing financial businesses for the past 10 years with content, strategy, business development, and marketing.
About the Author:
Zack Miller helps investment business grow. Business development, content creation, strategy, partnerships -- you name it, he's does it. Here's more on what I do.