Ask almost any financial advisor and they will admit that one of the biggest challenges they face to growing their practice is a difficulty in generating consistent, high quality leads. They can have great digital marketing and content marketing to promote their financial services but finding the ideal client is just not happening.
WHY DO FINANCIAL ADVISORS STRUGGLE TO GENERATE LEADS?
The problem is certainly not that the demand for the services of a good financial advisor is not there. In fact it’s quite to the contrary. More and more of the members of the ‘Baby Boom’ generation are either already retired or have their eyes on the prize.
Many of them failed to plan for this eventuality properly, either because they failed to make it a priority or, as is more often the case had believed they could not afford to make any major investments. Therefore the one thing they really do need at this point is the wisdom of a financial advisor.
They are not the only ones either. Adult children are increasingly being faced with the prospect of helping their ageing parents manage their financial affairs and they too are usually in need of as much expert help as they can get in order to do so successfully.
So, if they are operating in a high demand field, why is effective lead generation for financial advisors something that they find so difficult?
TIME FOR THE NEW
In most cases, it is because their efforts are inconsistent and they are trying to make use of outdated strategies that are simply no longer effective in the modern world. Many financial advisors still channel their efforts, and their money, into things like direct mail, and newspaper or magazine ads.
There are some financial advisors that may still see limited results making use of what are, to put it bluntly, rather archaic tactics, but the lead stream is rarely consistent and running these types of campaigns is neither time nor cost-efficient.
If you were to speak with top financial advisors, not one of them will tell you that their primary lead-generation strategies include any of the methods that we just mentioned above. That is because they have realised that the times have indeed changed and they have embraced that fact.
So why are these once fairly effective lead generation strategies failing? In the case of direct mail, the fact is that that most people automatically consider this junk and ignore it. And unless you are placing newspaper and magazine ads in niche publications they do not target a specific audience. They are also one of the most ineffective ways to target high net worth investors.
Financial advisors should look into automated marketing, a new lead generation tool (and trust me, there’s plenty). They should learn how to drive people to their landing page and other lead generation tactics. All of which will help with their sales funnel and get every new client from their target market they can.
LEAD GENERATION FOR FINANCIAL ADVISORS THAT WORKS
Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do when it comes to financial lead generation. If you keep trying to use the wrong strategies your business will not be successful, especially when your competitors are actually making use of the right strategies.
And this is where a lead generation agency comes in. Not a lead generation service, a lead generation agency. Services tend to stick to making use of cold calling, and occasionally cold email. And these can be effective, but rarely alone.
A modern lead generation campaign calls for a lot more in order to be effective and generate the consistent stream of high quality leads a financial advisor needs.
Having a website offers great potential, but that in itself is not enough either. However, it can be leveraged to generate a great stream of leads, but it takes specialist help to do that.
A lead generation agency like Pearl Lemon Leads is able to hire knowledgeable writers at an affordable rate and then create and post articles that are specifically geared toward your target audience and used as a lead magnet to attract those all-important prospects, the ones that have already demonstrated an interest in what you offer and are ripe for you to move in and close.
Some Kansas City SEO companies are also able to arrange for the local SEO – search engine optimization – needed to attract these people to your site to be implemented and to organise effective off-site promotion that does the same.
Then there is LinkedIn. You may already be on it, but how much use are you really making of it. LinkedIn can be one of the most effective ways for financial advisors to generate leads as it IS where those high worth investors can be easily reached.
According to LinkedIn themselves, among their active users, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers and 40 million are in decision-making positions, meaning that the chances are excellent that they also have incomes that reflect that seniority. Once you learn how LinkedIn can be leveraged as a lead generation machine (which it really is) often the sky’s the limit.
REMEMBER, YOUR TIME IS MONEY
There is one other, huge reason, that some of the most successful financial advisors the world over choose to work with a lead generation agency. Their time is money. They have current clients to attend to, and any time spent trying to generate leads by themselves is time that could be better spent in consultation with the new, paying clients that leads generated by others can bring in.
