There used to be a time when financial advisors and insurance agencies relied on recommendations, referrals, and word of mouth as the key driver of new businesses. But as the market flooded, the paradigm shifted to digital and social media marketing. Clients began looking into more sophisticated approaches to procure financial services, and as it stands – that’s where the industry lies.
The purchasing behaviour of both financial and insurance clients is no longer the same. If you’re NOT willing to rethink the strategic approach you employ to meet different financial needs and expectations of your clients, then there’s a whole lot you’re missing in terms of client acquisition.
As a financial advisor or insurance provider looking to make a difference, a good marketing strategy to adopt is one that focuses on delivering results that set you apart in the already saturated marketplace you’re competing in.
It’s no longer a surprise to see an insurance agency or financial advisor live and die with the digital marketing strategies they employ. Some are great. But some are blatantly bad.
This article focuses on great digital marketing ideas that financial advisors and insurance agencies in Singapore can adopt and grow their business. Not just some random collection of ideas, but a well laid-out strategy you could use to move your business to the next level of success.
By focusing on strategies that professionals employ to differentiate their brand, attract new policyholders, and retain the existing ones, we aim to help you develop a deeper understanding of digital marketing and how to use it to turn your financial prospects and insurance policyholders into lifelong customers your business can actually depend on.
As a financial advisor, the first hurdle to attracting new business involves breaking through the usual online noise. Online consumers are no longer the bunch we used to know. Gone are the days when you could win them over by being overly salesy. But as it stands, online consumers prefer doing their own due diligence, and any attempt to oversell anything to them is usually met with its deserving share of skepticism.
What consumers want is an instant, refined and picture perfect shopping experience. Purchasing insurance or financial advice is no different – consumers still expect the process not to be faulted, almost on the same scale as purchasing a pair of shoes on Amazon or eBay.
The strategies lined below are designed to help you achieve this and so much more.
Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is a crucial process in promoting your insurance and financial planning business to prospects. By churning out valuable and unique content, you’ll be working towards adding value and giving your prospects a reason to consider signing up with you.
The content you make may take various forms –including eBooks, videos, images, and podcasts to name a few. However, with blog posts, the content you create must be educational and engaging enough to make your readers keep coming for more.
Another notable benefit associated with content marketing for insurance agencies and financial advisors is that it gives you an opportunity to build trust and establish a long lasting relationship with the readers you get – which works to ensure a smooth working relationship when you finally get down to work.
That’s mostly because the content you create carries some key information that could go a long way to explaining some of the intricacies and complexities involved in the digital marketing strategies you employ.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Nothing is easier than finding a digital marketing agency to help you draft a functioning marketing plan for your business. The plan formulated should NOT only be cost-effective, but fit enough to increase your following in a bid to boost up sales.
But core to an effective digital marketing plan is a fool-proof content-marketing strategy. With this, you’ll be able to attract a huge number of potential clients without spending much of your hard-earned cash.
Here are more benefits associated with content marketing:
- You’re likely to attract 8 times more traffic by integrating content marketing into your digital marketing strategy.
- Content marketing investments costs way less than outbound marketing.
- Different studies suggest that you’re likely to drive 3 times more leads with content marketing
One thing most marketers fail to understand is that content marketing involves so much more than managing a functional blog or website.
For financial advisors, managing a successful blog takes so much effort and dedication compared to other industries. If anything, every single one of the articles you publish should be answering at least one of the questions consumers have in relation to your line of business.
One being – “are you in position to be trusted with their money?”
By proving your expertise through supplying your customers with a constant flow of well-crafted content, you’ll be showcasing your ability to solve their problem.
Read this bearing in mind that content marketing is NOT restricted to blogging. You have the option to try offering free eBooks and white papers to your prospects. Or start a podcast or webinar to establish some credibility in your area of expertise.
Content Marketing Ideas for Financial Advisors
You can Blog about Trending Topics
Customers seeking financial advice prefer being updated on what’s trending in addition to being served with a more practical approach. Your role as a financial advisor is serving your customers with useful pieces of advice on financial management. You’re accountable for almost any aspect of their financial success.
As a financial advisor, it’s important that you understand about this. Dishing out financial advice is important in solidifying your place in the industry, but it’s bound to get boring and redundant with time.
Blog about current trends and the impact it has on your customers.
As a financial advisor in Singapore, one approach would be to make an effort of sending emails of sound financial practices to your local prospects. Try looking at the current market and you’ll have an easy time coming up with a series of trendy topics to blog about.
A classic example of a company that leverages what’s trending is Fargo during the recent hurricane that occurred in Florida. All the company had to do was to create a series of blog posts, ads and emails dishing out a broad range of safety and survival tips for the hurricane. By doing so, the company was able to win quite a good number of new converts and get even more people to start banking with them.
Follow Your Objectives
Hidden in the mission statement or tagline of your business is a set of clear objectives, whose function is to guide you all through the marketing process.
Examples include a saving company with “More for Money as the tagline” or a local bank with “Committed to the people we serve as the mission statement.
The best content marketing idea for your business doesn’t necessarily need to fall outside your business. Look right into your mission statement sometimes, and you’re bound to come up with a number of sound ideas on what to write about.
The content you come up with should be an extension of the world you operate in. It’s the aura you create around your brand, and which customers feel whenever they’re transacting with you.
One way to make people trust your brand and the services you offer is by remaining true to your objectives.
Customize your Online Brand Image
As more and more people begin embracing digital media platforms, there arises the need to be even more organized and strategic with how you manage your social media accounts and pages. One reason being, a good number of your potential customers have at least 3 devices with which they use to access your business online. Each of these devices has its own format and layout that dictates how your content is viewed.
The content you post must be fluid enough to adapt to any of these devices without throwing your design off.
Learn to Appeal to Your Customers’ Interest
The easiest approach you can take to appeal to your customer’ interest is by addressing them on a personal level. Your customers want to feel the connection the two of you have.
Find out more about your customers interest and find a way to directly appeal to them. It’s also important that you use real time analogies to give examples they can relate to.
Many people go through so many life-changing events. They’ve been through college, married, had children and done so much, all of which played part shaping up the person they’re today.
You can start by identifying such stages and tailor your content to appeal to their interest directly and you’d have halfway succeeded in appealing to their interest.
Learn to Track Your Traffic and Analyze Your Data
You need to weigh your progress, and one way to do this is by keeping an accurate track of your web traffic and analyzing the data you get.
This is even more important if you’re looking for a marketing agency to work with. For a digital marketing agency like MediaOne, their strategic plan of action involves identifying your traffic data and analyzing it afterwards for an insight on the business decisions you make.
By tracking the traffic you get to analyze it, you’ll have an easy time adjusting your web content for more value.
Work On Local SEO
There’s no way you’re going to run a successful content marketing campaign without working on your local SEO. Your website and other online properties you run must be diligently optimized to secure you a top ranking in the search engines.
Here’s a compressed list of things to work on:
. – Get as much info as possible about your business listed across all the websites you can come up with. This includes your name, phone number, email address and a link directing potential customers back to your site. Here’s a link to an important tool you could use to assess the progress you make while working on this.
. – Try coming up with geo-targeted pages of every single one of the groups you serve. Create a separate page for each of the geographical location you’re targeting and work on optimizing it until it gets ranked.
. – Reach out to local newspapers, blogs and any other publication you can think of for press releases and back links.
Don’t focus on the already established publications. As a beginning financial advisors and insurance consultant, it’s much easier to target smaller publications to help you with your profile.
Optimize Your Site for Voice Searches
As personal assistance platforms such as Google Assistant and Amazon Echo increase in popularity, optimizing your site for voice searches is fast emerging as one of the most crucial digital marketing strategy of any growing business looking to take the big leap forward.
Here’s one way to look at it:
According to the latest stat report from ComScore, about 20 percent of all online searches are performed via voice searches, with the number expected to shoot to 50 percent by 2020.
That said, here’s a number of ways you can optimize your site for voice searches:
Focus on writing in a friendly, conversational tone:
While explaining a financial concept in a blog post or any of the writings you make, it’s important that you try as much as you possibly can to use a friendly style of writing. Write in a conversational tone, as if you’re explaining the concept to a friend in front of you.
Focus Long tail Search Terms
Users search for online content using head terms (short tail key words) and long tail search terms. Of this, 70 percent of all online searches are done using long tail terms.
The point is to try to get into the mind of a user and get to the specifics of what they are searching for. A classic example is the title of this post. Instead of shortening the title to “digital marketing strategies” the article gets to the specifics of who is targeted hence the title “digital marketing strategies for financial advisors and insurance agencies in Singapore.”
Focus on making your website Mobile Friendly
Your site should be able to equally load on desktop and mobile device without losing any of its structure. If the design is getting jumbled up on mobile devices, but loads just fine on desktop, then it’s high time you contacted your web developer for rectification of the issue.
Structure Your Posts to Respond to the Questions Your Prospects Ask
Every single one of your clients and prospects has lingering financial or insurance questions that they’d wish to see answered. If you can get into their mind and figure them out, you can easily come up with a series of questions that respond to the questions they have indirectly.
To increase your chances of being featured in the Google featured snippets i) be sure to structure your answers in bullet points or numbered list and ii) keep the answers succinct but relevant in relation to the kind of question being asked.
It’s a Wrap
Digital marketing is for the most part about increasing your online brand visibility. As a financial advisor, nailing this strategy is NOT hard provided you come up with a well structured plan. There might be a few differences here and there, but the principal that govern how you run your campaign is the same as that of any other industry out there.
If you’ve been investing time on ineffective digital marketing strategies then it’s high time you quit already and instead shifted your focus to attracting more financial prospects and insurance policyholders. For professional help, make a point to contact MediaOne today for a free SEO consultation.
