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Advisors have been slow to adapt the latest marketing trends. I still see many who rely on traditional marketing, such as seminars, dinners, lunch and learns, referrals/word of mouth, postcards/snail mail, rather than digital marketing.
While traditional marketing can still be effective, they are four factors that make it costly and time-consuming. There are incredible digital marketing tactics that advisors aren't leveraging, even though it is much less expensive and produces greater ROI over the long term.
Traditional marketing drawbacks versus digital marketing
Why you should implement digital marketing as a part of your overall marketing strategy? To best compare these two strategies, it is easiest to talk about some of the limitations of traditional marketing when compared with digital.
Check them out below and see why you shouldn't limit your firm to only traditional marketing, and how when executed properly, digital marketing is much more effective and will produce a higher ROI in the long run.
1. Higher costs
Traditional marketing costs are much higher than digital marketing costs. For example, that ad you placed in the local paper is only effective if your target audience sees it on the day you choose to run it. What about that postcard or flyer that you distributed? All of the fees to print them weren't cost-efficient, especially since the paper products are for one-time use.
Now, compare that to content, graphics, and other marketing assets that you create digitally. You can create digital content and then repurpose it across multiple channels. For instance, an infographic can be shared on your website, social media, a guest blog post, an email newsletter, an online ad and many other places.
Best of all, your digital content can be highly targeted to a specific audience. It can also be easily shared, which allows for your content to reach a much larger audience. Now that’s a win!
2. Limited customization
You can market to certain segments or demographics via traditional marketing methods, however, you cannot target certain customers individually.
For example, when running ads online you have a crazy amount of segmentation options to ensure you're reaching the right kind of prospects. When participating in digital marketing, this enables you to tailor the content you are serving up, since you know exactly who will be seeing it.
When marketing online, you can use keywords that your target audience is searching for, follow trending keywords, and in turn, boost your organic search rankings.
Engaging Women in Wealth is a mother-daughter duo who specializes in catering to the female niche. They tailored their website content to attract a female clientele base, and they’ve even created a blog, The Empowerment Diary, catering to their target audience. Including keywords that are important to their target niche (SEO optimization) allows that audience to easily find them through web searches.
3. No measurement
Results from traditional marketing can be incredibly hard to measure. Without any measurement of your marketing efforts, there's no way to know what's working and what's not and if you're investing in the right tactics.
On the other hand, digital marketing offers a plethora of analytics to measure the return on your investment. It can be a simple blog post, where you can track the total number of visits and where those visitors came from (a referral link, social media, or email), an e-book download that generates email sign-ups or an online ad that generates traffic to a landing page. All of these actions can be measured, giving you valuable insight into where you are getting the biggest ROI!
Even better, the granular measurement provided by digital marketing allows you to “A/B” test. For instance, you could run two ads online at the same time – with the same graphic and text, but one of those ads takes visitors to a landing page that just has text and a call to action, while the other includes a video that further explains the offer. You can then track which version of your landing page gets the most conversions (i.e., people “signing up” with their email) over a two week period.
The great part about seeing all of these analytics and reports is that you can draw conclusions from that data, iterate and fine-tune your digital marketing efforts, to make it even stronger and produce an even higher return on investment.
4. It’s not evergreen
If you host a seminar, send a print mailing, put an ad in the newspaper, invite prospects to a dinner event, or engage in some other traditional marketing you are paying for a one-time marketing event.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to create marketing that will continue to produce results forever. Every blog post you write, every video you upload, your website or the posts you put on social media – these are all marketing efforts that will live online indefinitely.
This is because anyone who conducts a search query online has the potential to stumble upon your content, regardless of when it was created. Of course, some content is more “evergreen” than others – a blog post about a new tax bill in 2017 will not get as many views in 2019. But a blog post on top considerations when deciding when to retire could get views for years and years.
Producing timely content on current events or trending topics should be part of your marketing strategy – but it is evergreen content – content that will be relevant to your viewers years from now – that will give you the biggest ROI over the long-haul.
Your turn to decide
According to Demand Metric, a market research firm, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. Coupled with the pros and cons above, it’s clear that digital marketing has a definite edge over traditional marketing methods. The chances are that you’ve tried traditional marketing methods. Ask yourself – did they provide ROI? If not, it’s time to make the switch to digital.
Samantha Russell is the chief marketing and business development officer at Twenty Over Ten (a digital marketing and website development company for financial advisors). Samantha helps financial advisors create digital marketing strategies that produce explosive growth through website development, content marketing, SEO, social media and video.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
