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If there’s one thing business owners are short on, it’s time. As an independent financial advisor, time can be one of your most valuable resources, or it can work against you. It all comes down to how well you manage it. Fortunately, the right technology can help you save time, organize it effectively, and use it more wisely to grow your business. This is why we always recommend that our clients use an appointment scheduling tool for consultation and appointment scheduling.
Before the widespread availability of appointment booking tools, scheduling meetings involved a lot of back-and-forth communication and wasted time. You had to play phone tag, go through rounds of emails, or rely on support staff to put a great deal of effort into confirming availability, “penciling in” meetings, and ironing out details. Online schedulers almost entirely eliminate that, freeing up time for you and your staff to focus on other things, and you might be surprised by what else they can do.
But we’re a marketing agency for financial advisors, so you may be wondering what appointment schedulers have to do with promoting your business growth. The answer is — a lot!
It’s essential to understand that marketing isn’t just promoting. According to the American Marketing Association, "Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." A comprehensive marketing strategy consists of every activity you do to attract and retain clients.
Optimizing Your Online Appointment Scheduler
Using a scheduling tool eliminates back-and-forth communication, streamlines operations, and can unlock a range of valuable benefits you might not have considered.
Setup and Configuration
Explore the features of your appointment scheduler or delegate the process to someone on your team. Getting all the settings just right can make a big difference in its effectiveness, ensuring you make the most of every feature to your advantage. From setting your availability and buffer times between meetings to syncing with your other calendars, CRM, and devices, there's a lot to discover that can help streamline your day.
Tailoring for Specific Meeting Types
By enabling specific meeting types on your calendar, you're not just scheduling time slots, you're creating opportunities for tailored communication. This means you can create customized reminders for each meeting type, allowing you to include links to educational resources or requests for documents — whatever is relevant and helpful to the purpose of the meeting. You can also create post-meeting follow-up communications tailored to the type of meeting. You and your staff don’t have to remember to send these communications and resources out because your appointment scheduler will already have handled it for you.
Whether it’s a free consultation meeting with a prospect, an initial discovery call, a quarterly check-in, or an annual review, you can customize your appointment scheduling tool to address and automate exactly what’s needed for things to run smoothly.
Integrate Into Marketing Campaigns
Maximizing marketing effectiveness hinges on tracking outcomes and basing decisions on solid data. Using online appointment schedulers within your marketing campaigns lets you pinpoint exactly where bookings are coming from. Configure a scheduling link unique to a particular marketing activity, such as a “refer a friend” campaign or webinar promotion, and you won’t have to wonder if the strategy is working.
Audits and Assessments
Appointment scheduling tools provide valuable insights into appointment trends and client behavior. Does booking slow down in the summer? Are you getting a good enough ROI from your speaking events? Are clients responding to your reminders to book check-in calls? There’s no need to guess when you have the data available. Use it to your advantage as you seek to grow your firm.
Ready to Mark Your Calendar?
As you can tell, we’re big fans of online appointment schedulers. We can’t emphasize enough how much we’ve seen them benefit our clients when growing their financial advisory firms.
In our experience, using a scheduling tool such as Calendly, Accuity Scheduling, or Google Workplace Calendar is a must for independent financial advisors. It saves valuable time and effort, enhances overall efficiency and professionalism, and fosters better client communication, enabling you to focus more on core business activities, better serve your client needs, and grow your firm.
How does your current marketing measure up? Discover where you stand with our quiz and elevate your marketing game.
Crystal Lee Butler is the founder & CEO of Crystal Marketing Solutions (CMS), a marketing agency dedicated to collaborating with independent financial advisors. To learn more about how CMS can help you, go to: crystalmarketingsolutions.com
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
