4 Questions to Ask Regarding Your Digital Marketing

Written By : Clifford Blodgett

As a financial advisor, the end goals of your content marketing campaign are to gain more clients and increase your revenue. Of course, marketing is always a marathon and not a sprint, and you know that it takes time to build a relationship with your target audience.

But if you’re feeling antsy about your strategy, and wondering when your efforts will finally pay off, ask yourself the following 4 questions…

Are you focusing on your audience? You know that you should create your content based upon the needs, questions, and desires of your target audience. But along the way, it can be easy to slip into a “selling” viewpoint, as you try to convince your readers to give you their business. Remember that anyone can make a quick sale here and there, but solid, loyal relationships last for life.

Ask yourself what you can do for your audience today. If you’re the professional who always answers their questions and provides the information they need, they’ll turn to you when they need financial help.

Are you sticking with what works? There are numerous highly talented professionals in the content marketing field, and they all work tirelessly to discover and hone the best marketing practices for their clients. You can believe that if anyone had discovered a way to instantly and easily attract scores of desirable clients, you would have heard about it already.

There is no such magical strategy. If you’re pushing yourself for instant results, you will likely succeed only in stifling your creativity, or investing too much time and energy into an ill-fated venture. Sometimes you really can try too hard!

However, we know quite a lot about what does work. Stick to traditional content marketing methods, and give your campaign time to work.

Are you setting yourself apart from the field? Sticking to the traditional methods is one thing, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t allow for any creativity at all. Ask yourself how you’re different from the competition, and make sure your content reflects that difference. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but you should ask yourself what is different about your wheel.

For example, the Coca-Cola company set itself apart from other soft drink companies by launching the “Have a Coke with….” campaign. Each bottle or can of their product has a name on the side, after the words “Have a Coke with”, and their customers delight in finding a bottle with a familiar name on it. Someone in marketing clearly decided that Coca Cola’s image was about fun times with friends and family, and made sure that image was reflected in their marketing campaign. They didn’t completely redesign how Coke is manufactured, distributed, or packaged… they just added a little something that set them apart from the competition.

Are you competitive in the ways that count?  You are competing with other financial advisors for a limited number of clients in your geographical area. That idea can provoke anxiety, can’t it? You might have found yourself obsessing over your appointment book from the moment you launched your content marketing campaign.

But looking too far into the future, and focusing on the finish line, can cause you to lose sight of the mile markers along the way. And those mile markers are important, because they signal that your strategy is working! Instead, focus on smaller victories, like moving up in Google rankings, meeting your goals for attracting social media followers, or the number of website visitors responding to your call to action.

Remember, marketing campaigns take time, but they pay off in relationships that last a lifetime.

Filed under: Financial Advisor Marketing