Part Four: Nurturing Leads and Retaining Clients

Written By : Clifford Blodgett

If you’ve been following this series of articles, you should remember fictional financial advisor Jeff. Jeff started a digital marketing campaign with high hopes, but quickly became discouraged when he didn’t achieve the results he imagined. You see, Jeff dedicated a lot of time and energy to his marketing campaign, but without a true understanding of how the process would work. He expected to see an immediate uptick in new customers, without taking the intermediate steps to create brand awareness, drive traffic to his website, and generate leads.

Jeff unfortunately gave up before he got here, but now we’re at the exciting part of the process! After funneling people through your marketing process, and generating plenty of leads, you’re ready to start converting those leads into customers.

At this point in the process, your leads are familiar with you. They know what your practice is all about, and now you just have to convince them to choose you.

With lead conversion as your goal, you must create content that further educates your leads about your services.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have the written material I need to convince leads that I am their best choice?
• Is the content truly educational in nature, helping leads to solve their financial problems, and not transparently pushing a sale?

When you reach out to your leads, the following types of content are useful to convince them to use your services:

• personal emails addressed to your leads
• video detailing your services
• attention-catching graphics
• infographics detailing your success rate

At this point, you will probably notice a very clear uptick in business. But that doesn’t mean you should just assume your marketing strategy is working, and give up tracking your key performance indicators! You still want to know which types of material are most successful, so that you can continue honing your method to perfection. Track the following KPIs to determine how well your lead generation strategy is working:

• The conversion rate of each piece of content – what is the ratio of leads contacted to those converted into clients?
• What is the average “time to close” – how long did it take a new lead to convert into a client?

… And that’s it! You’re finished! Wait… Not so fast. There is just one more thing we have to discuss.

Pursuing new clients is, of course, a worthwhile goal. But what you do once you gain those new clients is equally important! In fact, client retention is Step Five in this whole process.

At this point, your goal should be to make your customers happy. Of course, that sounds like a vague goal, but there are very specific methods you can use to satisfy your customers. The main thing to remember is that you should contact your clients regularly, and offer them informative content that keeps them engaged and informed. Use content such as:

• a blog detailing industry trends
• free e-books, webinars, and seminars
• exclusive offers

When customers feel that you’re making an effort to keep them informed, you will nurture feelings of loyalty. After all, everyone likes to feel special, and everyone likes to do business with people who treat them like a person and not a number. To assess whether your client retention strategy is working, measure the follow KPIs:

• retention rate
• percentage of customers who return for subsequent consultations
• revenue from upsell to new financial products
• rate of referrals from current clients (this is an indicator of their loyalty)

Now that you understand the different stages of the marketing funnel, you should be able to map out a clear and logical strategy. Identify areas where your practice could use some improvement, or simply begin at the top of the marketing funnel and work your way through it. Remember to select content based upon your specific goals, and measure your success by the correct KPIs.  And, as always, adjust your strategy in response to those KPIs, and you will hone your digital marketing campaign to perfection.

Filed under: Financial Advisor Marketing