How to Use Automated Marketing for More Nurtured Leads & Guaranteed Growth
The article explains that marketing automation is a software tool that automates routine marketing tasks like email campaigns and lead prioritization, enabling financial advisors to deliver consistent, relevant content across multiple channels to nurture leads effectively, improve marketing strategies through data feedback, and ultimately save time and guarantee business growth.
What is Marketing Automation, and Why Does it Matter?
Marketing automation is a software-based platform that helps automate specific types of marketing activities for a business. According to HubSpot:
“Marketing automation is software that handles routine marketing tasks without the need for human action. Common marketing automation workflows include email marketing, behavioral targeting, lead prioritization, and personalized advertising.”
Marketing automation is an essential tool that every financial advisor should utilize to make their marketing efforts easier while also saving time.
By adding automation to your marketing strategy, you can effectively deliver relevant messages and information to leads, nurturing them throughout the sales process. Presenting prospects with consistent content allows you to track what works and what doesn't, improving your marketing efforts overall.
This post explains the importance of marketing automation for today’s financial advisor, how to get started if you are new to automating your marketing efforts, and provides tips if you’ve already begun automating your marketing campaigns.
How to Get Started with Marketing Automation for Financial Advisors
1. Choose an Automation Platform
In the past, marketing automation almost exclusively referred to email marketing campaigns based on actions a potential client may or may not take with an email. This approach provided little useful data and relied on the volume of leads rather than their quality, resulting in a poor experience for both prospects and financial advisors.
Today, marketing automation must revolve around the needs of your prospects across all marketing channels—not just email. The best automation software communicates with your contact lists in multiple ways. Feedback from this cross-channel approach provides businesses with data to better satisfy potential clients’ wants and needs.
2. Identify Your Target Audiences
Marketing automation allows you to present a more personalized message to the contacts in your CRM. Create segments across your prospect list by focusing on various parameters, such as:
- Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, industry, etc.
- Platforms: Crafting content specifically suited for a particular social media channel, email, text, or newsletters.
- Interests: Respond to site or page visits with user-informed content. For example, if a prospect clicks on links related to retirement investments, follow up with messaging about retirement planning.
- Engagement: Build relationships with repeat visitors, utilizing data from previous interactions.
Personalized and efficient communications strengthen the quality of your leads, keep prospects in your sales funnel, and ultimately improve your conversion rate for servicing new clients.
3. Create and Implement Your Marketing Strategy
Modern automation software platforms provide financial advisors with workflow templates that guide users through scheduling and sequencing messages, emails, and posts. These templates save time and are a great way to test your marketing automation platform’s capabilities.
Customizing your marketing automations allows you to anticipate and respond to virtually any combination of responses or actions your prospect may take. Examples include:
- Sending a welcome email when someone fills out a contact form, joins a group, or follows you on social media.
- Sending a thank you message to individuals who view a video presentation or register for a webinar, including links to related information.
- Reaching out to old leads in your CRM, providing updates on your business and links to your scheduling platform.
Most importantly, create a marketing plan and get started. As Winston Churchill said, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”
4. Track Your Results (Good and Bad)
The speed and efficiency that marketing automation provides can be both a blessing and a curse. Despite the urge to react to initial results, remember that marketing and sales are a marathon, not a sprint. Patience will be rewarded with stronger leads and better clients. By reviewing analytics and detailed reports from your automation software, you can improve your understanding of who your future clients are and how to best earn their business.
By creating content that your prospects want, rather than what you thought they wanted, you will continue to grow your brand and customer base.
Next Steps
Marketing automation software is nearly a necessity for a growing business in today’s evolving marketplace. By empowering financial advisors to improve marketing processes and increase brand awareness in-house, automation allows you to have more control over the growth and success of your business.
When considering marketing automation tools and platforms, solutions like Redtail Campaigns can help you get started on the path to more nurtured leads and guaranteed growth through custom, pre-built content, powerful workflows, and direct integration into CRM systems.