How you can grow your business using technology
Financial advisors can use marketing technology to help attract, engage, nurture, and convert leads.
Technology is changing the way financial advisors do business.
So, what technology do you need for your practice? We're here to help.
A robust digital presence is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity—making smart use of technology important to growing your business. Clients want an experience that blends both a digital and human touch. Watch our video series for ways to deliver a digital experience in a meaningful and efficient way.
Start small, then build your technology stack.*
A technology stack is a group of digital applications that a company uses to manage their business and market to their clients. As advisors look to modernize their business and attract younger generations, having the right technology is most likely critical to success.
You want to start with a basic foundation and be able to grow—or stack—more technology applications onto the foundation when you're ready.
Are you holding more virtual meetings these days?
You aren’t alone. And we want to help.
Virtual meetings are a great way to stay in touch with your clients—and that’s so important right now. We’ve learned a lot in our own shift to virtual meetings, and we’ve picked up some best practices along the way. Watch the videos for tips to help make your virtual meetings the best they can be.
Want to hear more? Contact your Principal® representative for more tips on hosting a great virtual meeting.
Learn, track, and manage client relationships.
BASE, Salesforce, REDTAIL, HubSpot are not affiliates of any company of the Principal Financial Group®. Reference to these vendors is not an endorsement or recommendation of the specific CRM products/vendors.
Customer relationship management system (CRM)
At a base level of a technology stack one should consider a customer relationship management system (CRM). This software is a database of your clients and prospects that everyone in your office can access. It’s a lot more powerful than an Excel spreadsheet and a lot easier than trying to keep all that information in your head or in a notebook.
A CRM is a way to keep track of and manage everything related to a client or prospect in the sales process. Who they are, size of company, when you last met, what you discussed, details about their plan, etc. It also lets you manage leads: Was a follow-up sent? Who completed the task? What and when is the next contact?
There are several great CRMs out there just for financial advisors. You’ll want to do your homework to find a system that meets your needs and is easy for everyone on your team to use.
Build a website that helps drive business.
A professional looking website is the digital face of your business. Today, most clients will search for you on the web before they call you. It's important to make a good first impression, or they'll close the web browser and move on.
Your website should be easy to use and navigate, especially for mobile devices. Visitors should be able to quickly recognize what your website is about, find information they are looking for and be able to take action. We've put together an example homepage for an advisor site to make it easy to see what content is important for the digital experience of your users.
More than
50%
of consumers prefer video content over other forms of content like emails, social, and blogs.1
Over
51%
of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product while conducting a search on their smartphone.1
Capture. Nurture. Convert.
Attracting and engaging with prospects are the first steps in your digital marketing journey. Once you get them to your website, don’t leave them hanging. Add tools to capture their emails so you are able to nurture them and eventually ask for their business.
Email capturing
It’s important to keep in mind that your website is likely the start of your marketing funnel. You want a call to action where you capture visitor emails to nudge these new leads into your CRM system.
A way to collect email addresses is by offering something of value. For their email address, you will give them:
- A hassle-free consultation (provide appointment scheduler)
- Access to a white paper or video series
- Access to a seminar or webinar
No matter what type of email capture you use, it’s important that you develop a process to follow up and continue the conversation with these new leads ASAP.
Marketing automation
Adding marketing automation to your technology stack is something financial advisors should seriously consider. It’s a software system that you set up to automatically send targeted emails to the names in your CRM. Working together with your email capturing and online scheduling systems, marketing automation can organize, personalize, and nurture your leads digitally.
Examples of how to use marketing automation:
- Welcome new leads and continue to nurture and support with personalized content
- Simplify event registration and management
- Send quarterly or annual review information
- Send automated appointment requests and reminders
Here’s an example of how automated emails would be sent to potential clients. This is called an email marketing journey.
of sales require at least five follow-ups.2
Businesses that nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non–nurtured prospects.3
of top–performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years.3
More apps for your stack
There are other applications to add to your technology stack that may make it easier to service current and new clients.
Online appointment scheduling
Appointment scheduling software could save you and your staff lots of time and possibly make it easier for clients to do business with you. Having an online scheduler resource could eliminate missed phone calls or back-and-forth emails. You can include an appointment scheduler on your website and allow clients to set up certain types of appointments. The appointment requests come to your inbox and calendar.
Video conferencing
Most business clients are likely familiar with using video conferencing for meetings. A video conference works just as well as meeting in person and can be a time saver for many, especially if you can cut down on travel time.
Just a reminder, if you are using video conferencing, be conscious of what’s behind you. Make sure to keep your background professional with items such as books or a neutral piece of art. If you want to record the video conference, make sure to ask first.
Electronic signature
To finalize a deal, there’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of signatures. The use of an eSignature application can make getting signatures faster, easier, and more secure. Documents are saved electronically, allowing your clients to access them at their convenience and to sign them with any internet-enabled device.
Social media scheduler
Social media planning and posting is time-consuming and somewhat intimidating if you don’t know what to post. A social media automation tool lets you schedule posts across several social media channels in advance and allows you to batch a series of posts. This lets you tie posts together to create a story or a series. What a time saver!
Ideally, you should post daily, but that’s not always realistic. Consistency is key. If you only post a couple of times each week, that’s okay. If you have a hard time remembering to schedule posts, delegate the job to one or two other people in the office.
Increase your visibility online.
How do people find your website?
For illustration purposes only.
Search engine optimization
To get people to your website, you want to increase its visibility on the search engines, i.e., Google, Firefox, Safari, etc. This is called search engine optimization or SEO. It’s what you can do to increase the likelihood and placement of your website in the search results of various words or phrases. When a search engine such as Google crawls a webpage, it looks for keywords, the number of external websites linking to your page, page load times, and other elements. It “throws” all these elements into an algorithm that generates your webpage rank according to a certain search.
Social media for advisors
Social media is everywhere nowadays. It’s said that about 3.03 billion people are on social media around the globe.4
Before hopping on the social media bandwagon, you’ll
first want to check with your compliance resource to
be sure any social media activities comply with your
company’s policies. These should serve as your
guardrails for what you can and cannot post on your
social media sites.
(LinkedIn, 2018)
of senior executives navigate to a site after viewing a related YouTube video.5
investors have checked an advisor's Facebook page. Over 50% of them decided not to work with an advisor over something they saw.6
investors under 40 have checked an advisor's Facebook page.6
Questions?
Contact our Advisor Support Team
at 800-952-3343, option 2.
* If you need to retain emails and site information for compliance purposes, be sure to vet each vendor for retention capabilities.
1 Video marketing statistics, HubSpot, Inc., 2021.
2 Your sales fortune is in the follow up, Spotio, May 2021.
3 Lead generation statistics, HubSpot, Inc., 2021.
4 BrizFeel, 2018.
5 Single Grain, 2018.
6 LinkedIn, 2018.