When I refer to a robust digital infrastructure, I am talking about the tools and strategic plan you’ll need to thrive as a financial advisor in a virtual world – technological capabilities and efforts imperative to your success.
Even though modern-day consumers have been using online banking and mobile applications for years, the concept of online financial advisors is still relatively fresh, although quickly becoming a demand and the norm.
The question is, how do you cater to that demand, how do you make your target audience aware of your services? You do by creating a robust digital footprint. And how do you create a robust digital footprint, you ask? By implementing the following crucial online efforts, which form the foundation of your robust digital infrastructure:
Be Social
When it comes to brand awareness, your social media efforts are critical to building your digital infrastructure – this cannot be undervalued. Without a proper social media plan, no one will ever know about your business.
An effective social media plan consists of:
- Soft marketing
- Brand awareness
- Talking about solutions and benefits of the work you do to your target audience
- Actively engaging with others content regularly
- Posting about live seminars and webinars relevant to your brand or that you have created yourself
- Being genuine and transparent with your audience
- Growing your network
- Positioning yourself as a thought leader
- The blending of personal and business social profiles and content
- Frequently sending direct, personalized messages to your ideal client to build a relationship, not pitch!
- Collecting email addresses, in exchange for content of value (eBooks, etc.) by directing people to your other channels
- Video posts (better for engagement)
The whole point of social media is to educate your audience and stay away from pushy sales and products.
Host Live Virtual Seminars
By creating virtual seminars that dive deep into your brand and services, you can engage directly with your audience through live Q&As. You can also record them and post across your social media channels later, resulting in helpful content.
When it comes to the kind of content, you can create multiple presentations for specific topics and, in turn, breakdown and serve your target audience even more. Your virtual seminars can also be used as free giveaways (downloadable), strengthening your relationship and connection with prospective clients.
Have A Clean & Transparent Website
As I’ve highlighted before in previous posts, you can host all your content on your website; this will drive SEO efforts and become your “home” online. Be sure to regularly update it with new content to keep your audience engaged.
Clients should be able to book an appointment with you through your website too, which can be managed through an embedded calendar.
The possibilities are endless, but ensure that your website clearly states who you are, what you offer, and whatever you do don’t forget to list your prices – highlight your purpose.
Build A Mailing List
Now that you are creating excellent content, you can use giveaways (free downloads) to get prospective clients to sign up for your mailing list. For example, you give them a free webinar, seminar, or eBook, and they have to sign up to download it.
The benefit of building a mailing list as that you can retarget to people that you know for sure are already interested in your service offering.
Invest in Paid Ads
A whole other ballgame, but incredibly effective. With paid ads, you can also create an “ideal client” audience to market to.
Paid ads are a necessary investment, but they aren’t cheap. They do, however, garner instant results (you get what you pay for).
Paid ads essentially drive more traffic to your website from search engines such as Google or Yahoo, meaning that the traffic is relevant. For instance, if someone types “Virtual Financial Advisor” into Google, you could potentially (depending on how relevant your content is, and how much budget you have) be the first result that comes up.
This is something you don’t need to do right off the bat, build a solid foundation of digital infrastructure first, otherwise you are throwing digital spaghetti at the wall!
Build Relationships with Other Industry Players
By forming relationships with other industry players, they can potentially become what I like to call “referral partners.”
You can achieve this by guest blogging on another brand’s website, featuring on a relevant podcast, or generating backlinks to your own blogs. Backlinking, in particular, is super useful for building the credibility of your website. When one of your “referral partners” link back to your blog, and they have a high trust score, your content automatically becomes more trustworthy in the eyes of Google.
These relationships are strategic and should be beneficial to both parties.
In a nutshell, being relevant and visible is accomplished by being active online with engaging and highly valuable contributions to your specific industry.
Alright, that’s it for now! I hope you enjoyed reading my insight into the importance of robust digital infrastructure for financial advisors in a virtual world.
To dominate the digital space as a financial advisor, find out more about my virtual advisory system Conneqtor – it’ll transform your business. Hint hint, we teach advisors how to do all of this in our virtual advisor system…..
Kind regards,
Derek Notman.
