The financial advisor lead generation world is competitive but can be lucrative when you know what you’re doing.
Suppose your B2B financial advisory firm is looking for ways to stay competitive while trying to reach high-level business owners. In that case, you’ll be able to rise above your biggest rivals if you invest time and money into sales personalization.
That means understanding your target audience, their wants and needs, and gearing content toward them. It also means personalizing content to leads based on conversations you had. But all of this requires a lot of research, patience, and strategy.
B2B personalization is one of those client acquisition strategies for financial advisors that requires a lot of specialized know-how. If you’re starting to think about injecting personalization into your quest to grow your firm’s client base, you’ll need a detailed guide that maps out your path. That’s what this article is for. In the following sections, we’ll walk you through why personalization can be so helpful for financial advisory firms and how you can implement this strategy immediately.
Why is Personalization Vital to Financial Advisor Practice Management?
You must establish your legitimacy when trying to get businesses to trust you enough to help you manage their financial future. Prospects must perceive you as trustworthy and reliable. Aside from officializing as a limited liability company to help establish your business as legit, it also means investing time and energy into proving that you know what you’re doing — that you and your team are experts in the financial management world. That starts with quality content.
However, getting your target audience to focus on that content will be hard without personalization. That’s why 75% of marketers believe personalized content across multiple channels is vital in the modern marketing age.
A personalization strategy will ensure you’re using your time effectively marketing to the right audience. You’ll be able to know who you need to reach and when you need to get them. You’ll be able to understand how your ideal clients think, how their workload changes in different scenarios, like when certain months have five weeks, and what kind of content resonates with them most.
You’ll need to know as much about how their businesses work as you do your own. For example, if you’re trying to get a big company like Metlife Dental Insurance as a client, you’ll want to create content that appeals to their business model. A company like that uses outside sales reps to reach business owners and try to sell insurance plans. So, by creating content about managing travel expenses for outside sales reps, you’re creating personalized content that appeals to this prospect and others with similar business models.
It’s not enough to say you’re targeting “insurance companies.” This dental insurance company will have completely different needs than a company that sells life insurance, home insurance, or dog insurance. With a personalization strategy in place, you can segment these disparate companies and target each with a different approach.
Understand the Audience
Before you start targeting your prospects, do your research. Learn about the industry, the company, and the people you’re targeting. Please find out about their pain points and offer tailored solutions to their problems. As a financial advisor, you must focus on delivering a personal experience with your messaging.
Suppose your target market is local business owners who need help understanding their long-term financial goals. In that case, you’ll need to craft a different strategy than if you had a target market of big enterprises.
According to best-selling sales books, gathering basic information about your customers or potential customers is important for any sales personalization. For example, you’ll want to know what kind of budget they’re working with or when they’ll likely sign on with a financial service like yours. The HubSpot lead scoring software may help you determine the latter because lead scoring will help you with this analysis.
To appropriately personalize your marketing efforts toward your target audience, you must develop buyer personas and ideal customer profiles for every segment of your B2B audience. That includes:
- The size of the company
- Who the decision-makers are
- Where decision-makers spend their time
- What kind of content resonates with these decision-makers
- What kind of financial pain points do these businesses have?
- What are the business models of these companies?
- And much more.
Once you properly segment your audience and understand what kind of content they want, you can personalize marketing campaigns for each target demographic your firm is targeting.
Trust in Automation Platforms
While marketing personalization takes a lot of time, investing in marketing automation software can reduce some of the hours required. This technology can automatically send out email drip campaigns, attach the recipients’ names to all email messages, score the leads, and automatically segment the audience based on your criteria. Customer data platforms can be a great tool to build detailed insights on your customers for better personalization.
You can free up time and resources for more personalized customer interactions by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining your sales processes with sales automation tools. This approach to business process automation can include using tools to track your sales progress and even generate personalized sales proposals, severely cutting down on admin time for your team of financial advisors. Not only does this help to improve efficiency and productivity, but it also allows you to focus on building stronger relationships with your customers and tailoring your sales approach to their needs.
Personalized Videos
Crafting video content on financial health specifically designed to target the companies in your audience segments can be an excellent avenue for personalization. Through video content, you can better create value around your firm and provide information that you know your audience wants.
When personalizing sales, video promos are just what you need. They allow you to use the right insights to deliver messages to customers that make them feel as though you understand them and know what they’re thinking. The video’s visuals further enhance the effect of the insight, making it one of the best means of personalization. Using an AI presentation generator can make all the difference for personalization videos for your email campaigns. You can even track real-time analytics of who has viewed your video.
Video can capture the attention of your prospective clients in a way that text can’t. It’s a multi-sensory experience, where they can hear your message and see a friendly, knowledgeable face attached to it. Armed with all the demographic information you’ve gathered, you can craft messaging that appeals to different segments of your audience and push those videos out through targeted marketing channels on search engines, social media, YouTube, and more.
On YouTube, for instance, you’ll be able to push out your videos as paid ads, ensuring that they appear before the eyes of your target audience. Target these ads based on viewing history, search history, and other important identifying information that zeroes in on your ideal customer profile for each segment.
Personalized Email Marketing
Email personalization also plays a big part in your sales personalization strategy. However, personalizing a large number of emails can get tricky if you don’t have the right tools to tailor campaigns. Use AI for marketing and AI-powered writing tools such as paraphrase tools, rewriters, and ready-to-use templates to facilitate email personalization within your firm.
Then, when you’re ready to roll your emails out, you can take personalization efforts a step further. Create email segments based on your audience segments. By integrating your email marketing tool with your CRM, you can automate this process easily.
Additionally, you can kick things up a notch by using an email marketing service with personalization features. The platform should be able to access your customer profiles and extract each prospective client’s name. It can then automatically add these names to your emails’ subject lines and bodies. This creates a more personal touch that makes your prospect feel as though this email was sent specifically with them in mind.
Test Different Strategies and Track Results
To create personalized sales that can boost leads, businesses should focus on their past financial analytics. This will help them narrow down their data and get insights for making decisions quickly. That, in turn, can help you stay ahead of the markets and competitors.
It would be best if you tried different personalization tactics for each segment and closely monitor the results. If you notice you’re not getting many calls from a specific tactic, you should be flexible enough to switch gears and choose another. Additionally, if you identify robust strategies that are paying off, you can refocus future campaigns in this direction.
Conclusion
If you’re wondering how to grow your client base as a financial advisor, you can find the answer in one word — personalization.
By personalizing your marketing approach, you can appeal directly to your target B2B audience, reaching decision-makers while addressing their pain points and providing the answers they need. By doing this, you’ll establish trust and convey the value of your financial advisory firm.
To review, when trying to personalize your financial advisor marketing:
- Perform demographic research
- Let automation platforms handle tedious tasks
- Personalize video content to targeted audience segments
- Personalize your email marketing
- Test out different strategies and monitor the results
Following this guide’s advice, you can boost your results with B2B sales personalization.
Author Bio
Kelly Moser is the co-founder and editor at Home & Jet, a digital magazine for the modern era. She’s also the content manager at Login Lockdown, covering the latest tech, business, and security trends. Kelly is an expert in freelance writing and content marketing for SaaS, Fintech, and ecommerce startups.
