The more digitally connected the world is to every consumer, the less effective old traditional marketing advertisements are. The way customers interact and transact has also changed and that means businesses need to adapt the way they reach out to their market. This creates an opportunity for firms and institutions to capitalize on this and implement processes and strategies in place to leverage these changes to their own benefit.
As a wealth consultant working closely with investment advisors, mortgage brokers, private wealth consultants and insurance advisory services, I understood the importance of effective prospecting & retention strategies. Unfortunately, many of these professional services have a hard time prospecting. The ineffective email communications, the failed attempts in creating seminars, the constant emphasis on referrals through word of mouth and marketing strategies such a radio, television and billboard advertising has little to no ROI. The biggest problem with these investments is that society is changing the way they connect to the world. They do not want to look at their email inbox full with over 100 emails. They have less and less time available and do not want to spend it meeting an advisor or attending a seminar. They listen a lot less to radio and with all those new television streaming services, television viewers are declining year after year. Traditional advertising has become so excessively used by almost every business and consumers are no longer absorbing the content.
I saw the losses that businesses were wasting on marketing dollars and also realized the opportunity they had in front of them, if properly incorporated in their overall business development strategies. This is why I spent my time, resources and efforts to develop a digital strategy and process that takes into account the changes between the business to consumer relationship. Through my previous work experience and my current consulting company, I was able to boil it down to 3 main categories that EVERY wealth management company needs to invest in.
The first and main one is the lead generation process strategy. There are currently close to 7 billion humans on earth and close to 2.5 billion of them are on social media platforms. Digital marketing has given us the opportunity to use these platforms in order to reach out to our target market. I take advantage of this change and leverage quality digital strategies in order to create a system that constantly generates prospects.
The second strategy revolves around increasing the retention and upselling of existing clients. Many of the businesses in the wealth management industry use cold calling or email in order to reach out to their existing clientele. With very low success rate and the huge investment required to manually incorporate this process, the ROI is extremely low. Innovative digital marketing strategies has given us the opportunity to connect with our clients without "bothering" them. This gives companies an opportunity to incorporate a communication channel that has a much higher response rate.
The third strategy revolves around increasing brand awareness and visibility within its own market. Many companies still use billboards, radio, television, newspaper and mail advertisement that have quite substantial investment costs. Given the consumer market is resistant and almost no longer absorbing these types of advertisements, these strategies have an extremely low ROI. Social media advertisement has been proven to have substantially lower costs and yields better results by far.
Overall, it is very clear that there is a gap in how businesses prospect and transact with their market and I have created a consulting company that focuses primarily on incorporating these 3 strategies into businesses within the wealth management industry.
