In our previous blog, "The ROI Challenge in Financial Services Marketing," we explored the complex landscape of financial services marketing and the perpetual quest for measurable ROI. Today, we're taking a closer look at a solution that holds the potential to transform your marketing efforts: Inbound Marketing.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Let's start by defining Inbound Marketing and its core principles. Inbound Marketing is a methodology that revolves around attracting, engaging, and delighting potential customers by creating valuable, relevant content and experiences. It's customer-centric at its core, focusing on addressing the needs and pain points of your target audience.
Inbound Methodology
In the realm of financial services, Inbound Marketing can be your guiding light. It's a journey with distinct stages:
- Engagement Phase (Attract & Convert): This is where you cast your digital net wide, attracting potential advisors to your brand through content, social media, and SEO. Once you've gained their interest, you work on converting these prospects into leads.
- Due Diligence Phase (Educate & Evaluate): In this phase, you provide valuable insights, educational resources, and personalized content to guide your leads through their decision-making process. It's about building trust and establishing your firm as an industry authority.
- Inflows Phase (Invest/Close and Refer): Finally, you help your prospects make informed, confident decisions about working with your firm and you close them as new clients. Over time, you look to these clients as advocates who refer others.
Power of Content
Content is the lifeblood of Inbound Marketing, and it plays a pivotal role in each stage of the buyer's journey. In the engagement phase, it's about creating blog posts, videos, and social media content that pique interest. In the due diligence phase, you offer in-depth whitepapers, webinars, and case studies to educate and build trust. And in the inflows phase, it's about providing the right information to help advisors make a decision. Typically, the prospect will schedule a meeting with your sales professionals in this phase.
Measuring Inbound ROI
One of the challenges we discussed in our previous blog was measuring ROI. In Inbound Marketing, we rely on data-driven insights to gauge success. Key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, and lead-to-customer conversion can provide a clear picture of your ROI. To illustrate this, look at one of our previous blogs, How a Leading Fund Sponsor Cracked the RIA Market and Raised $350M (TO START), a case study demonstrating how Inbound Marketing can deliver tangible results in the financial services sector.
Inbound is Not the Opposite of Outbound
In fact, the two strategies are inextricably linked. Inbound simply makes outbound tactics more effective.
Inbound is an active framework that includes all the tactics and strategies needed to align with the digital buying processes of today–including that outbound call to a prospect. Following an Inbound strategy, that outbound dial is most timely when the prospect has provided digital signals of their interest in your firm or investments.
Perhaps the prospect downloaded multiple sets of materials from your site over the last several weeks. Or they signed up for one of your webinars. Or viewed your due diligence room today. These actions are digital signals for you to take prompt action and advance the relationship.
When viewed this way, the outbound dial is part of an Inbound strategy that creates and nurtures advisor interest and cues your sales team for the next steps.
Getting Started with Inbound
Are you ready to embark on your Inbound Marketing journey? Our Inbound Checklist provides you with practical steps for implementation. And if the digital marketing landscape seems overwhelming, don't worry—you can consider collaborating with an experienced Inbound Marketing agency to guide you through the process.
Conclusion
Inbound Marketing offers a promising path forward for financial services marketers like you. It aligns perfectly with the goal of achieving measurable ROI and navigating the digital landscape effectively. Inbound doesn’t replace outbound tactics, it simply makes them more effective. In our next blog, we'll look deeper into the tactics and strategies you can employ to maximize the power of Inbound Marketing.
Download our Inbound Checklist, which will serve as your roadmap to success.
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