Marketing campaigns for financial advisors are organized efforts to promote a specific service or product to achieve a specified goal. These campaigns can be designed for a variety of outcomes, from raising awareness of a new financial service to capturing client feedback. A well-designed financial advisor marketing campaign will reach out to prospects and clients across a range of digital platforms. These campaigns will reach your intended audience through a combination of media, including email, social media, and other digital platforms.

A financial advisor marketing campaign is a tool in your marketing strategy created for a specific purpose. Think of how militaries campaign for a specific battle. Their goal isn’t winning the war — it’s winning a particular battle. That’s why marketing campaigns for financial advisors should be focused on a specific goal. All of your campaign efforts should support your current marketing goals as opposed to being another component of an overall digital marketing strategy.

Successful financial advisor marketing campaigns follow a common theme and promote a single, focused idea or goal with a defined beginning, end, and outcome. While a digital marketing campaign is an easy-to-understand concept, creating and implementing an effective campaign takes work.

Keep reading to learn how to start a marketing campaign with our field-tested marketing campaign tips.

How to Start a Marketing Campaign

Below you’ll find what financial advisors need to know about starting a marketing campaign. Allowing you to create a campaign that will help you reach your target audience and grow your business.

Define Your Financial Advisor Marketing Campaign

Let’s start with the basics. Before you learn how to launch a marketing campaign, you have to start with some questions about what you’re trying to accomplish. Why do you want to launch a campaign? What would you like your first marketing campaign to accomplish for your financial advisory firm? These types of questions will help you focus your intentions to give your marketing campaign the best chance for success. If you’re having trouble defining your campaign purpose, start by taking a look at the goals below. Give some thought to which one(s) aligns with what you’re trying to accomplish:

This list should at least give you some good ideas of the types of goals marketing campaigns for financial advisors should include. It’s important for you to drill down and choose as specific a goal as you can to maximize your marketing efforts.

Measuring Your Financial Advisor Marketing Campaign

How you will measure your marketing campaign is just as important as defining your goals. The answers to this question could include things like new Facebook likes, the number of inquiries into a new service, email open rates, and others. While you don’t have to commit to a single measurement to gauge the success of your campaign, you do want to keep your measuring metrics to a minimum. Remember, we’re focusing on a specific outcome, so how we measure success should be just as specific.

Here are a few examples of metrics for some specific campaign objectives:

• Promoting a new financial service: Pre-orders, sales, upsells
• Generating revenue: Leads, sales, upsells
• Increasing user engagement: Blog shares, social shares, email interactions
• Advertising an upcoming webinar or other events: Sign-ups, social mentions, social shares

Before you continue learning how to launch a marketing campaign, think about what value your campaign will bring to your business if it doesn’t meet your specific goals.  Even the most well-planned and executed campaigns can fall short, so it’s important to be prepared and to take an objective look at how your efforts can still support your overall marketing strategy. When you determine how you will measure your campaign, it’s a good idea to set up some checkpoints along the way. Not only will these checkpoints help you measure your progress, but they can also be motivating reminders that your time and money investments are paying off.

Who Are You Targeting?

The first part of answering this question is to identify what stage of the client journey your campaign is targeting. Are you trying to educate prospects, or are you after feedback from existing clients? Are you marketing your financial services to those who are familiar with it, or are you introducing a new brand altogether?

Your marketing message will vary depending on whether your campaign audience is in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. It’s important to remember that a marketing campaign can include cross-messaging for prospects and clients in various stages of their journey. For example, while your campaign might target current clients, it might also bring brand awareness to prospects.

Next, identify your audience’s interests and pain points. Here are a few questions to ask yourself and your marketing team to understand your audience better.

• What are my audience’s general interests, and what attributes do they have in common?
• What type of TV shows do they watch?
• How do they spend their free time, or what are their hobbies?
• Where does my audience spend their time online?
• For what purpose do they use Instagram, Facebook, and other digital platforms, and how often? Do they engage, or are they spectators?
• What kind of content gets my audience’s attention and keeps it? Do they respond to more formal straightforward sales messages, or would they rather consume witty, humorous content?
• What cultural references would they understand?
• What kind of problems do they have that my services or brand could solve?

Becoming well-acquainted with your campaign’s targeted audience will help you answer these questions and any others that may be relevant to your buyer persona. To put everything we’ve discussed so far into perspective, check out our library of FINRA-reviewed campaigns for some real-world examples.

What Is Your Overall Campaign Concept?

Marketing campaigns are separate entities from your overall marketing strategy, so they are like their own brand. They require a goal, a strategy, and their own identity. Great campaigns are an offshoot of your primary brand, both visually and creatively, while maintaining their unique purpose. They stay consistent with the business brand but maintain their own purpose.

When you start putting together your first marketing campaign, your campaign identity will guide you as you create the various components. The design and creation process can be done in-house if you have the resources, or you can opt for one of the increasingly popular automated campaign agencies that are industry-specific. These marketing professionals understand the many facets of creating and implementing marketing campaigns for financial advisors with the benefit of knowing the financial services industry.

How Will Your Marketing Message Reach Your Targeted Audience?

Having a clear understanding of your intended audience should naturally bring some specific marketing channels to mind. By now, you should know where your prospects and clients spend their time in the digital landscape, so it’s a good idea to make a list of these channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. Now take a look at the current media channels you use to promote your company and services. Which channels are giving you the best return? Who offer flexibility, like paid advertisements and feature slots? Which has the best engagement for your brand?

Compare your most successful marketing channels with the channels your prospects and clients use the most. Any channels that show up in both lists are your no-brainers. With few exceptions, these “shared” channels should be your top picks when you launch your first marketing campaign. Also, while using multiple media channels can be very effective, you may want to skip some of the newer mediums unless you have compelling reasons why these channels would work for your campaign.

How and When Will You Publish?

Part of creating and implementing marketing campaigns for financial advisors should involve a general campaign timeline. Use a calendar or some other tracking format and start by assigning a start and end date. Next, take a look at your marketing components and your promotional marketing channels. Assess your resources as objectively as possible to determine reasonable expectations for your overall timeline, and start working on filling in your strategy.

At a minimum, you must understand things like how often you can afford to post your message on a particular channel. While you can see how tempting it is to publish your message on many channels many times per day, keep in mind that this is a targeted endeavor with constraints like your budget, skill level, personnel, and more. You can only do so much with what you have, so make your marketing efforts count with a realistic and focused timeline strategy.

While it’s okay to celebrate any bump in pre-orders, leads, views, or engagements, you spot when looking at your checkpoints, don’t assume that’s enough to predict continuing success. There’s a reason the very first thing you do is set a campaign goal. As we said earlier, while your campaign can still provide value without achieving the ultimate goal, sticking to that goal and making necessary adjustments will ensure your campaign gives you the biggest return on your investment.

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