Content marketing attracts and engages prospects at each stage of the buying process.

With a solid Digital Marketing Foundation, Financial Advisors can run effective, targeted campaigns to build reputation and generate qualified client leads that can be nurtured and won.

Digital Marketing Foundation

  • Target Market Strategy
  • Overall Content Marketing Plan
  • Quality eMail Marketing List & Tools
  • The Right Sponsorship, COIs & Affinity Groups

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Today, I received an email from a leading high performance sales training and systems company that offers leading solutions for buyer-focused sales and marketing. The company has been around for a while and is clearly a leader in their space, so they had credibility from the start. The email headline got my attention as it was related to new buyer-focused sales strategies and it included a call-to-action for  training in advanced marketing and sales.

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Best Wishes for the New Year!

Consider adding these resolutions to YOUR list and increase your impact in 2013.

  1. Deepen Your Relationships… Use social media and filtering tools to deepen 1:1 relationships, retain and grow contacts.
  2. Earn Your Reach In addition to paid media, differentiate with quality content to drive reach with earned media.
  3. Hug Your Sales Team… Don’t let inbound marketing make you forget your valued selling professionals and partner channels.
  4. Enhance Your Revenue Systems… Use best practices in media management, marketing automation, CRM, and social media
  5. Innovate and Stand Out Dust off that strategy and use design thinking to create innovative digital experiences.

 

Team Revenue Architects
revenuearchitects.com
877.REV.EARN

 

The Twitter Buzz was so great for #SchwabIMPACT and #RIAS4U during Schwab’s annual IMPACT conference this year, it reached Twitter’s trending list!!  The Keynot by EVP Bernard J. Clark, unveiling enhancements to “RIA Stands for You” campaign propelled the buzz.

Below are a selection of tweets as well as some highlights of a related webcast next week.

In next week’s webcast John Stone will be discussing five strategies for using the #RIAS4U campaign:
  • Website Hub – Use RIAS4U to enhance your website content and value
  • RIAS4U Branding – Gain from program’s “halo effect” by using the brand and content
  • 1:1 Targeting – Use new tools to filter and focus on 1:1 engagement using RIAS4U
  • Social Media – Expand your reach and influence with social media engagement
  • Campaigns – Combine RIAS4U elements into your custom campaigns.

 

RIA Stands for You: Tips to Get Started! – https://bit.ly/TVfXmU

Are RIA Firms Using CRM Effectively? – https://bit.ly/ToZZUj

Bernie Clark at Schwab Impact: RIAs’ Competitors ‘Want What You Have’ – https://bit.ly/RFcCrL

Check out our #RiAS4Y blog post and download our Revenue Performance Healthcheck – https://bit.ly/ZBnueC

Check out all of the news on the Schwab Talk blog – https://bit.ly/TnKCaa

 

Schwab is investing millions of dollars in the RIA Stands for You online campaign.  It is an opportunity for clients of Schwab Advisor Services to put the marketing muscle of Schwab to work for their own firms.

By focusing the campaign online, Schwab is validating the power and growing importance of digital and social media channels and marketing programs to attract new clients and referrals. The beauty of the web: it is measurable and trackable.

One of the major challenges of attracting the attention of prospects online is fresh content.  And Schwab is providing a great deal of this (educational documents, logo, videos and more), for RIAs to customize and integrate to enhance their own online marketing efforts.  Plus there is a dedicated website and a social media presence.

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Judy Gern, Revenue Architects Senior Client Partner, recently published this article in EContent,  a leading authority on the businesses of digital publishing, media, and marketing.

Here is an excerpt (click the image below to launch the full article)

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By John Nielsen

Lead scoring is the process of evaluating and assigning points to prospects and leads using marketing automation tools. Points are distributed based on the attributes associated with a qualified lead.  It is important to understand whom you are marketing to when managing a campaign, sending irrelevant content to your followers is a quick way to lose.  To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, below are a few tips one can easily follow to update your contact lists and help identify priority focus using lead scoring.

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Since the private equity business is dependent on relationships with a finite number of LPs, executives and entrepreneurs, you need to be sure you can identify every potential opportunity to engage with your target audience.  With 3 out of 4 Americans using social media, various platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have become an extremely cost-effective way for a firm to broaden its reach and strengthen its corporate relationships.  Surprisingly, however, when BackBay Communications surveyed the private equity market for its Private Equity Brand Equity II report, published last fall, only 7 percent of responding professionals said their firms were using social media regularly.

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Judy Gern, Senior Client Partner with Revenue Architects, recently posted an article on the Vocus blog that deserves some further sharing. The key message is that by using symbols creatively in emails, open rates can see dramatic results.

Click on the image below to visit the original post on the Vocus Blog.

 

Vocus Blog Post

We recently conducted a review of a campaign that was underperforming expectations. Our team was contributing elements of the campaign and we were very disappointed in the results. What was going wrong? What were the red flags?

English: Red Flag

The campaign was focused on marketing a leading technology solution to a target market based on geographic named accounts.  The client was following core principles of inbound marketing and digital marketing offering unique premium content for download and involving a number of components:

  • Active blog content
  • Active Twitter engagement
  • PPC Campaign
  • Microsite with landing pages aligned to key words
  • Relevant copy on each landing page
  • A call to action with premium content
  • Embedded conversion forms using a leading marketing automation platform
  • eMails tailored to each value proposition and landing page
  • A direct mail program to a validated list of targets.

The content was solid and the program was being executed carefully with iterative updates to enhance content and offering language. On the surface, everything looked good. So, why was the client getting limited response?

To evaluate the program, we took a commercial end-to-end revenue perspective and looked at the revenue cycle. We divided the campaign into three elements:  Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) and Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU). We looked for red flags.

Here were our findings:

Overall

  • Product revenue performance was good for the business with a concentration on a few large accounts, however the business was not coming from the campaign – rather it was coming from existing customers
  • Performance was driven largely by account-based sales efforts
  • The value proposition seemed to provide a clear competitive advantage, however no validation had occurred with target customers (a red flag)
  • The campaign incorporated many leading digital marketing and inbound practices and partner organizations recognized the program as unique and a stand out among peers.

TOFU- Top of Funnel

  • A microsite was of a very high quality with good relevant content & messaging and the team maintained a strong social media presence which was also building increased organic presence
  • We found that there was a very small target market– the campaign was targeting a named set of companies of only a few hundred companies (a red flag– was there a broad enough market? If the target market is this focused, why the emphasis no an inbound strategy?)
  • A sophisticated PPC Campaign was underway – with a substantial budget (another red flag– why so much investment in PPC with such a targeted audience?)
  • Direct mail campaigns also had little or no results or traction
  • No other new business lead sources were identified.

MOFU – Middle of the Funnel

  • The marketing list had been in place and marketed to for over a year with little or no results. The list was limited in size and consistent with the target company list.  The list was validated and augmented, but this remained a major red flag. Was this list ever going to produce results? Was the campaign targeting the right market?
  • There was no need for a nurture program and lead scoring had little relevance given such low lead gen results
  • Marketing automation was implemented well and while better campaign and email coordination and tracking across campaigns were needed, this did not explain a lack of lead generation within this campaign
  • The company was not engaged any consistent telesales (another red flag – especially given the highly targeted nature of the customer audience) Past telesales had mixed results depending on product, firm, timing and message.

BOFU – Bottom of Funnel

  • The direct sales teams were successfully closing deals and the existing account base for the organization was the primary source of product revenue
  • However, cross-selling the existing account base is difficult with entrenched vendor and sales relationships.

What did the red flags tell us?

The campaign needed to refresh its target universe/ marketing list and expand its exposure while also taking a deeper dive review of the value proposition by conducting a focused survey. Given the target market, budgets needed to shift from the top-of-funnel  inbound and PPC lead gen toward more 1:1 tele-prospecting and sales engagement.

By taking a commercial focused approach and mapping the end-to-end revenue cycle from marketing to sales, it became more apparent where to focus attention and make improvements.