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LinkedIn Set Up and Automated Prospecting Tools

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This article is periodically updated. It was originally published in 2013.

Your LinkedIn profile is an outpost for your personal brand. For many, it takes the place of a website. It is a landing page you can manage and share your professional background, positions, experiences and achievements. A LinkedIn profile often takes the place of a resume or CV. We used to think of LinkedIn as the online resume. While it remains important for job seekers and recruiters, it is now a powerful business social network.

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Smarter LinkedIn Marketing for Financial Advisors

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HNWI on LinkedIn

Source: Join the Dots

LinkedIn is the most used and most trusted social media platform that high net worth investors (HNWIs) tap to research financial decisions, according to a 2014 survey of HNWIs by Join the Dots. And they are using it across all investable asset ranges.

HNWI tapping LinkedIn Financial Content

Source: Join the Dots

 

 

 

These HNWIs are tapping various forms of content to inform the financial decision journey, according Join the Dots research.  Those who use it for both discovery and consideration are driven to action.

 

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LinkedIn for Financial Advisors: A Primer

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Linkedin Investor Usage

Source: Cogent Research


Linkedin is the most prominent social media network that investors use to research financial decisions.

With the large and every increasing number of affluent investors using LinkedIn, their expectations are that you have more than a presence. In order to provide value and differentiate from competitors, independent financial advisors need to actively engage.  Very simply, an active and robust presence on LinkedIn will enable you to better retain and attract new clients. 

  1. Increase your visibility, starting with a robust, search optimized profile
  2. Reconnect with clients and colleagues
  3. Get recommended
  4. Enhance reputation/build influence
  5. Prospect for new clients
  6. Share and join events/groups
  7. Conduct targeted advertising
  8. Set up a Company Page

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3 Simple Steps to Improve Your Company LinkedIn Page

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Linkedin Cloud

LinkedIn’s platform has evolved significantly in recent years, offering businesses new opportunities to enhance their online presence and connect with their target audience. By following these best practices, you can optimize your company page and maximize its impact.

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Cirrus Insight -> Salesforce -> Gmail: Nice Integration

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There are a range of terrific CRM solutions out there and we have tried several for both client installations and our own team’s use. We settled on Salesforce.com based on the richness of functionality, the level of demand we see with our own clients and some excellent integration opportunities.

In addition to integrating fully with our marketing automation solution to pass through inbound marketing leads and see lead scoring, we have implemented Cirrus Insight as a browser widget for contextual integration with Gmail. We like Cirrus a lot, though until recently, we were a little bit frustrated by how it co-exised with Rapportive – another fantastic solution recently acquired by LinkedIn. That problem has now been solved!!

Check Out Cirrus Here! (this is an affiliate link which would earn us some brownie points with Cirrus and you might get a discount!)

 

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Leveraging Social Media in the Private Equity World

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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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Using Symbols and Doubling Open Rates ✔ It Out!

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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

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Emerging Revenue Technology: Relationship Intelligence

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CRM systems are notorious in their complexity and lack of success in many cases. Organizational and cultural dynamics play a big role.  CRM systems offer a great deal of promise yet so often don’t deliver. With today’s economic pressures it is as critical as ever that firms increase sales without increasing the cost and complexity of selling.

One area getting more attention now is relationship management technology. Clearly LinkedIn has made a huge impact here and now new tools are emerging to help relationship-intensive businesses take better advantage of their enterprise contact and relationship assets.

New tools like Datahug, Gist and others are helping businesses manage information about the organization’s extended relationships (employee’s and firm’s) with individuals and customer/client organizations. They do this by mining the email database and social networks for connections and relationships. This can dramatically impact deal intelligence, qualification and positioning and drive up win rates.

Yet for many years, CRM deployments have consistently under delivered on the promise.  The adoption of any CRM-related technology must be approached with a view of the people, process and technology impacts. Relationship intelligence is part of what we call “Revenue Systems” and selecting the right tools and embedding them effectively in the organization requires careful thought and planning.

 Some things to consider:
  • Potential benefits are strong: These new technology approaches combined with people and organizational changes can deliver dramatic business results by helping firms leverage their extended, multi-level network of relationships that exist at the firm and individual level. By effectively mining a corporation’s extended relationship network, sales and cross-sales ratios can be dramatically improved
  • Contacts are highly personal and protected assets: Contact management is a complex human and systems dynamic  that requires careful and sensitive analysis to ensure effective adoption
  • CRM is notoriously difficult to implement successfully: Many organizations fail to achieve effective sales force adoption of CRM and SFA (salesforce automation) due to cultural resistance and protection of valuable and hard-won contact information. Put the success of the sales team first, and good things will follow.
  • Solutions must consider the cultural and process issues involved: An effective enterprise contact network must compliment existing systems and cultural norms while providing the protection and security of personal contact information

Done well, these new relationship intelligence technologies can be a powerful ally in firm-wide deployments – helping to increase win rates, inform bid decisions and enhance the tailoring of winning value propositions.

 

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The FeeOnlyNetwork.com: A Bid to Build Visibility for Fee-Only Advisors

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That’s the goal of NAPFA (National Association of Personal Financial Advisors) with the recent launch of the FeeOnlyNetwork.com for its more than 1,500 Fee-Only member advisors across the country. A parallel goal is to build the NAPFA brand and promote the benefits of working with NAPFA-registered investment advisors (RIAs) for comprehensive financial planning and fee-only compensation.

This comes as Fee-Only Registered Investment Advisors (RIA) have surged and changed the way Americans invest.  This in a climate where investors are more risk adverse, want to be involved in the investment process and, for all generations, increasingly use the web to “self-sell” before engaging.  Having a strong web presence  — including a dynamic web marketing hub, social media significance, thought leadership content and digital marketing programs — is not an option, but an imperative for advisors to be relevant and competitive today.

With FeeOnlyNetwork.com, Individual NAPFA members receive a free, search optimized profile and those who wish to pony up $250, receive a more sophisticated profile with more content, enhanced optimization and linking features. The value proposition seems solid: members can piggyback on the broader branding effort around “Fee Only” with NAPFA and generate leads and SEO value at a reasonable cost per year.

There are a number of things for members to consider in maximizing the value and effectiveness of their profiles. (See FeeOnlyNetwork mockup)

    • Differentiate the message beyond “Fee-Only”
      Use the bulleted specialties adjacent to photo and paragraph beneath it, to provide more depth and breadth surrounding resources and investment options offered, akin to what you might get from a broker dealer.
    • Choose messaging carefully
      Avoid “generic” messages like “specializes in financial planning and investment management”; be more sophisticated.
    • Align Profiles & Links
      Make sure your profiles line up across all your channels – LinkedIn, Website, Facebook, Twitter, FeeOnlyNetwork, etc. – including key words, messaging and positioning.
    • Include Links 
 Make sure all your publicly available links are reflected on the profile and picked up by FeeOnlyNetwork.
  • Complete all of the Profile Features
    This includes links to all of your social media profiles, recent articles, media mentions, welcome video and the like.  If you have more than one location, be sure to include it as well.  Also complete the company profile tab.  There will be an ability to cross-link with other NAPFA members in your company.
  • Show Bench Strength:
    The network is very “planner” and individual based rather than the firm… some investors may want to see that they can engage a firm with a broader set of expertise and specializations within the firm.  This can be done with the company profile tab, but perhaps you can influence the site’s positioning if you want to highlight both you and your company more strongly.
  • Generate Leads:
    Currently, the “Contact Me” button generates an email, however there are plans to enable a form.  Be on the look out and perhaps influence its development.  For example if it were a “Learn More” link instead of “Contact Me”, that could lead to a landing page on your website where they can further “opt-in” to learning without feeling the need to email you right away. Many “buyers” want to self-sell and learn about you (and others) without converting immediately to an email or meeting.

NAPFA says it has made a significant investment and allocated considerable resources to the FeeOnlyNetwork.com, a partnership with Advisorology, LLC, the parent company of the FeeOnlyNetwork.com and FinancialAdviceNetwork.com.  The partnership promises to continue to enhance the FeeOnlyNetwork.com.  Members would do well to actively participate in its evolution.

 

Thérèse Byrne is a Client Partner & Digital Strategist with Revenue Architects specializing in helping clients take advantage of modern marketing approaches to projects from the vantage of creative, innovative and agile solutions to growth. She works with a number offinancial advisor clients developing strategies and implementing compliant marketing solutions enabled by technology and inbound marketing.

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Social Media Presence – How Financial Advisors and RIA’s Can Spread the Word

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Social Media Marketing

Social media helps financial advisors build relationships, enhance their brand, and attract new clients. By strategically utilizing platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter (X), and Facebook, advisors can position themselves as industry experts, connect with potential clients, and foster meaningful relationships.

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