Advisors – Online Marketing Juice

Maximizing Your Reach: How CFP’s, Financial Advisors, and RIAs Can Use Multiple Channels to Deliver Niche Content

If you are a CFP, a financial advisor, or a registered investment advisor (RIA), you may wonder how to create niche content for your website, social media, and podcast that showcases your expertise and attracts your ideal clients. However, you also need to be mindful of the fiduciary duty that you owe to your clients and potential clients and avoid any conflicts of interest or misleading statements that could harm your reputation or expose you to legal risks.

In this blog post, I will share some tips on developing niche content messaging consistent with your fiduciary duty and compliant with the CFP Board’s Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, and other applicable regulations.

Tip #1: Define your niche and value proposition

Before you start creating content, you need a clear idea of your target audience and what value you can offer them. A niche is a specific market segment with distinct needs, preferences, and characteristics that you can address better than others. A value proposition is a statement that summarizes how you can help your niche solve their problems or achieve their goals.

For example, if your niche is young professionals who want to retire early, your value proposition could be: “I help young professionals achieve financial independence and retire early by creating personalized financial plans that optimize their income, expenses, savings, investments, and taxes.”

Tip #2: Research your niche’s pain points and interests

Once you have defined your niche and value proposition, you need to do some research to understand what your niche’s pain points and interests are. What are their biggest challenges and frustrations? What are their aspirations and dreams? What are their common questions and concerns? What are their sources of information and inspiration?

You can use various methods to research your niche, such as surveys, interviews, online forums, social media groups, podcasts, blogs, Reddit books, magazines, etc. The more you know about your niche, the more relevant and engaging your content will be.

Tip #3: Choose the right platforms and formats for your content

Depending on your niche’s preferences and habits, you may want to use different platforms and formats for your content. For example, some niches may prefer to read blog posts or articles on your website or newsletter, while others may prefer to listen to podcasts or watch videos on YouTube or Instagram. Some niches may respond well to infographics or charts that illustrate complex concepts or data, while others may enjoy stories or case studies that showcase real-life examples or testimonials.

You should experiment with different platforms and formats to see what works best for your niche and track the performance of your content using metrics such as views, clicks, shares, comments, likes, downloads, subscriptions, etc.

Tip #4: Provide valuable information and education

One of the main goals of your content is to provide valuable information and education to your niche that helps them solve their problems or achieve their goals. You want to position yourself as an expert and a trusted source of advice in your niche. You also want to demonstrate how you can add value to your niche through your services or products.

You should focus on relevant and useful topics in your niche to provide valuable information and education. You should also use clear and simple language that avoids jargon or technical terms that may confuse or alienate your audience. You should also cite credible sources of information and data that support your claims or recommendations.

Tip #5: Be transparent and honest

As a fiduciary advisor, you have a duty to act in the best interests of your clients at all times. This means that you should avoid or disclose any conflicts of interest that may affect your advice or recommendations. You should also avoid making any false or misleading statements that may deceive or harm your audience.

To be transparent and honest in your content, you should always disclose any affiliations or relationships that may influence your content. For example, if you receive compensation or benefits from a product or service that you mention in your content, you should disclose that fact. You should also disclose any limitations or risks associated with your advice or recommendations. You should also correct any errors or inaccuracies you discover in your content as soon as possible.

Small Business (SMB) – Why Blog?

Blogging helps bring customers, and potential clients onto your company website. Blog posts can also help visitors to specific landing pages (A landing page is a page on your site that is designed to convert visitors into leads). This additional and internal linking traffic will help brand awareness, increase sales & leads, and Google rankings.

Blogs are the new PR world order, a blog can become a destination, aggregate of knowledge and expertise that helps customers, clients (or investors) make decisions while also building relationships. Relationships are THE name of the game.

How many blogs per week? To boost organic traffic (from search engines, for example), you should publish 3 to 4 brand new posts per week, each of them fully optimized for search engines (HubSpot). For a specific industry like financial advisors, blogs are a great way to market your Company’s compliant content. Content shows up in Google Search and helps drive visitors back to your website.

Publishing a blog post really depends on the platform, demographic, and region. There is no blanket “best time” to publish. Ideally, should be published when your target demographic is getting home from work and they start checking their favorite websites as well as checking in on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media Marketing Is More Than Just Posting Once In A While…

Social Media marketing is more than just posting once in a while…Don’t let your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram gather cobwebs, you need to “show up” day after day with fresh content. Instead of spreading yourself thin across 5 different sites, focus on 2-3 primary accounts. Incorporating social scheduling and automation saves time and energy.

Content Marketing Strategy Takes Time

It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. If your business doesn’t have the resources to meet your goals, reach out to freelancers for help! Freelancers are a great low cost, effective source of helping any type of content marketing effort.
Online Marketing Juice

What do Search Engines like?

Trust. Search engines like Google, Bing, etc., are looking for signals that signify trust. Search engines want to give searchers the best possible result. That’s why you need to work on your trustworthiness on all levels, both technical as well as in content.

Use up-to-date software, have your SSL in order, make strong passwords, use tools such as Cloudflare to protect your site from DDoS attacks. An SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) is a set of data files that you can add to your server to achieve this encrypted connection between a browser and your server. Besides securing your website by way of encryption, it also helps with SEO (Google Rankings). Google has confirmed that HTTPS is a ranking signal. An unsecured website risks users’ online safety and could be hurting your SEO efforts. Google confirmed way back in 2014 that HTTPS is now a ranking signal. So, if your site doesn’t have SSL certificates and is on HTTPS, then now would a good time to update.

A SSL certificate increases customers trust and confidence in your website. Customer confidence is essential to increasing conversion rates.

Social Media Crisis Action Plan For 2022

Whether your a big or a SMB company, a celebrity or some kind of a famous personality with a large amount external public exposure, chances are you may have to deal with some kind of social media crisis sooner or later. A crisis can occur at random (insensitive tweet), or it can occur with a product misstep or even a social media account hacked. In this digital world, speed of these harmful conversations can implode on you or your company in mere seconds.

While there is no “one size fits all” approach, the below basic social media action plan will help you quickly identify the crisis (issue) and resolve it before it goes viral and turns into disaster.

The first stage of social media crisis planning is to identify the problem or issue in real-time before it gets out of control and goes viral. There are many tools out there that can help you keep tabs and monitor the majority of social media platforms. Most of these social tracking tools depend on keywords important to you or your company. Keywords such as “Company” or “product name” “name of person” “events” “competitors” “social media accounts” etc.

A short list below:

Social Mention. A great social real-time listening tool for your brand. It measures your influence within four key categories: passion, sentiment, strength, and reach.

Google Alerts. Track your brand mentions across web and news sites.

Mention.net. Track your brand across blogs, news sites and forums.

Talkwalker. Track your brand across across mostly blogs.

HowSociable. Measure and track what your competition is doing in Social Media.

Sprout Social. Great tool for monitoring and measuring your brands.

Radian6. A salesforce product. It allows you to quickly and efficiently track, monitor, and react to comments, questions, and complaints as they happen on most all social media platforms.

Here are five basic steps to include in your social media crisis plan:

1. Act quickly. Speeds kills, but speed also resolves! Explain the issue or problem FIRST and what your going to do to address it ASAP before it takes hold on Social Media. Be very transparent. You need to do this before it destroys your brand or major lawsuit.
2. Take charge. Step up and take charge of the issue and move fast (even if its at 2am).
3. Be transparent. If its bad and your company screwed up. Take ownership. Own up to the problem or issue!
4. Engage. Engage all the nay-sayers. Engage all the Social Media Trolls and critics.
5. Spread the word. Post your PR response on your website, company blog, social media pages and media releases.

Bottom line: Don’t wait until the threat to your company’s reputation becomes visible. Identify the crisis and get out in front of it before it takes hold.

If you can’t handle uncertainty, you can’t handle growth.

Quick List of The Best Digital Marketing Weapons (Tools) in 2022

Digital Marketing tools are constantly evolving and changing. They deliver benefits to any organization willing to build up a digital marketing team. Benefits include enhanced credibility, fast and easy access, increases customer relationships, feedback and reviews are easily tracked, cost effective, and can reach an enormous mass of people in a short amount of time. The below is a short list of digital tools in a ever changing digital marketing environment.

Google Analytics. Enough said on this one. Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you analyze your website traffic. Fundamentals of working with report data to advanced segmentation and analytics intelligence. Key for measuring and tweaking your marketing campaigns. Google keeps adding more and more functionality each year.

Google Keyword Planner. Once known as the Google Keyword Tool, Keyword Planner is a tool that every search marketer needs to familiarize themselves with and get to know inside out. It is a great way to discover new keywords to target in your campaigns, understand how searches across keywords have changed over time, see suggested bid estimates to help plan your Google Ads budget and more. You can extract valuable data about the demand and competition level of keywords you wish to target organically. The tool will also suggest similar keywords to the one in your query to give you alternative, relevant options for your keyword targeting. The Google Keyword Planner can come in handy whether you’re building your very first keyword list or looking to expand and/or switch directions in your keyword and content strategies.

SEOquake. This is a great Firefox extension. SEOquake is a free SEO extension by Semrush which helps you accelerate your SEO efforts on the fly. SEOquake provides you with key SEO metrics for a specific page, along with other useful tools such as the SEO Audit tool, the Keyword Density report, Internal/External link analysis, and even social metrics.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud. A powerful tool that lets you monitor specific keywords and phrases that are dominating conversations across the social media sphere. Marketing Cloud is also a platform for delivering relevant, personalized journeys across channels and devices — enabling marketers to deliver the right message at the right time throughout all phases of the relationship. Marketing Cloud includes integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content creation and management, and data analysis.

Traackr. Traackr is the system of record for data-driven influencer marketing that marketers use to invest in the right strategies, streamline campaigns, and scale programs. Traackr includes dynamic influencer lists, automates metrics-driven influencer mapping so you can instantly identify the right people for your projects, real-time listening, sentiment analysis, geo-targeted searches, and shows you all of your influencers’ relevant content in one place so you never miss an opportunity to reach out to them and be part of the social conversation.

TweetDeck or HootSuite. Free tool lets you simultaneously manage all your social media accounts from a single interface. Although it excels with Twitter, you can also effectively manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Foursquare profiles.

MailChimp. A really easy, dynamic email marketing platform. Your opt-in subscribers will be able to easily connect to social networking pages in order to share your email marketing campaigns. You’ll also be able to use social networking in conjunction with your email marketing. In one click, you’ll be able to send out an email campaign and update your social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Delicious, with your latest information. You can also see who has tweeted about or liked your business.

SurveyMonkey. I use this one a lot in my own projects. If you have questions about your products or services and you need immediate feedback, SurveyMonkey is THE best web-based survey solution.

SEOmoz. Anything SEO oriented, use this site. Analytics for all your in-bound marketing. There are a lot of free tools and paid ones as well. I use this site and tools daily for years. This site is an incredible value-add to your digital marketing efforts! Moz builds tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, link building, and content marketing easy.

Wistia. Is video marketing part of your digital marketing strategy? If so, you may want to think about professional video hosting from a company like Wistia. Video is a great way to communicate with your subscribers, prospects and customers. Wistia provides your business with a ton of great tools that you can use to measure your video’s engagement as well as make your videos more interactive. Wistia is designed exclusively to serve companies using video on their websites for marketing, support, and sales. Essentially, Wistia is ideal for “on-site” videos.

Pardot (Salesforce). Pardot is a marketing automation solution that helps companies create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals. Pardot is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation solution. If you’re a business who sells to other businesses (or B2B), Pardot can automate your marketing activities and unite your marketing and sales departments so that they can work better together.