You're not just a financial advisor; you're a business owner tasked with the dual responsibility of providing services and simultaneously marketing yourself as qualified professional. It's no wonder that advisors often feel stretched thin, and marketing is often the task that gets pushed to the back burner and neglected.
Within the last few years, a new marketing strategy has evolved that can dramatically reduce your time spent, and increase your effectiveness. It's called marketing automation. In the simplest of terms, marketing automation is designed to supplement, streamline, and measure your marketing efforts so you can improve business efficiency and boost revenue growth. The ultimate goal of marketing automation is twofold: to maintain your current client relationships, and also to build a strong connection with leads who might not be ready to use your services — yet.
With automation, you turn at least a portion of your content creation over to a professional service, and that service then schedules and implements all of your marketing. This allows you to share a continuous stream of content that piques a lead's interest, builds trust and encourages them to view you as an expert in your field and a resource for knowledgeable advice. When businesses use automation, the results are astounding.
On average, marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. 63% of companies that are outgrowing their competitors use marketing automation, and businesses using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates and an annualized revenue growth rate 3.1% higher than non-users.
While the average small business owner spends 20 hours a week on marketing, automation can significantly cut that down, in some cases to just a few hours per week! All you need to do is set up your marketing automation tasks and schedule them. Here's how.
Type of Content You Can Automate
With the right tools, you can automate nearly all of your marketing efforts, allowing a professional service to provide much of the content for many things that may currently eat up hours of your time, such as:
- Blog posts
- Website content updates
- LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook posts
- Email newsletters
Keep in mind that one of the key aspects of marketing is its social nature. Automation is not a "set it and forget it" structure. Rather, it significantly cuts back on the time you have to spend on content creation and deployment.
