Your IndustryOct 15 2015

Don’t get blogged down in promotions

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Financial advisers should allocate time to assess whether their marketing strategy has been worth their return on investment of money and time, according to Phillip Bray.

For Mr Bray, the network development manager at whole of market adviser network Sense, there are six main key performance indicators to scrutinise.

Monitoring the source of new enquiries is the first.

Business bosses should ensure that their advisers get into the practice of asking new enquiries how they found them, and keep a record of their source of entry, Mr Bray said.

He added: “Over time, you can start to overlay the source of a lead, with information about whether they became a client and the revenue generated. This will tell you which is the most cost-effective source of new enquiries – hugely useful information.”

Second, advisory firms should keep a keen eye on the performance of their website.

Tools such as Google Analytics offer firms an abundance of information on their websites. However, the key statistics to note are the number of people visiting the site, time spent on each page, traffic source, most popular pages and bounce rate.

The third key indicator is blogs.

Mr Bray said: “Providing useful information and demonstrating that you are an expert in your chosen market is one of the surefire ways of creating new enquiries. Writing blogs, either on your own website or as a guest elsewhere, is a great way to do this.

“If you are going to commit the time to writing a blog, then you need to be pretty sure it’s going to be read by your target audience and that what you write is useful to them.”

Fourth, advisers should track the revenue received from business generated through directories such as Unbiased and VouchedFor and compare it to the average cost of each lead.

The fifth indicator is newsletters, which come at a cost, either in terms of money or time, Mr Bray said, adding that it is easier and cheaper to track the effectiveness of the electronic variant as opposed to the printed alternative.

When it comes to monitoring electronic newsletter campaigns, the key data to analyse are the open rate, the number of people who clicked on a story or link, and the most popular articles.

Lastly, social media websites, such as Twitter and LinkedIn provide basic tools, allowing advisers to monitor the reach of their posts and how many people have clicked on links, Mr Bray said.

“Unless you employ the services of a social media ‘guru’, this is the cheapest of all forms of promotion, at least in terms of cold hard cash, but it can eat up huge amounts of time unless you are very focussed.

“Social media is again a great way of demonstrating your expertise whilst being helpful by providing information and answering questions.”

Adviser view

Roy Lupton, director of Kent-based Allied Luptons, said: “In the advisory business it is easy to go down a path and think a particular marketing strategy is working. It is only when you stop and take time to properly analyse it you realise that actually, it might have not been worthwhile.”