Pandemic driving advisers to digital marketing

Over the past few years, we have seen larger numbers of financial advisers turning to digital content marketing to reach new clients and the pandemic seems to have accelerated this trend.

Today I have been talking to my financial adviser contacts about what they are doing to help their businesses recover from the Coronavirus outbreak.

One area that keeps coming up in discussion is digital marketing. It’s an area that many had been toying with before the pandemic, but have started to dedicate a large portion of the marketing/business growth budget to in recent months with traditional networking events coming to a halt.

Social media platforms and consultants also seem to be benefiting with several advisers telling me their business is spending money in this area for the first time.

The importance of getting the best bang for your buck with digital content was key with many turning the conversation around and asking me for some free advice on how to make sure the content they are writing can be reused in as many ways as possible.

An interesting comparison with financial powerhouses

It is interesting to compare these conversations to those I had with asset managers and insurance consultancies at the start of lockdown. Many were confidently churning out content but were struggling to create or repurpose content that confidently strides the line between promotion and education and therefore appeal to the media due to a skills gap in house.

If even the big financial powerhouses struggle to confidently stride this line, without professional help it is clear that many smaller financial advisory businesses will struggle.

Anyone can write but is a specialist skill to write well. By letting an untrained or non-specialised writer loose on your marketing content you could end up doing more harm than good.

Not every marketing team includes someone with strong writing skills. The result can be clumsy or insensitive communications which end up rubbing your clients and prospects up the wrong way.

So what do you do when that specialist skill isn’t available to you in house?

I have written a short guide to choosing a writer to help get you started.

The future of financial planning

These conversations with financial advisers are part of a wider research piece I am doing for an article I am writing on financial advice businesses, how they have coped with the pandemic, why some are doing well whilst others struggle, and what their future looks like.

Make sure you subscribe to this blog for a link to the article when it is published next month.