All the talk of online and digital client engagement is no longer a future concept for the financial advice industry – it is right now.
At the recent AFA Conference, I watched with interest advisers discussing how they use various online channels to find new and better service existing clients. We also heard the same story at our own No More Practice live event.
If you don’t really understand how to use online channels and think you can get by without it, then your growth prospects are limited.
The good news is it is not too late. While many businesses are already yielding results from their use of online channels, no one in financial services is really dominating the space.
There are many ways you can enter the market and gain the benefits. The biggest thing to understand however is that you need to commit both resources and time. By resources I mean staff and money, in addition to your own time.
If you try and do it yourself to begin with, you will quickly discover that it can be a time consuming venture – taking you away from running the other core elements of your business.
There are several factors to engaging effectively with online channels that will take time from the outset, however, once established the benefits in doing so will outweigh the time costs.
What is it about developing a presence online that requires so much time?
Firstly, building a presence in social media via Twitter, Facebook and even LinkedIn. To get a result from these channels, you engage in ongoing and constant conversations. You may be able to start your own efforts, setting the tone and agenda for your social media voice, but maintaining this presence can be time consuming. I estimate that it takes about 3-4 hours per day to have meaningful interactions in these social communities.
I recommend hiring someone young and relatively junior to do the job of ‘community manager’ for your social media presence. With some guidelines from you and a weekly meeting to go over the week’s activities, your community manager should be able to represent your firm online.
The second good investment to get working on is your content marketing. By this I mean using your experience and expertise to create content, whether written or video, that can be distributed via the internet.
There are several content marketing tools out there which allow you to optimise your content and place it in other publications and media to maximise your reach. There are also paid content marketing options across all social media channels which will help increase your reach. These content marketing tools need to be incorporated into your monthly budget.
The two biggest things to remember are content creation and distribution of content, as well as matching resources and budgets to both those things.
If you get this right and maybe stop doing some of the things in your business that are no longer working like they used to, then your future is bright.
Vanessa Stoykov is the founder of No More Practice, and the founder of the parent company, evolution media group in 1999. She has over 20 years’ experience in financial services as both a journalist and business owner. She is an award winning chief executive who is passionate about creating education and communications to help the wealth industry and consumers fulfill their prosperity potential.
