The Biggest Mistake with Financial Advisor Marketing & Social Media

There is one vital piece of digital marketing for advisors that, if it’s missing from your online presence, is going to result in a lot of wasted time. I know this because I wasted half a year before I figured out this strategy. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

The vital piece that's missing from a lot of advisors’ social media efforts is having a free offer. But not just any free offer. It's not just a free plan or a free discovery meeting call. It has to be something that is actually valuable and that people want. This one vital thing needs to be a great lead magnet or a great free piece of value that someone would actually either share their email or give you something for in exchange. For us, the thing that's worked the best is the How Much to Retire Quiz. 

The How Much to Retire Quiz is a series of questions for prospective clients. Because that's the main question that they're asking––how much do I need to retire?––they'll fill it out. When they hit submit, the answers are automatically sent to me. We'll look at the questions and then we respond by making a video. What has been working great for us is designing a simple, very quick Loom video (or any sort of screen-recording service) sharing a light version of our retirement plan software (we use Riskalyze for this) using their answers and results. 

To wrap up the video, we share the most important part, which is stating some of the things that they should be thinking about for the stage of life that they're in. If they're 55 and thinking about retiring in the next five years, there's some key things to be thinking about those next five years. We use this video platform to let them know what they are. We also make sure and include that these are all assumptions. Make sure your compliance department is okay with these types of videos.  

But this process alone, of receiving responses to the quiz and responding via video, was one of the biggest-impact things for Streamline last year in 2021. It started to gain traction when our YouTube channel picked up a lot––that’s the main source for responses to the quiz.  

I encourage you to look at our website (the How Much to Retire Quiz is towards the bottom of the homepage) and maybe make your own version of this quiz. Or for more ideas of value pieces you could put together to grow your business, go to our firm's free resources page, and also my personal website. There might be something you could adapt to your own ideal clients. I'm happy to help as you're going on your journey to help people and make sure that you're doing good work as an advisor.