Indigo Marketing Agency was recently mentioned in the April 2020 edition of Bob Veres’ Inside Information, a monthly editorial published exclusively for leading financial professionals. This month’s issue is all about Marketing for Hire: A remarkable number of marketing resources are now available in the advisor ecosystem. The feature describes how financial advisors successfully outsource content creation to save time and gain new clients.
I want to personally thank Bob for this recognition. We sincerely appreciate it! You can read a transcript of our feature below, and learn more about Bob and what he does for financial advisors at www.bobveres.com.
Two Top Advisors Dominating Their Space
Isaac Presley, president of Cordant Wealth Partners in Portland, OR, hired Claire Akin of Indigo Marketing Agency (indigomarketingagency.com) to start the firm’s marketing campaigns that target Intel employees. They also manage its email newsletter, create webinars, and handle the social media postings for all of these things. “I’m not a marketer or copywriter, so we felt like we needed some outside expertise,” he says.
Sharlee Cretors of SC Financial Services in Scottsdale, AZ, is another client of Indigo. “Moving into marketing is kind of a scary space for me,” she says. “We went to Claire and bought her full marketing package, which includes a custom article every month.”
The articles are sent to Cretors or the firm’s two other advisors to modify as they see fit. “Once I’ve customized it, they take it from there,” she says. “They take care of all the social media links, making sure they are emailed out using MailChimp, and I can call or text them for anything that has to do with marketing.”
Recently, SC Financial Services engaged Indigo to create a webinar package. “That can be a huge distraction for me as a small company, figuring out the best way to do it and promote it,” she says. “Claire will go from writing the script to getting it done on video and then she’ll post it on your website and link to it through social media.” Of course, Akin also reviews an advisor’s website content.
Trusting The Experts
Indigo Marketing Agency has writers that are CFPs and CPAs, as well as marketing specialists all over the country who are on call for the firm’s advisory clients.
“I think the biggest thing about outsourcing marketing is: you don’t have to be afraid of it,” Cretors concludes. She says that it took about six months of consistent messaging before she started to see results. “But now I’m hearing from clients more, and the people I want to get to know are hearing from me.”
Akin started her company after working as an advisor for her father’s planning office in San Diego, and for FMG Suite, which creates a content library that advisors and brokers can access.
“What I learned from that experience is that there are many advisors out there who need more help than that,” she says. “I really believe in the power of custom content,” she adds. “If you’re an advisor who wants to show your own personality, or you work with a specialized group of clients, that really demands content that is unique to you.”
How It Works
What can advisory firms expect when they sign on with Indigo? “Typically, we start by taking over their website, do the search engine optimization, and set up their social media profiles,” Akin says. “We want to make sure their website is responsive, that it reflects them, and that it has an easy calendar scheduler button so that people can schedule a call with them. We create a 30-minute webinar and put it on their website and their social media profiles, and for some firms, we buy LinkedIn and Facebook ads to get them in front of people they don’t already know.”
Then, on an ongoing basis, Akin and her team develop content for the advisory firm, trying to keep the messages topical to reflect what’s going on in the world or the markets.
Indigo’s target market is smaller advisory firms with one or two partners. “When you get to the bigger firms, with 10-20 advisors, they usually have a marketing person on their team who can do this kind of thing,” Akin explains. She also experiences demand from firms whose founders are baffled by social media and who just want somebody to do it for them. “They know they should be marketing,” she says, “but for some reason, they’re not doing it, and they’d like to start.”
Helping Advisors Embrace A Speciality
What advice would Akin give the advisor community? “My very first advice to all advisors is to embrace a specialty,” she says. “Because we all want to work with specialists, whether you’re looking for a doctor, or if you have a big tax problem. By embracing a specialty,” Akin adds, “they can charge a premium for your services, and create marketing messages that will be more compelling with your audience.”
Second, Akin says that advisors should not totally replace referral marketing with social media outreach. “Most of their new clients are still going to come from referrals,” she says, “so it’s important to maintain that referral marketing pipeline, which comes from educating your existing clients, staying in touch, reminding them who you serve and how you help, and making it easy to share your information with people. That,” Akin adds, “is our primary focus with the materials we provide.”
Beyond that, advisors should recognize that it takes time for any marketing activity to get results. “The average person may get onto your email list and watch a webinar, but they may not set up an appointment with you for six months to a year,” says Akin. “This is a relationship business and it takes time to build that relationship online.”
What Does It Cost?
Pricing? Akin and her team charge $2,000 up front, which includes the website setup, optimizing the social media profile, creating a marketing calendar for the first year, and search engine optimization. “We also connect them to the technology called Databox,” she adds, “which gets your metrics. It sends out an email that compares this month to last month, numbers and traffic to their website and traffic from social media, and how many people are opening the messages they send out.” The ongoing articles service costs $625 a month.
If you have questions about your current marketing strategy during these uncertain times, or how to successfully outsource content creation, we’d love to chat with you about how we can help. Schedule your free strategy call here.