Marketing strategies guide for financial advisors

A Guide to High-Performing Marketing Strategies for Financial Advisors

Your role as a financial advisor has always been about more than numbers and wealth management. It’s about helping people secure their futures, achieve their dreams, and perhaps most importantly, address the fundamental human desires for survival, security, respect, and peace of mind. But to do that effectively, you need to be visible, relevant, and engaging. That’s where our unique, high-converting financial advisor marketing strategies come in.

The Anatomy of High-Performing Financial Advisor Marketing Strategies

Imagine a funnel. At its top, you have your reach out strategies. These are the ways you get in front of potential clients—whether it’s organically, through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or the oft-underrated art of the cold email.
Reach Out: Making the Connection
Your outreach must be intentional, and the tool we heavily recommend is cold emailing. Cold emailing for financial advisors might sound counterintuitive. It’s easy to worry about coming across as spam or intrusive. But here’s the secret—it’s all about how you frame it. Your cold emails are not just communication. They’re opportunities to connect, to empathize, to start a conversation around the very real, very human concerns your potential clients have.

 

Problem Solving: Understanding and Addressing Client Pain Points
As we move down the funnel, we get to the heart of the matter—problem-solving. To truly address the pain points of your clients, we must first understand them. This requires meaningful segmentation of your audience.
But we’re not talking about the standard, surface-level segmentation here. We’re delving deeper, into the realm of human needs and desires—survival, social status, breeding, respect. What are the fears, hopes, and dreams that keep your clients up at night? What financial hurdles are blocking their paths to fulfilling these basic needs?
This is where you, as a financial advisor, can create a discourse that resonates deeply with your clients. Show them that you understand their struggles and that you’re here to guide them through the financial maze.

 

Communication: The Art of Storytelling
It’s not enough to understand and empathize—you need to communicate your understanding effectively. This is where storytelling comes in. Humans are intrinsically drawn to stories. They captivate us, elicit emotions, and, most importantly, help us see ourselves in the narrative.
Donald Miller once said, “The greatest lie I believed was thinking that life is a story about me.” Your marketing message needs to reflect this understanding. It’s not about you—it’s about them. Their challenges, their dreams, their financial journey.

 

Lead Capture, Nurturing, CTA, and Sell: The Final Stages
Lead capture is the next step. Once you’ve connected with potential clients and resonated with their pain points, you need a system to retain and nurture those leads. An effective financial advisor email marketing strategy can play a huge role in this, keeping you in regular contact with your leads, providing them with valuable advice and insights.

 

Then comes your call-to-action (CTA)—the pivotal moment where you invite them to take the next step, whether that’s scheduling a consultation, signing up for a seminar, or subscribing to your newsletter. Once you have successfully guided them through this process, the selling stage becomes more of a natural progression than a hard push.

 

Making It Real: Marketing with Authenticity
The heart of this approach is not about formulas or algorithms. It’s about empathy, authenticity, and understanding that behind every financial decision is a human being with their unique story. This is not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. This is about deeply understanding your clients’ core desires and fears, then using that understanding to offer a service that truly meets their needs.
This authentic marketing strategy acknowledges the complexity and richness of human experience. It requires you to be not just a financial advisor, but also a listener, a problem-solver, and a storyteller. It’s about creating a genuine connection that fosters trust and shows your clients that you’re there for them, not just their wallets.
As you employ these marketing strategies, always remember: Your financial advice isn’t just shaping your clients’ financial futures—it’s impacting their lives. Every email sent, every landing page created, every sales funnel built should resonate with this reality. After all, the true essence of financial advising is not just about wealth—it’s about people.
A photo of an aged couple in an article about the right empathetic approach, financial advisors should adopt, when planning their marketing strategies

Building the Financial Advisor Sales Funnel: A Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Cold Emailing – Expanded
Email Deliverability: This is the ability of your emails to reach the inbox of your recipient without bouncing, being marked as spam, or being blocked by filters. Improving deliverability involves several factors:

Sender Reputation
: This is built over time and is affected by the number of emails you send, how frequently they’re marked as spam, bounce rates, and engagement rates. Maintain a good sender reputation by regularly cleaning your email list, keeping bounce rates low, and encouraging interaction.
Content Quality: Filters can flag emails as spam based on their content. Avoid spammy words, excessive use of capital letters or exclamation points, and ensure you include a clear unsubscribe option.
Authentication: Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your email. These authenticate your email server and significantly increase the chance of your emails landing in the inbox.

 

Email Servers & Systems: While numerous email servers and marketing automation systems are available, it’s crucial to differentiate between platforms for cold emailing and platforms for nurturing email marketing.
For the cold email system, the platform choice is crucial because it impacts your sender reputation, email deliverability, and ability to personalize at scale. According to our research, we recommend a platform specifically designed for cold outreach, such as Saleshandy. This platform can help manage your cold email campaigns effectively, offering features such as automatic follow-ups, personalized email sequences, and detailed analytics.
For the nurturing email marketing system, our top recommendations are Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) and ActiveCampaign. These systems are essential for managing warm leads—those who have already shown interest in your services—and guiding them towards becoming clients.
Brevo: Brevo excels in its ease of use, excellent deliverability rates, and robust automation capabilities. It offers a user-friendly interface that allows you to craft beautiful emails without the need for coding skills. Its automation features are powerful, allowing you to create intricate, condition-based email sequences that adapt to your recipients’ behaviors and preferences.
ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign is well-known for its superior automation and segmentation features. It allows you to segment your audience based on behavior, interests, and other custom fields, ensuring your messages are highly relevant to each recipient. The automation capabilities are quite advanced, offering if/then branching, event-triggered emails, and automated contact and lead scoring. While it might have a steeper learning curve than Brevo, it offers greater flexibility and depth, making it worth the investment for a more personalized and effective nurturing strategy.
Subject Line Hacks: The subject line is arguably the most critical part of your email, as it significantly impacts whether the recipient will open your email. Keep them short, personalized, and benefit-focused. Include numbers when possible (e.g., “5 Ways to Boost Your Retirement Savings”) and test different approaches to see what works best for your audience.
List Building & Maintenance: Your email list is the lifeblood of your cold email campaign. Build it by offering valuable content (like eBooks, webinars, or financial tips) in exchange for contact information. You can also use LinkedIn or industry directories to find potential leads. Regularly maintain your list by removing inactive subscribers and always respect opt-outs.

Step 2: Landing Pages, Retargeting Ads, and (warm) Email Automation

Once you’ve mastered cold emailing, you need a place for these potential clients to land—a well-designed, convincing landing page.
Landing Pages: These should be straightforward, with a clear value proposition and a call to action. Use a service like Unbounce or Leadpages to create professional-looking, highly converting landing pages.
Retargeting Ads: These are powerful tools for keeping your services in front of people who’ve visited your landing page but haven’t converted. Services like Google Ads and Facebook Ads offer retargeting options.
Email Automation: Automating your warm email marketing helps nurture leads by providing them with relevant content and reminders to keep your service in their minds. Email automation systems allow you to schedule follow-up emails, segment your email list, and analyze engagement metrics.
Remember, the aim is to guide your potential clients through a journey, where you understand them, add value, capture their interest, nurture the relationship, and finally, present your services as the solution they need. And at each stage, authenticity and empathy should be your guiding principles.