Consumers today demand trusted relationships with the brands and service providers they work with in every industry, but this need is especially acute when it comes to the financial advisors they trust to guide them in managing their hard-earned money as they prepare for their futures.

 So, savvy financial advisors are creating and executing personalized, localized marketing plans to engage with current and prospective clients in a way that is consistent and meaningful. Of course, this is easier said than done, particularly for large financial organizations with advisors and their teams operating as independent entities under a corporate umbrella.

With a sprawling network of teams creating and executing their own marketing campaigns, it can be difficult to ensure consistency—in design, messaging, and production quality—compliance, and budget management across every team.

It’s a lot to manage, but when you break it down into key elements—and when you find the right partner to support each phase—the prospect of planning and implementing global and local multichannel marketing campaigns in tandem with your advisors becomes a whole lot more feasible.

Brand Management for Financial Advisors

As for any global brand with far-flung reps creating localized marketing campaigns, the key challenge financial advisors face is ensuring their brand’s look, feel, and messaging are consistent from team to team. This is especially important considering the tight industry regulations that govern certain aspects of marketing messaging (more on compliance in a minute). But in general, it’s important for building trust with potential customers.

When they know what to expect from your communications, they become confident that they can trust your organization and its leaders with their money. When the messaging is inconsistent or the overall look changes from campaign to campaign and channel to channel, that trust starts to erode.

That’s why the first essential element of successful multichannel marketing for financial advisors is streamlining brand management, with a brand hub and asset management platform that keeps approved assets at every advisor’s fingertips.

Imagine: rather than having to spend time hunting down the latest assets or ping a single global marketing leader (whose plate is likely too full as it is) with every collateral request, individual advisors and their teams can simply log in to platform, quickly find what they need, and personalize the details for their particular audiences based on pre-approved templates. Nobody’s having to reinvent the collateral wheel, and key information can be locked down, so there are no concerns about compliance or brand integrity, and no need for any one leader to micromanage the process for every marketing team member.

In Person, Print and Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors

A great multichannel marketing campaign incorporates both print and digital channels, with communications that complement each other, meeting customers and prospects wherever they are at a given moment.

More than half of financial product purchases originate online, and 41 percent close online. It’s clear customers want to engage with their financial experts online, which means those that want to remain competitive need to ensure they’re visible via digital channels such as social media, search engine advertisements, landing pages, etc. If a financial advisor is not connecting through those channels, customers are likely to find another that is.

On the print side, direct mail outreach—from lunch & learn invitations using corporate event kits to highly sensitive financial documents—is a critical piece of a financial advisor’s omnichannel communication strategy. Despite its old-school reputation, direct mail remains a powerful marketing tool for financial advisors. For example, more than 4 in 5 millennials take the time to look through their mail, and response rates for direct mail have increased by 43 percent in recent years.

Including in person, print, and digital outreach in your marketing strategy allows the three pathways to support one another, amplifying your visibility and ensuring your brand name is always on customers’ minds.

Compliance in Every Phase

Of course, all of this outreach must uphold rigorous privacy standards in order to protect customers’ sensitive financial data and keep your organization compliant with local and federal regulations. This compliance burden often gets in the way of effective, personalized communication, but it doesn’t have to.

A printing and distribution partner with world-class data security protocols, such as SOC 2 compliance, 100% match mailing capabilities, and quality control processes can ease that compliance burden on financial advisors by ensuring every mailing—from Every Door Direct Mail postcards to end-of-year financial statements—maintains confidentiality while also building trust, nurturing client relationships, and reflecting a high standard of customer service.

From the technology side, a brand management platform with configurable user permissions ensures only those who should be accessing certain data can access it. And modular content and automated approval workflows make it easy to be certain that the legal-department-approved, compliant language—and only that language—makes its way onto every marketing asset.

The Personal Touch

With compliance buttoned up, national and local marketers can focus on the last (but certainly not least) element of a successful multichannel marketing campaign: personalization and localization. Tailoring your outreach to your specific audience is a critical way to show your prospective clients that you are interested in them as individuals, not just numbers, reassuring them that their personal finances are in good hands with your advisors.

This personal touch can (and should) take a few different forms:

• Localization: Each advisor should be tailoring outreach to their audience’s geographic situations. This could include “housekeeping” items like time zones and addresses of and directions to physical offices, but it could also go further and employ regional lingo or points of interest, all of which show customers you understand who they are and what matters to them.
• Customer History: Next, communications should be related to recipients’ history with your brand. Online, this might mean sending them an email with more information about products they’ve considered. In print, it could mean reengaging former clients with a personalized note from their advisor, or mailing information about a new offering that complements the ones already in their portfolios. Here again, the goal is to show customers that you’re reaching out to them specifically, as a person and not just a prospect.
• Names: They say our own names are our favorite sounds, and that’s proven to be true by the data on print marketing. Simply adding recipients’ names to mailers makes the mail more attention-grabbing and can increase response rates significantly. And the same goes with digital outreach such as email newsletters. When you add customers’ names, they take it personally—in a good way.

The Right Partner Makes Multichannel Marketing a Breeze for Financial Advisors

There’s a lot to juggle in creating an omnichannel marketing strategy that attracts prospective clients, builds trust, and keeps every communication secure. But with the right marketing execution partner supporting both your corporate marketing team and individual advisors, you can rest assured your marketing investment will yield powerful results.

At OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves on being that partner. We give financial advisors control of their brand by simplifying access to branded materials through our U.Connect platform, and we manage the entire digital and physical marketing supply chain, from creation to distribution, all while keeping you compliant. 

Learn more about how we work with financial advisors to create and implement multichannel marketing campaigns, and when you’re ready, we invite you to contact us or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.