If you’re like me, you’ve had the importance of first impressions drilled into you since childhood—by everyone from parents to self-help gurus. But in marketing, it’s actually the seventh impression that’s king. I’m referring to marketing’s magic rule of seven, which says it takes seven interactions before converting a prospective customer.
The question, of course, is how financial advisors can rack up those interactions—and the answer is easier and cheaper than most people realize. Even if you’ve built a well-trafficked website or regularly host informative seminars, you need a systematic way to re-engage those visitors and attendees. Remarketing allows you to do just that.
You’ve probably been on the receiving end of remarketing before. You went to Home Depot’s website to look at a lamp, and now that lamp is following you around the internet and your social media feeds via digital ads. Such targeted advertising isn’t limited to consumer goods, though. Many of the financial advisors I talk to don’t realize they can use Facebook and Google to do the same thing for their businesses.
Remarketing is an incredibly powerful addition to many advisors’ existing strategies—and it doesn’t have to break the bank. Here are three tips for getting started.
1. Follow up with lists and seminars
There are two main types of remarketing: list-based and pixel-based (or cookie-based). A prime example of the former—and a great place to start your remarketing campaign—is with seminar advertising. Let’s say you paid $6,500 for a financial seminar that brought in 40 people. That’s a cost of about $160 per lead.
Despite the fact that any seminar attendee has likely engaged with your brand several times already—such as going to the website beforehand to scope you out—it can still be challenging to make your spend pay off in the form of an actual first appointment. The timing might just be wrong, or they might want to think more about it and then completely forget.
Google Ads, though, lets you retarget particular audience lists, so you can serve display ads to everyone who attended. One advisor I know used remarketing to offer a complimentary consultation to anyone who came to a sign-up page on their website, leading to three additional meetings. This additional engagement may only cost 60 cents to a dollar as well.
A similar story can be told for any list of people you emailed or sent postcards to. Especially if your original engagement was costly, it’s well worth it to spend some extra change to actually make the conversion.
2. Continue driving traffic to your website
Another way to engage in remarketing is to follow your website visitors. Once again, this audience pool will likely overlap some with the folks you’ve emailed or engaged with at a seminar. But sometimes, website visitors come from a Google search, referral, newspaper mention or radio ad instead.
This is pixel-based marketing. Those who land on your website get “cookied” in and will begin seeing your ads in Facebook or Google. At the risk of stating the obvious, you first need a website to cookie people in. That’s the baseline—and hopefully one all advisors have met in today’s modern age.
Of course, remarketing will be most effective for those advisors putting in the work to continually drive people to their website, too. That original engagement is the hard part. Remarketing is just the icing on the cake.
3. Avoid breaking the bank
Despite the fact that remarketing represents an easy follow-up to more intensive and expensive strategies, far too many advisors continue to neglect it. Once again, though, the affordability of remarketing is another reason why there’s no reason to wait.
Let’s say you, as an advisor, get around 500 unique website visitors each month, and perhaps another 30 seminar attendees. When you retarget those two pools of people, you’re only charged when they actually click on your ad. Thus, it’s an extremely cost-effective way to rack up additional engagement on your way to the magic number seven.
In the end, remarketing is the cherry on top of any comprehensive marketing and advertising campaign. It gives extra legs to the strategies you’re already investing in, from driving people to your website to hosting financial seminars. Not everyone who comes to your site or event is ready to convert right away, but, just like that lamp from Home Depot, it’s important to stay in front of them while they make up their minds. Remarketing lets you do just that, at a fraction of the cost of other campaigns.
John T. Jones is the Advisor Marketing Services Director at USA Financial. For more information, go to www.usafinancial.com/pro.
