Wealth managers face an unprecedented opportunity to grow their books in the coming years – but only if they embrace digital marketing with both hands. The right digital marketing strategy can unlock a new client pipeline that delivers:
And we’re going to help you achieve those goals – using the strategies we used to help one firm generate over $2 billion AUM in new pipeline. But before we look at concrete tactics, let’s establish who exactly wealth managers are marketing to.
The foundation of all good marketing is a deep knowledge of your target audience. But a handful of factors that are disrupting established norms within wealth management – and fundamentally changing the marketing landscape:
Wealth has become heavily concentrated in recent years, creating more competition for individual clients. Individuals worth $5 million or more now possess 47% of investible assets- nearly 2x more than they did in 2010.
This is a double-edged sword for wealth managers. While increased competition increases the risk of losing clients, it also frees firms to focus their marketing on a smaller selection of prospective clients and deliver more targeted campaigns.
The “Great Wealth Transfer” will see children of HNWIs inherit $68 trillion over the next three decades. This sudden shift in wealth managers’ target demographic will disrupt existing marketing strategies – rendering many outdated or obsolete.
It will also present opportunities for firms to gain an edge over larger legacy firms that have won historically high-value business based on reputation rather than service. More than 70% of adult children will leave their parents’ advisors when they receive their inheritance, and a large proportion of them will seek out those new advisors online.
Wealth managers today are expected to be a “one-stop shop,” providing HNWIs with everything they need under one roof. McKinsey reports that 30% of clients with $1 million to $25 million in investable assets prefer to consolidate banking and wealth relationships, an increase of approximately 250% since 2018.
This is borne out by the data: firms that focus on HNWIs now offer 12 services on average – versus just 7 across advisory practices broadly. On average, these HNW firms offer 2 more services than they did 5 years ago – and 82% plan to add more within the next 5 years.
So, what does all this mean for wealth management marketers?
There are several clear takeaways:
Ultimately, the key to acquiring and retaining HNWIs is no longer in-person events; it’s driving online visibility and out-competing others on factors like inbound content, lead nurture efficacy, and the use of data analytics.
Digital marketing is like a building: it needs strong foundations to avoid collapsing over time. But most wealth managers struggle to put these foundations in place – and miss out on a wide range of benefits and opportunities as a result.
For example, surveys show that 80% of financial services marketers see data infrastructure and accessibility as an issue – while 89% say marketing automation and content personalization are a challenge. They don’t gain the insights digital marketing data could offer, waste hours of manual effort, and fail to drive reliable engagement through content marketing.
Our experience finds there are a few core factors every wealth management firm needs:
Marketing requires a clear and consistent narrative at every touch point, but the sheer number of channels digital marketing involves makes that difficult. Tone and emphasis shift slightly between emails, socials and website copy – creating a disjointed experience for your prospects.
Develop a centralized set of messages for each stage of the funnel:
While the vast majority of wealth managers have a website, many are either outdated or poorly designed. This is your “home base” online; a bad website that doesn’t accurately or effectively communicate what you do will actively harm how prospective clients perceive your brand.
Revamp your website to ensure the following:
Data and analytics are essential to help wealth managers understand and optimize their marketing performance. We’ve seen first-hand how impactful this can be; one advisory client didn’t properly track their LinkedIn Ads performance and turned out to be wasting huge chunks of their budget on extremely poor-quality leads.
Avoids that fate by assembling an effective data and analytics system:
The 80/20 of wealth management marketing is simple: simply producing enough content and distributing it across the right channels will get you most of the results you want. But in order to do that, you need to understand which channels – and what type of content – your audience wants at each phase of the funnel:
Top of the funnel (TOFU) marketing is about building brand awareness and generating high-quality leads. The key factors to focus on here are:
The right content delivered to the right audience will grow your brand and generate steady leads – especially if you use the right channels.
Key channels:
Middle of the funnel (MOFU) content is designed to nurture warm leads and prepare them to take the next step with your firm. This is the stage where many wealth managers struggle; our clients in the industry routinely complain of high churn and deals getting “stuck.”
This is often a problem of scalability. Most wealth managers have limited marketing budgets and allocate the majority to lead generation or sales enablement; little is left over for the big chunk of time in the middle. This is particularly problematic when you consider the average HNWI takes months to decide to switch advisors or hire a wealth manager.
Our experience suggests these resource problems can be overcome by process automation. Eliminate manual effort and make it easier to scale nurture without stealing resources from other marketing functions. HubSpot is particularly useful here, allowing you to create a wide range of automated workflows that can be automatically triggered. Nurture content is then deployed regularly at the exact right moment, so leads are never left cold for too long.
Key channels include:
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) content converts leads into paying clients. Wealth managers know this is a delicate process; most HNWIs want to speak extensively with their advisor and build trust through direct human engagement. However, marketing can support those efforts in a few key ways.
Let’s imagine you have a HNWI that’s choosing between your firm and a competitor. They might get lunch with both, discuss their portfolio with both, and consider their options carefully. But during that period, we will undoubtedly still use the internet – and firms that remain visible and give prospects a reason to choose them to win more often.
Key channels include:
ProperExpression is a wealth management marketing agency that helps firms grow their AUM and lower their costs. We’ve helped recent clients increase inbound leads by 1700%, reduce cost-per-lead by 248% and drive $2+ billion AUM in new pipeline.
Want to explore how we could do the same for your firm?