CRM for Financial Advisors Builds Stronger Relationships

Client relationship management (CRM) is a category of software solutions for managing your firm’s relationships and interactions with prospects and clients. A CRM system helps you stay connected to clients, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

A CRM system is typically thought of as a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. A CRM solution keeps the focus on your relationships with clients, colleagues, and suppliers throughout the relationship lifecycle. This focus includes prospecting, generating leads, conversions and support and services throughout the client journey.

Different CRM Systems for Different Needs

 Even though most financial advisors probably consider a CRM system to be a way to maintain client relations, there are three types of CRM systems, each focused on different data.

  • Operational CRM streamlines the business process and includes sales, marketing, and service automation. The primary goal of this type of CRM for financial advisors is to generate leads, create contacts, capture client information, and service clients along the client journey.Analytical CRM helps upper management, marketing, sales, and support personnel determine the best ways to serve clients. Data analysis is the primary function of this type of CRM application. It analyzes client data across various touch points to gain better insights into client needs. Analytical CRM can lead to better decisions and a better understanding of campaign effectiveness. The result is a proven method to help sales and support personnel improve the quality of client interaction and build stronger relationships.
  • Analytical CRM helps upper management, marketing, sales, and support personnel determine the best ways to serve clients. Data analysis is the primary function of this type of CRM application. It analyzes client data across various touch points to gain better insights into client needs. Analytical CRM can lead to better decisions and a better understanding of campaign effectiveness. The result is a proven method to help sales and support personnel improve the quality of client interaction and build stronger relationships.
  • Collaborative CRM lets your firm share clients’ information among departments like sales, marketing, technical, and support teams. Collaborative CRM unites different departments with data designed to improve the quality of service, establish brand awareness, and improve the quality of customer service to drive more business.

    How to Use CRM to Grow Your AUM

    CRM for financial advisors is all about understanding data and using it to serve clients better. Most types of CRMs create four types of data: identity, quantitative, descriptive, and qualitative. Let’s break down each of these types and the role they can play in your marketing strategies.

    Identity Data

    Identity data is what most users think of when they think of CRM. This is the fundamental data like a client’s name, birthday, address, and telephone number. Identity data provides the foundation for a variety of activities like list aggregation and targeted outreach.

    Quantitative Data

    Quantitative data explains how your clients and prospects have behaved and interacted with your products and services. After establishing who your clients are via identity data, you can then analyze transaction behaviors, communication, and social network information. Quantitative data provides insights into how visitors find your website, what they do when they arrive, and their perceptions of your client service and support. By studying quantitative data, financial advisors can easily see what’s working and what isn’t and adjust their marketing accordingly.

    Descriptive Data

    To gain a more comprehensive understanding of your clients, descriptive data provides more in-depth information such as family, career, and lifestyle details. A lot of advisors we work with enjoy getting to know their clients on a personal basis using details like how many children they have, where they go to college, or what the family does for a living. A CRM system allows advisors to compile, organize, and segment this information and allows for quick and easy retrieval.

     

    Qualitative Data

    Lastly, qualitative data provides information on a client’s attitudes, motivations, and opinions. While this data isn’t as objective as identity or quantitative data, it can provide significant insights that help you analyze why your clients do what they do. Some common questions advisors use when gathering qualitative data include:

    • How do you rate our customer service or buying experience?
    • How do you rate the value of our product or professional knowledge?
    • Why did you purchase a specific product? In other words, what was your motivation?

     

    You can use this qualitative data to fine-tune your mission statement or unique value proposition. For example, if the majority of your clients cite financial planning as a means to enjoy the things they love more often, you could incorporate this into your mission statement to emphasize it as a benefit.

     

    What Are the Benefits of Using a CRM System?

     In August 2016, we teamed up with Redtail Technology, one of the leaders in client relationship management systems for financial advisors. Redtail has been fine-tuning their CRM system for over 13 years, and our collaboration will allow our subscribers to manage their contacts and marketing outreach all in one place. Let’s look at three ways financial advisors can benefit from CRM with our Redtail partnership.

     

    Increased Efficiency

    The activities that keep you from growing your business are daily responsibilities such as data organization, marketing outreach, and analytics. These tasks are exactly what CRMs are built for — they eliminate manual processes and replace them with more efficient automated tools so financial advisors can focus on client interaction and building relationships.

     

    Opportunities for Collaboration

    Even for small businesses, many tasks are too complex or time-consuming to be handled by a single advisor. By using CRM for financial advisors, you can collaborate with other team members and departments on a single project. For example, when we have a new Exclusive™ customer, our sales reps share the project with our Client Success Coordinators who work with our White Glove team and designers to get everything done. We can easily notate when a portion of a project is complete so team members are held accountable for their share of the process.

     

    Improved Customer Experiences

    The ultimate benefit of using a CRM system is giving you the ability to provide the best client experience to increase retention and leads. CRMs save you money, time, and resources, so you can grow your business. When used effectively, you can supply relevant content to the right people, follow them along their client journey, and seamlessly manage all your clients’ projects.

     

    How to Harness the Power of CRM with Content That Gets Results

    You likely use a financial advisor CRM system to keep track of your clients and prospects and improve your relationships with them. What many advisors don’t realize is, they can harness their CRM and the resulting data to improve their content marketing. Segmenting your list and relying on personas helps you develop highly targeted content that will resonate with your ideal client base. Take time to view this insightful video about the CRM and content relationship for a better understanding.

     

    [

     

    We all know that the best content marketing caters to an audience’s needs. But this takes time and energy, and businesses often turn to generic promotional posts and advertisements by default. Without a CRM, you’re missing key elements of content marketing data. With a CRM system, you know more about what your clients need and how they behave so you can offer more targeted content.

     

    Here are some of the ways you can put this data to work:

     

    Monitor traffic for your current content by looking at clicks, comments, and social/website traffic. Use this data as a baseline to see what type of content resonates most with your followers and create content that appeals to your audience and consider revamping or dropping content that doesn’t.

     

    Make changes based on client needs. Like any plan, your content strategy should be seen as a guide rather than an inflexible directive. Based on the data you gather, you can tweak your marketing strategies as often as needed to give your audience more of what they want.

     

    Use personas to create personalized content. Most CRMs allow you to analyze the characteristics of your best clients and those who engage with your content the most. Using this information, you can craft content specifically tailored for your audience and avoid the generic content your market doesn’t like.

     

    These are just three ways you can use the data you gather from your financial advisor CRM to direct your content marketing efforts. Some of the best advertisers, including Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, and Nike, consistently identify pain points, followed the buying journey, and adjust their strategies and content accordingly.

     

Leveraging CRM Data for Targeted Marketing

Analyzing data is no longer the domain of aggregators or professional analysts. What was often considered a boring endeavor, data analysis can help financial advisors create more effective marketing and profit from better results. Leveraging your CRM data is the key to creating better content, deeper relationships, and an overall better understanding of your prospects and clients.

 

  1. Track Client and Prospect Engagement

With our integration with Redtail, it’s easier than ever to see who is viewing your emails, what they are doing after they view them, and what you should do about it. For example, after syncing your Redtail contacts into your FMG Suite dashboard, you see that Jane, 45, opened your Monthly Market Insights email. She then went to your website to find more information. It would make sense, then, to reach out to Jane to see if you could answer any questions she may have about her financial planning. The raw click-through data quickly turns into an opportunity to reach out.

  1. Create Ideal Personas

In the past, we have talked a lot about personas and how they can influence your marketing. Personas are breakdowns of your ideal clients and provide you with a definitive profile for targeted marketing efforts. Using a CRM, you can see who engages with your content the most and create campaigns and other marketing outreach efforts that attract these kinds of clients.

  1. Personalize Messaging

CRM systems provide client information like name, age, and other core information. But what does all this data mean for your marketing? Financial advisors can use this information to create targeted lists and create the most relevant content and offers. For example, you can segment your lists into retirement age clients, younger clients, and single or married clients. Personalized messages to each of these lists will get better results than a generic one.

  1. Adjust Marketing Strategies

After using your financial advisor CRM for a few months, you can analyze the performance of your marketing efforts. If, after three months, you see little or no engagement with specific content, it’s time to revamp it or toss it. You can adjust your strategies and do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Then you simply review your data every few months and make changes accordingly.

After breaking data down into action plans, your analytics go from boring numbers to insightful inspiration. Learn more about leveraging your data and our partnership with Redtail.

 

AMPs Are for Inspiring Action, CRMs Are for Nurturing Relationships

 

Most advisors use a CRM system, but not all of them have adopted automation software. Too often, advisors assume the two are the same. While it’s important that the two technologies work together, CRMs serve a different purpose than Automated Marketing Platforms (AMP). Here’s a quick overview of what each tool does and why they are important for managing client relationships and streamlining marketing.

 

AMPs

AMPs help you reach more prospects by sharing insights, information, and more to inspire engagement. Your automated marketing platform is your launch pad for all of your content campaigns. By creating lead capture centers, automated triggers, and drip campaigns, your message is delivered 24/7 and available on demand for anyone interested. Automated Marketing Platforms work best with insight-driven content that drives a single call to action. AMP content typically follows a sequence to teach, inspire, invite, follow up, and repeat.

One of the most powerful tools in Google’s analytic suite is Goals. A Google goal is a series of actions you want a prospect to take, like reading a blog, clicking a call to action, or signing up for a broadcast. It is the automated marketing platform’s job to supply the content that makes the action worthwhile and in the best interest of the prospect.

AMPs also allow you to scale your 1:1 marketing for a more personalized experience for prospects and clients. The advent of marketing automation has allowed financial advisors to deliver personalized 1:1 marketing on a large scale, as opposed to traditional mass marketing.

 

CRMs

CRMs are all about gaining insights to build stronger relationships and maintain them effectively. One of the most productive aspects of a financial advisor CRM system is its reporting functionality. With the right reports, you can learn invaluable information about your audience, the effectiveness of your content marketing, and how your ideal clients perceive your brand. This capability becomes even more powerful when you begin to track not only which of your content marketing efforts are most successful, but what topics resonated with readers the most.

Think of CRM systems for financial advisors as a powerful tool for tracking your clients’ actions. It can separate marketing efforts into campaigns and be used to track the ROI. Once you understand your returns, you can focus your efforts on the top performing elements of your campaigns and marketing programs. By creating a standardized approach for each new prospect that enters the sales pipeline, CRMs let you know precisely the right time to reach out to a prospect to bridge the gap between automation and relationship management.

By combining these two powerful technologies, you can reach more prospects, realize more conversions, and grow your business like never before.

To find out more about how optimizing your CRM, automated campaigns, and the other powerful tools available from FMG Suite, you can get a free demo today.