Eric Sajdak, ChFC • Green Bay, WI
Safeguard Wealth Management
We have had a lot of success using social media as a digital prospecting platform. We post videos that introduce our firm and our philosophy, and upload educational articles and white papers. We also use social media to build our database by offering targeted prospects educational and useful content.
For example, this year we created a retirement resolution checklist that prospects could request. The checklist specifies the areas people need to cover and questions they need to answer to formulate a comprehensive financial plan. This list covers topics such as estate planning, liquidity, and investing. Most people will not have considered all of the planning factors we discuss, and it is a thought-provoking way to stimulate a request for more information or a meeting with a principal of our firm.
We target social media ads by geography and by demographics. If someone responds to the ad, their email address and some basic information go into our database. We will continue to target them through an email funnel approach. The next offer, for example, might be an e-book one of our partners has written on retirement income planning. The prospect will hopefully request the book and read it. While it is not a difficult or long read, it prompts people to think about retirement issues they may not have considered before. Again, it will prompt a number of prospects to request a meeting. Hopefully the meeting will be in person, but we can also introduce ourselves more fully over the phone or in a Skype meeting.
The key to the success of this digital prospecting approach is twofold: (1) offering valuable content that positions our firm as thoughtful and insightful regarding a range of financial planning, retirement, and investment issues, and (2) continuing to try to build the relationship through an ongoing stream of communications. This isn’t a “hard sell,” and we hope to become both an educational resource for people and, ultimately, a firm they would like to do business with.
Disclosure: Safeguard Wealth Management is a registered investment advisor in the state of Wisconsin.
This article first published in Proactive Advisor Magazine on April 6, 2017, Volume 14, Issue 1.
Photography by Mike Roemer
