Joe Bayliss and Roy Furr
What if you could get double the results and double the ROI from your current advertising budget?
Most financial advisors would jump all over this. And we’re writing this article to tell you it’s possible. In fact, it could be closer within your reach than you might expect.
Let’s imagine this scenario…
This scenario may or may not match what you’re currently seeing. Our most dialed-in advisors are doing much better. We’ve seen advisors do much worse. But it’s a realistic starting point – with room for improvement.
Let’s assume you have an advertising channel or program that generates leads for $500.
And let’s assume that for every 20 leads you generate, one of those leads goes through your entire process and becomes a client.
So let’s work backwards. If you want one client, you know you need to generate 20 leads. And at a cost of $500 per lead, that means you need to spend $10,000.
Or in other words, for each $10,000 you put into this advertising program, you’re going to generate 20 leads, and one new client (on average).
If you want 5 new clients, you invest $50,000.
If you want 10 new clients, you invest $100,000.
Now you might see these numbers and say, “Sign me up!” Or maybe you see them and think, “That’s insane!” Either way…
This is your starting point.
So let’s say you have this program in place, and you’re content to keep investing $100,000 for 10 new clients.
But now you decide you want to grow your business. Perhaps you’re bringing on a new advisor, or just decide you could handle more clients.
Let’s say you want to get 20 in the same time frame – instead of 10
One way you could do this is by simply doubling your investment every month. Assuming the numbers stay the same, you invest $200,000 and you should get 20 new clients.
But what happens if there’s not the opportunity to double your investment? For example, maybe those media opportunities simply don’t exist? Or what if the only other media is more expensive and less responsive? Or if you simply can’t double the budget right now, even if it were to work?
In all cases, you would benefit from where we’re going next with our example.
Remember – our little illustration had you investing $100,000 to generate 10 new clients. But for every single new client generated, there were a total of 20 leads – and 19 of those people who were originally interested in your message still haven’t become clients… YET!
So every time you spend $100,000 on marketing, you’re generating 10 clients and 190 unconverted leads. And all of these contacts go into your database.
Now, we’ll be the first to admit – some of those 190 leads are not qualified to become clients! That’s fine.
But there’s likely a significant percentage of them who are qualified to become clients – yet who don’t become clients right away, for whatever reason.
So here’s your big opportunity.
Because once those leads have moved from the great unwashed masses into your database, there is almost ZERO marginal cost of marketing to them again.
And for every lead who becomes a client on the first pass, if there’s just 1 more out of those 19 who would become a client later (or sooner), you’ve suddenly doubled your results.
And because you’re generating double the results at effectively zero marginal cost, you just got 2X the results and 2X the ROI on your advertising spend.
Every $100,000 is now generating 20 clients instead of 10.
Your cost per new client dropped from $10,000 to $5,000.
The question becomes, how do you do this?
We have a number of strategies for those unconverted leads in your database, including database marketing programs, education-based lead nurturing sequences, webinar campaigns to your database, and targeted sales emails.
Finding the right answer for what will work for you starts by knowing what you’re looking for – and then testing to find effective ways to generate that result.
Further, there may be other opportunities.
If you’re only converting 1 out of 20 on the first pass, there’s a high likelihood you could improve your conversion process.
Whether it’s how the initial inbound call is handled, how that lead is followed up with, any first triage phone call, the first appointment, additional steps after that, marketing that happens during this period, or some other factor – there is likely an opportunity here (or many) to turn more leads into clients.
And if you get more effective at both converting new leads and converting previous leads, you could more than double your results generated from these leads – without spending another dollar on advertising.
This actually creates an even bigger advantage for you.
It’s been said that the business who can spend the most money to acquire a client wins. And while this is generally true, you’re not actually spending money to acquire clients. You’re spending money to acquire leads, some of which turn into clients. And if you’re twice as effective with every advertising dollar you spend, you’re far more likely to be in that camp.
Plus, the more effective you are at converting new leads into clients, the more courage you can have as you invest in new media and new advertising initiatives.
One more thought: The difference between the leads you could be converting and the ones you are currently converting should be seen as waste. If you’re only closing half the clients you could be, you’re effectively wasting half of your leads, and half of your advertising spend.
And that could very well be from dropping the ball on the one yard line.
You can fix this.
Would you like our help converting more leads into clients and closed production?
Request a marketing audit and let us know you’d like to discuss lead conversion and database marketing programs with us. There’s no cost or obligation from this first conversation – we’re simply looking to see whether it’s a mutual fit.
Because of the nature of our services, we only work with clients who spend a minimum of $250,000 per year on advertising and marketing, and are in a top 60 metro area. For many database marketing programs to make sense, it’s best if you have at least 5,000+ unconverted leads.
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