Most major wealth management companies and the financial advisors that work for them have a distinct disadvantage as it relates to digital marketing.
The big guns in the industry are afraid of running afoul of regulators so they don’t even do the basic/generic stuff correctly. This gun-shy approach to digital marketing forces them to spend more on branding and more on PPC advertising.
Seota Digital Marketing has done a quick case study to show how small financial advisors and wealth management firms can take advantage of the gap in the market. When you compete in a lucrative industry and the market leaders are afraid to do SEO, web design, and basic digital marketing, the opportunity to grab market share is ripe and easy to pick.
This article will look at two major firms with slightly different approaches to digital marketing and then we will look at opportunities a small player in the space can take advantage of.
It Gets Worse on The Map View
Navigating the three-pack of Google map results you can click a link to see more results. The results of clicking to see more results on the map is below.
So, if you run a small financial firm, this is an opportunity for you. If the other big firms won’t work their local markets for market share, it opens the playing field for smaller firms to move in. You will notice one local listing here for Cantrill Financial Group – Not a lot of effort went into his GMB listing and he is outranking the biggest firms in the country by just doing the basics.
Edward Jones Digital Approach Appears Different
The second group we will look at is Edward Jones. They are doing much better with Google My Business and they have an effort underfoot to get their agents properly set up on GMB. The GMB sites link to the right listing on the Edward Jones website and the information is solid.
Edward Jones may get more traffic from their organic GMB listings than they do from Pay Per Click and online advertising combined. This is financially smart as well as digitally smart. Edward Jones financial advisors are showing up in the organic search results in my local area. None of the other major wealth management firms are in the organic top 10.
The benefits to smart digital marketing for Edward Jones, as we see them, flow all the way down to recruiting new advisors. They can show the organic listings and data from Google as evidence that they are contributing to their advisor’s success. If you are a millennial who grew up on the internet, this is a good selling point. It will also help the new advisors get a jump-start new customer acquisition for the firm. Smart digital marketing has trickle-down benefits for the organization.
I searched Edward Jones Financial Advisors in Frisco and skimmed the results for a wealth manager that I met at an event in Frisco. Two things jumped out at me. 1. Edward Jones did a great job, their advisors dominated the first page and 2nd. I found the person I was looking for immediately. (and 8 other advisors all branded with Edward Jones).
Wealth Management and Financial Advisors still depend on relationships more than the internet for new clients but as times change a lot of those relationships will start online, and Edward Jones seems to have the early upper hand, at least in our local market. (we got similar results in Alpharetta, GA, Clearwater FL and Hinsdale, IL)
Smaller Firms Missing a Big Opportunity
As you can see by looking at the map, a few small firms are showing up but Edward Jones is dominating. The smaller more agile firms could be dominating this map and the local search market where they do business with basic digital marketing. The aggressive digital marketers could be taking market share from all the big firms spending as little as 1-2k per month.
If the big firms wake up and apply their massive digital equity to their local offices the little firms will have zero chance of competing online – but as far as we can tell, this is never going to happen.
Search results as they showed 06/12/2019
