How Financial Firms Can Improve ROI by Modernizing Their Marketing Strategy
- Financial services firms that fail to track marketing ROI are at risk of rising ad costs, lower client quality, and missed growth opportunities, as traditional broad-net tactics no longer deliver sustainable results.
- Maximizing ROI starts with setting measurable goals, identifying performance bottlenecks, and using tools like A/B testing and booking funnel analytics to improve campaign outcomes and attract higher-value clients.
- Trust-building through local SEO, reviews, and consistent online presence is essential to boost conversion rates and lower acquisition costs, and platforms like Surefire Local help financial firms automate and optimize these efforts for long-term success.
The marketing landscape has changed for financial services companies like CPA firms, wealth management, and financial advisors. The old school method of casting a broad net and seeing what sticks doesn’t work anymore. Modern marketing tools and methods efficiently track, analyze, and even make useful suggestions to maximize ROI.
As more of your competitors utilize small business software to track performance, it becomes increasingly difficult for those who don’t to maintain sustainable profit margins.
Improving your ROI isn’t just about getting more clients. It’s about booking clients who generate higher revenues over the lifetime of that relationship.
ROI tracking tools allow you to dig deep into the data to learn how to improve your ROI by attracting these goldilocks zone clients.
And here’s the thing. With the right tools and techniques, even you can do this in your spare time. We’re going to show you today.
The Cost of Not Tracking Marketing Effectively
When you use wide net tactics, you miss opportunities to fix out-of-control customer acquisition costs because it’s hard to tell what’s working…or isn’t.
And to make matters worse, the system is “rigged”. As your return on investment goes down, ad platforms like Google and Facebook say “these ads aren’t working. We don’t want to show them to our users.”
So, they hike up the price you pay per impression or click. Eventually, advertising becomes completely cost-prohibitive.
And that’s only one cost. Others include:
- Not attracting the best (highest value) clients for your firm
- Failing to convert leads to paying clients, leading to higher per-client acquisition costs
- Struggling to keep the clients you have, and increasing your marketing spend to find new clients
- Losing the ability to prove ROI and justify to your partners that spending on marketing is worth it.
So, those costs come at you from multiple angles. Fortunately, the best solution for how to increase ROI can reclaim all of these missed opportunities at once.
How to Maximize ROI (Example)
1. Set Clear Goals Before You Spend
Before launching a single ad, spending money on web design, or setting up your social media, it’s vital to define success in clear terms.
Get more clients, increase ROI, lower my acquisition costs, grow my firm—these aren’t goals in and of themselves. They’re the general directions you want to go.
Work your way back from what matters most—money. These become your SMART goals.
So…
- If you want to generate X revenue per year, you need to generate X revenue per month (considering seasonal variance).
- If one client generates X amount of revenue, you need X number of clients (or billable hours) per month to meet your monthly revenue goal.
- X number of new clients plus X number of retained clients will equal the total number of monthly clients.
- To get more new clients, you need X number of new bookings per month. To retain clients, you need a certain percentage of these bookings from existing clients (client retention rate).
- Now, bookings can be made online or over the phone. So you need X percentage of visits to a conversion-focused booking page to result in a booking. Or you need X percentage of call inquiries to result in a booking.
- To generate X booking calls or direct website bookings, you need X percentage of clients who click on your ad or calls from your ad (depending on how your campaigns are set up). You can track both ways using UTM tracking and other methods.
- At the bottom of this chain, you need X number of people to respond to your ad.
In this basic paid advertising example, each X becomes its own goal that you can track independently, but look at holistically.
And to sweeten the pot, as you improve your ad performance, ad platforms reward you with lower ad costs compared to your competitors through a “Quality Score” system, further improving your ROI.
2. Identify Bottlenecks (Opportunities)
As you improve each X down the line, you become more likely to reach the goal above it. But you’ll also be able to see if one of the goals isn’t budging even as the ones below improve.
When this happens, your numbers are telling you something. An opportunity is right there. Capturing it will maximize your ROI.
To continue our paid advertising example, let’s say that you increase the number of clicks on your ads by improving your ad copy. But you’re not getting more bookings.
So, you’re paying for more clicks with no payoff. That’s wasting money.
If you let this continue, your overall ROI will move in the wrong direction. So, what opportunity is this showing you?
3. Define the Opportunity
Sometimes, the precise opportunity will be obvious. At other times, you might review the other data you’re collecting to determine how to capture the opportunity.
If you’re getting clicks without the number of bookings going up, here are the primary opportunities you should explore, fix, or rule out.
- Improve your web page loading speed
- Ensure the page looks as you expect on mobile
- Eliminate any barriers in your booking system
- Ensure the ad is directed to a compelling landing page that aligns with the ad, not just your home page.
- Put a relevant and impactful testimonial near the booking button to enhance trust
4. Measure the Outcome & Adjust
Once you’ve defined the opportunity and put a fix in place, continue to track that goal over a period of time. Did your number improve after the fix? If it didn’t, you’ll want to revisit the opportunity to see what other opportunities you might have missed.
Again, analyzing your tracking data further can help you do this.
So, you’ve made some changes. And you’re still not converting?
Is your landing page as effective as it could be? Make the page simple, eliminating any distractions or reasons to click away. Make sure it aligns with the ad, so there’s no confusion about whether the person is in the right place.
You might even go back a step to the ad copy. Is it attracting clicks from the right people?
5. Optimize Through Testing
You’ll get to a point where you’re now getting bookings, but you’re wondering….could I get even more? Or could I secure more bookings from clients who generate more billable hours over the lifetime of the client relationship?
Congratulations. You’re at the optimization stage. This is where you look for opportunities to make a small change to see if it improves your results.
You’ll do this through A/B testing.
To start, duplicate your landing page. Make one small change to one of those pages. Track both pages and see which performs better. Remember: only change one thing and give yourself some time to test it (at least 2 weeks).
For example, you could test the following on a landing page:
- Different booking button sizes, colors, fonts, or outlines.
- Shorter forms
- Bold vs. no bold
- Shortening or lengthening your landing page intro
- Changing page color or font.
- Adding photos or videos
- Putting the testimonial above or below the booking button
- Making the testimonial text or video
Even small improvements add up over time to maximize ROI.
6. Invest in Trust-Building Around the Internet
We mentioned testimonials as an integral part of maximizing advertising ROI for financial firms. And there’s a reason for that. Trust matters in every industry, but perhaps more so in financial services.
It’s critical to think beyond just running ads to generate leads. Those ads are more effective when you establish trust signals on the Internet. These signals communicate both directly and indirectly who you say you are. And you can deliver on your promises.
They improve your ROI through several means, most importantly:
- Increasing ad click-through on ads because this isn’t the first time they’ve seen your name
- Increasing booking rates because they see others are having good experiences
- Increasing the size and lifetime of contracts because they know up front you’re the right professional for them.
- Encouraging referrals and free promotion from happy clients because good vibes are contagious online
- Lowering advertising and customer acquisition costs as more potential clients go directly to your website
- Maximizing profits and growing your firm.
So, how do you build trust in something as big as the Internet? Focus on what’s most important. Your local community of people who need financial services. Localize your online presence and build trust there:
- Get more 5-star reviews on key platforms like Google and Facebook
- Ensure your information is accurate, consistent and present in key online directories and listings
- Build up your localized social media presence
- Invest in local SEO and local content marketing to improve your visibility in local’s searches and on Google Maps
- Set up and maintain your Google Business Profile
We’ve built an all-in-one marketing platform for small, local, financial firms like yours. It not only helps you track and analyze marketing to maximize ROI. It automates and manages key tasks that improve that return on investment.
You’ll want to see this for yourself. To learn more about how Surefire Local’s marketing platform makes it easier to increase your ROI, schedule your demo today.