By Mike Schaffman, Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing.
We’ve got bad news: you’re probably missing out on a huge source of potential leads. But we also have good news: we can show you how to find those leads, get those leads in the seat across from you, and turn those leads into customers. And we have even better news: those leads are probably people you have already sent materials to.
So, how do you reach those leads? Track and analyze your client and prospect engagement. Analyzing the data you get from your engagements in a careful and thoughtful way can help you to understand your customer’s journey more effectively. And the more you know about what your prospects are thinking, the easier it will be to know what they need to see or hear to turn them into a customer.
As Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Co-Founder, John Capuano, said in this guide to advisor advertising: “Our average firm doubles the number of annual assets raised within three years…because they become more introspective on consumer behavior, and execute sales and marketing plans based on that behavior.”
Once you understand your customer’s journey from being a prospect to your client, there are 5 actions you can take to help turn that information into results.
Identifying Touchpoints
A touchpoint is what you use to reach your prospects and promote your brand. Websites, mailers, live events, emails–all of these things are touchpoints. Anything you use to reach your potential clients is a touchpoint.
The first step to track your engagement is to map out every one of your touchpoints. A focused list of all of your touchpoints will be essential for the later steps in this process.
Define Your Interactions
Defining your interactions is all about understanding your touchpoints and how well they work. For each one of the touchpoints on your list, consider the following 4 questions:
- Reach: How many people have the opportunity to see this specific touchpoint? Keep in mind that this question is not about who reads the message. This question is about the raw number of people your message goes to. So, if you send an email to 1000 potential clients, that’s the reach of your email touchpoint.
- Frequency: How often do you reach out to your audience?
- Impressions: How many times is your content viewed? This is the point where we ask how many of your messages were read or engaged with. So, if 200 people opened your emails and viewed them, that’s your impressions for your email touchpoint.
- Consistency: Are these interactions one-time occurrences or do they happen multiple times, establishing a pattern of engagement?
Breaking your interactions down into these categories should help you to get a clearer sense of how your touchpoints are working.
Understanding Levels of Engagement
In the previous step we took a look at what you are doing to reach the customer, but understanding engagement is about how the customer is feeling about what you’re showing them. There are many kinds of potential customers out there, and it can be useful to categorize them. The following 4 categories should help you get a sense of what kind of potential customers there are out there. They’re arranged from least engaged to most engaged:
- High-Level Visibility: Those who are aware of your brand but may not engage deeply.
- Top of Funnel: Potential customers who have shown some interest.
- Bottom of Funnel: Those who are considering a purchase or action.
- Brand Ambassadors: Loyal customers who promote your brand through referrals.
Once you get a sense of what kinds of prospective clients there are (and how they’re thinking about your brand), that can help you to understand who you may need to market toward. If you’re interested in more information about engagement we recommend taking a look at this customer engagement guide by Forbes.
Setting Up an Attribution System
Now that you understand how you can interact with your customers and the levels of customer engagement, we’ll get into how to analyze them.
An attribution system is a system where you assign a number value to the various parts of your marketing so that you can better understand how well each part is working, and get a better sense of how engaged a customer is.
For example, you may assign attribution points to a touchpoint based on that touchpoint’s ability to move a customer from one level of engagement to the next level of engagement. The more customers that your touchpoint converts, the higher the number.
So, if you send out an email that converts a lot of customers from Top of the Funnel to Bottom of the Funnel, then that email should get a lot of attribution points.
Find Out When and Why Prospects Convert to High Engagement
Once you’ve developed a system that lets you track the success of your marketing numerically, you can start to analyze what touchpoints are most effective at converting customers to be more engaged. You can also start to see which category of engagement each of your customers falls into.
Simply put: an attribution system that allows you to attribute success to specific customer behaviors and actions your customers are taking can help you understand when and why prospects decide to become more engaged with your brand. This can help where you should focus your efforts.
We mentioned that these tools would help you find leads you didn’t have before. Here’s how that can happen: an attribution system will help you correlate certain. You may find that you have a bulk of potential customers sitting at Top of the Funnel. They open your emails every now and then, but they never actually end up calling you for an appointment.
Those are not dead leads! An attribution system will help you develop tools for potential customers like this. Maybe you need to make your customer’s journey a captivating experience. Or maybe you need to consider a rebrand because your old branding isn’t pulling enough with your customers.
One thing to keep in mind is that an attribution system only works when you know how to analyze and understand the data that you’re creating. Marketing Evolution has a great guide to attributions systems if you’re interested in reading more.
Attributions systems are an in-depth and complex topic, and these examples are only scratching the surface of what we do at Simplicity Lone Beacon. Our proprietary scoring algorithm was developed after years of working in the advertising field for advisors. Our attribution system was designed from the ground up to work specifically for advisors looking to grow their businesses and generate more leads.
About the Author: Mike Schaffman joined Simplicity Lone Beacon in 2015, pioneering their core marketing platform, creating content and connecting media and broadcast components with a turnkey digital solution. Mike helped transform Simplicity Lone Beacon’s offerings and solutions into one of the leading independent financial advisor marketing services in the country today. When he’s not in the office, Mike enjoys playing golf and hockey and likes to experiment in the kitchen.
