By Zoe Menendez, Senior Digital Media Manager.
One of the most important aspects that makes your digital ads successful is the geographic location that you’re targeting. It often gets forgotten because flashy creatives and thought-provoking copy (which are both equally as important!) is more visible. However, location could be the deciding factor for a prospect when they’re deciding if your firm is a good fit for them. From personal experience, I can tell you why this is so important. In this article, I’ll uncover how the marketing techniques of businesses like restaurants aren’t so different from the strategies that financial advisors use.
Recently, I came across a Facebook ad for a new restaurant that just opened. The pictures of the food used in the ad looked great and the place looked unique enough to please my chef fiancé while being friendly on our wallets. I thought, “This is awesome! I just found our new date-night spot.” But, due to the restaurant’s ineffective geographic marketing strategy, that would not be the case…
Interested in this restaurant, I checked out their Facebook page to learn more about them and find a link to book a reservation. Now imagine how I felt when I found out that this restaurant was in fact not in my area (Charleston, SC) but over 2 hours away in Savannah, GA. The consumer in me was bummed out. The marketer in me couldn’t stop thinking about how this business just spent money on someone who was categorically disqualified from being a likely customer and missed out on a new regular customer because they were serving ads to someone who was too far away.
While these two business types—restaurants and financial advisories—are vastly different in many ways, they have a couple of core things in common: Their customers come in with high expectations that they are expected to meet or exceed, and, crucially, their customers need them to be easily accessible.
The rest of the article will focus on why it’s so important for financial advisors to target the proper geographic locations in their digital ads for events and in-person meetings.
Strategizing Your Advertising Geography
Decide where you want your “home base” to be. For many advisors, this is their office location. Before expanding to new markets, you need to understand your main market so you can own the area and build a solid community behind your brand.
At Simplicity Lone Beacon, our standard campaigns target 20 miles out from an advisor’s office. However, there are several other things to consider when deciding on what size radius will give you the best outcome.
Is your office near a major city?
In a market like Boston, a 20-mile ad radius might give you a huge audience size, but if you’re marketing for an event or an in-person meeting, it might take some leads close to an hour to get to you. And some people just won’t want to make that drive. Especially during the winter months when it gets dark early, and all people want to do after work is go home. In this case, you might want to start using a 10 – 15-mile radius and take it from there.
Is your office in a very rural area?
Conversely, if you’re somewhere like Maine where people are few and far between, 20 miles might not give you the audience size you need. In areas like this, people are used to driving farther for things, so a 25 to 30-mile radius might make more sense.
Is your office near a major waterway or right on the coast?
In a market like Seattle which is right on the water, 20 miles out is going to target people who need to take a ferry just to attend your event or come to your office. While this is suitable for some people, unless they know you well, most people won’t want to make this journey. In this case, you might need to forgo a single radius strategy and use a couple of smaller radii to ensure you’re reaching a decent number of people within reasonable driving distance.
If you’re an advisor who takes virtual clients as well as in-person clients, you might be thinking that this thinking doesn’t apply to you. While I don’t completely disagree, an extremely important thing to remember is that now, it has never been more important for an advisor to build trust early in the client relationship.
The Value of Proximity to Your Prospects
By serving your ads to prospects who are in your area and can easily attend your event or visit your office, you get the advantage of meeting your prospects on their timeline and showing them how you truly have their best interests at heart.
I understand it’s enticing to expand your radius, go after a huge audience, and get a lot of leads, but we believe in quality over quantity. By being smart about the radius that you’re using in your digital ads, you can generate leads that you can realistically convert to clients in your sales funnel.
Of course, this skill takes practice and there is an art to finding the perfect radius. It’s difficult for many people to effectively and successfully buy digital ads unless you have experience working in the industry. That’s why it’s so important to work with a marketing firm like Simplicity Lone Beacon that can guide you on the right path and take the guesswork off your plate to help you achieve marketing success while you focus on providing outstanding financial services to your clients.
About the Author: Before Zoe came to us she worked with two well-known New England advertising agencies where she honed her skills at digital marketing serving both local and national accounts. She attended Johnson and Wales University where she won two national collegiate advertising titles and graduated with a BS, as well an MBA in Advertising and Marketing. Zoe is a native New Englander and grew up in New Hampshire, but happily for us left for the city life in Boston where she resides and is a proud mom to her cat, Winston.
