5 Lead Generation Tips for the Financial Services Industry in 2024

Whether it is difficulties with form submission conversion on a landing page, or a lack of understanding regarding the complexities of creating an effective give-and-take lead generation program, there are several pitfalls that could be limiting your marketing effectiveness. Making the most of your content marketing can build your brand awareness and help to drive new leads.

We have made it a core goal to help solve what we call the conversion rate crisis by focusing on the user’s journey, from introduction to acquisition. Ultimately, this involves helping our clients not only create original firm-specific content that differentiates, but incentive-driven investment-based marketing automation strategies and content that streamlines the conversion process and captures new leads.

This is our own 5-step process for a successful lead generation campaign within the financial services industries.

Step 1: Connect through Content

Creating compelling content is key to establishing your firm as the ‘go-to’ resource in your industry, giving the readers more reason to conduct business with you. This brand-building strategy is centered around promoting your firm’s expertise is specific financial industries or within niche investment strategies. Your lead generation strategy should begin with the content on your site’s most prominent page because this is where most users make those all-important initial judgments.

If your content isn’t relevant or there is no clearly labeled call-to-action (CTA) for an offering, visitors will more than likely bounce from your site. Likewise, if your lead generating content (such as forms, white papers or email captures) is buried somewhere that is difficult to find, then your web marketing structure will lead to rapidly diminishing returns.

Content layout for commercial real estate loan provider, Trimont’s ‘News’ section

Step 2. Use LinkedIn for Geo-Targeted B2B Leads

LinkedIn makes B2B targeted lead generation easy. For a financial services firm, this is extremely valuable. Although broad-based advertising can be expensive, firms can take a more tactical approach to marketing while spending less through geo-targeting tools. If utilized effectively, geo-targeting can eliminate waste in marketing spend while focusing on a much more relevant and receptive audience.

Think of the ability to target financial advisors that work at a specific firm, in a specific location or that are at a particular conference. It can be a great way to reach the right people with a limited amount of spend if you have compelling content to trade. Whether your geo targeting is done by state, or narrowed down by city, you can help increase your lead generation numbers and improve the quality by qualifying leads, asking the right questions, and then providing those answers in the form of a targeted marketing campaign.

Step 3: Incentive-based Lead Generation

When looking at the biggest drivers of underperforming lead generation programs, one of the most significant issues is often the lack of compelling value in the offer. Humans are incentive-based, which is especially apparent in the digital space within financial and investment services, where firms and businesses are constantly fighting to create the perception of value in their offers. This does not mean to continue racing to the bottom in terms of discounts or savings, but rather to find targeted ways to incentivize potential clients with content that will provide a value-added experience that they won’t find anywhere else.

In financial services, the offer may be as simple as a free 30-minute consultation with a financial advisor, or access to a truly educational content piece such as a whitepaper.

High value offer + persuasion = irresistible

Step 4. Optimize Forms and Landing Pages

While there are a few types of landing pages, there is one in particular that has worked well for firms in the financial services space: The Give-and-Take. The term for type of landing page is quite literal, essentially “giving” something to the user in exchange for “taking” their information. For example, an investment firm will provide access to a valued add industry white paper or upcoming webinar on something very topical, while asking the potential lead for their info. This “give before you ask” relationship-based landing page behavior is crucial to the user experience, and the content being given out has to live up to the hype or consider that lead a dead end.

Headlines, subtitles, CTAs and bullet points need to be tested more than just once. In this case, consider your landing pages and forms as a prime piece of real estate in the lead generation strategy. The more time you tend to and cultivate this piece, the more likely you will be rewarded with form submissions.

Step 5. Scoring your Leads

If you want to maximize the reliability and effectiveness of lead generation over the long-term, then you need to also score those leads to help your business development team understand and prioritize who these leads really are and who they should reach out to. The act of scoring helps better prioritize their levels of engagement with your inbound marketing content in order to provide a more accurate determination of who is actually ready to purchase.

The process boils down to quantifying the interactions of your leads with your marketing materials, web pages and forms by assigning points based on behavior. Here are some common interactions and their point values we use in financial services with our clients and their lead generation and CRM platforms:

• Subscribe to insights – 5pts
• Download a whitepaper – 10pts
• Attend a webinar – 15pts
• Webpages visited – 2pts each

Take the Lead

Good content marketing coupled with intelligent planning and implementation can help support the efficacy of an investment lead generation program. Best practices will include systematic strategies that integrate incentive-based marketing that make sense on each digital platform. MBC Strategic has helped the investment services industry take advantage of these strategies, and when it comes to lead generation, we can help your firm grow as well.

To learn more about how MBC Strategic can improve the lead generation strategies of your firm, please, give us a call and contact us today.