Financial Advisors, Drive Your Business Forward Digitally, During The Lockdown

With the lockdown going on for more than 2 months now, most businesses are suffering. From a macro point of view, the economy is suffering. The stock market faced a steep correction, making the situation more difficult for financial advisors & planners. As financial advisors, gaining trust of clients is the most important aspect of the business. And that becomes difficult when meetings are restricted. Keeping in touch, acquiring new clients, growing business and being able to make the right recommendations through the investment journey is a challenge that most of us are facing with the lockdown.

As a matter of fact, with most people staying home, there’s enough time being spent online consuming digital content. And that, makes for an opportunity for you to adopt digital tools that can help you optimise your time & effort towards continuing Business As Usual.

We use WhatsApp & Facebook extensively when it comes to our personal connections. Well, you can use them for your business too! In fact, there are a host of other platforms that you can use for free and drive your business forward in these difficult times & otherwise too.

Facebook is a great platform to engage with family & friends and equally good to engage with your clients. Create a business page (if you don’t already have one) to build credibility as opposed to using your personal profile for business requirements. Keep posting informative and educative content to engage with existing clients and network with potential ones.

Whereas Twitter is a platform where every opinion matters and should be leveraged to engage with your clients by conducting polls and quizzes and sharing your thoughts on personal finances.

The most widely used platform, WhatsApp is always at your fingertips. This makes it an ideal communication channel to share updates, viewpoints and absolutely anything. Use dynamic formats like voice notes, videos & links to external blogs/ articles to regularly keep in touch with existing clients & tap into potential clients. Create segmented broadcast lists upto 256 members for newly acquired, potential & existing clients and narrow cast your content. For ease of typing and to view documents, you can use the web WhatsApp that allows you to access your whatsApp on your computer.

Another very important platform in the social media suite is YouTube. The go-to place for all things audio-visual, YouTube has revolutionised the way Indians consume content. Use the platform and its reach to demonstrate your expertise. Create videos in the language that you and your audience are comfortable with and share your view on different sectors, market outlook etc. If you are wondering where to start and how to go about it, just keep a few things in mind: placement of the camera, lighting and ensure you speak loud & clear.

These platforms will help you engage with your audience on a regular basis and share your views. Just like these, there are digital platforms like Quora that can help with client acquisition. Ideal for asking questions & finding answers, Quora is the platform to showcase your professional expertise to answer question related to personal finance. With each question that you answer, you will gain the trust of everyone seeking that answer especially because the thread never expires. It is useful to explain a concept or make a point, share videos, images, link blogs etc. You can use the content you post on your social media in your relevant answers on Quora.

While all the platforms discussed above will help you a great deal, nothing comes close to face-to- face meetings especially when it comes to investing. And so, bring in Skype to your digital ecosystem to have one-to-one or group discussions using the video calling and screen share facilities. Not just that, use this platform to make presentations, review client portfolios and share documents, reports & updates. Use this time and opportunity to conduct investor awareness programs through Skype with a group of up to 50 people.

Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media, according to a study done by McKinsey & Company in January 2020. And that brings us to another very useful platform, Mailchimp. Create, run, monitor & track email campaigns with Mail Chimp. Access the ready-to-use templates to send your email to 2000 IDs at once and that too at zero cost. Track performance based on open, click & bounce rates.

These platforms are very user-friendly and will give your business just the nudge it requires during this time. To make the most of these platforms, interlink them and post all formats across all your social media handles. This way, your content will reach a much larger audience. A website of your own that can become your content hub is ideal for interlinking. All your blogs, articles, videos & achievements can be part of the website. Content from here can be shared, on different social media platforms. This helps drive traffic to your website and reinforce the credibility of your business.

Have your transactions also come to a halt because of the pandemic? Carry out your Business As Usual by using AMC platforms for managing your mutual fund business – transact & track with ease. Some of them are really robust and facilitates fast, easy & paperless transactions, real-time status of transactions, instant access to account statements, modification of SIP, cross-selling & up-selling among others.

Now that you know how to track, transact & thrive digitally, get set & begin your online journey to generate more revenue. There couldn’t be a better time to go digital. Good luck!