I generated more than six figures in my first dating advice consulting business for men, which relied on high-quality lead generation, appointments, and in-person sales. I also worked for one of the biggest digital insurers in the region, selling millions in premiums per month during my enterprise days.
The consulting business is similar to the financial advisory business. Today, there are multiple marketing agencies providing lead generation to financial advisors and insurance agents in Singapore. They take different approaches from selling the product directly, to branding the agent… to Tiktok videos… etc.
However, here is how I’ll do if I was in in the shoes of a financial advisor.
Niching Down in Your Market
Firstly, I’ll ignore most of the total market and narrow down to a specific segment.
You’ll want to carve out a market segment that has both the ability and willingness to pay. This ensures that you’re not just generating any leads, but those who are most likely to convert into profitable clients.
For example, products like retirement or savings plans are high-margin products and offer high commissions for financial advisors. There is going to be a certain client profile that is seeking out such products. Once, an insurance agent acquaintance of mine told me he doesn’t want to sell to anyone below 40 years old because investors below that age are more hands-on and wouldn’t require a financial advisor.
That is a form of honing in on a niche market.
This also makes sense from an economic perspective, helping you recoup and make a profit on advertising spend.
Yes, these products may be similar across insurance companies. However, it is how you deliver your message and consult clients that’ll set you apart.
- Economics of Lead Generation
Let’s say you make $1,000 profit per sale of a retirement plan, and it costs you $30 to get one webinar sign-up. If the net conversion rate on live webinars is 5%, you’ll need 100 sign ups to convert 5 leads, hence resulting in $5,000 in revenue.
The key idea here is to get the economics of your business right from the get go. Hence, you’ve got to refine this process until your live webinars convert at the right rate before scaling.
The Pitfalls of Quick Lead Capture
One common mistake is running an ad and immediately trying to capture contact information. There are many Facebook marketing agencies that do this. They run simple lead form ads and all the user has to do is to fill in their information, and the user become a lead.
This may generate a large number of leads, but the quality of those leads are often low. The reason? The resistance to becoming a lead is minimal, which means many people may sign up without any real intent to follow through.
High quality lead generation exists on a continuum.
On one end of the spectrum, highly qualified leads are those who have consumed your content and are genuinely interested in your services. On the other end, you have low-quality leads—those who may have signed up out of curiosity or by accident. The goal is to increase the quality of your leads by creating a process that naturally filters out those who are less likely to convert.
This is commonly known as a sales funnel in the online marketing industry.
Live Webinars, Is it a Dinosaur Method Today?
Instead of trying to capture leads immediately, consider a more structured approach: run an ad that leads to a live webinar, and then encourage attendees to book a call.
You can’t automated a webinar until you’re sure that the live version converts.
Here’s why you got to go LIVE:
- Live Webinars Provide Valuable Feedback
Hosting a live webinar allows you to interact with potential clients in real-time, gathering feedback that can help you refine your marketing message. This interaction is crucial because it ensures that your content resonates with your audience. You can ask questions, get them to fill in survey forms, and most of all, it allows you to tweak your messaging from the first to second one, so on and forth.
- Test Before Automating
Many people rush to automate webinars before perfecting their live presentations. However, if your live webinar doesn’t convert, automation won’t save you. It simply makes sens right?
There fore, you got to focus on honing your live webinars first, ensuring that your conversion rates are where they need to be before automating the process.
Refinement Is Key: Listen to Customers
The different mechanisms of your lead generation process can then be continually refined based on customer feedback and data. After each webinar, you can gather feedback from attendees, what resonated with them, what didn’t—and use this data to improve your approach.
- Send out SMS and ask for feedback
- Listen to them on free consults
- Send out emails and survey forms
This ongoing refinement can significantly boost your conversion rates.
For instance, if you initially convert at 4%, but through refinement, you double that to 8%, you’ve just drastically increased your profitability.
I can’t stress this enough but successful campaigns, whether in e-commerce or lead generation both rely on constant feedback from customers. Hence forth, by listening to their needs and refining your messaging accordingly, you can adjust both the message and the offer of your products.
Scaling Your Business
Once you’ve refined your front end lead generation process and have consistent conversion rates, scaling becomes a matter of increasing inputs such as ad spend and impressions. This can’t be achieved if you’re losing money if your conversion rates at poor or negligible.
Lastly, the big profits come from lifetime value (LTV) of a customer without additional advertising costs.
The lifetime value of a customer represents the total revenue you can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of your relationship with them.
- Repeat purchases, upsells, down sells and side sells
- Referrals
Therefore, your email list and sms data base becomes an asset. Your email list is a direct line of communication with your customers and potential clients, allowing you to nurture relationships, build trust, and maintain engagement over time. You can send them content pieces, such as informative blog posts or exclusive video content.
You can look for a graphic explanation of the system here:
Conclusion
Everyone is a lead in the financial advisory business. However, it is the quality leads that matter. The key is to build a process that naturally filters out the noise. Our choice is a live webinar. It can seem daunting to go live, but live webinars allow you to interact directly with potential clients, tweak your approach on the fly, and get a ROI positive conversion rate before going on to automate it.
Then build up an asset base such as an email list and continually to value add to your audience through content pieces.