by Tony Vidler 
I found this cartoon ages ago and I love it because it so accurately describes what I think is the biggest mistake in financial adviser digital marketing and I just keep seeing it happen over and over.
Enormous effort and resource is put into creating wonderful websites, facebook pages and blogs…..then……nothing! Nothing new goes onto these wonderful pieces of online real estate.
While there is an excellent and strong argument for reserving and parking your digital domains or the electronic IP that is your brand or personal name, there is not a marketing case for grabbing your “brand” while you can, creating a presence with it immediately, and then letting it languish. Creating a Facebook page or website for example, promoting it and attracting viewers, and then never posting anything fresh or interesting thereafter is effectively building a Ghost Town. And in doing so you have probably just wasted those most valuable “first followers”…those first followers are the ones who lead others to you and create momentum. They are immensely valuable to building your brand and your presence, and helping others in the market to find you and engage with you.
Once you have decided to build your website, social media platform or blog, it is imperative that there is a strategy for continually refreshing it with new content and interesting information to maintain interest from your audience. Without the content strategy it is more likely that you will lose credibility and market engagement than create it. Ghost towns in the marketing sense simply do nto support life for the advisory practice. They are deadly to a brand and all its’ other marketing efforts.
Social media use for marketing a practice is like most other new initiatives that involve you stepping into the unknown. You can begin with small steps and don’t have to be a master to begin. A degree of caution is appropriate while you are working out how to finesse the use of your chosen platform…but there does have to be another step after the first step…and then another. A regular weekly update to a website or Facebook page is far better than a mad rush of 15 postings in 3 weeks, then silence for 4 weeks.
Build a community post by post, and by being there regularly and reliably – even if it isn’t as often as others. It is about creating expectations for your audience, and then delivering to those expectations at least (if not surpassing them). For a brand to build trust it must build reliability and a reputation for delivering to expectations at least.
The same principle applies to your website or any other electronic marketing platform, not just social media use. It is pointless just building a place in the wilderness which looks lovely if nobody ever visits or uses it. The same concept applies to marketing platforms, such as social media channels or adviser websites. It is not enough to build it. You have to continually work to make it atractive enough or useful enough that people keep wanting to come back. The key is regular delivery of quality content to the platform or audience. Anything less does create a ghost town eventually.
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