The First Step in Developing Last-Mile Digital Maturity

As we shared in our first blog post of this series, a new phase of digital maturity is underway. Transformational financial services firms are proactively orchestrating how the field engages with clients in the “last-mile” and guiding seamless handoffs between channels to deliver business outcomes.

Guiding your field to deliver outcomes at scale is difficult. It takes time to set up the right framework, mine the data, and leverage technology to scale efforts across a distributed network of advisors and agents. COVID placed immediate pressure on firms to rethink service offerings and accelerate digital adoption; these changes will be entrenched amongst the most digitally mature.
But transformation doesn’t happen overnight: The first step in the digital maturity journey is building the consistency and scale needed to cultivate brand awareness and acquire leads.

The Building Blocks of Reach & Attract

In this age, a credible digital presence and robust social media profiles are table stakes for advisor and agent validation. Recent research shows it takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form a first opinion of your brand once they’ve seen your profile or website. Not surprisingly, consumers frequently visit a number of sites to conduct research on financial services decisions. Prospects in an investigative phase will gravitate toward advisors with a strong digital presence. Think of it this way—would you go to a restaurant that wasn’t reviewed online?

How can firms help their teams meet this demand? It starts by building a strong social presence across the corporate brand and the field. Tapping into the network effect of social media, firms can reach a wider range of clients and prospects across demographics and regions. But credibility is key: In our analysis, advisors and agents with professional-quality profiles are 7x more likely to be called for a referral.

A cohesive strategy around social and web programs helps drive leads and increase conversion rates – that’s why it’s critical to empower your field with personalized, content-rich and SEO-optimized websites. Leads in financial services are predominantly sourced at the individual level, so a firm’s ability to deliver their field personalized websites at scale, while remaining aligned with corporate messaging, can promote a seamless client journey that captures leads while maintaining a consistent and rich brand experience.

Establishing Digital Credibility

In working with enterprise clients over the past decade, we’ve found a few consistently clear indicators for social media presence success:

• Personalized, content-rich and SEO optimized websites for >90% of field teams.
• At least 75% of the field has a complete social media presence. This includes: a professional photo, branding, and information detailing areas of expertise.
• At least two major social networks are activated. While firms may gravitate toward a particular network, embracing the flexibility to connect with customers on their preferred network—which may be Instagram—is important.

These measurable steps to establishing digital credibility are the building blocks for achieving the consistency and scale needed to build your brand and acquire leads.

Attribution and Measurement

You’ve no doubt heard that what gets measured is managed. Yet one metric that is often underutilized is click-level attribution, which allows firms to evaluate the effectiveness of content, segmentation, and users, as well as assess ROI.

With Hearsay’s URL Attribution tool, firms can tag social media content with unique UTM codes to monitor inbound website traffic from social media down to the hierarchy, user, and content level. This can then be compared to organic, paid and referral traffic, and assigned a tangible ad equivalency value.

For one Hearsay customer, this level of data granularity underscored a significant increase in social traffic, and click-level attribution is now consistently a top driver of overall web traffic. This has had a tangible business impact—alongside their single customer view (a consolidated database which ingests information from their CRM, email and website analytics), social analytics help drive a deeper analytical understanding of their investor base. For instance, they now know prospects arriving on their website from social are more likely to invest than those arriving from other channels.

Supervision to Mitigate Risk

Finally, to mitigate risk and, where necessary, properly supervise client engagement activity, channels need to connect with a platform that allows for scalable monitoring, supervision, and potential remediation of client engagement activity. An essential building block for any digital engagement program is a framework for risk mitigation. When client engagement channels are connected to a unified supervision platform, your teams have a single platform to review multiple channels, streamlining efforts so they can focus more effectively on risk control.

With these foundational pieces in place, mature firms are integrating core technologies to build economies of scale and reach even more clients and prospects.

Next time, we’ll take a look at achieving scale and consistency in the reach and attract phase of lead generation and client engagement. And just like last week, if you can’t wait to learn more, download the full white paper now.