Last week, we hosted our first-ever digital marketing summit, and we can honestly say it was one of our best events ever. If you didn’t get a chance to make it, don’t worry, we’re going to fill you in all you missed.
The event kicked off with some rough weather. Literally. It was rough. Some large storms moved through the area delaying flights and grounding planes. However, at Impact, we don’t let a little bad weather get us down, so with some quick thinking, we made some adjustments to the schedule and hosted an action-packed Thursday and Friday.
What is Digital Marketing?
We began by defining digital marketing and why it’s important to our industry. If you missed our introduction to digital marketing blog you can check it out here.
The hub for all of your digital marketing strategies starts with your website. Our lead web developer, Tyler Orr, helped our attendees understand what makes a great website and how certain tactics can help you rank higher in search engines.
Pro tip from Tyler: Have prospects put your website into a Google search bar rather than the browser bar — this can help you grow in the ranks.
Optimizing Your Search Results
As the event continued, we took a deep dive into SEO and what it means for your website. There can be a lot of confusion about the types of SEO and the partnership you should look for if you hire an SEO company. At Impact, we focus on three main categories: On-site, Off-site, and Social Media Optimization (SMO). We ensured that our attendees left the presentation with an understanding of how these techniques work and how each category can contribute to a higher ranking in the search engines.
Introducing Tomi Lahren
Next up was our big celebrity guest, Tomi Lahren. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tomi, she’s the youngest political talk show host in history at 24 years old. She’s best known for her signature “Final Thoughts” on everything from Beyoncé to President Obama and, of course, San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick. Tomi took the stage to share how she built her brand on social media and gave everyone in attendance tips on how they can do it for their practices.
Her biggest key points were:
- Be genuine and true to your brand.
- Be careful on how often you post so you don’t scare off your followers.
- The first 1,000 followers are the hardest, but keep after it and you’ll see results.
We’d like to give a big thank you to Tomi and her team for joining us at our office and sharing great information with our team and attendees.
Big Returns with Minimal Cost
The rest of the afternoon consisted of learning even more about social media as we discussed how to use social media as an advertising opportunity and why it doesn’t take much to get started.
We focused our efforts on Facebook advertising because it’s so popular with our baby boomer generation. Facebook has all the tools needed to create smart, targeted ads. Our digital marketing team is currently helping many advisors inexpensively generate leads for their practices using Facebook ads.
Adding Social to Your Marketing Mix
Our Chief Media Officer, Mark Richards, and the rest of the media team took the stage to share how advisors on radio and TV take their shows one step further by involving social media in their marketing mix. If you’re on radio and TV, you can easily use clips and segments to reach a larger audience on your social platforms.
A Strong Partnership
The next morning, Ryan Wheless, our partner with FormulaFolios Investments (FFI), took the crowd through a presentation on leveraging digital to build and keep your book. If you haven’t heard of FormulaFolios, we highly recommend checking them out. FFI was ranked as the 15th fastest-growing private company in the country by Inc. 500 and has helped many Impact advisors successfully grow their books of businesses.
Get Your Time Back
The last session focused on bringing all your marketing avenues together and using an automation service to streamline your processes and communication. Having a strong CRM and automation system are important for any advisor marketing through different mediums. It can help give time back to you and your staff, and it works 24/7 to keep your brand in front of all your clients and prospects.
In Closing
The event wrapped with a panel discussion made up of all our speakers. We had a lot of great questions about referral development, running multiple offices at once, and how technology can help transform your practice. We’d like to thank our other speakers Abe Ashton, Brad Jenkins, and Ryan Wheless for opening up their practices and sharing their Impact experiences with the rest of the crowd.
Since April is Digital Marketing month, make sure to check back with us often for more digital marketing tips!
