Financial Advisors – Stop Feeding the Dinosaurs
Loyalty is admirable but you are not required to feed the dinosaurs to ensure their survival. They need to adapt and evolve or go extinct and there is a very good reason they only exist in markets where the entire industry lags behind technology.
Imagine targeting people actually “in-market” every single day and actually marketing to them. Not just a Google ad where you pay to display a link next to 10 competitions and you pay for traffic knowing well over ½ the traffic you pay for is bot traffic and click fraud, but actually marketing just your business to them. And definitely not lobbing generic ads through channels nobody listens to or reads.
The generation turning 59 ½ this year is different than others before it. Gen X marks the hard stop of the media generations. This generation is just the start and yesterday’s play will fail.
We don’t listen to AM radio and frankly, the vast majority of us don’t listen to FM radio either. Between satellite radio and streaming radio on our phones, like Amazon music, Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, and the like, we simply take a hard pass on the commercial heavy radio options. Audio marketing can still work but your entry point isn’t the guy with a really good relationship with the local radio stations, its now adtech. If you want to use audio commercials to reach today’s consumer, you better have a tech partner that can target them on these platforms.
Unlike AM and FM radio, adtech can actually target the audiences worth your spend and stop wasting money on people that don’t meet the criteria of a good prospect for your business; something FMOs simply don’t understand.
They make their money by dipping their hands into all sides of the marketing spend thus skewing the decision-making process and putting their own revenue model at the center of your ad spend. It doesn’t make any sense but, in an industry, slow to adapt, those charged with leadership have the most to lose moving strategy to drive real efficiency. The world has changed and its time to stop feeding the dinosaurs.
I’m not saying radio/audio marketing is the way to go. I’m just saying that if you are convinced it is, your marketing leaders haven’t even figured out streaming services and connected TV yet which is where your next clients get their music and talk radio. These are the same leaders still making money using direct mail. Good luck with that play moving forward. There are only 2 groups of people that think and pretend direct mail makes any sense- the people that sell it and the printers that print it. Outside of those groups, the world has moved on. Direct mail should be relegated to a very small group of people still amenable to it, and only in a very specific part of the customer journey. Using it any other way guarantees a ton of waste.
It’s time to stop the madness. It’s time to stop feeding the dinosaurs that refuse to evolve and learn. Frankly, it’s time to start putting your business at the center of your ad spend and stop feeding antiquated monetization models.