‘How Can I Generate More Leads for My Finance Company?’

It’s a question you’ve no doubt asked yourself on countless occasions. By definition, a question is something that needs an answer and dapa Marketing is here to provide that answer.

We’ve all experienced it. The very moment you’re about to sink into that warm, relaxing bath and bang the phone rings…

‘Can I speak to Joe Bloggs…this is an important message about your chimney repairs?’

This kind of interaction with persistent telemarketers is the exact reason we’re here to walk you through your inbound finance lead generation, to prevent your company from being a bath spoiling cold-caller.

Let’s start with the basics: defining a lead, and then we’ll branch out into online lead gen, why you need it, how you qualify a lead, and why inbound lead gen is much more effective than merely purchasing them.

Chapter One: Finance Leads – What Are They?

Every story has an opening chapter, in which the basics of the plot are outlined and that’s exactly where we shall start our journey: the beginning.

A lead is a party who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service.

Instead of calling people with purchased contact information, someone would instead receive communication from your business fully aware of your business’ appeal.

Let’s say, for example, someone signed up for your newsletter about managing their pension pot. If they then received further communication from you a week later about how your company could help manage their pension for them, they aren’t likely to find this intrusive or irrelevant.

In fact, from a customer service point of view, it’s what they willingly signed up for. And all the information you collected about them and be used to form personalised communication with a potential new client.

Chapter Two: What is Finance Lead Generation?

The process of finance lead generation is attracting and converting prospects into the leads we talked about way back in chapter one.

To expand further, it’s the creative pursuit of finding unique ways to attract people to your business. The important factor is warming them up to the brand enough, so when they do eventually hear from you, it’s a pleasant surprise and not a bath interrupting intrusion.

In a nutshell that is exactly what lead gen is: warming up potential customers to get on your company’s escalator in order to lift them to the level where they wish to part with cash.

Chapter Three: But dapa, Why Does My Finance Business Need Lead Generation?

A very good question, dear conscientious business owner…

By showing an organic interest in your finance business, those customers are beginning the relationship with you, rather than the other way around. This encourages a more natural relationship, which creates a more organic platform for sales in the future.

Lead generation falls into stage two of the overall marketing picture. It happens after the audience has been attracted and are ready to be converted from visitors into leads for the use of your sales team.

Chapter Four: Qualify the Finance Leads

As we’ve already covered, a lead is someone who has taken the time to indicate their interest in your particular service or products. In this chapter, we’ll cover the ways in which someone may show their interest.

Like anything, sales leads are generated through the collection of information. That information can be collected in a number of ways, as we already covered. But other ways could include a consumer sharing information in exchange for money off a product or service, someone filling out a form to download an eBook, but in truth, there are many other options.

We’ve outlined just a few examples of the many ways in which you could qualify a potential lead:

• Money Off: It is very difficult to know if someone has come across one of your online coupons. But if the coupon is of interest to them, they may be more than willing to exchange their name, email and even phone number to get their hands on it. Granted, it isn’t a huge amount of information, but it’s enough to know someone is interested.
• Content: While signing up in exchange for a coupon does show that someone has an interest in a product or service, content like eBooks doesn’t. To truly understand the nature of someone’s interest in your finance business, you’ll probably need a collect more information for your sales team to work with. This could come in the guise of an extended form with mandatory fields.

These examples just highlight how lead generation is different depending on the product or service that a company is offering. It’s important to collect differing amounts of information depending on what a sales team needs to qualify someone’s true intentions for interacting with a company.

Let’s take The Financial Times as an example, in order to sign up for a free trial to read articles they ask for a form which contains the following:

If someone comes onto the website and is really invested in reading a certain article, they are likely to sign up for the free trial and they then offer someone a personalised experience with the following form:

This is an example of a company collecting information to use at a later date. If someone were to cancel their free trial and then receive an email a few weeks later showing them what articles are available to read which relate to their personal tastes, it isn’t likely to shock them given that they have previously registered interest in the product.

And after being shown what they are missing it may even encourage them to return to sign up on a full-time basis. Classic manoeuvre.

Chapter Five: What’s Under the Bonnet of Finance Lead Generation?

We’ve covered how lead generation fits into inbound marketing, so let’s review how the components come together to form a bigger picture.

Visitor: A visitor has discovered your business through one or more of your marketing channels, that could be your website, a blog or even your social pages.

Call-to-Action: This needs to be present on all of your channels. It could be an image, button or some text that encourages action from your user.

Landing Page: This action is designed to lead to a landing page, which is a web page that a visitor lands on for specific purpose. Whilst it’s true to say that a landing page can be used for various purposes, one of the most common is to capture leads.

Forms: Forms are typically the focal point of a landing page, and they will typically look like the form from The Financial Times example.

Offer: The forms collect information in exchange for an offer, which is defined as something of value to the visitor. The offer must have enough value to a visitor to convince them to part with personal information.

Once you put all these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to link and drive traffic to the landing page, so you can start generating leads. Here is a typical example of a pathway for lead generation:

Chapter Six: Isn’t it Easier to Just Purchase Finance Leads?

Everyone wants to fill their sales pipeline as quickly as possible. That’s where buying leads come in: potential quick wins. Buying finance leads, instead of generating them organically, is much easier and takes less time and effort, despite the expense. So, why shouldn’t you just buy them?

Firstly, the lead on the other end of the phone doesn’t know you. Generally speaking, they’ve made contact and signed up for something else and they certainly didn’t sign up to hearing from you.

The messages that are sent to them are therefore unwarranted. And sending unwanted messages are intrusive, not inviting. Remember that bath?

If the prospect hasn’t been to your website, shown an interest in your finance services or products, then you’re just irritating them…simple.

If they haven’t opted to receive messages about your specific services, then you’re in spam territory and this is dangerous for your company. Being flagged as spam means you can end up on a ‘black list’ which is shared with other email providers (there’s no escape). Once you’re there it’s very difficult to clean up your reputation after that.

This is precisely why you should always, always focus on organic lead generation.

Having said that it’s a tough slog to do all alone, so in order to make the most from your finance lead generation, enlisting the help of an experienced marketing for finance company can help give your business the boost it needs.

Chapter Seven: Why You Should Do None of This…

If you’ve even paid attention to any of the previous chapters, this would appear like a rather foolish U-turn, right?

Well, actually this isn’t the case at all, in fact this piece is designed more for education purposes than an actual point-by-point guide for generating financial leads for your company.

Generating leads is always best left to experts. And not to toot our own horn or anything, but this is something we specialise in and we’re very good at it. In fact, just in case you weren’t convinced by dapa’s financial lead generation pedigree, let’s run through it in a bit more detail:

At dapa we already understand typical revenue models and commission levels; the crucial factor of building up repeat business; common valuation devices and important legislation in the finance industry.

We been around the block more than a few times and we know what a good outcome looks like and what a Cost Per Lead conversion rates are scalable and realistic.

We’re more than aware of the king makers and gaps in the financial market.

We have numerous clients with which we work on the positioning strategies for firms of all sizes.

We have a solid understanding of the legislation, jargon and general goings-on in the industry and the way we can make it work for us.

The experience we have in this industry means we’ve learnt the nuances and any new finance client will not present a huge learning curve for us. 

But, hey, none of this matters at all without results. At dapa Marketing we’re all about bottom line results and helping our clients’ businesses is what drives us… that’s why we’re here after all!

Appendix: Common Lead Generation for Finance Mistakes to Avoid

Meet James. He’s a financial director at a large financial company. James has been operating in the sector for over twenty years. Along with his business partner, he has grown the company from two employees to an institution boasting four nationwide offices and forty sales people separated into different product teams.

As we all know, marketing is a hard slog – it’s hard to pin down ROI and that can be a minefield for any business young or old.

However, James is facing some issues. His marketing channels aren’t generating high quality leads and he is at a loss as to why this is happening.

The sales team aren’t seeing the volume and quality that they were once able to generate.

Did you Know? 61% of B2B companies send all leads straight to their sales teams? But, only 27% of these leads are qualified. 

Lead Generation for Finance: So, What’s the Problem?

After James began to analyse his budgets and where he was funnelling them to, here’s what he found:

Thousands Spent on Yellow Pages

The days when the yellow pages were a great way for people to see your brand and retrieve phone numbers are a thing of the past.

People just don’t use these forms of advertisements to contact companies anymore.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and few could have known how much it would change the online world and the way advertising would evolve.

James researched, and began to rake in more and more knowledge about finance inbound marketing. He discovered the way that people were assessing and interacting with businesses in different ways.

Search engines give power to the consumer to research and sound a company out at the push of a button. There is no longer any need to contact companies at phase one of the buying process.

Did You Know? An estimated 61% of internet users research products on the web.

Hours a Week Cold Calling

James has a very committed and skilled sales team that spends over 20 hours a week each working the phones talking to people who may be interested in their service.

The sales team, however, are finding that they are having difficulty in speaking to people as they are finding them uninterested and unresponsive. Therefore, James furthered his research and learned that people no longer wish to be contacted and sold to in this way anymore.

Did You Know? 90% of cold calls end in failure, with only 5% even picking up the phone. 

James came to a quick conclusion that this was such a huge waste of time and resources. Inbound marketing is the way forward, because, as we’ve previously mentioned, you’re only dealing with people who are interested in the services his company has to offer and these leads are qualified.

Over £5,000 a Year on Print Ads

James was sure that his print advertising budget was still producing good results and despite his lack of statistics relating to ROI, he was certain it was working.

So, James decided to perform a quick Google search to find answers to his questions and make him feel better about his yearly outlay.

Much to his disdain however, after Googling ‘Is Print Advertising Still a Good Investment?’ He was greeted by results such as:

Print Advertising Isn’t Working

And

Newspaper Sales are Falling

James surmised that if people aren’t buying newspapers anymore, how can they be seeing his expensive ads?

James’ business came up with an idea…

‘Surely, it be better to spend our marketing budget on drawing our target market to us rather than pushing a message to people who aren’t interested?’

£15,000 A Year on Search Engines

James is now learning that marketing is not just a standalone investment, it’s a culmination of multiple different functions.

Although SEO services represent a solid investment, it’s not always as simple as driving traffic and hey presto! Things like the design of the site or conversion aspects are key in understanding the customer journey.

What Would James Say to Others About Lead Generation for Finance?

The marketing techniques that James’ company was utilising simply weren’t working and were just draining his budget. James decided to work closely with dapa Marketing, and we work to create great content that helps answer potential prospects’ questions.

His website is now performing well, by creating great traffic that generates leads and sales. His team of salespeople are much happier now they are working with quality leads that are sales ready.

To speak to one of our highly knowledgeable advisors, contact us today…