Social media offers a wide variety of opportunities for financial advisors to connect with prospective clients. While LinkedIn might seem like a less obvious choice than Facebook or Instagram for advisor marketing, the platform’s Sales Navigator feature offers some unique possibilities. This premium service can be used to facilitate lead generation so you can grow your business.
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What Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a deep sales platform that’s designed to help professionals expand their social media reach while generating leads. Sales Navigator wasn’t designed exclusively for use in financial services, but its features and capabilities make it an attractive marketing tool for advisors.
Sales Navigator is different from LinkedIn Premium Business. With Premium Business, you can shine a spotlight on your firm and enhance your credibility. But sales Navigator is a comprehensive sales tool that’s made for professionals who are interested in:
- Generating more leads for the business
- Fostering engagement with prospects
- Cultivating relationships that lead to conversions
There are three plans financial advisors can choose from: Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus. Your choice of plan determines which Sales Navigator features you have access to and what you pay monthly. A free trial is available for Core and Advanced plans; if you’re interested in Advanced Plus, you can request a demo.
Benefits of Sales Navigator for Financial Advisors
Before investing in any marketing tool, it’s helpful to consider what you’ll get from it in return. Here are some of the ways that your firm may benefit from using Sales Navigator:
- Filtering. Sales Navigator is designed to make it easier for you to identify prospective leads that best fit your ideal client profile. The advanced search tool allows you to filter results by industry, profession and other characteristics to find the leads you most want to work with.
- Organization and tracking. Sales Navigator simplifies organization by cataloging saved leads. You can then establish custom rules for sorting them, making it easier to track leads by category or “freshness.”
- Sharing. Ensuring that every member of your team has access to the same information is easier with Sales Navigator. Team members can view leads and prospect notes in a single place while allowing you to determine which information they have access to.
- Messaging. All Sales Navigator plans include monthly InMail credits you can use to send messages to prospective clients you’re not directly connected to. You’ll have a separate inbox you can use to track messages sent and received.
- Statistics and integration. Data collection is central to lead generation, and Sales Navigator is designed to simplify analysis and tracking. You can view data for searches, saved leads and other metrics through the dashboard and easily integrate information with your CRM software or other data analysis tools.
Using Sales Navigator can help advisors automate much of the work that goes into finding quality leads. You can use it, along with LinkedIn’s free features, to increase your brand’s visibility and scale your business at a pace that suits you.
Sales Navigator Tips for Financial Advisors
If you’re ready to try Sales Navigator, it’s helpful to spend some time familiarizing yourself with what the platform can do. Again, this will largely depend on which plan you choose.
With that in mind, here are some helpful tips to remember:
- Polish your profile. Before reaching out to leads, check your profile to gauge the type of impression you’re making. A good financial advisor LinkedIn profile highlights your expertise, skills and professional background. It also includes an up-to-date photo, contact information and links to your website/social media profiles.
- Set up a persona. Sales Navigator allows you to create personas to more easily identify leads that fit your ideal client profile. When you set up a persona, you can select individual criteria to fully define it. You can use the personas you create to search for leads, along with other search filters.
- Choose search filters. Sales Navigator offers more than two dozen filters to help you narrow your search for leads. For example, you may search by company size, geographic region or years of experience. You’ll need to decide which filters are likely to produce the best results, based on the type of clients you’re hoping to connect with.
- Use Spotlights. The Spotlights feature allows you to filter for leads who are most likely to engage with you and/or your LinkedIn content. For instance, you might filter for prospects who have shared experiences with you or follow your firm on the platform.
- Save and share leads. Sales Navigator includes a built-in feature that allows you to save leads with the click of a button. You can save individual prospects and group them together using metrics that make the most sense, based on your goals. Organizing leads is as simple as adding a tag or note, which you can make visible to everyone on your team.
- Leverage InMail. Your Sales Navigator plan includes InMail credits, so you don’t want to let them go to waste. To make the most of them, LinkedIn recommends identifying the candidates who are most likely to respond and highlighting mutual connections. You can select premade templates and then personalize your messages.
Sales Navigator Compliance for Financial Advisors
Ensuring compliance with your marketing strategy is important, particularly when it comes to how you document client information, maintain records and implement cybersecurity protections.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes this easier by partnering with several compliance software providers. Using this type of technology allows you to market your business to prospective leads through the platform without having to worry about running afoul of regulatory guidelines.
For example, you can use compliance software to:
- Capture and import data from the LinkedIn Sales Navigator application programming interface (API)
- Document messages, including all images or attachments, and seamlessly organize message threads
- Securely store and protect client information
- Monitor communications on and off the LinkedIn platform, and flag content that may be non-compliant
- Take remediation actions quickly when a compliance violation occurs
These types of tools can simplify the compliance workflow for you or your chief compliance officer (CCO), if you employ one. You aren’t required to use one of LinkedIn’s software partners to use Sales Navigator, though doing so could eliminate some of the guesswork involved in staying compliant.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Sales Navigator Work for Financial Advisors?
Sales Navigator can work for financial advisors who familiarize themselves with the platform’s features and clearly define their goals for using it. Investors are increasingly using online searches to find financial advice, and LinkedIn is just one of the many social media platforms they’re relying on to find an advisor to work with.
Who Should Use Sales Navigator?
Sales Navigator is intended for professionals who want to gain new leads and grow their businesses using the LinkedIn platform. Financial advisors might consider testing this tool if they’re already using LinkedIn to identify prospective clients and want access to a wider range of features.
Where Do Financial Advisors Get Their Leads?
Financial advisors can get leads in a variety of ways, including referral sources and word-of-mouth, social media, email marketing and lead-generation platforms. Cold calling, collaborations, networking and direct mail marketing can also produce leads for advisors.
Bottom Line
The benefits of Sales Navigator for financial advisors are numerous, and if you’re not using LinkedIn as part of your financial advisor business plan, you could be missing out. Requesting a demo or free trial is something you might consider if you’re ready to test the possibilities of scaling through the LinkedIn platform.
Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business
- Social media is just one avenue you might pursue for lead generation. You might also try partnering with an advisor marketing platform to get more eyes on your business. With SmartAsset AMP, you can get access to automated tools to help nurture campaigns and reach out to qualified leads. That can free up valuable time that you can dedicate to serving your clients.
- If you’re not ready to take the plunge with Sales Navigator, you can still leverage LinkedIn as a professional networking tool. You can also use it to establish and build your brand’s credibility by creating a detailed profile that’s optimized for search so it’s easy for prospective clients to find you.
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