Using digital marketing to expand your reach during crisis

One of our main goals for this year was to do seminar marketing. Then of course when the crisis started, obviously you’re not going to be able to get groups of people in a room. So, we started to explore the options and speak to other people who were already in this arena about webinar marketing. And they’d had some really good successes with that.

Apart from very vulnerable clients, we didn’t reach out individually; everything was done on a group basis. We’re now exploring the options of doing live webinars and also doing pre-recorded webinars, particularly for things like estate planning, different areas of trust planning that we maybe wouldn’t have picked up before. And also using video updates as opposed to other forms of media. Some of my advisors have never done anything by Zoom or by Teams. So getting the full company to adapt to this way of working was brilliant, and the clients are also happy with it.

I certainly think that going forward, webinar marketing will be important. An advisor in London who does a lot of it said, “Well, suddenly overnight, we’ve all become national advisors. We’ve all gotten national companies, because we’re doing everything via video link. You don’t need to be in someone’s living room. They don’t need to be in your office. You don’t need to pick a hotel and get bums on seats for a seminar.”

Suddenly, it opens up a whole load of opportunities, and I think putting yourself out there in an environment like Zoom, where nobody really likes looking at their own face, is something that you’ve got to have confidence about and be comfortable with doing. So in the next few weeks, months, years, I think that will be our biggest shift. We’ve actually got a marketing strategy meeting all day on Thursday, and it’s all going to be tunneled toward the whole opportunity of webinar marketing.

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