Welcome to Paradigm's Marketing Month 2023

Welcome to Marketing Month 2023! Over the next month, we’ll be looking at different ways you can improve your engagement and communication with customers via marketing. In this challenging market, it’s more important than ever that your communication with customers helps them to understand the situation we’re in, and the value of the advice you are giving. 

Combined with other activities, marketing is a great means of communicating with your existing and prospective customers, keeping them up to date with the services and support that you can offer. Our aim over this coming month is to help firms who currently may not do very much marketing and are looking to get started, or give some new ideas to those of you who may be finding your current marketing either boring, outdated or time-consuming. We know everyone learns differently so that’s why we’ll be creating a range of different resources and we hope some of them will come in handy!  
 

There are a few key reasons that marketing may be important to you and your business, these are most likely:

 

• To attract new customers to use your services and to increase sales
• To retain your existing customers and to build an ongoing relationship
• To increase your brand awareness and to establish your company as a trusted provider of financial advice

When getting started, it’s really important to outline what your objectives are, and the realistic timeframes that you’d like to achieve these in. This will be important for you to monitor your performance and to determine whether your marketing activities are working for you and your business. 

To help you get started, on our Marketing Month page you’ll find our handy guide with an accompanying worksheet, both created by our Senior Marketing Coordinator, Megan Chester. This includes a range of models and theory that you can put into practice to help you create a comprehensive and refreshed marketing strategy. For example, the guide includes a full situational analysis, enabling you to outline your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT), before taking the next steps with any marketing activities. It can be an excellent indicator of your current situation and helps identify barriers, risks and concerns (as well as the positives!) of potential strategies you may be considering. It should also help you to identify your priorities and help you to focus on the most important areas. If you have a team you can work with, undertaking a SWOT analysis as a group can be a fantastic way of encouraging new ideas and ways of thinking.
 

When did you last update your website?

Most firms that we work with have a website, however the quality and detail available on them varies hugely. Setting up and running a good website can be time-consuming, however, if you are going to start investing time and money into marketing, having a good website will really help. Your website should provide information directed at both new/prospective customers who are seeking out a service and provide details about ongoing support available to existing clients. It can offer much more detail about services than you’d be able to provide in say a post on social media or a marketing email to your database, meaning that you can keep these short and snappy, directing the reader to your website for further information.

As you will know, information can tend to go out of date quite quickly in our industry. We recommend that you schedule in time either monthly or quarterly to quickly review what’s on your website. We would highly recommend checking for broken links (links where the webpage is no longer live or available, which gives a poor customer experience). We use Broken Link Check to check for these on our site, and there are plenty of other free options available too.
 

Where to start?

To get started with Marketing Month, it’s best to begin by assessing what you already do and whether it works for you or not. This might include:
 

• Taking a look at our handy guide 
• Working out what your marketing objectives are
• Assessing what you currently do and what can be improved
• Considering what forms of marketing you’ll be using to achieve your objectives
• Deciding what data you’ll need for this
• Determining whether your current database/website/social media accounts are all up to date 

Of course, as firms are regulated by the FCA it is absolutely crucial that all of your communication with customers and financial promotions including marketing activities are fair, clear and not misleading. At Paradigm, our Technical Helpdesk can assist with your financial promotion procedures as well as helping you to draft and issue compliant promotions designed for your target audience. We’ll be launching another blog soon which details the extent of the support they can offer which includes websites, brochures, flyers, stationery, blogs and social media. Please get in touch on 03300 536061 or arrange a call back if you’d like to learn more about the support available.

We hope you’ll find the content we share over the next few weeks helpful, and if you need any additional support, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.