Categories
Social Media

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

You may have noticed that we at Marketing Intent have been using LinkedIn a lot more to stay in front of our target audiences, as well as our clients. LinkedIn can be a really powerful connection tool.

How do you optimize your LinkedIn profile to connect with both your prospects and your clients?  

Use the Tagline

There’s an area underneath the name on your LinkedIn profile, and a lot of people use that for their job title, but we think there might be better ways to use that real estate.

One great thing you can use is a tagline. It can be a tagline on what your company does but stay away from any jargon or messaging that may be confusing. It should be quick and to the point. It’s a great way to advertise exactly who you are. And a tagline can allude to your title and what you do, so you don’t need to have a title featured.

There is another place, as well, that a lot of people don’t use and that’s the banner. You can do the same thing there and include your tagline or feature another point about what your firm does or what you focus on.

Include Your Target Audience

We suggest making sure you include your target audience in the two areas outlined above and highlight who they are. For example, “We help single women better prepare for retirement.” That way prospects clearly understand who you serve.

Something we want to point out is that it is okay to be repetitive, because we all know that everyone skims. The key is ensuring your target audience is highlighted – it will quickly grab their attention.

Building Trust

How can advisors help build trust with prospects and clients on their LinkedIn profile? Trust is huge, especially for advisors. There is so much going on these days and during rapidly changing market conditions, building trust is very valuable. We think it serves advisors further than most people realize.

One thing you can do to earn trust is to feature content you create. Don’t just repost other people’s content. Feature content you create. It shows your personality, how you communicate and who you are.

It also gives people a glimpse of what it’s like to work with you because they can see your perspective and what you’re trying to get across to your audience.

If you need help optimizing your LinkedIn profile and making sure that it speaks to your target audience, reach out to Marketing Intent, we’d be happy to help you.

Categories
Communication

The Importance of Communication

Everybody understands the importance of communication in projects, in your day-to-day, in work life and in everything that you do. But sometimes the effectiveness of our communication gets lost in the shuffle.

Let’s talk about how to emphasize open communication with clients.

Focusing on Communication

As a marketing firm with multiple clients, we have to focus on our communication. It has to be at the forefront of every morning, every evening and every week of what we do. Let’s go over some of the things that we do at Marketing Intent and review some options on how you can help improve your communication.

One of the first things that we do is hold weekly status updates. Every Monday we get together with our internal team and go over every single project, even if we’re not involved, that way we understand what’s going on. If one of us needs to be pulled in, or if we can offer some insight, we do.

Providing Weekly Email Updates

The other thing that we do is provide weekly email updates. If something’s changing throughout the week and we don’t have a meeting on the books, a quick way to update everybody is through an email. We really focus on making sure that we’re keeping everybody included and aware of what’s going on, even if it’s not time for a meeting.

The Best Way our Clients Receive Communication

When we bring on clients, we follow our onboard process and start off every client the same. Each client starts with a weekly project meeting and then we will also provide weekly status emails, but that doesn’t always work for everybody.

We tune into how clients best receive communication. We may have a client that likes to text, we may have a client that prefers phone calls, or we may have a client that loves emails. As we’re onboarding, we analyze the way that they are receiving our information and we adjust and tailor our communication specific to them. 

We are providing them with the most effective communication that is shareable with key stakeholders that is effective and easily digestible. This is a great way to help smooth out their process for projects and keep everybody in the know, so that there are no surprises that come up.

If you would like our communication experts to make sure your next project runs smoothly, please reach out to us at Marketing Intent.

Categories
Marketing Management

Planning your 2023 Budget

Our team likes annual budget time – that special time! We know that’s not the case for everybody.

Taking time to create your budget for the next year helps you decide what you’re going to focus on and how to help your company reach its goals.

Let Us Help You Plan Your Budget

One of the most time-consuming parts of budgeting is figuring out how much these great ideas are going to cost. At Marketing Intent, whether you’re our client or you’re not our client yet, we are happy to help you plan for your budgeting for 2023.

Understanding our Packages

We have several programs that are off the shelf. If you are launching a fund, we can look at it and explain some of the small, medium, and large packages for how you want to market. You can then understand what those costs are, going into 2023.

How Long is This Going to Take to Execute?

If you have a new idea that you want to explore, like geotargeting, or even bringing direct mail back to your marketing plan, we can help with that.  We can give you a sense for how long it takes to plan and execute a program, and how much it might cost you.

Please reach out to us and we’d be happy to help you with your marketing plans and budgeting for 2023.

Categories
Client Value

Marketing Intent and the Resources We Have Built

Let’s talk about how Marketing Intent is structured and the network of resources the firm has built.

Cherie Fournier, our CEO, has been in the financial services marketing arena for 25 plus years. After working in corporate environments for most of that time, she decided at the beginning of 2020 to start her own marketing firm.

Marketing Intent focuses efforts on helping asset managers market to their target audiences. We also help streamline their marketing operations and develop plans and strategies.

The Thinking Behind Marketing Intent

The reason we started Marketing Intent in 2020 is because we wanted to tap into our financial industry experience to serve a wide range of companies. But we knew we weren’t experts in all facets of marketing. We’re not graphic designers or web developers, and we know our clients have a broad range of marketing needs. We felt it was an ideal time to tap into the gig economy, which has gotten even more attention after COVID. People started working from home and seeking better work life balance.

We found ourselves with a lot of great talent available to us to build out a network of professional marketers who could help our clients. For example, Cherie’s background is marketing management, strategy and copywriting, and Alise’s is marketing strategy and project management. Obviously, marketing goes far beyond that. Our professional marketing network helps us offer our clients a much greater bench depth of professionals to help with their projects and make them successful.

Our Network of Professionals

We structured Marketing Intent around these networks of professionals. Cherie and Alise are front and center with each of our clients. We look at our network and choose the right professionals for each project, and each client.

If we have somebody who’s looking at rebranding and doing a website, we may pick a design resource that might be different than a firm that is just redoing a brochure or wants to freshen up something that’s existing. We look at who is going to be the best match for each project and we deliberately select the best team.

How We Developed Our Network

Throughout Cherie’s career, she has had many relationships on the client side of working with different professionals. Marketing Intent has tapped into those cultivated relationships. Some are are decades long and other resources are newer.  We continually look at contacts and see who we can get connected with to grow our base of professional marketers. We are never static. We’re constantly growing and constantly looking for new people to add to our roster of contract resources.

The Ever-Changing Market

Sometimes we have a client that needs a resource that we don’t have. Marketing is ever changing as we know, and we don’t always know what is going to come our way or what type of requests are made. Often, if we have a request come up on something that we haven’t yet done, we tap into our current contacts to see if they have a trusted resource that we can use for a project. If not, we do research and vet different companies to see which ones are going to work well with us and who is going to serve our clients to our standards. We then bring that firm or individual on board as a contractor to help us with a certain project.

If you would like to learn more about how Marketing Intent can help your business grow by tapping into our network of professionals, please reach out to us.

Categories
Marketing Basics

Three Ways to Improve Your Marketing Execution

When most people think of marketing, they think of the creativity that goes into copywriting design and web development. But we all know without a solid strategy for execution, that creativity doesn’t go very far.

In this article, we’ll discuss three ways to improve your marketing execution through project management, technology know-how, and procedures.

Project Management

Let’s start with project management. Most marketing projects are more in depth than they might seem on the surface, with many moving parts. At Marketing Intent, we use Trello to manage our projects as well as our clients’ projects. Trello is a simple and versatile project management software that we use for anything from managing an event to launching a fund. Trello allows us to keep all project details and deadlines in one place so we can keep tabs on how deliverables are moving forward. There are many choices in project management software today. Pick one that is simple, fits your needs – and most importantly – that you will use consistently.

Technology Know-How

A software tool is only as good as how you use it. So, it’s important to have somebody on your marketing team who is comfortable with technology – and not just on the project management side of the equation. In today’s world of digital marketing, marketers are using numerous types of technologies to do their jobs. Sometimes 10 or 12 different programs. It’s important to have somebody who is comfortable and willing to learn and maximize these technologies.

But keep in mind that you don’t have to use every available function of a technology. The goal is to use technology to increase your efficiency. Not to get overwhelmed by its features or go so far into functionality that you take time away from core marketing tasks, or the technology becomes so complicated that you don’t use it.

Procedures

That takes us to our next point. And this one may be foreign to many people thinking about marketing. Procedures. I like to think of procedures as being kind to my future self.

Oftentimes in marketing, there are projects that need to be done once a month or quarter. Instead of trying to remember what you did last time or re-learning the process every time you’re working on that project, take time to create procedures for the project. Next time you do that project, refer to your document and you’ll save time and brain power…and your future self will thank you!

To recap, we’ve talked about improving your marketing efficiencies with project management, the use of technology and procedures. These are strategies we use every day at Marketing Intent to manage our own projects, as well as our clients.

At Marketing Intent, we implement smart technology, project management platforms and helpful procedures to assist clients with their marketing initiatives.

If you’d like help becoming more efficient in your marketing, reach out to us, we’d be glad to help.