Financial Planning: Process and Rules - Steps in the Financial

Planning Process
Six Steps in the Financial Planning Process
The following steps make up the financial planning:
1. Establishing and defining the client-planner relationship - The financial planner
explains or documents the services to be provided and defines his or her responsibilities
along with the responsibilities of the client. The planner explains how he or she will be
paid and by whom. The planner and client should agree on how long the relationship will
last and on how decisions will be made.
2. Gathering client data and determining goals and expectations - The financial planner
asks about the client's financial situation, personal and financial goals and attitude about
risk. The planner gathers all necessary documents at this stage before giving advice.
3. Analyzing and evaluating the client's financial status - The financial planner analyzes
client information to assess his or her current situation and determine what must be done
to achieve the client's goals. Depending on the services requested, this assessment could
include analyzing the client's assets, liabilities and cash flow, current insurance coverage,
investments or tax strategies.
4. Developing and presenting the financial planning recommendations and/or
alternatives - The financial planner offers financial planning recommendations that
address the client's goals, based on the information the client provided. The planner
reviews the recommendations with the client to allow the client to make informed
decisions. The planner listens to client concerns and revises recommendations as
appropriate.
5. Implementing the financial planning recommendations - The financial planner and
client agree on how recommendations will be carried out. The planner may carry out the
recommendations for the client or serve as a "coach, " coordinating the process with the
client and other professionals such as attorneys or stockbrokers.
6. Monitoring the financial planning recommendations - The client and financial planner
agree upon who will monitor the client's progress toward goals. If the planner is involved,
he or she should report to the client periodically to review the situation and adjust
recommendations as needed.

Are you new to inbound or think your current campaigns could use some direction?
Over at OverGo weve come up with a pretty foolproof and seamless process of
creating a marketing strategy. Its really quite simple, all you need to do is set the
goals, create the basics, automate the processes, and analyze the results. Lets dig
deeper!

Step 1: Setting Goals

The first step to creating an inbound marketing strategy is to define your business
goals. Based on where you are and where you want to go, its important to create a
road map of how to get there. Along this road you can define the KPIs that tell you
how your inbound marketing campaign is doing. You can look at your competitors,
your industry market, and where you are in that market to create realistic and
attainable goals.

Discovery Session
The first step in setting a direction is to set customized goals during a discovery
session. Conducting a meeting with you and your team to identify your ideal
customers is the best way to go about this. In this meeting you can discuss your key
metrics, revenue goals, and your sales process to produce the best customized
strategy.

Create a Buyer Persona

A deeper understanding of your audience provides direction for the content you
create and keeps your visitors coming back for more. You can create a researchbased representation of who your buyers are, what they want to accomplish, pain
points that shape their behavior, and how they make buying decisions.

Industry Research
An understanding of your competitors and what other companies are doing in your
industry is ideal. You can pinpoint your specialty and see where the holes are in your
industry that could be filled.

Step 2: Getting Found

Keyword Research
Once we get an understanding of your audience, its important to find out how people
are searching for your content through keyword research. This allows you to see the
estimated global and local search volume, ranking difficulty, and also predicts the
cost of running paid campaigns. Through this research you can decipher which
terms and phrases to target in order to attract the right visitors to your website.

Onsite SEO
This consists of all the factors on a website page that influence search engine
ranking. In order to get found for the keywords that are chosen in your keyword
strategy, its important to optimize every page that is created on your website. All
pages should include the appropriate keyword within the content, page properties,
and the image tags. Performing onsite SEO for all current and future pages that you
build out for your website is very important.

Editorial Calendar
Before beginning your blogging campaign, come up with an editorial calendar to
ensure that you are publishing and promoting content on a regular basis. An editorial
calendar will not only make it easier to schedule content, capitalize on upcoming
product or service launches, but it will ultimately encourage discipline in the running
and updating of any blog.

Blog Writing, and Posting

Blogging is the basis of bringing traffic to your website and relevant visitors will come
to your site when you blog about the right content. The key is to create content
around your buyer personas pain points and main industry topics. Keeping up with
blogging is high priority in getting your website found online, the more frequent you
blog the more visitors you will attract.

Pay-Per-Click

PPC campaigns give you an opportunity to put your message in front of an audience
that is seeking your product or service. Through keyword research, strategic bidding,
and a compelling advertisement you can get the results you want. PPC is no longer
limited to search engines, you can also run PPC campaigns on various social media
platforms.

Social Marketing
Social media is THE platform for sharing content and odds are your audience is
engaging on at least one social media platform. Sharing content on your social
media accounts allows you to reach your audience on multiple channels- Facebook,
Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn. Social media acts as a gateway for potential prospects to
find your website so it is important to be relevant, active and engaging in this sphere.

Step 3: Getting Leads

Premium Content Production
Premium content converts visitors to leads on your website. Specifically, premium
content is an offer that contains unique informational value to your target audience.
Visitors are willing to fill out a form with their contact information in order to gain
access to your premium content. Examples of premium content are eBooks,
Webinars, Whitepapers, Case Studies, etc.

Landing Page Design

Landing pages are where premium content lives. Sending your potential clients to
landing pages where you capture their information and create new leads for your
sales team is a best practice. A good landing page is eye-catching, properly
designed, and attracts new leads. The basis of a good landing page is to have a
desired user action, which is what you want your visitors to do once they land on
your page.

Call-to-Action Creation

A call-to-action (CTA) can make or break your website's lead acquisition rate. CTA's
direct visitors to your premium content landing pages. We work with the branding of
your website in order to create professional and exceptional graphic buttons your
visitors will be compelled to click. We think of CTA as mini billboards positioned on
your website to direct visitors to the next steps you want them to take. To facilitate
lead generation you can design A/B CTA test groups and position them on various
pages throughout your website.

Step 4: Acquiring Customers

Alignment of Sales and Marketing
Utilizing CRM integration allows you to provide your sales team with information that
will make them better equipped for sales calls. With CRM systems you can track
every action a lead takes on your website, your email marketing and on social
media. This kind of information puts your sales team one step ahead on sales call.
They will be able to prepare themselves for the type of product or service the lead is
interested in, and build on the trust the lead has already established with your
business.

Lifecycle Communications
Getting to know your potential clients better is also important by creating a lead
lifecycle plan based on your website content and sales funnel. Lifecycle plans
segment leads based on who they are, how much interaction they've had with your
business online, what kind of content you want them to receive, and at what part of
the sales funnel you want them to receive it.

Lead Nurturing
The best way to move a lead through a sales funnel is to launch lead nurturing
campaigns. You can do this with a workflow which allows you to trigger a follow-up
email or a series of emails based on the action that a lead may take. This helps
nurture and educate leads so they are prompted to take next steps and prepared
before they even talk to a sales person.

Automated Workflows
Workflows are more than just a lead nurturing tool. They help you automate common
marketing processes, moving leads through your funnel in an efficient way. Sending
marketing emails, changing contact properties, and sending internal notification
emails, are all possible with workflows. They bring marketers the same kind of
automation a sophisticated CRM system provides to sales, bridging the gap between
both processes.

Closed-Loop Reporting
Closed-loop reporting gives sales an opportunity to report on what happened to the
qualified leads we provided, helping \ further understand your best and worst lead
sources. With closed-loop reporting, you are able to plan more strategically for the
future by focusing on your best lead sources, those with the best lead to customer
conversion rate.

Step 5: Retaining Customers

Closing sales and getting customers are great goals to have. But I think the inbound
marketing mentality supports the fact that the relationship with your customers
doesnt need to end there. After you bring in leads from online tactics you can focus
on turning customers into promoters of your business. After all, the best advocates of
your products or services are those that have experience with them. Options for
continued retention processes include implementing referral programs, continued
customer education pieces, and segmenting customer newsletters in order to keep
your customers coming back for more.

Continued Education Pieces

Inbound allows you to segment your customers into lists based on their needs and
implement marketing automation. You can communicate information on any
additional needs they may have as a customer. Perhaps there is an opportunity to
cross sell but your customer was not aware of it, these communications will make
sure they are well educated on the full scope of your products and services.

Segmented Customer Newsletters

Newsletters arent just for leads and potential customers; you can send segmented
customer newsletters so they continue to see you as experts in your industry.
Customers receive newsletters that contain updates on current events in your
industry, as well as press releases and product and service announcements.

Referral Programs
A referral customer comes at a much lower cost and has a higher potential for
retention and loyalty. If applicable for your business, you can create referral
programs that make it easy for current customers to promote your product or service.

Step 6: Account Analysis

Marketing Benchmarks
Always analyzing your main marketing benchmarks is key. These metrics include
customer acquisition cost (CAC) and ratio of customer value to CAC which is the
total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you
spend to acquire that new customer.
You can also look at the time to payback CAC which is the number of months it
takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers,
marketing originated customer percent which shows what new business is driven by
marketing, and the marketing influenced customer percent which takes into account
all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads
anytime during the sales process.

Onsite Analysis
Consistently performing a full onsite analysis of your website is also important. You
do this by looking at keyword performance and rankings, organic search traffic and
conversions, search engine optimization, blog performance, page performance,
email click-through-rates, and much more.

Offsite Analysis

Offsite analysis goes hand in hand with onsite analysis. You can perform offsite
analysis which is the measurement and analysis of your online presence away from
your website. This includes paid search campaigns, social media accounts and paid
social campaigns.

Monthly Reporting
Lastly, you can keep track of your unique business goals with in-depth reports based
on your custom key performance indicators. Your reports are designed to foster
communication and collaboration within your company so customizing it to your
goals and with your sales and marketing teams is very necessary.

Takeaway
Setting up your strategy the right way might take a little bit of time, but in the end its
worth it and will produce the type of results that turn into leads and customers for
your marketing and sales teams! If you want to learn more about how this can
applied to your business, I invite you to download our resource below!

1. Start with the business vision and understand the supporting initiatives required to achieve
this.
This is a fundamental step that many organisations appear to skip, delving right into the detail rather than taking
a high level view of what they are looking to achieve with their data. These high level vision statements vary
across organisations and sectors although reoccurring themes stand, such as knowing our consumer or
developing increased customer advocacy. Once this has been agreed focus on the success metrics. Each
organisation will be likely to have at least 3 or 4 supporting initiatives; these are likely to include obvious
objectives such as increasing subscriber sign up, active customer base or increase product purchase. Again,
these basic steps ensure that the business has a clear view of what its trying to achieve before embarking on
such a project, thus obtaining key stakeholder buy in. Further down the line, referring back to these can provide
clarity as to whether a task is in or out of scope of the project

2. Define how the business will need to use the data to deliver on its vision
Having agreed on the basics review what the business needs to do to achieve them; this is likely to touch on:

Current data collection mechanisms and marketing opt ins to ensure maximum customer contactability;
Developing increased customer knowledge across demographics and previous interactions with the
organisation;

Leveraging advanced analytics to increase relevant personalisation and contact strategies to positively impact
customer behaviours;

Ensuring all customer touch points are aligned to deliver relevant and consistent messaging;
Increase ability to react to behaviours in real-time as the consumer is engaging with you;
Track impact of changes over business as usual.Where possible even high level estimates of potential returns
help grab attention.

3. ONLY at this point map out the data that will be required to achieve your goals

Having developed the vision it becomes much easier to review exactly what data will be
necessary to underpin the strategies.

As you are defining the information then it is useful to assess whether you have highlighted items
that address every part of the customer journey the data an organisation requires to achieve
an effective sales conversion from prospect to buyer is very different than managing an ongoing
relationship with a loyal consumer.

Concentrate on a wish list regardless of whether the data is currently available remember to
include data that could come from external sources as well as your own internal sources.

Linking back to the overall vision should allow the business to assess which information is
priority data items that cannot impact any of the overall objectives should be disregarded at
this stage.

This is important as now more than ever there is an abundance of data.

4. Conduct a current state assessment

Once decided on which elements of data are fundamental, organisations need to review their current data assets.
This should cover the following areas:

Data coverage: where are the gaps in data items coverage can these be plugged by enhanced data
collection or utilising external data?

Marketing options: assessment of current processes to assess if they are leading to optimal contacts and
whether there is a case to try and enhance current opt-ins across different channels.

 Data quality: check how clean the current data is, assessing volumes of duplicate records across individuals
and whether data items captured across different source systems have been captured to consistent
documented rules.

Data redundancy and governance: if data is collected at multiple points, review which data should be taken
from what source as data is integrated.

Meta data capture: if there is intelligence embedded into data items, such as source codes or campaign
extracts, is the underlying data captured in an easy to access way.

Data Linkage: different sources of data may operate on different references, e.g. email subscriber lists
compared to website transactors. Organisations need to assess how best to link this data together to meet
their objectives, again this could be enhanced by considering external data assets.

Data capture: current processes and usage across different business units.
Documentation: reviewing the current data assets will likely uncover a lack of data dictionary documentation.
As part of the process rigorous documentation should be adopted to ensure that time is not wasted.

5. Evaluate current state objectively in line with your wish list and agree the plan

Define and prioritise what processes, resources/skill sets and technologies need to be adopted
within the business to firstly get the data into the required state and then to analyse, deploy and
measure ongoing impacts. You will probably need to adopt a staged approach based on an
informed view of what will drive most business benefit. For example, is there any point getting
distracted on how best to integrate social data if you core customer data or transactional data

cant be trusted?

6. Ongoing ownership
Data should be seen as an asset so any data strategy initiative needs high level sponsorship and
ongoing commitment to ensure that decisions are underpinned by accurate data.

It is not a stand-alone project but should develop over time as the business objectives change or
new data becomes available thorough ground work at the start of the project will allow an easy
way to evaluate new requirements.