Financial Marketing

Another way to get video online easily is to buy a Flip video camera (www.theflip.com), which costs about $120. I took one to a conference and did quick video interviews with some of the exhibitors and speakers. Using the built-in USB plug-in, I easily uploaded them to a blog I had set up for the conference. You can see my video interviews and movie at www.t3conference.blogspot.com.

In another experiment, I used a Flip video to capture 2-minute mini-speeches at this year’s FPA Annual Convention in California. You can see the results of the session – Twitter Live! With Industry Thought Leaders – at www.FPATwitterLive.Blogspot.com.

There are many ways you could use a Flip video camera: Record a question of the week for your website or blog, post footage of you speaking at a seminar or record a personal message welcoming people to your website. While you can do the same with any digital video camera, the Flip video is fun and easy to use. It's smaller than my wallet, so it's easy to carry. Its memory is limited to around an hour, though, so if you're recording something longer, use a video camera with enough memory.

Someone who is using all these strategies effectively is Dan Danford, an advisor in St. Joe, Mo., who started out as a bank trust officer and now runs his own investment advisory firm. He has a Twitter page, video presentations, a planned blog and a website, www.familyinvestmentcenter.com, with lots of special features on it. He's also out there talking to the media, so he has a full newsroom page with links to articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the local St. Joe's paper and radio and television outlets. All this boosts his visibility, both in his community and on search engines, where his name invariably comes up first when you search for "Dan Danford." Go to www.Google.com and put in Dan Danford – you’ll quickly see his blog, Twitter page and bank of online videos.

Like Danford, you should reach out to newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. Being interviewed and quoted or writing an article not only gives you visibility, but also the credibility as a third-party expert. It's not just you saying you're important, it's the media saying that you're important enough to quote. You can leverage print articles by handing out reprints, posting them on your website or emailing them to clients. You can also post radio or television interviews on your website. Be sure to blog or tweet about them too.

Use Google News Alerts to monitor your online presence; it's free. Go to www.Google.com, click the News Alerts tab and type in some key words. I put my name and company name in quotation marks. Every time there's a mention of my name or firm, I get a notice from Google in my email box and can see what's being said about my firm (or a client's firm). Idea: Type in key clients' personal or company names and you'll know when they're in the news. Then you can reach out to them with a handwritten note saying: "Congratulations! I saw your quote in such-and-such magazine. Here's an extra copy for your scrapbook." Or if you are monitoring topics of interest: "I just saw this article on duck hunting in Minnesota and thought you'd be interested."

Next time we’ll talk about using surveys to gather information and let clients know that you care.

Marie Swift is president and CEO of Impact Communications, a marketing and PR firm that for over 17 years worked exclusively with independent financial advisors and the institutions that serve them. She is a popular speaker and coach for the Garrett Planning Network, Kinder Institute of Life Planning and FinancialPlanning.com. A frequent contributor to industry publications, her articles appear regularly in Financial Planning magazine, Bank Investment Consultant magazine, Research.com, Transitions e-zine and MorningstarAdvisor.com. Follow her on www.Twitter.com (marieswift). Read her Best Practices in the Financial Services blog at www.marie-swift.blogspot.com.