For the last two decades, I have studied the most successful financial advisors to determine their secret to success. Top financial advisors have one common denominator– a financial advisor marketing and follow-up strategy that includes the following seven steps for growing your advisory business and increasing your bottom line:
1. Provide a Personal Touch in your Financial Advisor Marketing Strategy
The more personal your communication with clients, prospects and centers of influence, the more effective your message will be. Clearly, the old saying is true: “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” The secret in your personal touch is to focus on the value and benefits to your prospects and clients.
2. Communicate Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Successful advisors understand how important it is to differentiate themselves from the competition. Your financial advisor marketing message needs to communicate your unique value proposition. The best way to communicate your UVP is through both online and offline strategies. Your offline strategies should include postcards, letters, and cards. Your online strategies will include e-mails, social media and article marketing. Make sure that your financial advisor marketing message is consistent, stands out and resonates with your target audience.
3. Choose a Niche Market
The core of your financial advisor marketing strategy needs to include a niche market. Once you identify the clients you want to serve, you can then find out everything you need to know to dominate that market. By working with a group of people with similar needs, you can learn exactly what they need, fear and even desire which allows you to better service them. When your affluent clients experience this level of care, they will give high quality referrals without you having to ask for them.
4. Share Your Referrals with Reciprocal Referral Partners
One of the easiest methods for receiving highly qualified referrals is from reciprocal referral partners who serve the same niche market. This financial advisor marketing strategy has been worth its weight in gold for me and it can be for you too! My first referral using this financial advisor strategy came from a CPA who referred me to a family with a net worth of over $100 million. Take time up front to set up expectations with your referral partners. The result is an amazing relationship with referrals flowing to each other.
5. Maintain Consistent Frequency of Follow Up in Your Financial Advisor Marketing Strategy
Top advisors touch their affluent clients between 18 and 27 times per year. Depending on your clients needs, you may need to touch them even more. To achieve this goal, it’s essential that you include an automated follow-up process in your financial advisor marketing plan. Don’t wait to learn this the hard way. While following up was an integral part of my financial advisor marketing plan for the first eight years of my practice, after that, we simply were too busy to maintain contact with everyone. One day, I ran into a center of influence that I hadn’t connected with for a few years. After catching up, we started discussing my business. He exclaimed, “I forgot that you were an expert at transition planning. My father-in-law died last year and we had to find an advisor to manage my mother-in-law’s $2,000,000. I wish we had stayed in touch so I could have referred her to you.” He went on to share that the experience with the current financial advisor was not a great one and that the advisor had locked up her money for 15 years. It was a hard but valuable lesson that could have been avoided. So make sure and include follow up in your financial advisor marketing plan!
6. Leverage Your Time
The most successful advisors automate and systematize as much of their financial advisor marketing strategy as possible. This allows them to spend their time completing HVFDAs (high value fixed daily activities) and IPAs (income producing activities) such as new client acquisition meetings and weekly community workshop presentations.
7. Increase your Retention & Relationship
With retention ratios of some advisors as low as 2%, it is critical that you include relationship building in your financial advisor marketing plan. Much of this process can be systematized and automated, allowing you to achieve amazing results with very little effort. When relationship building strategies are not automated, urgent tasks will tend to get in the way, leaving no time for this critical activity.
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