Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource
issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of
Advisor Perspectives.
Dear Bev,
We should be getting more from social media. We all have LinkedIn accounts. We have a Twitter account for the
firm, and we regularly post articles and ideas. None of this leads to new business. What can we do to generate
prospects from our social media activities?
Jean Y.
Dear Jean,
Measuring impact from social media is not easy. You can hire someone who specializes in this area, but measuring the
specific return on the investment can be tricky. That said, you have to use social media and you have to use it
well. The younger investor will immediately “Google you” to find out what your perspectives are and
whether there are any blemishes against you. It’s not safe in today’s environment to be hidden. Not
appearing when someone looks for you is assumed to be bad; you must not be real or you must be hiding something.
Unless you are launching a very targeted social media campaign it is a mistake to assume you can link new prospects
or the lack of new prospects to a social media presence. The activities can be part of an overall whole – in
fact having a concentrated effort with different elements is often the best strategy. A few things to think about to
make your activities more profitable:
-
Set a goal for what you hope your social media activities will do for you. Why are you engaging in social
media? How will you measure your “return”? How much time can you devote and what areas will you
focus on?
-
Stand out with your messaging. For example on LinkedIn, instead of being a “Financial Advisor”
define exactly who you are, who you help and what you do. “Expert in Effective Retirement Strategies
for Successful Entrepreneurs” would be more descriptive and more compelling.
-
Be active. If you are going to participate, you can’t just put up a page and hope for the best. Write
blogs on a topic you wish to be known for, post articles of interest to your market and pose
thought-provoking questions.
-
Use social media for networking purposes. Identify those COIs or friends of clients you want to approach.
See how they might be connected to you or what they are interested in. Doing some detective work in advance
gives you the chance to learn something about them and then make a connection.
-
Reinforce your image and culture in all that you do. Having a strong message and knowing who you are is
important. Every message you put out should remind people who you are and what you do well.
-
Have fun with it. If you can put aside the need for immediate results, there is a lot to learn from others
and a lot to be shared.
Dear Bev,
We just spent a small fortune revamping our website. It’s beautiful and has all of the nicest flash
technology, but we aren’t getting much traffic. Are high net worth investors really going to find us on
the web and hire us because we have a nice website? I think this is a people business, and there is no
replacement for being out with people. The website is nice to have, but our marketing person is concerned about
lack of interest in our site after all of the money we spent.
Ronan D.
Dear Ronan,
I put your question in with the social media one this week because the answers are somewhat similar. What were you
hoping to achieve with the new website? Why did you spend the “fortune”?
Before undertaking any marketing effort, it’s important to identify the hoped-for outcomes and the budget. A
website is similar to a social media presence; you have to have it. People will hear of you and Google you, and they
want to find a website. It’s suspicious nowadays if you don’t have one, or you have one that clearly
hasn’t been updated in a while.
In my experience advisory firms revamping their websites often have not thought through what their story is and how
they want to tell it. Your website and all of your marketing and messaging should be consistent.
As far as driving traffic to the site, this is where being in the public eye, having a coordinated marketing effort
and pushing your message out is important. People need to hear about you and be interested in you in order to want
to visit your website. Unless you are posting interesting, new content on your site, your existing clients won’t
need to visit it. When existing clients refer you, they probably just give out your name and number. Only people
searching for you and caring to learn more about you are going to come to your website (again, unless you have a
client portal or other reason to draw people who know you there). Examine what you are doing with your proactive
marketing. Don’t take the attitude that “if we build it, they will come.” Your market has to hear
about you and want to learn more. Ask your marketing person to focus on these activities but again, with a budget, a
timeline and an objective.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business
building for the financial services industry in 1995. In 2008, she co-founded Advisors Trusted Advisor to offer
dedicated practice management resources to advisors, planners and wealth managers. She is currently an adjunct
professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate students Leadership & Social Responsibility. Beverly
is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and
quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions
Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA
Institute.
Read more articles by Beverly Flaxington
Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource
issues. To submit yours, email us here.
