The Three Most Common Marketing Complaints – Solved!

The best thing you can do is bring a concise and highly relevant snippet to your audience. Here’s a formula.

Take the most popular or salient question a client asked you last week.

Example: “What if I threw away my last three years of capital gains statements?”

Then you answer it in one paragraph.

BOOM – there’s your marketing piece.

It’ll be relevant, because a client actually asked you the question, instead of rambling about some random question the 25-year old made up. Do this once a month, send it out over email newsletter to all clients, prospects, and COIs and post it to your social media.

This will take you 25 minutes to produce. If it takes you more time than that, send me an email and bite my head off. Don’t worry, I get my head bitten off all the time, not literally but figuratively, by the hate mail you send me daily. I’m used to it.

Can I get a “whoo hoo” on that, too, while you’re at it?

2. I don’t have any money

Whiny voice, advisors: “I don’t have monnnnnney for marketing and it’s soooo expensive.”

Yeah, I can see how this would be valid if you were doing steak dinner seminars for $8,000 an evening. But most of the tools you need these days are free or very cheap if you are talking about digital marketing.

And there’s nothing wrong with looking like you aren’t all shined up. People love real. Too fancy and you look like Vanguard or Fidelity. Let’s be real; nobody besides financial advisors reads their stuff – real people don’t go there.

Let’s see…

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – all free to build an online following and post content. Plus there’s:

• Mail chimp – free for under a certain number of email sends a month, I think it is 1,000
• Zubtitle – free for one video a month, helps you subtitle videos
• Loom – free to use to record videos by sharing your desktop
• Google Trends, Ubersuggest – free keyword research tools
• Canva – free graphic editing software

I’m not seeing anything that costs money. I could be missing something, so let me know.

Can you stop whining now, please?

3. My broker dealer (wirehouse, insurance home office, etc.) gives me content for free

Oh, advisors.

(sigh)

What’s the adage about the free lunch?

Any time somebody is providing you with content, whether it’s for free or you are paying for it, it’s the kind of cookie-cutter garbage that people ignore.

One day I saw three emails in my spam folder , literally three emails, from financial advisors with the same subject line. They were all with the same insurance company, which provided them with this magic “free content.”

Don’t throw the free stuff out the window, but it should be used selectively and not as a matter of course.

The social media algorithms can sense when something has been posted by another advisor already, and they push that content down in the feed.

There is so much nuance that is missed with this crap. It’s accurate but a lot of times this content is high-level and doesn’t get into the questions that really exist in people’s minds. It’s textbook style stuff, in other words.

Plus, it’s just… ick. Soooo dry and boring with not even a hint of humor.

People are hiring you for your personal touch. If people chose advisors by the book, the big firms would beat you every time. Show them that personalization in your marketing to differentiate yourself.

Example:

Picture of you and your spouse on wedding day, 25 years ago, with the caption, “If we had only known that the life insurance policies we bought when we married would be 1/25th of the actual amount we’d need once the kids came along three years later, lol.”

Now, this takes care of #1 (no time) and #2 (no money) as well.

See, it’s way easier than you make it!

Sara’s upshot

Are you done complaining or is there something else? Send me a message and whine it over to me, lol. I’ll make a social media post about it and answer your question.

If you like my approach to social media, join my training program or read my e-book.

I’m also available for consulting or writing content, just send me a message.

Here are some marketing blogs that may help you.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next month!

Sara Grillo, CFA, is a marketing consultant who helps investment management, financial planning, and RIA firms fight the tendency to scatter meaningless clichés on their prospects and bore them as a result. Prior to launching her own firm, she was a financial advisor.

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