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Most advisors grow by referral and word of mouth. But what happens when your clients stop talking about you? Here are three ways to start marketing.
#1: Create a community with existing clients at the center
Many of you leverage your existing client base through events (“dinner seminars”) and ask your clients to invite their friends. This is expensive, time-consuming and a waste of everyone’s time and money. Nobody wants to put their friends into a high-pressure, high-expectations sales situation. It’s asking too much.
Ditch that plan, and do this instead:
Find three clients who have a common trait, and use the knowledge you gain from those relationships to build a community.
Example: You have three clients who are all TV script writers. Interview them. Find out information such as:
- How did you get your first writing job?
- Are you part of the writer’s guild? What are the benefits of that?
- What website has helped you find the most gigs?
- What would you say to someone who has just started to gain success in this field?
- What laws have had a direct impact on your work?
Turn their answers into SEO-optimized blog posts, a webinar series, and a set of email newsletters. Ask your clients to pass this written information to their friends. You are positioning yourself as an advocate and serving people with valuable knowledge without having to strongarm them after the steak dinner seminar.
#2. Create a newsletter
Most advisors are copying this month’s DFA market outlook, slapping their logo on it, and calling it their monthly newsletter. Nobody is reading it or sending them referrals, because nobody cares.
You can differentiate yourself. Use your strongest asset – your relationship with clients – to serve as the basis for the content you write. Aren’t their true-life challenges more relevant to your prospects than some esoteric investment theme?
Do you think your client’s best friend, who runs 10-person veterinary clinic, would rather read about the stock market’s last six months of performance, or about the best way to get more employees to engage with their new 401k plan?
Do you think your client’s 60-year-old brother wants to read about market dispersion and the jobs report? Or does he want to read about the proposed Harris tax plan and what to do if he has to pay a 45% capital gains tax for selling the $1 million home he bought for $22,000 after he got married 40 years ago?
Which one?
Right.
Now, make a Microsoft document on your desktop right now.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Good. Now, write down the best question somebody asked you last week. If you can’t remember, that’s okay, just do it this week and every week for the rest of the month. On the last day, pick the best question and write a two-paragraph response.
Put it into an email and send it to your client base.
Good.
Now, send it to prospects and centers of influence too. They’ll never miss the DFA market outlook once you hit them with this stuff.
Bonus: Give the newsletter a cool name. For example, “The Wealth Cactus” could answer one prickly tax question a month for Arizona residents.
#3. Cold call
Most people think of cold calling as soul-killing treachery.
- What if you could redefine it as a fun exercise you actually enjoy?
- What if, instead of randomly firing at anything that moves, you sat down and asked yourself this question: “If I were to bring 20 people into my business, who would be easy and cool to work with over the next 20-30 years?”
It becomes the pursuit of a dream, not a quota.
Bring it back to your existing client base. Who do you enjoy working with the most? Why not go find 20 more people like them? Once you have this focus, it becomes an exercise in connecting rather than “eat what you kill,” or whatever sales mantra you want to use.
Bonus: Use social media as a spy tool to warm up the call. I wrote about this process in response to a question about business walk-ins.
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. If you want more marketing tips, she publishes a free email newsletter every day at 5 a.m.; please subscribe here.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.