Articles About Financial Advisor Marketing

For many financial advisors, ‘proving’ their worth to prospects prior to engaging them as clients (by delving deep into the details of the prospect’s situation, and then coming up with potential strategies of how the advisor believes they can help the prospective client to ‘fix’ their financial life) is an irresistible means of marketing themselves to cultivate new client relationships. However, the reality is that financial advisors don’t always prioritize the same issues that are actually most important to prospective clients and can often invest time and energy analyzing details that do little to actually bring in new clients. This isn’t to say that the important issues viewed by the advisor should not be addressed – rather, selling to a prospect by emphasizing what’s most important to them (i.e., reaching their goals), and then servicing them once they become clients by addressing all of the points the advisor knows is most important for the client’s holistic plan to be successful, is not only a more efficient use of the advisor’s time but also a more effective way to convert prospects to clients and to fully service them with their financial planning needs.

In this guest post, Evan Beach, Director of Wealth Advisory at Campbell Wealth Management, an RIA in Alexandria, VA , discusses a research study conducted by Morningstar that found that clients value an advisor who helps them reach their financial goals above anything else. On the other hand, the advisors who were surveyed believed that their clients’ top priority would be for their advisor to understand who they were and their unique needs. And while these priorities may have similarities, the challenge facing these advisors is on keeping the focus of their discussions with new prospects on the big-picture journey to achieving their goals, rather than on the nuts and bolts of the mechanical necessities of ensuring the ‘vehicle’ (i.e., the financial plan) – at least initially during the prospecting stage – will not break down along the way. Accordingly, it is crucial for advisors to ask prospects and new clients the right questions to identify and understand the goals that are most important to them. One approach is to ask questions during the initial meeting that probe into the client’s vision for the long-term, mid-range, and short-term future vision of how their life would look if they had and did everything they wanted, and then to prioritize the importance of the goals identified. Then, with that information in hand, advisors can structure subsequent meetings to address how they can help the client to plan for and actually achieve the goals they identified.

A financial advisor’s skills and knowledge are what clients identified as the second most valued aspect of the relationship with their advisor, which is an important point for advisors to consider when setting up their website and social media profiles because many clients will use these resources to identify if the advisor has the qualifications they seek before even reaching out to them in the first place. Additionally, advisors can bolster their credibility by using media inquiry services like those offered through the Financial Planning Association or through the Help A Reporter Out (HARO) service, by engaging with a public relation firm, and even authoring articles for personal finance and financial planning websites. The CFP designation, too, demonstrates an advisor’s credibility to prospective clients that they are likely to associate with a requisite level of expertise. Similarly, good communication skills are also ranked highly by clients, and using a storytelling structure can be a good strategy for advisors to explain complex ideas to clients.

Surprisingly for many advisors, many clients care a lot more about investment returns than advisors think they do. Accordingly, financial advisors should be thoughtful and empathetic when addressing their clients’ investment concerns while maintaining sound financial planning logic and practices. Advisors should educate their clients about rational benchmarking decisions, as well as create unique investment portfolios specifically designed to meet their individual clients’ goals.

Ultimately, the key point is that advisors can strengthen their client relationships (and improve their prospect marketing efficiency) by identifying and understanding what their clients value most from them. For many clients, focusing on and prioritizing goals (versus discussing the technical side of their advisor’s financial planning strategies) are generally what matters most to them. And to successfully convey to the client (and prospect) that you are on the same page with them and that you have the relevant knowledge and ability to help them achieve their goals, will be the most effective approach to providing the most value to your existing (and future) clients!

Read More...

Growth is a real challenge for many advisory firms, from the advisor who got into the business to help people (not market to them), to the advisor who’s 'great' in front of prospects (with a strong ability to sell their value) but struggles to find prospects to get in front of in the first place. Often at best, advisors find one particular strategy that works at least ‘OK’ for them, and then focus all their time and energy there… and in the process, neglect (or never even attempt) the rest of the steps of a comprehensive marketing plan and doing what it takes to build a steady ongoing pipeline of prospects for growth.

In this guest post, Amy Parvaneh, Founder and CEO of Select Advisors Institute, explains the WAVE Method, a 12-step marketing plan created to apply the concept of diversification to advisor marketing strategy by engaging efforts across four categories: 1) Wealth Detection, 2) Asking For Referrals, 3) Visibility, and 4) Emailing Prospective Clients.

The Wealth Detection category is about advisors staying informed about their communities (through local magazines), and the areas relevant to their niche clients (through Google alerts), as well as creating a pipeline of potential business development leads (by taking notes on individuals and places encountered on a daily basis to ‘detect’ who has wealth or, better yet, money in motion).

Asking For Referrals focuses on using clients and Centers Of Influence (COIs) as primary referral sources, ideally with a systematic routine of asking for referrals regularly. Additionally, more passive strategies can be used to softly ‘Ask’ For Referrals, such as including a brief message in your email signature line or adding a call-to-action banner on your website that directs clients on where to go to “Give a Referral”.

The featured areas of Visibility that can help an advisor grow their business include Social Media Visibility, in which advisors post personalized and relevant content regularly to establish a captivated audience that wants to follow them; Humanized Visibility, in which advisors are encouraged to connect with others as much as possible either in person or virtually, through activities such as attending trade conferences, volunteering, and creating video content; and Public Relations efforts, in which advisors pitch and contribute content to editors or publishers of well-known media publications for brand-name affiliation.

Emailing Prospective Clients helps advisors connect directly with generating actionable leads ready to do business, and can include ‘cold’ emails that are targeted to commercially available lists, or specifically targeted people the advisor is interested in meeting. Alternatively, social media followers, such as connections on LinkedIn, can be reached by sending them a past post of interest (perhaps one that may have been featured on the advisor’s feed). Last, the production of an original, personalized newsletter can be an effective way to reach prospective clients (and then sending it outbound via email to ensure it gets in front of them!).

Ultimately, the key point is that there are many strategies available to advisors to market their firms, but that advisors don’t necessarily have to bet everything on one strategy, and instead, similar to investing, can diversify efforts across multiple areas. Just be certain to also engage in a periodic review of performance and results to understand what’s working!

Read More...

When it comes to marketing strategies for financial advisors who want to grow their firms, there are generally two commonly used approaches. Optimistic “glass-half-full” strategists often decide to invest in a(n ever-widening) variety of marketing tactics in the hopes of attracting more and more new clients, whereas more Pessimistic “glass-half-empty” strategists may often feel that suboptimal business development efforts hold them back from potential growth and will spend their marketing resources on hiring, training, and restructuring their teams to correct the problem with more and better rainmaker advisors. However, these approaches are not generally the most logical way to grow firms, as adding new marketing tactics can be expensive and doesn’t always equate to more clients, and relying on the efficacy of rainmaker advisors is risky (as finding and keeping great rainmaker talent is often very difficult).

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains how a more efficient approach to marketing for growth is to view the process as an “Engineer”, where the firm focuses on one marketing tool proven to work in the past, hones that specific tactic, and then maintains and continuously optimizes the process that supports that tactic over the long run. For Engineer strategists, the advisor marketing process can be broken down into three “ART” phases: Audit, Run, and Tune.

In the Audit phase, advisors and their firms evaluate their current inventory of marketing tools and identify the characteristics of the firm’s typical (and hopefully ideal) client – in a photographic ‘client picture board’. Pictures are important to illustrate the advisor’s ideal client, because the exercise can only be successful if the advisor has a deep enough understanding of their clientele to find the ‘right’ pictures to begin with. Thus, the Audit stage is instrumental in helping advisors to picture their clients clearly, which in turn clarifies how best to connect and speak to those prospects and turn them into the new clients they most want to attract.

In the Run phase, the firm identifies one marketing tactic that will serve to connect (and to keep connecting) with the target client identified and ‘pictured’ in the Audit phase. The focus is on establishing a meaningful rapport with the particular type of target prospects pursuing one specific channel where the firm can best reach out to their audience (e.g., podcasting on a topic that the firm’s clients would be particularly interested in). Which, notably, means that this is not the stage to update the firm’s design elements such as the website or logo. Instead, the important point in the Run phase is simply to focus on one strategy, and prepare to refine that one strategy to be even better… not to layer multiple marketing tactics that spread the firm’s attention too thinly to Tune any one in particular.

In turn, in the Tune phase, advisors review their now-primary marketing strategy, and assess what is working (and what isn’t) by gathering key data to make relevant adjustments along the way. Specifically, lead flow data measuring how many people (who weren’t referred by an existing client) actually contacted the firm to schedule an appointment, is the key statistic that can give insight about how effective the marketing strategy is at connecting with its target audience. Tuning a strategy is often simply a matter of expanding the scope of expertise offered through the strategy (e.g., for a strategy that relies on podcasting, perhaps the scope of topics can include stock options instead of just estate planning), as well as improving how the strategy connects to its target people in a sustainable and consistent manner.

Ultimately, the key point is that advisors who want to grow their firms through marketing efforts don’t need to invest in an array of marketing tactics, nor do they need to restructure their teams to rely on a rainmaker to do it for them. Rather, the more efficient way to successfully market an advisory firm is to focus on the ART of the marketing process – Auditing the firm’s existing marketing efforts to identify and hone one effective tactic to use, Running the marketing strategy identified over a long period of time, and continually Tuning the process to become a successful and sustainable strategy. Going deeper into one specific, carefully chosen strategy, and optimizing it, before choosing to add new marketing tactics into the mix, will likely prove to be a much more effective and efficient process in growing the advisor’s firm… and will serve to connect more meaningfully with its clients!

Read More...

There is no question that writing and publishing a book as a first-time author is a huge commitment, yet a growing number of financial advisors are finding that having a self-published book is not only a doable and personally rewarding undertaking, but that it is also a highly effective return on their time and financial investment. As while the revenue generated from book sales may not be exceedingly lucrative, it is the opportunity a book offers to the financial advisor to grow their business that is actually worth far more than the book sale revenue itself! For instance, publishing a book not only bolsters an advisor’s authority as a subject matter expert, but it can also be used to promote the author, generate client referrals, and open conversations with key contacts (from prospects to hard-to-reach COIs).

In this guest post, Zach Obront, Co-Founder of Scribe Media, explains how financial advisors can harness the potential of a self-published book to strengthen their brand, establish their expertise, and grow their business. As a starting point, successfully leveraging a self-published book begins with establishing a well-crafted listing on Amazon. This includes not only a compelling description of the book itself, but also a complete Central Author page (including author photo, bio, and other articles or content released), and getting book reviews (which can be generated by asking people who have read the book, or to whom the advisor can offer to send a copy of the book, to leave a written review). When asking for book reviews, it is important to ensure that reviews are only about the book itself, and that they do not include comments on the advisor or on the advisory firm’s abilities. Accordingly, it is helpful to ask for reviews from readers who are not the advisor’s clients to prevent any potential issues around testimonial rules.

And with a good foundation in place, financial advisors as authors can optimize publicity by identifying who their primary target audience is (i.e., the ideal client persona they want to reach), and the media sources where they spend the most time. Authors can use articles or blog posts to pitch their books and seek out interview or podcast opportunities to talk about their book. Financial advisors can also share and/or discuss their book with existing and prospective clients, which is a good method of word-of-mouth publicity, and with symbiotic professionals (i.e., Centers Of Influence) whose lines of work intersect with the topic of the advisor's book and who can provide copies of the advisor’s book to their own clients to promote the advisor’s subject matter expertise (and generate referrals in the process).

Ultimately, the key point is that financial advisors with a self-published book possess a powerful tool to increase their own authority as subject matter experts and generate new client referrals… which can be worth many multiples more than ‘just’ the value of book sales themselves. By intentionally determining who they want to attract and who would be interested in the subject matter of the book, advisors can make powerful new connections by opening conversations with potential new clients and lead-generators.

Read More...

Established financial advisors who aim to accelerate the growth of their firms often look to increase their marketing efforts to attract more prospects and bring in additional new clients. In practice, this is often done by taking the main components of a firm’s brand – value, verbal messaging, and visual design – and refining, in particular, the firm’s visual design, with a new website and new marketing materials designed to instill new and faster growth. Yet, in reality, the biggest driver of accelerated growth is often to improve verbal messaging first… and upon doing so, many advisory firms discover that it’s even more appealing to leverage that new messaging as internal marketing to generate more referrals from existing clients instead!

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – talks about the core components of a brand, and why these components are important to drive firm growth. As while the value of a firm lies in its services offered, the client experience as a whole, and how the firm delivers on both, many advisory firms make the mistake of investing too early and heavily in visual design upon recognizing the value they provide, without first working out the verbal messaging which defines and communicates their own identity and values. The end result of this disconnect between the value and the messaging about it is lackluster lead flow; accordingly, the visual design should actually be defined by the verbal messaging and will be most impactful when it can serve to communicate the firm’s values and convey its identity. Which is only possible when the firm’s verbal messaging has been clearly defined in the first place.

The two primary modes of marketing communication are internal and external. All new firms must start out with external marketing efforts to grow their client base in the first place – in other words, they need to target strangers, website visitors, and prospects to simply convey that the firm exists and to identify the services available. In addition to prioritizing the main components of a firm’s brand, understanding the firm’s different audiences and knowing how to effectively communicate with each are paramount to effective external marketing to increase lead generation.

However, for existing firms, especially those with well-established client bases, internal marketing can be a much more valuable marketing approach, if done correctly. Internal marketing targets existing clients exclusively, providing not only updates about the firm’s growth and progress, but also reminders of the firm’s value through educational content and the ongoing provision of outstanding client service. In fact, ideally, internal marketing strategies should provide exclusive marketing value and messaging that is only available to existing clients. If done right, internal marketing can leverage clients themselves as promoters who generate referrals for the firm. Because with the right branding, client service experience, and exclusive internal marketing outreach efforts, clients will be enthusiastic about telling other people they know about the firm and will eventually become the firm’s own best marketers!

Ultimately, the key point is that firms who are just starting out will need to rely on external marketing efforts to cultivate clients in the first place, but firms with a well-established client base can leverage their own clients as effective promoters of the firm by using an internal marketing strategy that targets clients exclusively. However, this is only effective if the firm has invested in creating a well-defined brand with verbal messaging that clearly conveys their identity and values (which is then communicated consistently with internal scripts for client review meetings), developing employees as part of the brand, and specializing their marketing communications… all available only to existing clients who may then refer the advisory firm (even more often than they did before!).

Read More...

For most financial advisory firms that seek to grow, it takes a significant commitment of time to market to, attract, and ultimately close prospective new clients. But as advisory firms grow, the cost of that time it takes to attract clients through marketing efforts and close them through sales efforts becomes commensurately more expensive as the business owner’s own time becomes more valuable. Which can be problematic for firms that want to grow, and the cost to acquire new clients becomes more expensive as the business (and cost of that time) grows, becoming inherently less scalable the larger the business gets … unless the firm updates its marketing and sales methods to match the firm’s (newfound) size and resources.

In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains why advisory firms need to adapt the sales engagement methods that they use if they want to continue growing in a sustainable (and time-cost-effective) manner. As notably, while industry benchmarking statistics suggest that an average financial advisory firm will spend about 3% of revenue on marketing, these numbers only include direct marketing expenditures (e.g., online ads, consultant expenses, etc.), and don’t include the actual value of the advisor’s potentially-quite-costly time spent on acquiring clients (e.g., attending networking events, meeting with prospects, etc.). Furthermore, as a financial advisor’s firm grows and the advisor gains experience and expertise, their time generally becomes more valuable; thus, if they spend the same amount of time on client acquisition as they did when their time was worth less, the total cost actually spent on marketing can significantly increase!

In light of this growing premium on an advisor’s time as a part of the marketing and sales process, how should an advisor most efficiently spend their time on business development efforts? To address this, it’s important to consider the three primary processes in any financial advisory firm:  A Marketing process to establish awareness that the firm exists, a Sales process to engage prospective clients, and a Client Service process, to cultivate lasting trust with clients and to give them a reason to stay with the firm. While many firms focus primarily on the Marketing or the Client Service process to address growth problems, the reality is that, more often than not, problems with growth (and time-cost-consuming nature) reside mainly in the Sales process – the stage in client acquisition that begins when a prospect schedules a first appointment, and ends with a signed contract.

For most advisory firms, there are generally three methods of engagement an advisor can use in the sales process. The best method for any firm to use will often depend on the approximate revenue of the firm.  The “Do” Method involves actually doing something for the prospective client to show them what they might expect to receive from the firm and is most valuable for newer firms (generally those with less than $750,000 in annual revenues) who have not yet established a brand identity. Clients seeking these firms are looking for value and are most interested in what the firm has to offer them. The “Show” Method is less labor-intensive and involves showing samples of what the firm has to offer to the client (e.g., a sample financial plan or investment policy statement); in other words, these firms are typically well-established and can rely on their brand value with compelling stories, supported by “showing” what they offer. While this is more efficient than the “Do” Method, it does still require time to prepare samples to show a target clientele and is often more appropriate for firms with annual revenues between $750,000 and $3 million. The “Tell” Method is the most time-efficient and relies on an advisor’s own confidence in the firm to tell the client specifically how they will address the client’s needs. There is no “free work” done or samples offered because an advisor in a firm with more than $3M in annual revenue can generally rely on their firm’s brand value and the story behind the firm alone to establish trust with a new client. Which is important, because considering the high value of an advisor’s time at this level, (still) using the “Do” or “Tell” methods can be exponentially more expensive (than it may have been when the firm had less revenue and the advisor’s cost of time was less).

Ultimately, the key point is that the Sales process is a distinct step from the Marketing and Client Service processes and that, for many firms, growth problems can most effectively be addressed by adjusting how the Sales process is carried out. While newer firms with less revenue can benefit most using the “Do” method of offering free work to prove to clients they are worthy of their trust and engagement, firms with more revenue can benefit from the more efficient “Show” method of offering work samples and demonstrations to back up their firm’s brand identity, while firms with revenue generally over $3M are often the most well-established and generally have widespread brand recognition… that advisors can leverage to simply “Tell” a client why they should be engaged, ideally (and cost-effectively) ‘closing’ the deal after just one meeting!

Read More...

For more than 20 years, industry benchmarking studies have helped financial advisors understand how to manage the profitability of their businesses, and ensure that the costs to service clients are in line with the fees they’re being charged. However,  remarkably little research has been done into the costs that must be incurred to actually obtain those clients in the first place and the cost-effectiveness of various client acquisition strategies that financial advisors use.

And it turns out those client acquisition costs are substantial! In our recently released Kitces Research report of more than 800 financial advisors who participated in a survey, the average total cost for a financial advisor to acquire a new client is $3,119 per client. Notably, though, a significant portion of that cost is the ‘time cost’ of the financial advisor themselves (an average of $2,600 worth of time spent, or 83% of the total cost of client acquisition), while only $519 is typically spent on hard-dollar marketing costs themselves.  Which suggests that while early-on it may be cost-effective for advisory firms often to substitute advisor time for firm dollars when it comes to marketing efforts, especially for those who don’t have a lot of money to invest into growing their business in those initial years, that advisory firms may be overly reliant on an advisor’s (less-and-less-cost-effective) time to grow the business, rather than allocating marketing dollars to grow the business in a more scalable way.

The significant upfront cost to acquire a client is especially salient for financial advisors with recurring revenue models, as the cost to acquire a client may often be equal to or more than the entire revenue generated by the client in the first year – and the equivalent of several years’ worth of profits – which results in a “J-Curve” of client profitability (where aggregate profitability of a new client is negative in the early years and only turns positive over time). Which is important, as overzealous marketing efforts can cause a steep negative J-Curve dip, which in turn can cause the firm to overextend its growth capacity and ‘grow broke’ even if otherwise on a long-term path to profitability. Though on the other hand, the depth of the J-curve of advisor profitability, when coupled with firms that often have 20-30+ year-average client retention (at 95% to 97% annual retention rates), suggests that most advisory firms may be grossly underspending on marketing relative to the astonishing lifetime client value of an individual new client.

To maximize marketing spending – and minimize Client Acquisition Costs (CACs) – our Kitces Research Report identified the most cost-effective (measured by the actual CAC) and cost-efficient (measured by the revenue generated from the client relative to CAC) marketing strategies in use by the financial advisors surveyed, which included both ‘traditional’ methods (e.g., client referrals, networking, and Centers of Influence), but also underappreciated alternatives (albeit with more upfront cost) including SEO, writing a book, webinars, marketing lists, and paid third-party website listings. Interestingly, the most cost-effective strategies differed for firms with the highest marketing efficiency (books, direct mail, paid web listings, marketing lists, and SEO) versus the most efficient strategies for firms not as ‘marketing-inclined’ as others (paid advertising, paid solicitors, seminars, and general networking).

Examining marketing strategy efficiency relative to advisor adoption rate also reveals that some of the most commonly used strategies are actually among the least efficient (e.g., social media, blogging, and client appreciation events), whereas some of the lesser-used are still very efficient (e.g., marketing lists, radio, solicitors, online ads, and paid websites). This suggests an inherent inefficiency when it comes to marketing strategies chosen by financial advisors. The biggest driver behind this inefficiency appears to be the strong advisor preference for strategies that rely on the advisor’s time (versus hard dollars invested in the strategy), and an overweighting on strategies that produce a high quality of leads over those that produce a scalable quantity of leads or are actually the most cost-effective (which may help to explain why larger firms are outgrowing smaller ones, as they are able to accommodate scalable hard-dollar marketing strategies that smaller advisors might not otherwise be able to afford or be willing to invest into).

Ultimately, though, the key point is that while there is a wide range of marketing options available for advisors, effectiveness and efficiency are important criteria that need to be considered to ensure that resulting growth is sustainable, as initial costs may be recouped only after a client has generated revenue for the firm over several years. In fact, with an average CAC of $3,119, this Kitces Research Report suggests that perhaps the primary reason that advisory firms struggle to serve mass affluent clientele and the broader population is not because it is cost-ineffective to service them, but that it’s too cost-ineffective to market and gain a scalable number of them as clients in the first place! Though on the other hand, with recent reports suggesting robo-advisors have ‘just’ an average acquisition cost of $500 - $1,000, it seems clear that an opportunity exists for advisors to reduce the overall cost of their marketing efforts (and/or for third-party providers to scale their own lead generation services for advisors)… which may both improve the profitability of advisory firms, and allow them to grow more scalably and reach a wider range of clientele.

Read More...