Articles About Financial Advisor Marketing

As the message about the importance - and value - of social media gets out, an increasing number of advisors are beginning to join social media sites, with LinkedIn reported as being by far the most popular amongst advisors for business. Yet a deeper look at advisor use of social media platforms suggests that for many, they may be doing little more than just showing up, and their LinkedIn presence is little more than having written out their resume in digital form (with, not surprisingly, quite limited results, if any!).

In this guest post, public relations and advisor marketing consultant Kevin Dinino shares some thoughts about more intermediate and "advanced" LinkedIn tools and strategies, and how they can be applied in the context of advisors. From adopting LinkedIn Groups for networking, with a study group, or as the advisory firm's company intranet, to the Advanced People Search capabilities and even the Volunteer Marketplace, there's a lot more to LinkedIn for advisors beyond just listing out the details of your current job description and work history!

So if you've heard that other advisors are generating business from LinkedIn but feel like you're missing out despite having created a LinkedIn profile, hopefully this article will give you some ideas about how to take your social media marketing efforts to the next level. Or alternatively, if you have perhaps been tinkering a little on LinkedIn already, but don't feel like you're making any headway, perhaps you'll find a few new tools and strategies to try out!

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As consumers increasingly use the internet to research potential products and services, a financial planning firm's website is often the prospective client's first impression. Yet unfortunately, the reality is that most financial planning firms fail to answer the three basic questions any consumer has when visiting the website for a potential professional to hire: 1) What services do you provide? (i.e., what is your value); 2) Do you work with people like me? (i.e., what are your minimums and am I in your firm's target niche?); and most important, 3) How much will this cost?

The last issue in particular is often a sticking point for financial planners, who fear that if costs and fees can't be discussed in person, the client may misunderstand or not properly evaluate the value the firm provides. Yet the reality is that avoiding the issue on your website doesn't help; instead, it simply drives away prospective clients and referrers who move on to the next website/professional who does clearly disclose cost! Transparency is a fundamental factor in building trust... which means being opaque about the cost of your services is not exactly the best way to start a trusting relationship!

The solution, instead, is to clearly communicate the pricing of your financial planning fees on your website; and if you're concerned that clients will not evaluate the costs properly, then provide them "proper" comparisons on the spot! Transparency is crucial to establishing trust, but it doesn't have to exist in a vacuum!

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Many readers of this blog contact me directly with questions and comments. While often the responses are very specific to a particular circumstance, occasionally the subject matter is general enough that it might be of interest to others as well. Accordingly, I will occasionally post a new "MailBag" article, presenting the question or comment (on a strictly anonymous basis!) and my response, in the hopes that the discussion may be useful food for thought.

In this week's MailBag, we look at a question about how to get started using LinkedIn to get new clients. Just searching through your connections for people who might fit your profile and then ask for an introduction probably isn't going to work. This is where a content-based marketing strategy can be effective.

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As social media becomes increasingly popular, the financial planning world has struggled to figure out how social media marketing fits into the big picture. Where can an advisor find time to engage in social media amidst other efforts to network, develop business, and drive referrals? And of course, all of that marketing activity has to fit around the time to actually run a business and serve clients, too!

Yet from a best practices perspective, social media shouldn't be viewed as an alternative to networking and referral marketing. Instead, social media is simply another way to do networking and referral marketing in the first place! After all, social media success still ultimately relies upon making personal connections and building relationships to generate new business. Or viewed another way, relationship marketing is all about being social, and social media is just another medium for being social!

The caveat, however, is that while networking meetings and referral marketing are often a slow, one-client-and-center-of-influence-at-a-time effort, time invested in social media is able to be leveraged to reach dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of prospective clients at once. In other words, ultimately social media is not an alternative to networking and referral marketing, it's simply a more leveraged and scalable way to do it! Which also means if you're trying to figure out where to find the time to start getting engaged on social media, you might look to carve the time from some of your other, less efficient and effective marketing activities!

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Having a website as a financial advisor is increasingly shifting from a "nice to have" to a necessary minimum just to establish that the advisor is a legitimate professional in the first place. If your business cannot be found online, then it's almost as though the advisor doesn't exist. Yet at the same time, just having a website isn't enough; it has to convey credibility and trustworthiness to prospective clients to really be an effective marketing tool for the business.

In this guest post, business consultant Maria Marsala shares her checklist of 19 ways that financial advisor websites can be made more credible and trustworthy. From the importance of having your own domain name - for both your business and your email address - to eliminating annoying flash and pop-ups, to making sure that prospective clients can learn the information they need, Maria's list helps to ensure your website is up to speed in today's environment.

Whether you're looking at creating your first advisory firm website, upgrading and replacing it to something new, or simply looking for a checklist that you can use to review your own site and perhaps make a few tweaks, I hope you find today's guest post to be helpful!

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Given that the core of financial planning is the delivery of personalized, customized financial advice, there have always been limited benefits of scale for financial advisory firms; no matter how good the technology, operations, and staff support, advisors only have so many hours available and so much mental "bandwidth" to serve clients, ultimately limiting the scalability of an advisory firm.

Yet while advice itself may not be conducive to scale, the marketing of financial advice certainly is. In fact, recent industry studies are beginning to show that larger firms seem to be driving more referrals than smaller ones, and many of the largest advisory firms are generating a huge volume of new clients by leveraging the value of relatively few dedicated full-time marketing staff.

Accordingly, this suggests the environment for smaller advisory firms may become increasingly challenged, as the larger firms grow larger while the smaller firms remain "stuck" small, unable to reinvest enough into marketing the practice to accelerate its own growth. While this may not be the end of small firms and solo practitioners, it will make such firms increasingly reliant on scalable marketing strategies (e.g., social media) or focused niche markets to carve out a space where they can remain differentiated and truly competitive.

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As communication becomes increasingly virtual, from telephone calls to emails, it becomes harder and harder to ensure that interactions between the staff and clients of any firm maintain their personal touch. Yet maintaining that personal connection with the individual client is crucial; in fact, a recent study in medicine found that radiologists are dramatically more effective in their analysis of scans of patients they've never met, simply by attaching a photo of the subject to help make the interaction more personal.

The opportunity to reinforce such connections is equally relevant in a financial planning firm, and equally feasible to implement. Just as the radiologist demonstrates a better connection to their patients with the photo - and report feeling more empathy on behalf of their patients - so too can client photos be attached to client files, or loaded into the main page of a client's CRM record, to ensure staff bear in mind the human being at the other end of the account/phone call/email message.

In addition, the reality is that the need for a visual personal connection in a virtual environment goes both ways. As a result, it's perhaps equally important to include a picture of all your staff members on your website - or even in the signature of their emails - to help clients understand who they're relating to as well. And the issue is relevant for the financial planners themselves, too; while planners will typically meet with their clients in person, at some point before a client is a client, they're a prospect who might visit your website to do their due diligence. When a potential client looks you up on your website, what is their first impression? Do they have a chance to make a visual connection and actually SEE you?

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While the focus of this blog is typically on "the written word" and long articles, I thought you might be interested in some recent material I've recorded, including a 5-minute video for Investment News at the Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference about best practices in social media for advisors, and a 15-minute radio show recording about financial planning industry trends.

On a lighter note, there's also a very entertaining video from last week's Saturday Night Live, showing the ultimate in niche financial planning: Papal Securities, specializing in retirement advice for Popes!

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As financial planning shifts increasingly to a pure fiduciary focus, many advisors have begun to differentiate themselves by explaining to prospective clients their fiduciary obligations, ostensibly in an effort to demonstrate that they are trustworthy. Unfortunately, though, the reality is that saying "You can trust me" is actually a terrible way to establish trust, especially when it's done using complex jargon that most consumers don't even understand! Even worse, in many cases an advisor talking about fiduciary status is less about demonstrating the trustworthiness of the advisor, and more about bashing the competition for not being worthy of trust - despite the fact that may make the advisor appear petty or desperate with little value to offer, and may actually prime clients towards distrust of any advisors! So what should financial planners do instead? Focus on conveying credibility more holistically, which includes a focus not only on motives and intent, but also the advisor's integrity, capabilities to deliver value to the client, and track record for positive financial planning results. And establish your trust and credibility not just by your words, but by your actions and behaviors. Or stated more simply: stop trying to establish client trust by saying you're a fiduciary; instead, build real trust with your clients by actually being one and behaving accordingly!

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As consumers increasingly turn to the internet for information about potential products, the ability of a company and its products to turn up at the top of search engine results is increasingly crucial for success and growth - leading to an explosion of consultants that will help companies with their "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) to ensure that their products and services come up first. A similar process occurs when consumers search for information about services and people to work with, although the process is more complicated due to the fact that many experts may appear prominently on lots of sites, not all of which are necessarily tied to their business.

To better understand not just where influential content is, but the influential people who create it, Google has begun to develop a new system for its search engines to track authors and determine who's influential, called "AuthorRank", which is intended to supplement the "PageRank" algorithms it uses to identify and rank influential websites and content. The upshot of this change is that for the first time ever, financial planners and other service professionals will be able to start establishing their own online "webutation" as they tie content they have produced to their personal profile and business, regardless of where it is published. The caveat, though, is that Google accomplishes "Google Authorship" tracking by having authors tie their content and websites to a specific Google+ profile - which means any financial planners that produce a blog or other content who hadn't already established a Google+ profile need to go create one, now!

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