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!
Welcome back to the 195th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
