Financial advisors provide a much-needed service. Everyone needs guidance on how to build and manage their wealth—only it’s not easy to find that guidance.
Financial advisors can’t just rely on the fact that many investors need their expert advice; they need to get the word out that they have the answers investors are looking for. Unfortunately, most financial advisors have been trained on how to provide financial services, not on how to market financial services.
In this guide, we’ll provide crucial information to help advisors get the word out about their services. We’ll cover the why behind marketing, the common challenges advisors face, prevalent myths about marketing, how to get started, key strategies to consider, and more. Let’s dive in.
Research shows that more than three quarters of financial advisors have no defined marketing strategy.
There are a lot of potential reasons behind that figure. Some advisors might not have the time, while others might not see the point of marketing. For advisors that fall in the latter category, there are some important points they should keep in mind.
First, it’s important to remember that while marketing isn’t necessarily an essential aspect of being a financial advisor, it is an essential aspect of being a business owner. Solo advisors, RIAs, and other financial advisors that run their own practice are business owners, whether they want to be or not. And with that categorization comes a host of responsibilities, requiring skills that may not fall within a financial advisor’s traditional sphere.
Second, marketing is essential if you want to grow your financial advisory business. Just consider the fact that when financial advisors gain additional capital from business growth, two thirds report that they intend to re-invest that capital into marketing efforts. Successful advisors recognize that at least part of their success is due to marketing; they choose to double down on marketing to achieve future growth.
Third, marketing makes your financial advisory practice more valuable. If part of your goals for your practice include eventually selling it to another entity and retiring, then a robust and well-structured marketing operation is essential to maximizing the value of your business. Potential buyers want to know that they are purchasing something capable of future growth. Unfortunately, a truly valuable marketing operation takes time to build, so it’s essential that advisors get started early—even if their exit date is far off in the future.
While some advisors may not realize the benefits of marketing, others might feel highly motivated to start attracting new clients to their practice. Too frequently, these advisors find that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew—they weren’t prepared for the sorts of challenges that a marketing campaign can pose to a financial advisor. Here’s what a financial advisor trying their hand at marketing for the first time can expect to run into.
Simply put, advisors should start with a marketing plan—or rather, a business plan that comprises a marketing plan.
Most of the challenges we described above (such as struggling to translate goals into actions or vice versa) result due to a lack of initial planning. We go into detail about what makes for a good business plan in our blog post, Gaining an Edge: 5 Key Elements to a Financial Advisor's Business Plan, but broadly, you’ll want to build a plan that captures these elements:
To put it all together, let’s consider a hypothetical.
Your vision is a more lucrative practice with more AUM in the next 10 years. Because your clientbase is predominantly elderly, you decide that the best approach to growing AUM is by focusing on generational wealth. Thus, your objective is to convince more of your clients’ family members to become clients themselves.
What’s the best way to get in front of your clients’ family members? As your plan of action, you decide that you’re going to host family events. Remember, the goal is to get younger members of your clients’ family, so an overly formal event probably won’t be too attractive. Maybe you decide to host quarterly events for your longest standing clients, such as a beer tasting at your local brewery during the summer, free family photos around the holidays, and so on.
Every first quarter, your scheduled review will involve looking back on the past year and assessing how effective you were. You’ll be able to tell because you’ll have defined metrics to help you measure success, such as the number of event attendees, client family members who have become clients themselves, the number of new names and faces you’ve met, and so on.
Of course, you don’t have to host events, and you don’t have to focus on your clients’ family members. You could focus on attracting net new prospects by regularly blogging, or redesigning your website to increase the odds that anybody stumbling across it will become a client. You could (and should) include multiple fronts in your marketing strategy—maybe you redesign your website for an updated look and feel, so your clients’ younger family members feel that you’re a modern kind of financial advisor.
There are any number of strategies you can deploy in your marketing activities. Let’s explore a few of them.
If you’ve decided to build out your marketing plan, it can be tough to know exactly what to plan for—especially if you’re new to marketing as a financial advisor. We can talk through some of the activities you can put into place as part of your overall marketing plan.
Note that there is some overlap within these activities. Additionally, we recommend implementing more than one. An email marketing strategy, for instance, won’t have much substance to it unless accompanied by content marketing.
And lastly, this is by no means an exhaustive list. There are as many different marketing strategies as there are different financial practices. This list should, however, enable you to become familiar with some of the general practices and approaches to financial advisor marketing strategies.
Any modern business, including financial advisory practices, needs to prioritize digital marketing.
Simply put, digital marketing for financial advisors is the promotion of your brand and practice across digital channels. The most noteworthy and important example of this is your website.
"Design is the silent ambassador of your brand." - Paul Rand
No matter what, your website needs to look and feel modern, be accessible on mobile, and be well designed. Even if you and your clients value in-person interaction, the first place that any prospective customer will evaluate your practice is through your website. Just consider these statistics:
Most of the other strategies, tactics, and ideas listed here fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. None of them, however, will be as impactful as they can be if your website makes a poor impression.
Financial advising is a great fit for content marketing. The knowledge required to achieve financial wellbeing is something that everybody needs, but few possess. As a financial advisor, you have a considerable amount of information to share with the world. By creating content that educates and demonstrates your own expertise, you’ll attract individuals most in need of answers and–by extension–your services.
Roughly half of all investors are interested in learning more about investing. If you create content that provides that education, you’ll have created a magnet that brings in leads through search engines, a resource to send out to your email contacts, relevant collateral to show potential clients as they evaluate you, and so much more.
What form should this content take? Types of content vary, but plenty of advisors find success with blogging. Others prefer podcasts, or participating in web seminars or virtual summits. Still others create videos to host on Youtube. Others deploy a mix of all of these mediums. The important thing is to create something that educates, promotes your brand, and is highly shareable and discoverable.
As we will explore below, email marketing is still an effective strategy for advisor marketing. But what happens when your list inevitably shrinks with each send? You have to have a strategy for bringing in fresh subscribers.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel; you can repurpose content from old blogs or webinars and craft them into a downloadable asset, such as a pdf.
Whatever you do here, the key is to "gate" your premium content by asking for a contact (email address) in exchange.
The best part of content marketing is that it is one of the most effective strategies for SEO (search engine optimization). SEO can sound scary to some, but really it just boils down to getting found on search engines like Google or Bing. Your helpful and authentic content, if done on a regular basis, can do just that.
The takeaway? With content marketing, you can be yourself and share your knowledge, all while:
Now that you have this content, what do you do with it? If it's genuinely helpful, you'll want to share it.
You can drive traffic to your new content, and give your target audience a reason to keep you top-of-mind with email marketing and paid advertising.
“Email marketing” might conjure the image on inboxes filled to the brim with hyperbolic, hokey spam messages, but the reality is very different.
For one, you probably conflate email marketing with spam because spam sticks out. If a business sends you a genuinely useful and relevant email, you might follow a link to their website, consider the service, and forget all about the email. If a fishy website you’ve never heard of sends you an email with an all-caps subject line, you’ll likely feel annoyed that it got past your spam filter and flag it as an unwanted presence in your inbox.
"For every dollar spent on email marketing campaigns, businesses earn another $42 back on average."
When performed in a respectful and professional manner, email marketing is actually one of the most effective marketing tools available to you. In fact, for every dollar spent on email marketing campaigns, businesses earn another $42 back on average.
When it comes to email marketing, do not leave it to chance. Successful email marketing programs create an editorial calendar, and stick to it.
Whether it's once a month or once a week, we can't really answer the question of what is best for you, but we do know that consistency is key.
In order to email on a consistent basis, you will need a "reason to approach" your subscribers, aka: content. This will keep you on your toes to make sure you are always proactively creating value and getting in front of your current and prospective clients.
To keep things fresh, you can mix and match your reasons to approach.
One of the most surefire ways to get clients as a financial advisor is through relationship marketing.
Rather than focus on completely cold prospects who have never heard of your practice before, relationship marketing focuses on generating referrals from your clients and your network.
Every advisor understands that satisfied clients are more likely to recommend their services to a friend. But fewer advisors understand that building relationships with centers of influence in your clients’ networks can yield referrals as well. When we talk about centers of influence, we’re talking about people like attorneys, CPAs, small business owners, or any professional who might drop your name when one of their clients mentions their financial situation.
In PPC, or pay-per-click, you pay a certain fee every time an internet user clicks on your ad. You can host ads on search engines like Google or social media sites like LinkedIn.
Similar to email marketing, you might think that paid advertisements are just an annoyance—something that can’t really generate results. In reality, setting up a PPC campaign is a great way to attract cold leads to your website. The important thing to remember is that advertisements don’t have to be intrusive and annoying. If you, for example, write a compelling eBook with vital investing information and then advertise free access to that eBook via Google, LinkedIn, or other platforms, people will click.
They’ll be happy to provide you with their contact information, browse other resources on your site, or sign up with you on the spot. The end result is that more people will be aware of your brand after a PPC campaign than before.
Reading through this article has probably already sparked a lot of ideas about the kind of marketing strategy you want to implement at your practice. Now, it’s just a matter of formalizing and executing that strategy.
Only it’s not as simple as that. The content we’ve covered here is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to financial advisor marketing. To actually identify the right approach for your practice and the tools you’ll need to carry it out, you can work with marketing professionals that have worked with financial advisory practices before. That way, you don’t have to worry about neglecting your current clients when you try to attract new ones.
AssetMark can offer two powerful services to financial advisors investigating how best to implement a marketing strategy at their practice: 1) Dedicated business consultants and 2) our Marketing Advantage platform.
When you work with AssetMark gain access to a dedicated business consultant team focused on understanding the unique nature of your practice. Your business consulting team will assess your practice, identify the areas where the biggest impact can be made, define goals, support your marketing plan, and clarify the exact steps that need to be taken along the way. This way, you’ll never find yourself floundering for the next step to take; we’ll walk you through a successful marketing strategy from end to end.
When it comes to the actual execution, advisors working with AssetMark gain access to our Marketing Advantage platform for free. Marketing Advantage provides advisors with:
There are a lot of ways that we can manage your financial advisor marketing strategy. If you’d like to learn more, we recommend exploring our page on Marketing Advantage. Or, if you're curious about what our business consultants can do for your practice, why not request a consultation?