How to Improve Your Financial Advisory Firm's Marketing

November 14, 2019 5 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

This article is written by Patrick Brewer, founder of Brewer Consulting and SurePath Wealth, host of “The Model FA” podcast, and an Advisor in The Oracles.

If you’re a financial advisor, you may be facing challenges when it comes to marketing your business.

There are many tools out there that promise to automate and simplify your marketing. But automation alone won’t solve your challenges. That’s because the advisory business requires a level of trust-building that just can’t be automated.

When you try to automate everything, your outreach ends up being ineffective. It might even burn your audience.

I should know. I’ve helped hundreds of financial advisors improve their marketing techniques with the exact strategies I have personally used to grow my advisory business from $0 to $60 million in assets under management in just three years.

These strategies use technology to more effectively build human relationships, not automate communications with prospective clients.

If you want to improve your financial advisory firm’s marketing today without adopting expensive tech, then read on.

1. Make videos to draw in prospects.

Video is a huge opportunity for financial advisors. The combination of seeing your face and hearing your voice means you create a deeper emotional connection with potential clients than you can through other mediums.

That makes it invaluable for a business like ours that’s built on relationships. You need to be investing in well-sequenced and well-timed videos during the marketing and sales process. Before a prospect walks in the door, they need to have seen you on video at least once.

If you work with smaller clients, you can get away with making your own videos—ones that introduce you, what you believe, and who you serve. The editing of the videos can be outsourced to professionals on sites like Fiverr or Upwork in a cost-effective manner.

If you work with larger clients, you may want to fully outsource the process. Outsourcing video production can be more expensive in dollar terms, but considering the high-value demands on your time, that investment may be wise.

If you’ve never done video before, you’ll benefit from spending time actually storyboarding the content, then filming it for your first few videos—no matter what size firm you are. That will help you better understand the process so that you can more effectively outsource it later.

2. Invest in Facebook advertising.

Facebook gives you the power to reach almost any audience you want with targeted advertising. And right now, video ads on Facebook are cheap.

That means you can get in front of most specialized markets (say, people with specific job titles or in specific industries) and targeted geographic areas, all for relatively little money. For instance, I’ve gotten more than 10,000 people to watch full videos introducing me and my services for less than $2,000.

You can create custom audiences of the people who view your content, then serve them valuable offers—like free consultations or lead magnets—that get them into your sales funnel.

This approach, like many smart marketing strategies, is about solving problems. Your ads need to introduce who you are, who you serve, and how you can solve real problems your audiences experience in their financial lives.

For advisors willing to learn or partner with an expert, this is a massive opportunity to reach large, qualified audiences of prospects in a deeply personal and cost-effective way.

3. Take advantage of organic reach on LinkedIn.

The third big marketing opportunity for advisors is LinkedIn.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn allows you to hyper-target people based on their job titles and geography. For instance, if you focus on a niche like plastic surgeons, you can easily find them on LinkedIn.

Once you do, you can connect with them for free, then share content they will see in their feed. If your content is valuable enough, these highly qualified prospects will engage with it, which creates substantial organic reach.

That means you don’t have to pay for reach, unlike on Facebook where free organic reach of this scale is dead.

For instance, imagine that you connect with 50 percent of the plastic surgeons in your area. Then you could share videos, posts, or other content pieces that are highly relevant and specific to their problems.

After a few months of delivering valuable content to your ideal target prospects, you will have become a trusted resource to them.

Here’s what that might look like:

Begin by sending a free personalized connection request to someone in your niche. Then you send each a personal introduction video. (You can create a free one using a tool like Loom.)

After a brief introduction, you might say something like “I’d love to talk a bit more and see if there’s anyone in my network who might help you.” There are no sales involved yet. You’re just breaking the ice and being of service.

Then you continue to publish valuable content. After a few months of giving, you will have earned the ability to get back in touch with them. You can then ask them if it makes sense to schedule a call or meeting to explore how you can solve their financial problems.

The result?

Highly qualified prospects that know and trust you—before they step one foot inside your office.

All of this can be accomplished for free or relatively inexpensively—as long as the advisor is willing to put in the work.

What’s more, it works.

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