How to Get Ahead of 99% of Financial Advisors – Financial Advisor Big Brand

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October 8, 2020

No doubt, financial advisor marketing is one of the toughest games around. Unfortunately with the pressures of running your practice, the brand is something most financial advisors put last. The reality is that 99% of financial advisors (RIA firms, insurance agents, wealth managers, financial planners) are saying the same exact thing. If you want to make it in this business, the only choice, the only way to go, is to lay a solid foundation with a nice, big brand. This article is going to discuss why relying on your referral sources (as most financial advisors do) for leads is not viable, what exactly a big brand is, examples of good and bad financial advisor branding, and how to go about letting that fierce brand roar.

This is a no-BS Article about financial advisor branding

For those of you who are new to my blog/podcast, my name is Sara. I am a CFA® charterholder and I used to be a financial advisor. I have a weekly newsletter in which I talk about financial advisor lead generation topics and it is best described as “fun and irreverent.” So please subscribe!

Sara Grillo, CFA is a highly fun and slightly crazy marketing consultant based in NYC.

I am an insightful and fun marketing consultant for financial advisors.

By the way, thanks for joining me. If you’re looking for some straight up talk then you’ve come to the right place!

2022 Financial advisor brand trends

In the past, financial advisor brands were defined by products or AUM or investment performance. Because that’s where most of the advisor’s value was tied up. Something tangible. It is now moving from the tangible to the intangible.

As a result, most advisors don’t really know what a brand is. Everybody thinks it means putting your logo on a free water bottle and what color your website is. It’s not. A brand is another word for theme, idea. It should be a current that runs through everything you do as a firm, and it should express your value proposition. they are scared to take a stand because they worry if people disagree or won’t like them.

Remember this:

The brand is YOU.

Not your logo, not your website.

Not your water bottles.

Brands are becoming less corporate style and more genuine, more dress down. It’s about the feelings you create as a person not necessarily as a corporate body. A few years ago it was rare to see people snapping a pic with their iPhone and posting it on social media, whereas these posts are going viral all the time on LinkedIn now. You and your pets, you and your kids, and your hobbies. All the things that make you a unique person.

Financial advisor branding is about:

Connection
Relevance
Feelings
Ideas

Cold vs. Warm Market

Time and time again, financial advisors struggle to find a solid sustainable source of leads for their practice. And that’s perfectly understandable; marketing by any means other than referrals is hard to do in this business. The industry is notorious for its high turnover and the heinous crimes that some financial professionals have committed against their innocent clients, so you’ve got a reputational strike against you before you even open your mouth.

The result?

Most financial advisors do not even attempt to actively market themselves into “cold markets.”

The unfortunate reality is that you’re going to have some skinny kids and a low financial advisor salary if the only leads you get come from client referrals or introductions from people in your network such as accountants and attorneys.

Here’s why

It’s the most market sensitive, cyclical source of leads. In a down market, very few clients are going to refer anyone to a financial advisor who they resent because they have to pay your fee while you’re losing their money. Sometimes losing the client’s money is unavoidable, but in the eyes of the client you are still to blame. Every client has that one friend who loves shooting their mouth off every cocktail party about how they’re getting 35% a month while the market is in a down spiral. You’d be better off marketing to someone who knows nothing about you than a current client in a down market.
Referrals are a myth anyways. They can never be relied upon. They should be considered a bonus for hard work. Would you rely on your annual bonus to pay your daily bills? No. They are a way of saying “thank you.” Would you ever try to force someone to say thank you? No. You can ask all you want, but at the end of the day there is no way to guarantee referrals.
Attorney, prop/cas insurance, and accountant leads are the most competitive market you could possibly participate in. They’re also intrinsically not aligned with growing your practice for the following reasons.

More Reasons

Many accountants already provide wealth management services as an ancillary offering. They also tend to be very risk averse and every dollar counts! Every single one! They love counting dollars which is why they are accountants. They are hesitant to trust any financial advisor who is going to potentially sour their relationship with their client by losing a dollar of their money.
Property/casualty agents. Just as in the case of accountants, most prop cas agents are already licensed to sell life and disability insurance.
Attorneys are the worst referral sources you could possibly have. Expect zero reciprocity. They get all their business from financial advisors and other attorneys. It never goes your way. They may have one financial advisor that they refer business to once in a blue moon but if you’re not that person then you can probably forget it. They’d love to take your estate planning leads, though!

Certainly, having an empty pipeline stinks.

The Cold Market Isn’t That Cold If You Have a Big Financial Advisor Brand

So the warm market isn’t reliable. The only market you can really control is the cold market. Financial advisors hate the cold market, though. Now, when most financial advisors hear the word “cold market”, they think of cold calling. You don’t have to go out there and start dialing for dollars like this is 1976. Nowadays there are many strategies to use, including:

Seminars – virtual or in person
LinkedIn or Facebook advertising
LinkedIn messaging or Facebook messaging
Blogging
Using a financial advisor lead generation service

Since the cold market gives most of us the shivers, you can’t cold market all the time. Don’t get me wrong; it’s demoralizing, embittering, and humbling all the time, even for the best of us. But that’s no reason for you to have to suffer through living in what I call the Small RIA Firm Poverty Trap.

Here’s my golden rule of cold marketing based upon over a decade of financial experience. Don’t go there unless you have a big brand. The next section will discuss what a big brand is and how to get one.

What is a Financial Advisor Big Brand?

A financial advisor big brand can be defined as a big bold line that allows you to be seen as different from all the other financial advisors out there, you have to draw the line somewhere. Many financial advisors hesitate to do this because they don’t want to leave money on the table by going into a niche and excluding prospects.

In reality you are too busy to serve all prospects. Remember, everyone has a brother in law who works at Morgan Stanley.

Better to go deep than wide because they are so many advisors out there with ties to the people you want to reach. Unless you really hit them over the head with a reason to work with you instead of their uncle or sister in law who just so happens to work at Merrill Lynch, you’ll end up with excuses like, “I’m really busy at work which is why I can’t roll over my IRA right now” but the reality is their uncle got to them at last week’s family Fourth of July party.

Draw The Line

Above all, you have to draw the line somewhere to separate yourself. The most common branding mistakes I see financial advisors making are:

1) Not drawing a bold enough line that really differentiates you

2) Presenting a brand with too many ideas which subconsciously distracts and confuses the audience or

3) Inconsistently presenting the brand. For example, referring to yourself as “Chairman of XY Company” in some places rather than “CEO of XY Company.” Consistency matters because the audience doesn’t have time to sit there and figure you out. Make it so easy a three year old could understand it.

Moreover, a financial advisor big brand isn’t just about the logo and tagline looking good. It should clearly and quickly speak to the fundamental purpose of what you’re doing and why somebody should work with you rather than the next one.

Examples of Bad Branding

The following examples typify financial advisor branding and are considered weak brands. These do not represent any one brand in particular but rather a compilation. Does this sound like your marketing copy at all?

We are independent fee-based advisors who fall under the fiduciary standard and always put our clients’ needs before our own. We do not accept commissions.

First of all, every single financial advisor who is a registered investment advisor representative uses this line. It’s the most tired pick up line in the history of the industry. There are some RIA firms that are ripping people off just as much as broker-dealers supposedly do, and with DOL changes most brokers are going to be fiduciaries soon anyways.

Second of all, it’s a negative marketing pitch to throw every commission based broker dealer under the bus. Do you realize that most financial advisors nowadays aren’t just broker dealers anymore? Seeking to avoid this scrutiny, most of them became “hybrid” RIA and broker dealer.

In addition, the problem isn’t the commission it’s the churning. Do you think the client really cares that much as long as you do a good job? I mean, at the end of the day the client wants their money cared for prudently. They want to be treated right, but at the end of the day if you are doing right by them, does it really matter how you are getting paid? People don’t want their portfolios churned or to suffer wrongdoing. But paying a commission once in a while instead of a regular fee could be very attractive for a passive investor, for example.

Here’s Some BS

We are dedicated to maximizing return while minimizing risk and have a 99% retention rate over our tenure. We do this by focusing on your unique needs, and our advice is customized to your goals and preferences.
This is so generic and it’s BS. It’s not a unique aspect of your brand, it’s the definition of what an investment advisor does and the clients are tired of hearing about it. Even the ones who don’t customize say that they customize. There’s no empirical evidence that customized portfolios or actively managed portfolios outperform the index, by the way. The customized portfolios go down in bad market just like the cookie cutter ones do.

We empower our clients with financial education and knowledge and help them make the right decisions to maximize wealth, reduce taxes, and improve savings for their families.

I’m so sweet. See my halo?

Let’s Look Into Financial Advisor Branding Further

Finance is known for being the most ethically flawed and arrogant industry on the planet. You realize that that’s how people see you, right? It is seen as the least altruistic business in the world. That is always in the back of every client’s mind when they think of you. This warm and fuzzy approach can’t help but come off as disingenuous, yet every single financial advisor uses it as their motto.

So, the truth is that no financial advisor is in the game to educate the people who truly need the financial education. That would mean serving the broke people who don’t have a penny and need debt counseling, giving them the rigorous attention and care to help them save $100. Those are the people with real financial problems. It’s so pandering to say that we care so much about people’s financial education when in reality we only care about educating them so that they do what we want them to do with their $500k of investable assets or more.

Let’s be real.

You’re really not there to improve their knowledge of how the markets work, because if you had that as your life goal you would have been a college professor earning $25k per year. Most of the time the financial advisor’s definition of “educating the client” means telling the client what strategy you recommend and helping them understand it well enough to agree to it. You’re there to make them believe that it’s okay to invest their large sums of money for a fee in the vehicles that financially reward you, so you can pay your own mortgage.

The other thing is that I’m not sure people want to be educated. Finance is the only industry that does this. When I go to the dentist, he doesn’t whip out a dental school book and try to teach me about how he’s going to x-ray my teeth. I’ve found that anyone who doesn’t have his or her head in the sand is just looking for you to validate the hair-brained ideas they got from their friends or from CNBC.

Most people with $500k or more know a thing or two about stocks, and if they don’t they are surrounded by wealthy people who do. Plus if they’re that wealthy they probably earned it somehow by being really successful at their jobs and don’t have time to sit around and learn about finance as a hobby. They’re not chomping at the bit to become students anytime soon.

Another Example of BS financial advisor marketing

Here’s one for a financial advisor who is in charge of recruiting other advisors.

Are you an experienced advisor whose needs have been neglected by broker-dealer? If so, then let’s discuss opportunities on our team to see if we may be the right fit for each other. We have over 70 years in the business.

This is the recruiting language used by every recruiting financial advisor in the world. Here’s why it fails. There’s no real “why” given here. The only compelling thing is that I know you’re not a fly by night organization because you mentioned you’ve been in business for 70 years. What benefit does that create for me? Does that give me access to the best mentors? Training? Facilities? Products? Better payouts? Why why why?

The callout is also very weak here. It doesn’t “agitate” enough. It mentions that your needs might be neglected, but what does that mean? Broker dealers might neglect you by not getting your proposals generated quickly enough, not passing your advertising through compliance quickly enough, not subsidizing your licenses, etc. None of those are mentioned here and I’m not agitated at my boss enough as a result of reading your copy to feel motivated to reach out to you.

Branding ideas for financial advisors (do’s and don’ts)

Do’s:

Establish a weird niche: car wash owners, psychic mediums
Get a catchy tagline or elevator pitch– listen to my podcast about this brilliant one sentence elevator speech.
Say it on the front page of your website
Get a mantra. Something like, “your financial plan is only as good as the questions you’re asked.”
Get a branded lead magnet
Go get some territory on Google. Not just the typical keywords like, “financial advisor in Boise, Idaho” but the weird keywords that are up for grabs. For example, I love the flat fee advisors. As I show in this blog about fixed fee advisor marketing, the term “flat fee advisor” has a decent amount of searches per month with a very low competition score. If I were a flat fee advisor I would be blogging about flat fee brand elements like there is no tomorrow: questions to ask a flat fee advisor, how to find a good one, flat fee advisor in Plymouth MA, etc.
Get some weird centers-of-influence and build a community. Not the typical CPA/attorney. Like high end hairdressers, realtors, pool cleaning company owners, etc., and start building an online community where you interact and share each others’ content with your audiences.
Set yourself apart with dynamic elements that build brand equity

Don’ts:

The biggest risk isn’t in not defining a brand, it is defining something you think is a brand, and it really is a non brand.
Don’t be be vague or use cliché. “We are the ones who help you sleep at night”
Don’t be afraid to exclude people. Your brand is specific and that makes it not right for everyone. Let them find another advisor, there are thousands to pick from.
Don’t just decide on one and go all in. test it out a bit. Get a client panel to review and make sure there’s not some glaring hole.

Create your own Financial Advisor Big Brand

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