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In this blog and podcast, I’m going to talk about the components of a simple and easy financial advisor marketing plan.
You will learn:
- Why simple financial advisor marketing plans work better than complicated ones
- The importance of knowing your hourly rate and how much you want to make as a financial advisor
- What a solid marketing plan for financial advisors consists of
By the way, thanks for joining me.
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 which is best described as “fun and irreverent.” So please subscribe!
Financial Advisor Marketing Plan + Downloadable Template
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. It is best described as “fun and irreverent.” So please subscribe!
If you’re looking for some straight up talk then you’ve come to the right place!
By the way, if you want more specific guidance on how to create your own marketing strategy, download this e-book. It contains what may be considered a financial advisor marketing plan template. It also explains how you can execute a marketing strategy customized to your specific style as a financial advisor or planner, which will hopefully lead to new clients.
Why simple marketing plans for financial advisors work better than complicated ones
The first point I want to make about building a financial adviser marketing plan is I want to just knock down the fallacy that you need to go in a million different directions and do a lot of different things in order to market your financial advisor practice successfully and find new clients. This is a difficult thing because as financial advisers, I think you are all in the mindset of diversification and not putting all your eggs in one basket.
I want to tell you that this is not a Roth IRA. This is a marketing strategy.
-Sara Grillo, CFA
This is a one stock portfolio, financial advisors.
Your worst enemy in marketing is a lack of focus.
-Sara Grillo, CFA
And that’s where I see a lot of you going, failing, falling down with this and going in too many directions because you stand to lose me way more than you stand to gain by having a cluttered marketing plan!
Declutter it by reading the rest of this blog post!
Your hourly rate as a financial advisor is the foundation for your marketing plan
The second thing I want you to think about before you create your marketing plan is you really have to think about the monetary value of an hour of your time as a practicing financial advisor or financial planner. This should be the foundation of your marketing plan. In fact, it should be the foundation of the work that you do within your practice.
But yet, as financially savvy as all of you financial advisers are, I see a lot of you overlooking this underestimating and really having no clue what an hour of your time is worth. And unfortunately, it results in very derailing behaviors, such as doing work for free for prospects.
You know what I mean – getting breadcrumbed.
You know, there’s always that one client or one prospect that has 5MM dollars and they’ve given you $150,000 of it to manage. And they’re like, well, I’m just testing you, I need to know you before I give you more.
Loooooooooook, you’re never going to see the rest of that portfolio.
Know that getting burned by performance chasers or DIY clients, this is another form of breadcrumbing, by the way, or just having to put up with annoying, overly demanding clients that suck the life out of you.
All of these are symptoms of a lack of clarity about numerically how you should be investing your time and what the return on that investment of time should be on. These activities are degrading your worth.
You’re not being greedy here. I am sorry, but how much you make as a financial advisor is important. Nobody wants to be the client of a broken business or a business that has no plans to sustain itself, given whatever changes may happen in the world and in the economy. You’re not as much doing this for yourself, really, as you are doing it for your clients. Map it out, because there’s a lot of people counting on you to stay in business and to do it profitably.
How weird would it be for your clients if they knew your business wasn’t profitable? Or if they knew that you couldn’t pay your bills easy, or live comfortably, or that your own financial future were uncertain?
Profitability matters. It really does.
-Sara Grillo, CFA
What a solid marketing strategy for financial advisors and planners consists of
There’s different kinds of marketing. I’m going to kind of segmented into two major components. There’s content; and then there’s communications. I talk more about this in my financial advisor marketing plan e-book.
Before you go out there and you start to execute any strategy, you need to have the basics.
And these are some (but not all) of the basics.
A complete website
I’m going to define what a complete website is in a minute. Most financial advisers have a website. It does not have to be fancy. You don’t need to spend 10,000 dollars on your Web site. In other words, it doesn’t have to have a ton of bells and whistles.
However, there are a few elements that need to be in place on the front end and on the back into the website. Understand first that out of all the pages on your website, the ones that are going to get the most attention are the home page, team page, and fees page.
Social media pages
The other thing is you should establish some basic social media pages. So at the very basic level, every financial advisor should have a personal LinkedIn page. Even if you don’t post a lot, you need to give people the opportunity to follow you and you need to post every so often so that it doesn’t look like you are a total graveyard.
What a financial advisor marketing plan template looks like
I covered a few of the basic elements above.
To get the full story ,I wrote an e-book that gets into what the five components of a financial adviser marketing plan are. It’s kind of like a financial advisor marketing plan template.
Download e-book with financial advisor marketing plan template.
I hope you’ll subscribe to my podcast on financial advisor lead generation or consider joining my membership.
Thanks to all for reading and listening. I hope you’ll subscribe and stay with me for the next one.
-Sara
Music
Nice to You by the Vibe Tracks
