The 52: To Be an Expert, You Must Share Your Expertise

Week 34

To Be an Expert, You Must Share Your Expertise

Think of five people you consider to be an expert you respect. They can be people in your business or industry or in other areas of your life, like academic affiliations, hobbies, interests, health, and family. Now that you have them in your head, think of what they have in common. They all share their original thinking through some form of content (e.g., lectures, keynote speeches, books, columns, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels). For you to be viewed as an expert by others, it is not enough to be able to perform the work; you must be able to share your knowledge with your audience. If you want to be perceived as an expert, it’s time to start creating original content.

The 52: Set Your Younger Advisors Up for Success with a Niche

Week 33

Set Your Younger Advisors Up for Success with a Niche

Young advisors employed by an RIA are often at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting new clients to a firm. They generally lack the network, relationships, and experience needed to convince prospective clients to work with them.

If firm ownership would like to help their young advisors overcome these challenges, they would be well served to coach them into working with a niche. A niche will help the advisor:

1. Focus their marketing time and direction

2. Stand out from the crowd

3. Take ownership of their marketing

4. Overcome the lack of a large network

5. Overcome a perceived lack of experience

6. Overcome any apprehension around sales and marketing

7. Believe bringing in clients on their own is achievable.

The 52: Understand Plagiarism to Avoid Liability

Week 32

Understand Plagiarism to Avoid Liability

Did you know, your team may be posting plagiarized content on your website and they don’t even know it? Most people know that copying someone else’s writing verbatim is plagiarism, but there are less obvious forms that can create liability for your firm, such as paraphrasing or following inspiration articles too closely in structure and sentiment.

Here are seven ways to avoid plagiarism:

1. Write in your own words.

2. Put quotation marks around verbatim copy.

3. Give credit to the original source even when paraphrasing.

4. Include links to the original source.

5. Include sources for all data, charts, and graphs that are not proprietary to you.

6. Use footnotes.

7. Use a plagiarism checker like Grammarly to make sure you, your team, and your freelancers aren’t accidentally plagiarizing.

The 52: Define the Purpose of Your Content

Week 31

Define the Purpose of Your Content

When developing content for your website, consider first the purpose of your content. Here are some options:

1. Nurture relationships (e.g., canned newsletter content)

2. Generate leads (e.g., ebook, recorded webinar)

3. Establish expertise and credibility (e.g., original blogs, original videos)

4. Change mindset (e.g., blog on why hiring a financial advisor is better than DIY)

5. Search engine optimization (e.g., blog on how to find a financial advisor in San Diego)

6. Demonstrating client experience (e.g., case studies, testimonials)

7. Behind the scenes (e.g., press release on the company winning a Best Places to Work award)

Once you know your purpose, you can craft your content with the end result in mind.

The 52: Match the Sales Experience to the Client Service Experience

Week 30

Match the Sales Experience to the Client Service Experience

Use your sales process to train your prospects to be good clients. Often, advisors will bend over backward to convert a prospect only to shift expectations once the paperwork is signed. If you take a prospect’s call immediately the first time they call in, they will expect you to be available every time they call as a client. But if you teach them to schedule a time to talk as a prospect, they’ll do the same as a client. By matching your sales experience to your client service experience, you’ll attract the right kinds of prospects to your firm and train them to be good clients.

The 52: Provide a Unique Service that Solves a Unique Problem

Week 29

Provide a Unique Service that Solves a Unique Problem

The next tip in our series on how to simplify your marketing is to provide a unique service that solves a unique problem. When you provide the same or similar service as thousands of other advisors, you have to do a lot more marketing to get noticed over your competitors. Do you think you can make more marketing headway with the message “We help clients achieve peace of mind during retirement” than the largest financial firms with the biggest budgets?

When you provide a unique service that solves a problem for a specific niche (e.g., “We develop estate planning strategies for blended families”), it’s immediately obvious how you are different. And when you are truly different, you don’t have to spend as much time, money, and energy promoting that message.

The 52: Focus on a Niche

Week 28

Focus on a Niche

The next tip in our series on how to simplify your marketing is to focus on a niche. When you focus on too many audiences at the same time (e.g., pre-retirees, widows, and young professionals), you need different messages and different campaigns to make sure you resonate with each group. This not only creates complexity but also increases the volume of marketing—which means more of your time, money, and energy—that you must do to achieve results.

The 52: Focus on What Moves the Needle

Week 27

Focus on What Moves the Needle

The next tip in our series on how to simplify your marketing is to focus on what matters most. Too often, advisors spend their time on marketing activities that seem fun, easy, or interesting instead of the ones that actually move the needle. For example, a firm changes the images on their website when they could be reaching out to influencers who can help them get in front of their niche. Advisors feel validated that they are spending time on marketing, but they aren’t producing results. When you focus on only the activities that make an impact, you don’t waste your time on frivolous exercises that don’t get you anywhere.

The 52: Do the Marketing Activities You Enjoy

Week 26

Do the Marketing Activities You Enjoy

In last week’s tip, I introduced the concept of simplifying marketing to make more of an impact. One way to do this is to focus your marketing on the activities you love, such as nurturing relationships, teaching financial concepts, or optimizing your website. When you do something you love, your marketing becomes easy, and you are more likely to implement consistently. When you do things you don’t enjoy, it’s easy to put them off or do them poorly, neither of which leads to success.

The 52: Do Less Marketing

Week 25

Do Less Marketing

I’m a fan of Greg McKeown and his books Essentialism and Effortless. In a nutshell, his philosophy is to do only the things that matter and then make those things easier. This philosophy can easily be applied to marketing. In an industry that always tells you to do more marketing, maybe the secret is to do less but do it better. Here is what happens when you attempt to do too much marketing:

• You fail to implement consistently and never gain traction.

• You focus on volume over quality and just add to the noise.

When you simplify your marketing, you can dive deeper and focus on quality so that your marketing becomes more controlled and can have more impact. In the coming weeks, I’ll talk about how you can simplify your marketing to get better results.