The 52: The Magic of Repetition and Routines

The Magic of Repetition and Routines

Effective marketing requires repetition and consistency to build relationships, establish trust, and increase brand awareness. While marketing should be memorable, creative, and engaging, the implementation should be repetitive and boring.

Make marketing a regular part of your operations by building it into your company's workflows. This helps you build awareness, increase sales, stay competitive, and adapt to changing market conditions.

By marketing regularly, you stay top of mind with existing clients and COIs and reach prospective clients in your niche.

Establish a routine for activities such as content creation, social media, email marketing, and networking to ensure marketing success and stand out. Consistent effort leads to growth and success!

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by humans.

The 52: Treat Marketing as an Experiment

Treat Marketing as an Experiment

Financial advisors should consider marketing an experiment because it allows you to try different strategies, tactics, and channels to see what works best for your business. Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach; what works for one advisor may not work for you. By approaching marketing as an experiment, you can:

• Test strategies: Try different marketing tactics to see which ones resonate best with your target audience. For example, experiment with social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, or traditional advertising to see which channels drive the most leads.

• Measure results: Track metrics like new appointments and conversion rates to determine which marketing efforts are most effective. This allows you to focus your resources on the strategies that yield the highest ROI.

• Adapt to changing trends: Prospect behavior constantly evolves depending on economic, political, and social environments. By treating marketing as an experiment, you can experiment with new tactics and channels to adapt to the changing environment.

• Learn from failures: Not every marketing experiment will be successful, and that’s OK. By embracing failure as a learning opportunity, you can identify what didn’t work and adjust your approach accordingly.

Treating marketing as an experiment allows you to be more agile and responsive to changing market conditions. Continuously testing and refining your marketing strategies can improve your brand awareness, attract more leads, and ultimately grow your business.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by humans.

The 52: Go Ahead and Ask

Go Ahead and Ask

I’ve recently moved and have been surprised by how often I’ve been asked for referrals or reviews as part of the process. My mortgage broker asked three times—by email and text—if I would post a review about him. The movers asked me to give them a five-star review after they unloaded my furniture. And my new dentist encouraged me to refer my friends and family as I left my new-patient consultation.

If it is so easy for other professionals to ask for reviews and referrals, why is it hard for financial advisors? It’s almost a ubiquitous request at this point when doing business. In all three instances, the requests appeared to be part of the standard business practice.

So go ahead and ask for those reviews or referrals at the end of each client meeting. Build it into your business practice. The request has become so common in society that your clients probably won’t think twice.

The 52: Start with the Top of the Funnel

Start with the Top of the Funnel

I have noticed that many highly analytical advisors prioritize bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) marketing activities, such as client testimonials and website tools like calculators or assessments (e.g., Riskalyze), to convert leads into clients. These are important parts of the funnel, but if you are anxious to get new clients, I recommend starting with top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) marketing instead. This type of marketing focuses on attracting and educating potential clients and includes presentations, content distribution (e.g., blogs, videos) across various channels, and SEO strategies.

The logic is simple: You need to first attract visitors to your website. Only then can you improve your marketing process by focusing on BoFu activities that will convert them into clients. When you concentrate on BoFu activities first, you may have a great system for converting prospects, but there may be no prospects visiting your website to convert.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by humans.

The 52: Unlocking the Power of Naming: The Benefits of Hiring a Naming Company

Unlocking the Power of Naming: The Benefits of Hiring a Naming Company

I often receive requests to help advisors come up with a new name for their company or a new service offering. Despite appearing simple at first, naming can be a complex and challenging task that takes months. If you are serious about naming a company or service, I recommend hiring a company that specializes in naming. They can help you with:

1. Strategy development: The company will collaborate with you to create a comprehensive naming strategy that reflects your brand values, vision, and target audience.

2. Creative name generation: They will generate a list of potential names that are memorable, meaningful, and suitable for your brand.

3. Trademark research: The company will conduct a thorough investigation to ensure the desired name is available and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights.

4. Linguistic and cultural analysis: They will analyze the name for linguistic and cultural appropriateness, ensuring it is appealing in different markets and regions.

5. Brand positioning: The company will help position your brand by creating names that evoke specific emotions, values, or benefits.

6. Domain name availability: They will check the availability of domain names for your website and suggest alternatives if your first choice is unavailable.

7. Trademark and legal support: They will provide help with trademark registration and other legal considerations related to naming your brand.

At Kaleido, we don’t offer naming services, so we recommend Tungsten.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by humans.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

With its 11 Oscar nominations, Everything Everywhere All at Once has been on my mind. Not so much the movie since I found it hard to understand—the title is what caught my attention. This phrase is a fitting description of many financial advisors’ marketing strategy. The idea is that you can maximize your chances of reaching potential clients by being present in multiple places and in multiple ways. However, this scattershot approach can be problematic for several reasons:

1. It can be costly and time-consuming to implement a variety of marketing tactics. If not executed effectively, you will end up wasting time and money.

2. You may find it difficult to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts when you spread your resources too thin. You’ll find it hard to make informed decisions on how to allocate resources.

3. You may not effectively target your ideal clients by trying to be everywhere and appealing to everyone. This can lead to a low conversion rate and a lack of return on investment.

Instead of trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once, consider doing a few things, in a few places, consistently well.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by a human.

The 52: Maximize Your Marketing Efforts by Minimizing Low-Value, High-Time Activities

Maximize Your Marketing Efforts by Minimizing Low-Value, High-Time Activities

As a financial advisor, it's important to ensure that your marketing efforts produce tangible results. You don’t want to waste your time on low-impact activities that make you feel like you're doing something but, in reality, are just busy work (e.g., unfocused networking or constantly tweaking your website). Instead, focus on strategies that will drive real growth for your business.

Remember, time is a valuable commodity and should be invested wisely, just like you do with your money. By minimizing low-value, high-time marketing activities, you can maximize your return on investment and see real results in your business.

The 52: Standing Out in the AI Era: Humanize Your Educational Content

Standing Out in the AI Era: Humanize Your Educational Content

With the ease of generating educational content using artificial intelligence, it’s important to make your content stand out. One effective strategy is to humanize it by incorporating humor, opinion, and real-life examples. For example, you can add a touch of levity to your articles or videos to make them more engaging. If humor doesn’t align with your brand, consider sharing your personal opinions on a topic to add a unique perspective. Additionally, incorporating anonymous real-life stories or situations that reinforce your subject can make your content more relatable and memorable for your audience. By adding these elements, you can offer readers and viewers a more personal and engaging experience than what they can get from AI-generated content alone.

The 52: Different Roles, Different Marketing Pieces

Different Roles, Different Marketing Pieces

If you have different client types that you serve, you probably have different marketing pieces for each one. For example, you probably have a different brochure or webpage for widows than for business owners.

But do you have different pieces for the different roles in the client relationship? For example, do you have one piece for the spouse who is leading the charge and one for the spouse who is burying their head in the sand about their finances? Do you have one for the older widow who is suddenly in charge of her money and one for the child who will ultimately act as the power of attorney?

Often, there are multiple people involved in the decision to hire you. Customize your marketing materials for each role in the relationship to address their concerns or questions in advance. This will help you avoid any one person in the relationship derailing the opportunity to work with you.

The 52: Offer the Value-Adds That Actually Impact Your Niche

Offer the Value-Adds That Actually Impact Your Niche

In November, Kitces.com published the article “101 Things That Advisors Actually DO To Add Value.” Since then, I’ve been observing online conversations and having discussions with advisors who skipped over the article and jumped right to the chart of 101 services. The advisors I spoke with were enthusiastically planning to add as many of these services as they can to their practice.

The problem is many advisors missed the lesson the author was trying to convey. In his conclusion, Adam Van Deusen states: “Ultimately, the key point is that while there are more than a hundred different ways advisors can add value to their clients’ lives, advisors who are able to go deeper for their ideal target client have hundreds more ways to do so.”

He continues: “In fact, by crafting an ideal target client persona and shaping their service offering around the value adds that most apply to these clients, advisors can not only enhance their efficiency, but also better differentiate themselves from more generalist firms, potentially leading to more efficient marketing and greater client growth in the long run!”

The lesson of the article is not to offer as many of the 101 services as possible to a broad set of clients. The lesson is to offer only the most impactful services to your niche. Your operations will be more efficient, your marketing will be easier, and you will be happier.