Breaking the Cycle of the Post-Tax Season Marketing Rush

In my nearly 16 years in business, I've noticed a common trend among financial advisors: marketing often takes a back seat from February to mid-April, as tax season peaks. Advisors typically focus on supporting clients during this time, which leads to a drop in marketing activities. However, after April 15, when tax season ends and schedules clear up, there's a noticeable rush to ramp up marketing efforts.

If you're an advisor who tends to reduce marketing during these months, the period right after tax season is the perfect moment to reconsider this approach. Consistent marketing throughout the year, even during busy periods, ensures continuous engagement with clients and prospects and prevents the need for a post-tax season marketing surge. It's essential to integrate steady marketing practices into your daily routine now to avoid the start-stop pattern in your marketing efforts in the future.

Strategic Sponsorship Decision-Making

Handling sponsorship requests can be challenging. You need to strike a balance between maintaining relationships and ensuring the sponsorship is beneficial for the company. Companies should consider establishing clear selection criteria when they are bombarded with requests for sponsorships, donations, or ad purchases from clients, centers of influence (COIs), influential community members, and friends.

When developing these criteria, consider:

• The size of the financial request

• The importance of the requesting party

• The fit with your company's marketing goals

It's important to evaluate if the opportunity aligns with your niche's interests and values, and what impact it could have on your brand. Consider factors like cost-effectiveness and the chance to connect with key decision-makers.

By adopting a structured process, you ensure a thorough evaluation of each sponsorship request, helping you make well-informed decisions.

6 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Marketing Point Person

One of the best ways to increase your chances of marketing success is to designate a marketing point person within your firm—someone who can ensure that projects are completed and deadlines are met. While you and other team members will have input in the firm's overall marketing strategy, delegating routine tactics keeps your marketing consistent.

Marketing requires a certain skill set to be successful. When appointing a marketing point person, ask yourself these six questions:

1. Is this person organized and capable of meeting deadlines?

2. Does this person have time?

3. Is this person detail-oriented?

4. Is this person self-motivated?

5. Does this person have both the financial and marketing knowledge required to manage outside vendors?

6. Does this person understand the compliance issues?

Track Your Sales Data

A recent Kitces.com article, “KPIs To Track Your Advisor Marketing And Figure Out What’s Actually Working (Or Not)”, inspired me to reshare this tip from June 2019.

To determine if your marketing is working, you have to closely track your sales funnel. While marketing metrics such as website visitors and workshop attendees are a good predictor of future sales activity, measuring sales metrics is the final indicator of what actually works. That means you need to track prospects and opportunities in your CRM, running monthly sales reports and analyzing the data. To collect information that will allow you to refine your sales and marketing initiatives, we recommend you track the following information in your CRM:

• Sales cycle (time between the first contact and when they became a client)

• Lead source (how the prospect found you)

• Referral source (who referred them, if applicable)

• Whether the prospect qualified

• Stage in your sales process that the prospect is in

• Assets

• Triggering event (pain point that made the prospect reach out)

Why You Should Think Twice Before Buying an Email List

I often receive the question, “Should I buy an email list?” While tools that allow this are available, purchasing an email list for marketing is generally discouraged for several reasons:

1. Legal and compliance issues. Laws in many regions, such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S. and the CCPA in California, require consent for email marketing.

2. Low success rate. Marketing to people who have not opted into your email list is unlikely to elicit a response.

3. Impact on deliverability. If recipients mark your emails as spam, or if you send to addresses that bounce, it could harm your sender reputation and affect the delivery of emails to legitimate subscribers.

4. Risk of being banned by your email marketing software. Providers like Mailchimp and Constant Contact will freeze your account if they discover you have uploaded a purchased list.

If you are still adamant about sending ”cold emails,“ I recommend using technology (e.g., Apollo) and agencies specializing in this type of marketing. They can help you maintain compliance, protect your sender reputation, and implement strategies to increase the success rate of your emails.

Go with the Marketing Flow

This week’s tip was adapted from a June 2021 post.

Marketing effectiveness ebbs and flows with the seasons, and your marketing activities should match these natural rhythms. Here are the optimal times to ramp up your efforts and when to scale back:

Winter through spring (January–May): Capitalize on this prime marketing window by focusing on serious educational topics for your events and content. Include compelling calls to action that encourage people to take the next step.

Summer school break (June–August): During this quieter period, marketing is less effective. Keep your activities light with social events and enjoyable content. Use the additional time for strategic planning and preparation for fall marketing activities.

Fall (September–mid-November): Leverage this prime time for marketing by focusing on launching impactful campaigns. This short window is your opportunity to make a significant impact before the holiday season.

The holidays (mid-November–New Year’s): Marketing during this time is generally less effective, making it ideal for focusing on maintaining relationships. Send cards, gifts, or invitations to social events, and strategize for next year’s marketing plan. This period allows for reflection and planning, setting the stage for a successful year ahead.

Diversify Your Content to Entertain, Educate, Inspire, Convince

When you use different types of content, you can meet various communication goals: entertain, educate, inspire, and convince. This approach helps you reach prospective clients with different interests and needs. Here's how:

1. Entertain: Capture attention, increase engagement, and become memorable by using entertaining videos, fun quizzes, and interactive tools to engage your audience in a lighthearted way.

2. Educate: Establish yourself as a thought leader by creating and sharing valuable knowledge, tips, and insights. Blogs, articles, guides, ebooks, white papers, and webinars are excellent ways to provide information.

3. Inspire: Encourage your prospective clients to act by sharing uplifting content and success stories through community forums and social media.

4. Convince: Demonstrate why your company is the best option by featuring testimonials, reviews, and case studies.

Effectively mixing these content types guides potential clients through their decision-making journey to hire you as their advisor.

To Be an Expert, You Must Share Your Expertise

This week’s tip was adapted from an August 2021 post.

Think of five people whom you consider to be experts you respect. These individuals can be from your business or industry, or they may relate to other areas of your life, such as academic affiliations, hobbies, interests, health, or family.

Now that you have them in mind, consider what they have in common. They all share their original thinking through some form of content—be it lectures, keynote speeches, books, columns, podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, etc.

To be viewed as an expert in your niche by others, it is not enough to merely be capable of performing the work; you must also be able to communicate your knowledge to your audience. If you aspire to be perceived as an expert, it's time to start creating original content.

Smart Content Planning—Test Your Ideas on Social Media First

Using social media to see what content ideas work best is a smart move in planning what you create. Before you dive into making blogs, podcasts, or videos, a simple test on social media can show you what your audience likes. Post a snippet about a topic you're thinking of covering or share interesting content from others (just make sure they're not your competitors) to see how people react. This way, you ensure what you eventually create speaks to your audience. You might even get ideas on how to tweak it to be even better.

Keep in mind, though, this works best if you've got a good number of followers. If your social media circle is smaller, asking questions or running polls can be a great way to find out what interests people. This approach helps you make smart choices, ensuring your efforts in creating content pay off.

New Gmail and Yahoo Email Sender Guidelines

Starting February 1, Gmail and Yahoo introduced new requirements for all emails to improve deliverability and reduce spam. The Gmail policy applies only to senders who send more than 5,000 emails a day to Gmail users. This probably does not concern 99% of people reading this email, but I recommend that everyone adhere to this policy as a best practice to avoid any issues with your marketing emails being delivered. Here are some things you can do:

• Send emails from your own domain (e.g., yourcompany.com) and not from a free email address like gmail.com or yahoo.com.

• Make unsubscribing easy. All popular email marketing systems facilitate this; however, if you send over 5,000 messages daily, you must include a one-click unsubscribe option.

• Avoid being flagged as spam. If your recipients mark your emails as spam beyond a certain threshold, your deliverability to Gmail and Yahoo accounts could be affected. This means not purchasing email lists or adding people to your list without their permission.

The next two requirements may seem technical but take only a few minutes to implement. Your marketing email provider will have instructions on how to do this, and some, like MailChimp, offer automated tools that simplify the process.

• Authenticate your domain using CNAME records.

• Publish a DMARC policy record in your DNS settings.

This might seem complicated, but taking these steps increases the likelihood that your marketing emails will reach your intended recipients now and in the future.