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The 52: Your Social Media Posts Should Be About the Client, Not You
Week 44: Stop talking about yourself; start talking to your prospect.
Week 44
Your Social Media Posts Should Be About the Client, Not You
Recently, whenever I’m on LinkedIn, my feed is filled with advisors talking about themselves—the awards they’ve won, the new employees they’ve hired, or some other personal story. If you want to use social media as a marketing tool, most of your posts should focus on your prospective client, not you. As Donald Miller says in his book Building a StoryBrand, when it comes to promoting your business, you are not the hero of your story—your client is. While it is OK to brag occasionally, your posts should tell a prospect how you are helping them in their life’s story, not telling them about your life story.
Social Media Doesn’t Work All That Well for Financial Advisors. Try These Channels Instead
With few exceptions, financial advisors don’t generate the leads they want with a social media strategy. They should consider the influencer and search channels to get more exposure to their target market and, thus, leads.
Whenever an RIA reaches out to my firm, we always ask what they hope to accomplish. One of the most common responses we get is, “We want to improve our social media presence.” What they are really saying is, “If we improve our social media, we’ll get more leads.” In my experience, and the experience of many marketers I talk to, this is just not the case.
Social media generally does not build leads for most financial advisory firms. Of course, rare exceptions exist, but those companies devote more time and effort than 99.9% of advisors ever will creating content, building an audience, and consistently engaging on social media.
The best use of social media is for nurturing existing relationships, but that also requires active engagement. If all you do is post content, then your posts just become one more thing that people scroll past on their cellphones.
If you want to get more exposure with your target market and, as a result, more leads, there are better channels than social media. Let’s look at two of them: influencers and search.
Influencers
Building an audience, whether that is through social media, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, or email lists, takes time. While building an audience is valuable and worth pursuing, you should start connecting with that audience by leveraging influencers.
Influencers are the people, publications, and organizations that already have the audience you want to reach. They already have built-in trust with your audience and are likely to have engaged followers.
So how can you leverage influencers? Here are some ideas:
Contribute guest blog posts to popular websites your target market visits.
Contribute articles to publications your target market reads.
Be a guest on a podcast your target market listens to.
Be a guest speaker at a conference, workshop, or event your target market attends.
Engage with influencers your target market follows on social media who may be willing to share your content.
Contribute expertise to a newsletter or educational event of a traditional center of influence (e.g., CPA, attorney) your target market is connected to.
If you don’t have a large network or following of your target market, leveraging the relationships of others will be the fastest way to get in front of your desired audience.
Search
When people have questions, the first place they look to for an answer is the internet, whether that is on Google or YouTube. These are people who clearly have a pain point they want to resolve, and you can help! These people are actively engaged in solving their problem, and a portion of them may be in the mindset of hiring a financial advisor.
The key to using search to your benefit is to identify the most pressing questions prospects who would be interested in your services may search for. You then develop content that provides them with an answer.
This content creation is the first step. The second step is to optimize your content so that your prospect is likely to find it on Google or another search engine, or YouTube if you produce videos.
While the search strategy will not get you in front of your target market as quickly as the influencer method, investing in a search engine optimization strategy can provide compounded rewards over the long run in the form of new prospects.
Summary
If you are frustrated with your social media efforts, don’t double down on a tactic that isn’t working. Instead, focus on leveraging influencers and search engine optimization. You’ll connect with your target audience and have a better opportunity to generate the leads you seek.
About Kristen Luke
Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.
The 52: A Niche May Require a Creative Fee Structure
Week 43: A straight AUM fee structure may not work for your niche.
Week 37
A Niche May Require a Creative Fee Structure
Pre-retirees and retirees are a popular client type for RIAs because they fit well into the AUM model. But when you specialize in a niche, you may find the traditional AUM fee structure doesn’t work for your prospects. For example, business owners who are starting to plan for the sale of their business may not meet your investable asset minimums today but will have a windfall in three to five years. Or perhaps you work with attorneys who are more comfortable paying a retainer because that is how they charge their own clients. When working with a niche, you may need to adopt a creative fee structure to monetize the opportunity your niche presents.
The 52: The Two Best Channels to Promote Your Content
Week 42: Promote your content to people already interested in it.
Week 42
The Two Best Channels to Promote Your Content
As you begin to create content, the question is, how do you get people to see it? Social media is often the go-to answer, but most advisors don’t have a large enough network for this avenue to work. Here are two more effective channels to promote your content:
Influencers: Ask the people who already have a network of prospects you want to reach to share your content. An influencer can be a person or an organization your target market follows and trusts, such as centers of influence, publishers, social media influencers, YouTubers, and podcasters, just to name a few.
Search engines: Optimize your content for search engines to help your ideal prospects find the answers to the financial questions they are researching and, as a result, find you.
The 52: How to Differentiate Your Firm
Week 41: If you want to sound different, you have to be different.
Week 41
How to Differentiate Your Firm
I often hear financial advisors ask how they can differentiate from other advisors who say they do the same thing as their firm (even if they don’t). Instead of asking yourself, “How do I differentiate?” ask the question, “How do I become incomparable?” If you want to sound different, you have to be different in a way that is obvious to your prospects. Here are five ways to do that:
Focus on a niche that most advisors don’t exclusively serve (e.g., United Airlines pilots).
Be an expert in an area most other advisors don’t serve (e.g., the Federal Employees Retirement System).
Develop a unique proprietary process that can’t be compared with any other firm’s process. (Hint! Not the CFP Board’s seven-step financial planning process or CEG’s wealth management process.)
Have a unique distribution method (e.g., your office is in an Airstream you drive to the client).
Offer best-in-class customer service. (This is extremely difficult because the only way for this to work is through widespread word-of-mouth from your existing clients—think Ritz-Carlton and Nordstrom.)
Seven Ways to Differentiate Your Financial Advisory Business
Financial advisors often sound like their competition. They use the same differentiators and the same language. Here are seven ways you can position your firm so that it is incomparable to prospective clients.
One of the most common frustrations I hear from financial advisors is “How do I get prospects to understand that we are different from the other firms out there?” Usually, those “other firms” I hear about claim to offer comprehensive financial planning but don’t deliver on their promise. Yet time and time again, the prospect is choosing the company with the best marketing, not necessarily the one with the best financial advice.
When I ask an advisor how they think their firm is different, I hear terms like “fee-only,” “fiduciary,” and “independent,” or statements like “We actually do comprehensive financial planning.” These are all good qualities worth highlighting. But unless a prospect is highly informed, those “differentiators” don’t help them understand how you are different from other companies they interview—especially if they say the same thing as you.
Instead of asking the question “How do I differentiate my firm from the competition?” you should ask yourself, “How do I become incomparable?” If you want to sound different, you have to be different in a way that is obvious to your prospects.
So how can you position yourself to be incomparable from your competition? Let’s look at seven ways:
1. Focus on a Niche
When you focus on a narrow set of clients—for example, business owners who are selling their company—it is obvious that you specialize in the needs of one type of client. For people in your niche, this will be in sharp contrast to the firms they interview that are all things to all people.
2. Be an Expert Where Others Aren’t
You can position yourself as an expert in an area most other advisors don’t have knowledge. This focus may overlap with a niche, or it can be a stand-alone solution covering a wide variety of client types. For example, you may have expertise working with people highly invested in real estate who need an investment strategy that diversifies their concentrated position in real estate but doesn’t force them to sell property.
3. Develop a Proprietary Process
By developing a unique, proprietary process, you make comparing your firm to others akin to comparing apples to oranges. This approach means throwing out the standard seven-step financial planning process that most firms use. Your unique process should help prospective clients see a clear path from where they are today to where they can expect to be after working with you.
4. Have a Unique Distribution Method
Offering a way to deliver advice other than by meeting in the office or over Zoom can help you stand out from the crowd. For example, let’s say your office is an Airstream you bring to the client’s home. You offer the ultimate in convenience because all your client has to do is step out their front door, and there you are.
5. Offer Best-in-Class Customer Service
You can propel your business by having customer service so good that people can’t help but talk about you. Just consider the reputation of the Ritz-Carlton and Nordstrom. However, this approach is challenging for most advisory firms to pull off because the only way it works is through widespread word-of-mouth from your existing clients. That means you need enough clients who talk about you regularly to build your reputation in the community.
6. Outspend the Competition on Marketing
One way to stand out from the competition is to be louder than them. That means having a bold brand and being everywhere—workshops, radio shows, podcasts, billboards, sponsorships, advertisements, etc. If your brand is ubiquitous, your prospects will feel like they already know you, and it will be hard for them to compare you with other firms. The downside is that you have to be prepared to spend a lot of money. If you’re not fully committed, you’ll just waste your money.
7. Stand for Something
When you share the same values and beliefs as your prospects, they automatically recognize you as different from other advisors. But this means you need to be bold in your messaging, perhaps even controversial or divisive. For example, you state, “We are a faith-based firm that weaves in conservative, Christian values into everything we do.” Then you build your culture and client experience to match those values. As with No. 6 above, you have to commit to this approach. If you dabble in standing for something, you won’t have the impact you are looking for.
Go All In
Choosing just one of these methods can help you stand out from your competition. If you layer in multiple options, you’ll find even more ways to prove your uniqueness. Whether you adopt one approach or multiple ones, the key to success is to go all in. Putting your toe in the water won’t get you any results, and you’ll continue to look and sound like every other advisor. Remember, if you want prospects to think you are different, you actually have to be different.
About Kristen Luke
Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.
The 52: You Aren’t Imagining It. Closing Web Leads Is Harder
Week 40: Your close rate for web leads will be lower than average.
Week 40
You Aren’t Imagining It. Closing Web Leads Is Harder
Many financial advisors covet website leads—those prospects who reach out because they found you on a Google search. It feels like they are the answer to easy marketing. But web leads aren’t always quality leads. Compared with leads from other marketing sources, such as referrals, web leads are generally less qualified, more likely to shop around for advisors, or less likely to commit to hiring an advisor. For these reasons, you can expect your sales close rate to be much lower than your average for other leads. While web leads may mean the marketing is easier, they also mean the sale is harder.
