The 52: Create Content Focused on Your Prospects’ Questions, Problems, and Aspirations

Week 46

Create Content Focused on Your Prospects’ Questions, Problems, and Aspirations

To connect with prospects, you want to let them know you understand what they are thinking and feeling. This means creating content that answers questions they have, solves problems they face, or provides tips to achieve aspirations they desire. It is addressing these issues (not what happened with the stock market last week) that will motivate them to hire you.

Four Reasons Why Your Marketing Isn't Connecting with Prospects

How to Compete for Clients on Your Terms: 4 Key Realities Advisors Face

Do you struggle to attract new clients other than from referrals? There may be a reason for that struggle—it is hard for prospects to choose you. That may sound insulting, but I don’t mean it to be. Let’s take a look at some basic realities prospects face.

Reality #1: Most Financial Advisors Make the Same Claims

All financial advisors claim they are good at the most important services a prospective client is looking for, including comprehensive financial planning and investment management. Even if your competition isn’t effective at these services, they also need to keep their businesses running, so they will say what it takes to get clients. The truth is, you can’t stop financial advisors from saying they do what you do, even if they don’t.

Reality #2: Prospects Aren’t Qualified to Evaluate Financial Advisors

Most prospects aren’t qualified to evaluate whether a financial advisor is good or not. Have they worked with dozens of financial advisors in the past to know the difference? You hope not because that kind of track record means they will probably be a terrible client. Unless the prospect is in a field that requires them to interact with a lot of financial advisors—for example, CPAs—this is probably the first or second time they’ve had to evaluate and hire a financial advisor, meaning they don’t have the skills to do so.

Reality #3: Prospects Have Too Many Similar Choices

To a prospect, most independent financial advisors look the same. They all offer the same basic services (financial planning, investment management, retirement planning, etc.), work with the same typical client (high net worth, probably nearing retirement), for the same similar price (1% of AUM +/-).

They have so many similar options and don’t know how to make the right choice. They become so overwhelmed, they don’t make any decision in fear of making the wrong one, or they choose an advisor based on some factor other than being the most qualified (see reality #4). 

Reality #4: When Prospects Can’t Evaluate Qualification, They Use Other Factors

When a prospect can’t evaluate you based on qualification (because how do they know if you are more qualified than the dozens or even hundreds of other advisors in their area?), they will resort to other factors. These factors include (1) the lowest price; (2) whether they like you more than the other advisors they meet with; (3) someone they know recommends you (this person is probably also not qualified to evaluate financial advisors); (4) they like your marketing the best; or (5) they choose an established (probably national) brand they think is a safe choice.

Again, It’s Hard for Prospects to Choose You

If you wonder why it is hard to get new clients, it is because it is hard for them to choose you. You must compete on factors that have nothing to do with how qualified you are or the services you provide.

Do you want to offer the lowest price? Probably not. Are you more likable than all the other advisors your prospect interviews? Who knows? Do you have the largest network in town of people who can refer business to you? Unlikely. Are you the best marketer in your area? My guess is definitely not! And do you have a well-known brand name with decades of history behind you? Not if you are a small, independent RIA.    

Sure, you can try to compete on being independent, fee-only, or a fiduciary if those are still differentiating factors in your community (most places, they are not). Today, most advisors claim they put their clients’ interests first, which goes back to reality #1. And from most prospects’ point of view, those factors equate to minuscule differences anyway.

Compete on Qualification Instead

So how do you compete? You can lower your price, work on being more likable, expand your network, or spend more money to have the best marketing. Or you can change the playing field completely and compete for clients based on qualification. After all, most prospects would prefer to choose the advisor they knew is most qualified instead of just going off gut instinct.

How do you compete on qualification? The easiest answer is to specialize in a niche, a narrow segment of clients you serve exclusively.

When you work exclusively with a niche, such as business owners selling their business or employees with pension plans at the local utility company, it’s easier to make the claim you are the most qualified among a prospect’s choices.

When all you do every day is work with a niche, it’s logical for a prospect to assume you are more qualified to handle their niche-specific problems than a generalist firm would be. How could you not be?

The services a niche needs may not even be that different from what most people of similar wealth and income levels need. But when you point out their differences and how they need a specialist, they will evaluate all other advisors based on their level of experience in working with people like them.

The key is to narrow in on a niche where few companies can make the same claim as you. For example, many firms claim they work with business owners, so you can say you work with business owners who own agricultural businesses. You position yourself as an expert in the specific issues that ranch and farm owners face.  

Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

Marketing is hard when you have a business in an industry where prospects can’t tell the difference between you and the competition. The solution is not to differentiate your firm in some minor way that prospects won’t even notice. The answer is to design your firm so that prospects can’t even compare you to other firms. There just aren’t other firms like you that exist. That’s when you have no competition!

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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.

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Further Reading:

If You Want to Get Rich, Build a Power Niche by Bruce M. Stachenfeld
Differentiate or Die: Survival in the Era of Killer Competition by Jack Trout

The 52: Additional Domain Names Do Not Help Your Search Engine Rankings

Week 45

Additional Domain Names Do Not Help Your Search Engine Rankings

I often get the question from advisors about whether they should buy additional website domains (e.g., WorldsBestFinancialAdvisor.com) and forward them to their primary company domain (e.g., ABCFinancialAdvisors.com) to improve their Google rankings. The short answer is “No!” Buying domains and forwarding them to your company site has zero impact on your search rankings. Instead of spending money on additional domains, you’d be better off creating valuable, original content that answers the questions people search for.

Social Media Doesn’t Work for Advisors

The 52: Your Social Media Posts Should Be About the Client, Not You

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

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.

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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 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

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.

Seven Ways to Differentiate Your Advisory Business