The 52: Agitate the Pain

Agitate the Pain So Your Prospect Acts

Two indicators that predict whether a prospect will hire an advisor are how much pain they feel because of their financial situation and their sense of urgency around solving that problem. Some client types, like widows, inherently have a high sense of pain and urgency, while others do not (e.g., people who are sitting on so much cash that they don’t know what to do with it).

When you face a situation where a prospect doesn’t feel significant pain, you need to agitate any pain that does exist to get them to take action. You don’t have to market on fear, but you need to bring to light the pain they may not be aware of. For example, if someone has piles of cash, you could explain, “Each day you are sitting on cash, your money is worth less than the day before because of inflation. The longer you wait, the less valuable your cash becomes.”

If your prospect doesn’t feel pain and urgency, you must create this for them to get them to act.

The 52: Marketing Surges: More Momentum, Less Effort

Marketing Surges: More Momentum, Less Effort

Stephanie Bogan’s meeting surge has become a popular client service approach for many RIAs. But the concept can be applied to marketing as well. While there are some activities that should be consistently implemented (e.g., newsletters), others could actually be more effective if done in surges. For example:

• Schedule all your one-on-one meetings with CPAs in January right before tax season gets busy.

• When launching a niche, flood your social media channels with as much niche-focused content as possible during the first three months to start establishing your reputation as an expert.

• Schedule your speaking engagements in January, February, March, April, May, September, and October when people are most likely to take action on their finances.

Through marketing surges, you will create more momentum with less effort.

Where Is Your Marketing Failing?

A lot of financial advisors complain that their marketing is not working. They’ll list out all the things they are doing that they’ve been told to do but just aren’t seeing the results they hoped for.

It can be frustrating when you think you are following all the marketing best practices, but they don’t work. Do you need to scrap your work and try something else? Most likely not. Instead, analyze your marketing to see where there may be a point or points of failure. 

Think of your marketing system as an arch. An arch is a structure that supports a building—in this case, your business. Each stone of the arch reinforces the other to create one sound structure. If any part is weak or fails, the entire system is compromised. 

Your marketing system acts in the same way. The individual “stones” that make up your arch are your audience, message, channel, content, call to action, lead capture, nurturing, and conversion. They rely on one another’s strength to make the overall marketing system structurally sound.

Since all these pieces are interconnected, you need to analyze which stone is exhibiting weakness to see why your overall system is not structurally sound. Let’s take a look at each piece.

Stone 1: Audience

Do you have a narrowly defined audience you are trying to reach with your marketing? Your audience will dictate which message to communicate, which marketing channels to use, and which content to create. An overly broad audience (e.g., pre-retirees with investable assets of $500,000 in the greater Los Angeles area) will water down the effectiveness of your message, channels, and content.

Signs of Weakness:

• Not defining your audience

• Marketing to too large of an audience

Stone 2: Message

Do you have a clear, simple message that resonates with your audience? Do you consistently communicate that message? If you have a broad audience, your message is probably generic and doesn’t appeal to anyone.

If your message is generic (e.g., we help you achieve peace of mind), complex (e.g., addressing all the services you offer), or not repeated enough, you won’t break through the noise in the various marketing channels you use. You also won’t get your audience to accept your call to action to do business with you.

Signs of Failure:

• Having a generic message

• Not addressing your audience’s primary financial pain point

• Having too many messages you are trying to communicate

• Having a complex message

• Not repeating one simple message often enough

Stone 3: Channel

Are you using marketing channels that reach your audience? Do you attend the events your audience attends? Have you published in the media that your audience consumes?

If you use the wrong channels, you will fail to have your audience hear your message or consume your content. 

Signs of Failure:

• Blindly using social media

• Attending broadly targeted events (e.g., chamber of commerce)

• Placing ads in non-targeted publications or websites

Stone 4: Content

Are you using the right content for your channel? For example, you can fail in using written content on a visual channel, such as promoting blogs on Instagram.

Are you communicating the right message in your content? If you are using the wrong content, your channel won’t generate interest in your business and won’t entice people to accept your call to action. 

Signs of Failure:

• Content that does not address your audience’s primary financial concerns or aspirations

• Content mediums that are not conducive to the channels you chose

• Content that does not represent the way you solve problems for your clients

Stone 5: Call to Action

Do you have a clear and specific action you want your audience to take in every marketing campaign? You should actually have two calls to action to choose from depending on the campaign you run:

• Transition call to action: Use this when you want a lead to enter their contact information so you can market to them in the future (e.g., “download the ebook”).

• Direct call to action: Use this when you want a prospect to make an appointment (e.g., “schedule a 30-minute introductory call”).

Signs of Failure:

• Not using transition calls to action on most marketing campaigns or on the website

• Using a direct call to action too soon in the marketing funnel (e.g., Facebook ads promoting “schedule an appointment”)

• Not including a direct call to action on every nurturing campaign once you have the prospect’s email address

• Having too soft of a direct call to action (e.g., “contact us to learn more”)

Stone 6: Lead Capture

Do you have a way to capture the names and contact information of your audience you would like to market to in the future? This lead capture is usually an ebook, webinar, course, report, or another tool that directly addresses the audience’s primary pain point and is promoted through your transition call to action.

Signs of Failure:

• Not having a lead capture that directly relates to your audience’s primary pain point

• Not having a lead capture that is part of the sales process

Stone 7: Nurturing

Do you have a system for nurturing the leads from your lead capture? You will want two types of nurturing campaigns:

• Short term: A campaign that looks to capture people ready to take action and schedule an appointment now! This is usually a series of drip emails specific to the lead capture resource sent over several weeks. The series agitates the problem, overcomes the prospects’ objectives, and convinces them that you’re the right advisor for them.

• Long term: A campaign that you regularly send month after month, year after year, such as a newsletter. The goal is to stay top of mind with your entire prospect database until they decide to take action and schedule an appointment.

Signs of Failure:

• Not having both a short-term and long-term nurturing campaign

• Not having the direct call to action on every campaign

Stone 8: Conversion

Do you have a process that makes it easy for your audience to go from lead to prospect to client? Do you have a follow-up process so that prospects don’t fall through the cracks?

If you don’t have a good system to turn your marketing leads into appointments on your calendar and then clients for your business, you waste all the time, money, and effort spent on the other stones of your marketing arch.   

Signs of Failure:

• Making it difficult for prospects to sign up to work with you

• Not having a way for prospects to schedule an initial appointment with you on your website

• Not having a qualifying questionnaire so that you meet with only ideal prospects

• Not having a way for prospects to easily sign agreements on their computer or device when they are ready to move forward

• Not having a standardized follow-up process to keep prospects engaged until they are ready to work with you

All the stones of your marketing need to support each other to generate consistent results. Evaluating the individual stones in your arch will indicate whether you have an incredibly strong marketing structure or if your whole system is compromised.

If you do identify a weak stone, you now know where you should spend your time, effort, and money improving your marketing instead of randomly implementing new tactics, hoping for better results.  

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About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency that helps transform Registered Investment Advisors and their employees into experts in a niche, making it easier for them to stand out from the competition and attract ideal clients. Over the past 16 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

The 52: The Most Popular Niche We See Is …

The Most Popular Niche We See Is …

I talk to a lot of financial advisors about which niches they are pursuing or considering. For a long time, the niches I heard most frequently were business owners and women in transition. But these days, the most popular niche of the advisors I speak to is employees with equity compensation.

Does this mean equity compensation is too saturated to pursue? No, it just means you must niche down and become more specialized so that you can clearly differentiate from other advisors in the equity comp space. That could mean focusing on one industry or even one company. Or it could mean specializing in one subset of the niche, like C-suite executives or IPOs.

When there is too much competition in a niche, it’s time to niche down.

How Choosing A Niche Can Help Financial Advisors Conquer The 3 B’s Of Marketing Differentiation

The 52: Market What Your Prospect Wants

Market What Your Prospect Wants

One of the biggest mistakes I see advisors make is that they try to communicate a message that is focused on what they want for the prospect instead of what the prospect wants for themselves. For example, the advisor says, “We develop a portfolio based on your risk tolerance.” But the prospect is thinking, “Do I have enough money saved up to retire?”

When marketing to a prospect, always focus your message on what their immediate pain point is. Speak in their language. And don’t try to promote messages for things they aren’t even aware they need yet (e.g., we make sure your beneficiaries are up to date.

The 52: Marketing Strategy Changes with Scale

Marketing Strategy Changes with Scale

In the book The 1-Page Marketing Plan, author Allan Dib states that marketing strategy changes with scale. He poses the analogy that it takes a much different approach and investment to build a skyscraper than it does a small investment property.

The same concept can be applied to marketing a multibillion-dollar-AUM RIA versus a $100 million-AUM RIA. Yet many small RIAs look to the largest firms in the industry to replicate their marketing strategy.

Large firms spend money on national TV, radio, print, and digital advertising because they have the money for it to make an impact, and the cost is a drop in the bucket for them. Small firms that try this, even on a local level, will blow through their annual marketing budget in weeks and have nothing to show for it.

Instead of trying to imitate the outsized competition, RIAs should pick a strategy that matches the stage and size of their business.

The 52: You Can’t Market on Customer Service

You Can’t Market on Customer Service

When I evaluate the viability of a niche with an advisor, I always ask what they offer to that niche that other advisors don’t. If I get the answer, “I provide better service,” I send them back to the drawing board.

The truth is, you can’t market on customer service! Sure, companies like the Ritz-Carlton and Nordstrom attract customers based on their reputation for stellar service. But they can do this because they have millions of customers who can spread the word. When you only have 100 clients, you don’t have enough people to generate word-of-mouth marketing about your service.

At the end of the day, being the best at customer service is hard to prove, hard to maintain a competitive advantage for, and even harder to market.

How to Know if You Picked a Good Niche

Building a More Successful—and Satisfying—Business Through Niche Marketing