The 12-Week Advisor Marketing Plan

The 52: Qualify Your Prospects Using Your Scheduling Software

Qualify Your Prospects Using Your Scheduling Software

If you get a fair number of leads from your website, you’ve faced the rude awakening that most web leads don’t meet the minimum requirements to become a client. So how do you quickly identify the people who are not a fit and refer them to another advisor before you spend your valuable time on a call or in a meeting?

The answer! Use your calendaring software to ask basic qualifying questions. Many systems allow you to add custom questions to gather this kind of information.

To learn the questions to use on your scheduling software to screen your prospects, read our latest blog.

The 12-Week Financial Advisor Marketing Plan

I have been developing marketing plans for financial advisors for more than 15 years. A marketing plan serves an important function of giving a firm direction on what needs to be accomplished. The problem is that, like a financial plan, the marketing plan becomes outdated quickly because the business environment is constantly changing. For example, most marketing plans developed in January 2020 needed an overhaul by April 2020. While a drastic shift in strategy like we saw in 2020 is rare, adapting marketing tactics based on new opportunities and threats is not rare.

Besides becoming irrelevant quickly, annual marketing plans face other issues:

1. The 12-month timeline is so long that it is easy to procrastinate and put off tasks for another day, month, or quarter.

2. The goals tend to be objective-based (e.g., implement a client referral program) instead of action-based (e.g., ask 10 clients for a referral), making it difficult to know when the objective has been achieved.

3. An annual plan can’t foresee all the things you will learn as you implement various tactics. Your experience and results may significantly change your strategy and tactics.

4. It doesn’t anticipate the opportunities that will arise as you succeed in implementing your plan (e.g., speaking engagements pop up, you get invited to be a podcast guest).

5. It is not designed to adapt, so when tactics become outdated, the entire marketing plan gets disregarded.

In the book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months, author Brian Moran proposes a different way to create a plan—by shortening your planning period from one year to 12 weeks.

The argument is that if you develop a 12-week plan, every task in your plan will be actionable. With only 12 weeks to implement the plan, you have a built-in sense of urgency that doesn’t allow for procrastination. A 12-week plan also means you are more likely to complete the action items you commit to, making it more feasible to hit your goals.

You can easily apply the framework of The 12 Week Year to a marketing plan. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Establish Overall Objectives for Your Marketing

What would you like to accomplish? Do you want to increase the leads you get from Google searches? Do you want to increase referrals from your clients? Do you want to overhaul your brand and website?

Write down your firm’s priorities that are top of mind. Do not include “parking lot ideas” because you won’t have time to implement them.

Step 2: Break Down Tasks

Using a spreadsheet, use one column to record all the tasks needed to maintain your existing marketing—for example, send monthly newsletter, attend Chamber of Commerce lunch, record podcast episode. In the same column, write down all the tasks required to implement the objectives you identified in Step 1 above.

You will quickly find that the number of tasks required to implement all your objectives is not feasible in 12 weeks. Adjust by picking just one or two objectives to focus on.

Here are examples of tasks:

• Write blog on [topic]

• Promote blog on social media

• Contact [center of influence name] to schedule lunch

• Attend lunch with [center of influence name]

• Ask [client name] for referral

• Send monthly newsletter

• Send invitation for webinar

• Research search engine optimization companies

• Choose website developer from companies interviewed

Step 3: Assign Each Task to a Week

In a second column, assign a week (1-12) to each of the tasks in the first column. I recommend you include the date of the first day of the week to make visualization easier—for example, “Week 1: April 4.”

You will need to put tasks in the order of weeks required to accomplish them. For example, if you want to launch a new website, the tasks might be:

• Research website companies (Week 1)

• Schedule appointments with website companies (Week 2)

• Meet with ABC website company (Week 3)

• Meet with DEF website company (Week 3)

• Meet with XYZ website company (Week 4)

• Decide on which company to hire (Week 6)

You may not have the information you need during your planning session to include all the required tasks, but you can add new tasks later. In the example above, you will add your tasks to meet with specific website companies to the correct week once you schedule the appointments. You will add the tasks for website development once you know the process and timeline for the company you hire.

If you find that you have too many tasks after assigning them to specific weeks, you may have to make cuts. The 12-week marketing plan is designed to keep you accountable and stop procrastination. If you know you won’t be able to accomplish all the tasks, create a more realistic plan.

Step 4: Execute and Track

With your 12-week plan in place, all you have to do now is follow the plan and execute the tasks assigned to each week. If something new comes up that needs to be integrated into your plan (e.g., speak at ABC accounting firm), add the task to the correct week. This is not an invitation to add new “shiny object” distractions to your plan but instead consider new opportunities resulting from your efforts.  

At the end of each week, mark each task as “complete” or “not complete.” If a task is partially complete, record it as “not complete” because you did not accomplish it by the date you set for yourself. You can then copy and paste the task into another row and assign it to the week you plan on completing it.

Count all the tasks you completed and divide that by the total number of tasks for the week. In The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran calls this the execution score. It is the percentage of the tasks set for the week that you completed. For example, if you meet eight out of 10 tasks, your execution score is 80%.

Moran considers a weekly execution score of over 85% as “success.” Your execution score will be more meaningful if you break out the tasks into many pieces. If you have only one task that encompasses many parts and don’t fully execute it, your execution score will be 0%, which will decrease your motivation.

For example, “podcast” has many components: reaching out to a guest, booking a guest, recording the podcast, posting it on the website, promoting it on social media, and sending it out via email. There are six separate tasks here. If you just put “Podcast” as your task and don’t send out the email, your execution score will be 0%. If you break it out into six tasks, your execution score will be 83% (five tasks completed/six tasks total).

Even if you miss one task, such as emailing the podcast, it doesn’t mean that the rest of the efforts had no value. This score is to keep you accountable for executing your tasks and provide insight into where you can make improvements.

Step 5: Use Week 13 to Analyze and Plan

Use the last week of the quarter (the 13th week) to review the results from your previous 12 weeks and plan for the next 12.

Assess your overall execution score for the period. If it is low, did you take on too much, and do you need to adjust expectations next quarter? Do you need to free up time or hire additional help to implement? If the execution score is high, can you take on more next quarter and make even faster progress toward your marketing objectives? And no matter your score, where is there room for improvement next quarter?

Once you have analyzed your completed 12-week marketing plan, repeat Steps 1-5 for the next 12-week period.

Final Thoughts

You might find that you quickly abandon a year-long marketing plan. New opportunities and threats can make your strategies irrelevant, and the long timeline invites procrastination.

If 12 months is too long, 12 weeks is just right. Build a 12-week marketing plan using the steps outlined here to create a framework that supports you rather than weighs you down.

With a shorter time frame, you can adapt your strategies as needed and accomplish more. The end result? A better marketing system for you and your firm.

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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.

Use Your Calendaring System to Qualify Prospects

The 52: The 12-Week Marketing Plan

The 12-Week Marketing Plan

If a financial advisory firm creates a marketing plan, it’s usually done on an annual basis. The problem with an annual plan is that it tends to be objective-based (e.g., implement a client referral program) instead of action-based (e.g., ask 10 clients for a referral). It’s also easy to procrastinate with an annual plan because you have months to complete your objectives. The result is that you rarely accomplish what you aimed for.

Instead of developing an annual marketing plan, consider a quarterly plan as described by Brian Moran in the book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months.

By developing a quarterly marketing plan, you are more likely to complete the action items you commit to, you can more easily adapt your strategy as opportunities arise, and you are more likely to hit your goals.

Nine Steps to Launch a New Niche

The 52: How to Expand Your Niche

How to Expand Your Niche

When I talk to advisors about niching, the conversation is usually about narrowing the niche to become more specialized. However, there may be times when it makes sense to expand your niche. For example, you may have dominated your market and need to expand just to continue growing your business.

When you are ready to expand your niche, start by looking at markets that share a similar problem to your existing niche. For example, if you work with widows, you could expand into divorcees since both groups share the problem of being solely responsible for their household finances for the first time. Or if you work with tech employees, you could expand into biotech and pharma employees who share the problem of managing their equity compensation.

When it’s time to expand, the key is to find a new market that shares the same problem as your existing niche.

The 52: Market Solutions, Not Services

Market Solutions, Not Services

Many financial advisor websites highlight the services they offer—financial planning, investment management, estate planning, tax planning, retirement planning, education planning, etc. But most prospects don’t know what service they need. They just understand the problem they have.

Instead of marketing your services, market the solution to the problem your prospect is facing. Here are some examples:

• Education planning: “Put your kid through college.”

• Tax planning: “Keep more of the money you earned.”

• Estate planning: “Protect your family even after you are gone.”

Where Is Your Marketing Failing?

9 Steps to Launching a New Niche Specialization Within Your Firm

Most financial advisory firms grow their businesses through referrals and word of mouth. As a result, they often have a wide range of client types. Often though, once a firm reaches a certain size (for example, $1 billion in AUM), one of two things usually happens:

1. They realize they want to make a more focused effort marketing to a segment of their client base where they see additional opportunity, such as business owners, executives, or women in transition.

2. The firm hires younger advisors they would like to groom into business development roles and wants to use a niche to help them succeed (e.g., young tech professionals).

When a firm is ready to launch into a new niche specialization, the next question is how do they go about doing it? Up until this point, marketing has centered on generating referrals, but a niche focus requires a different approach. Here are the nine steps you need to take when entering a new niche market.    

Step 1: Define Your Audience

The first step is to define the general niche specialization you want to focus on, for example, business owners, women, executives, or health care workers. From there, you want to further narrow this niche by identifying the one problem that you will solve for them.

Ideally, this problem is painful to your niche and is urgent for them to solve. For example, if your category is tech employees, the one problem you solve may be helping them minimize the taxes associated with their equity compensation.

While you actually solve many problems for this niche, defining the one problem they all share helps you get clear on exactly who your niche audience is.

Step 2: Assign a Leader

Once you have defined your new practice area, the next step is to assign an advisor within the firm to spearhead the effort. This person needs to have some sort of connection to or experience with this new niche. This person needs to be dedicated to this marketing effort and should be given the time and resources they need to make it succeed.

While other people in the firm can help with the niche, the leader is ultimately responsible for making it succeed. If no one is in charge, the niche is doomed to hobble along and never gain traction.

Step 3: Develop Your Message

The third step is developing a compelling message that specifically attracts your niche. Clients hire you to solve a problem for them. Therefore, you need to establish a clear, simple message that articulates the problem the prospective client faces and how you solve this problem.

The message needs to be specific to the niche’s pain points and aspirations and use their language, not yours. This message then needs to be translated to other marketing materials, like a landing page on your website or a brochure.

Step 4: Create a Landing Page

To seriously market to a new niche, you need to highlight the niche offering on your website.

You do not need to change your entire website. All you need to do is add one page to your website that communicates your message to your niche and include that page in your main navigation menu. The landing page should also offer a way for your niche to schedule an appointment with you.

Step 5: Develop a Lead Capture Mechanism

In step five, you need to begin building a list of names of people in your niche you can market to for years to come.

One way to do this is to offer a resource on your website that prospects are willing to enter their contact information in exchange for the resource. These lead capture devices can be ebooks, recorded webinars, online courses, reports, white papers, or even physical books.

Step 6: Create Nurturing Campaigns

As you integrate into a niche community, you want a way to stay top of mind with everyone you meet for years and years. Your goal is to be the first financial advisor your niche prospects reach out to when they are ready to hire a professional.

One of the best long-term ways to nurture these contacts is through an email newsletter that you send weekly, semimonthly, or monthly.

You also need a short-term nurturing campaign for those people who give you their contact information on your lead capture resource. This is usually an automated email series that immediately follows the download of your resource.

The goal with this nurturing campaign is to capture any prospects who are ready to act right away.

Step 7: Determine Content to Create

Content marketing is the most effective way to demonstrate your expertise with a niche, even when you are just beginning.

Pick one communication medium—written, video, audio, or visual—that you want to use to showcase your expertise. Then pick a format within that medium, such as presentations, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, or infographics, that you will use.

Use the content to highlight your expertise in the various channels you use (see the next step).

Step 8: Determine the Channels to Access Your Niche

Ask the people you know in the niche where you can find other people like them. What events do they attend? What organizations do they join? What media or publications do they consume? Where do they congregate online? Who are the key influencers who can get you access to this niche?

Once you understand where they are, figure out how you can integrate yourself into those channels. Can you contribute a guest article to a popular website or publication? Can you speak in front of a group? Can you interview influencers on your podcast so they promote it to their audience? Try to leverage the people, organizations, and publications that already have access to the niche you want to reach.

Step 9: Develop a Conversion Process

After you’ve put in all this effort into marketing to a prospect, you want to make sure you convert a high percentage of those people into clients. To do this, you need a process that seamlessly transitions a prospect into a client. This includes having an appointment calendaring system on your website, a pitchbook and proposal that convey your value proposition, and a follow-up process to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks.

Final Thoughts

A niche market can help firms focus their marketing on an area of opportunity and groom the next generation of financial advisors into business development roles. Regardless of your intention, entering a new niche market will make it easier for you to stand out from the competition and attract clients. Follow these nine steps as a roadmap to establish yourself in your desired niche market.  

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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.