Ask yourself this question, how does your prospect know you exist? If you are looking to stand-out from the competition, you have to market yourself differently. Or do you market yourself at all?
Let's face it; there are easily 4-5 financial planners or financial advisers that most qualified prospects in their 30s and 40s already know. Why should they listen to you and not the others?
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The three key factors to stand out in our Financial Advisory arena are: trusted references, expertise branding and effective use of marketing.
Trusted References
How we first contact our prospects will be enhanced by trusted references. In order of the likelihood of conversion: Trusted friend's referral, media references like articles in newspapers or video interviews and third party testimonials.
Referral Marketing is certainly one area you should really work at. How referable are you? Do your clients and advocates know how to sell you? How often do you update them about your services? Do you have a system to constantly feed them with information and spur them into referring for you?
Building a strong relationship is not enough, you will need to educate them about your services and how to refer business to you.
Personal Branding
Now that you've got your referrals, they will need somewhere to catch a glimpse of you before they agree to meet you. Years ago, without Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and a host of other social websites, it was not possible to do a pre-meeting introduction. Imagine if before you even make an approach to your prospect, they already know you are well connected, loved by your clients, and have a solid knowledge about financial planning and about other topics your prospects are passionate about. Will that not help to secure a meeting with them?
So, work on your personal branding. A good website and web profile tells the prospect that you are modern, informed, connected and trusted.
Check with your company what they allow and do not allow to be public and on websites. With the advent of many web-tools, you can still have web interaction with your targeted prospects, within company guidelines.
Effective Use of Marketing
To access new markets where you have little or no connections, you'll have work out a marketing plan exploring on-line and off-line methods.
The on-line world has not been much penetrated by Financial Advisers in my opinion. There are so many means of marketing or branding oneself on-line, which complements the off-line marketing strategies. On-line advertising can be targeted (Example: on Amazon, targeting at books your target audience read), or general (for Example: advertising on Google sites when a related term appears in the content).
Email Marketing with Auto Responders can automate contact with your reservoir of prospects you are not ready to talk to, but want to gain some mind-share. It can even bring to life that pile of name cards you have gathered over the years.
Video via YouTube and other forms of media like podcasts generate tons of traffic into your website, or at least helps to educate your prospects about the benefits you can have for them.
Some markets are unlikely to "select" their financial adviser on-line, but it may be useful for branding so by the time you contact them, they have formulated a good opinion about you. The majority of the efforts have to be off-line: direct-mail campaign (usually 3-5 continuous weekly contact to achieve any reasonable results), advertising, articles writing on magazines your target market reads etc.
Conclusion
It is clear that if you fail to stand-out from your competitors, you will soon join the dinosaurs and fade into extinction in this rapid age of information. To even protect your current clientele you'd better work on your marketing strategy to maintain mind-share, or be blown away by the tsunami of competition.
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