Posts related to wealth management and financial advisor marketing.

Market Success

 

Independent Advisors need a strategy-led, systematic growth program.

The Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™ outlines the Revenue Architecture Methodology that financial advisors can use to add structure and predictability to their revenue engine. We introduce nine steps and advisor-specific marketing and sales strategies that are helping advisors capture client value.

The comprehensive guide helps independent financial advisors build a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:

  • Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
  • Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
  • Increase Velocity: Increase your Conversion Rate
  • Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.

Having a vision and game plan for growth is essential for financial advisors to thrive in a challenging marketplace. The Smart Book™ outlines how you can achieve more predictable and sustainable revenue growth by establishing a Revenue Architecture that fits your firm. The key is to commit to a systematic sales and marketing process by following the 9 proven strategies to guide your approach.

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Professional Selling

Envision the best ways to access your particular market segments and ideal clients.

In the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™.  we outline a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:

  • Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
  • Velocity: Accelerate the Process
  • Value: Grow AUM growth and Revenue.

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This post is updated. The original post was published in 2017.

Personas represent the needs and behaviors of your ideal clients and are helpful in shaping your positioning and messaging.

We recently published the 2020 Edition of the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™.  This resource is a comprehensive guide to help independent financial advisors build an ‘independent difference,’ that is, a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:

  • Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
  • Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
  • Increase Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
  • Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.

[Strategy 2 of 9] Valued Offering ~ Craft Market-Ready Service Offerings and Segment Messaging

You will be surprised how effective it is when you communicate offerings based on specific personas that represent the needs (or pain points) and behaviors of your best clients.

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Join us at our upcoming Lorman Education Services live webinar Using Digital and Social Media to Acquire and Expand Client Relationships on May 7 at 1 pm ET.

This educational webinar is tailored for financial advisors and professionals who would like to navigate the role of social media and digital marketing to grow your professional practice.

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Professional Selling

Build a technology platform to support your go-to-market strategy.

 

We recently published an enhanced edition of the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK. This resource is a comprehensive guide to help independent financial advisors build an ‘independent difference,’ that is, a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:

  • Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
  • Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
  • Increase Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
  • Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.

Read more

Brand Matters

Set yourself apart with an authentic and differentiated brand identity

We recently published the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK. This resource is a comprehensive guide to help independent financial advisors build an ‘independent difference,’ that is, a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:

  • Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
  • Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
  • Increase Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
  • Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.

[Strategy 4 of 9] Brand Presence: Craft a Distinctive Brand Identity and Digital Presence

Brand matters, but many advisors look and sound the same. You want your brand identity to tell a story and build trust in the hearts and minds of your prospective clients. Set yourself apart with an authentic and differentiated brand identity, collateral, and digital presence.

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Effective Asset Management buyer engagement begins with an understanding of the ideal customer or client and influencers for your products and services.

Your marketing success will depend on strategies and programs that rely on accurate identification and targeting of market segments. Depending on your business model, you will target a variety of different audiences. An asset management firm might consider top-level market segments like  Wirehouse FAs, Independent BD firms and independent/Fee Only RIAs and Hybrids. But these groupings do not go far enough to properly tailor your advisor engagement strategy. Engagement strategies will vary significantly across these groups and even further within each group. There are a wide range of advisor types and styles that you must consider when crafting an engagement strategy.

An effective advisor engagement strategy requires a deep understanding of how your investment offerings fit with the target groups, subsegments and the size and economics of each sector.

Yet too often, our marketing and communications efforts are not targeted towards the most promising target segments. The benefit of improved segmentation is the ability to drive sales by crafting differentiated communications, deploying customized marketing programs, aligning distribution strategies and improving marketing and sales focus.

So how do we identify our ideal advisors and influencers?

The answer is to segment the market around criteria that matter.

Understand segmentation and the factors in your business model that should determine the ‘ideal advisors’.

  • Segments should have similar preferences within each segment and distinct preferences between segments.
  • Segments should be actionable for purposes of marketing planning and sales execution.
  • Segments should consider a range of factors that matter to your offerings, (e,g.  financial viability in terms of size, scale, margins; investment style, e.g. discretionary vs non-discretionary, etc.)

Go beyond groups (like Wirehouse, Indy, RIA) and consider factors that distinguish advisor’s likely interest, fit and engagement styles. Examples you might consider are:

  • Advisor business model
  • Advisor value proposition (e.g., wealth manager, investment manager, stock picker)
  • End client interaction – proactive vs reactive
  • Portfolio Management Approach: discretionary vs non-discretionary
  • Product/Market Mix – expansive or niche/limited vs full portfolio
  • Current relationship – established vs new
  • Position among peers – opinion leader vs trend follower
  • Stage in career: Ramping up, established, finishing up
  • Organization: Lone wolf, small team, office
  • Specialization within team: relationship vs product leadership
  • Channel preferences: wholesaler vs online/self-directed
  • Communication preferences: email vs letter/newsletter vs brochure
  • Education: direct/wholesaler vs webinar/video/TV
  • Awareness model: advertising vs product search

Identify and focus on the segments that work for you

  • Reviewing existing and/or planned segments in light of your business model
  • Identify and measure Total Addressable Market (TAM) so you can better measure awareness and engagement levels
  • Prioritize your target audience (e.g., by discretionary/non-discretionary, firm size/AUM, shared attributes, etc.)
  • Identify target audience buyer composition (e.g., personas, DMUs (decision making units) and influencers

 

Financial Advisor Marketing

Financial Advisors are an amazingly difficult prospect to engage. They are incredibly busy and already have a wealth of resources already available to them – do they even need to engage with wholesalers? The best way to convert financial advisors to customers is to build your marketing automation program around them.

Lead generation starts with effective segmentation

Before focusing on key strategies, Sales and Marketing must have defined a set of engagement personas and customer segments. Marketing has had personas for a decade but only since the advent of marketing automation software have engagement personas become empowered and brought to life.

Defining financial advisor segments for lead generation

Creating clarity with Sales is a two step process:

  1. Lead scoring – a measure of how active a financial advisor on your digital properties
  2. Lead grading – a measure of how profitable the financial advisor is likely to be

 

Advisor Marketing Focus

 

It may take several iterations to get lead scoring and grading optimized, however, the process should be fruitful for Sales and Marketing. The process crystallizes Marketing and Sales perspectives around which advisors are most profitable and which digital behaviors are believed to be most relevant to a sale. Some marketing automation vendors have one score that represents profitability and interest. However, being able to separate advisor behaviors from profitability factors simplifies discussions by clarifying customer segments by profitability as seen in the above graphic. As an example, Pardot applies a numerical value for an advisor’s lead score and a letter grade (A-F) for an advisor’s expected profitability.

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A prospective client may assume that a financial advisor, when giving advice, is acting in their best interest.

Fiduciary Standard for Financial Advisors

Indeed this prospective client may have heard the word FIDUCIARY Financial Advisor bandied about by talking heads and journalists in the financial media and that is now a Rule of Law.  For an independent fee-only Financial Advisor (RIA), being a fiduciary will matter a great deal to your ideal client and can be a key if not prerequisite selling point. But they may not grasp the full meaning and intent.

Positioned right, being a fiduciary can be a major point of differentiation from broker/dealers claiming to be financial advisors, but who are associated with vertically integrated brokerage firms that sell products with ‘hidden fees’.

One advisor quoted in the article in a recent New York Times article said  “The fiduciary rule ultimately comes down to the fact that some people are making a lot of money at the expense of other people who have no idea how much their adviser is getting paid.”  A video from a large independent advisor, compares butchers and nutritionists.  Butchers push meat. Nutritionists advise you what to eat, because they have the best interests of the client at heart.  The latter is the fiduciary.  A Revenue Architects client says, “the professional fiduciary is expected to perform and advise you based on your best interests, even if it comes into conflict with the advisor’s own interests.”

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Recent studies indicate that financial advisors expect continued strong demand for their services in the next year.  Russell Investments third-quarter Financial Professional Outlook indicated that Advisors remain bullish about the capital markets looking out over the next three years.

Marketing Volatility and Investor Behavior

Source: Russell Investments

However, they worry about investors’ emotional response to market events that could harm their businesses and their clients’ well-being, The Russell Investments study showed market volatility to be the most common topic initiated by clients.  A Fidelity Advisor Investment Pulse Survey showed similar results.

“When investors make emotional decisions, they decrease the odds of reaching their financial goals,” said John Hailer, chief executive officer of Natixis Global Asset Management in the Americas and Asia.

How can financial advisors set reasonable expectations with challenges like volatility and low-interest rates?…how can they take the emotion out of investor conversations to set realistic goals and stick to them?

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