Are you an independent financial advisor in growth mode and actively on the hunt for tips you can apply to your business?
Trent Grzegorczyk, founder and principal owner of Resilient Financial Planning and also the founder of Secure Your Retirement Now, a virtual retirement planning educational platform, knows a thing or two about scaling a financial firm from the ground up.
He's here to share strategies that you can apply to your business in order to grow. Let's dive into 3 marketing lessons he's learned from his time helping individuals and families secure their financial future.
1. Understand who you want to serve
In order to drive value for your clients, you have to understand their needs. When you pinpoint who your ideal customers are, you make it much easier to find them, create more relationships, and grow your firm.
As we outline in our Marketing Playbook for Advisors [PDF], developing your ideal customer type begins with research. Once you determine who this hypothetical person is, their background, where they spend their time (online and offline), what their challenges are, and how you can solve them, you can figure out who you should be targeting with your marketing efforts.
More so, once you understand who you want to serve, you can focus resources on attracting those high-quality prospects, offering valuable content, and getting more referrals to meet your firm's business goals.
2. Take inspiration from proven models and make them your own
You may be surprised to hear the age old saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies to marketing strategies for personal finance too! Instead of spending time, resources, and energy on creating something new that may or may not work to attract clients, look to what has already worked and replicate it.
This means taking inspiration from other financial advisors, industries, and even your own past campaigns to see how you can build something similar to serve your unique clients.
For example, maybe a realtor in your area partnered with a local membership association to give a monthly seminar on how to buy and sell real estate in this crazy market. The seminar was well-attended and the realtor was able to generate many leads from this audience. Now this is a great model for your financial firm. Can you approach the association and inquire about giving a seminar on a personal finance topic for this audience? If you can’t get airtime with the association, can you market your seminar to this audience through a different channel? Perhaps you can advertise in their email newsletter or partner with the realtor to host a joint seminar.
3. Test quickly, test more, and keep testing
Your financial firm has special characteristics that make it the right fit for your target audience and testing helps you generate better strategies to acquire new clients.
From email campaigns to webinars, how can you create more meaningful content for your ideal client profile? By marrying up those special characteristics with your ideal client's challenges and serving that content directly to your audience.
For example, let's say your firm primarily serves clients in the tech industry. Their challenges are mostly centered around equity compensation packages, employee stock purchase plans, and preparing for retirement. So you decide to launch a digital course with this specific content and test which social media channels bring in the most sign-ups. After three months of collecting data, you see that LinkedIn ads brought in 60% of you enrollments, while sponsored posts on Twitter only brought in 10%. Now you can confidently move more budget to LinkedIn and double down on your marketing efforts. Keep tracking the right data for a few more months and you could potentially even gauge engagement on the topics in your course in order to expand on the areas that individuals spent the most time on.
When you test out which channels, strategies, and tools work for your unique financial firm, you can see what mix attracts more interaction and conversions from your clients. This gives you the information you need to provide a better experience while breeding trust and confidence in your firm.
When visitors begin to trust your financial firm because of the value you provide, increased conversions and loyal clients are a natural result.
To learn more about Trent and to connect, please visit Resilient Financial Planning
Going Independent
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