You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Welcome to another episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I'm your host, as always, James Pollard, and today we're diving into a topic that might ruffle some feathers. Wait a minute, ruffle some feathers? Who? Me? But that is what I'm here for, I suppose. We're going to talk about 10 specific ways financial advisors sabotage their marketing efforts. I guess we are not going to talk about it. I'm going to talk about it and you're going to listen, I hope. [00:57.8]
Before we begin, I want to let you know that this episode is sponsored by me, myself and I, through TheAdvisorCoach.com. I have more than 290 episodes now, can you believe it? And I have never accepted a single sponsor or ran a single paid advertisement on this show because I am my own sponsor. Hmm, I use my marketing skills to market my services, to market my products, to market my business.
So, if you love this show and appreciate the effort that I put in, week in and week out, make sure to go to TheAdvisorCoach.com and get involved there. Buy something. Join my email list. Register for a video or something. Just get involved.
Let’s get into it. Buckle up, because some of these might hit close to home. Number one, the first way financial advisors sabotage their marketing is neglecting to define a clear target market. Look, I've said it a million times, but I'll say it again—trying to appeal to everyone means you appeal to no one. It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. Spoiler alert, it usually doesn't. You need to get specific. [01:59.3]
Who do you want to work with? What problems can you solve for those people? If you can't answer those questions, or at least questions like them, you're already setting yourself up for failure, because no real business operates without a plan to serve specific people in a specific way. It just does not exist.
Let me break it down for you. When you try to market to everyone, your message becomes so diluted that it resonates with no one. It's like being at a party and trying to have a conversation with everyone all at once, and it's just not going to work. You end up having a bunch of shallow, meaningless interactions, instead of making any real connections. Since the financial services industry is a relationship business, it's a relationship industry. Then you should probably do the thing that helps you build relationships.
When you narrow your focus, you can become the go-to expert for a specific group of people. Sometimes I slip up and I say, “You will become the go-to expert.” That's not true. You can become. You have the opportunity to become. It's up to you. You can become the big fish in a small pond instead of just another minnow in the ocean. [03:01.5]
I'll give you another example. Lots of examples in this episode, or at least I plan on giving them to you. Say, you're a financial advisor who decides to focus on helping dentists manage their finances. Instead of generic marketing messages about securing your financial future or planning for your retirement, you can get specific. You can talk about things like managing student loan debt from dental school, strategies for expanding a dental practice. You can address the unique challenges and opportunities that dentists face.
Suddenly, your marketing can become a lot more powerful. When a dentist sees your ads or lands on your website, he or she might think, Wow, this person really gets me. This person understands my specific situation—and just like that, you've gone from being just another financial advisor out there in the great big wide world to being “the” financial advisor for dentists, or at least on the short list of advisors that are being considered by that dentist.
Plus, there are some financial strategies that may or may not apply to various markets. I'll use myself as an example here. I have lost count of how many financial advisors have told me they have tried to apply information from generic marketers and bestselling books only to have them fall flat. One of the biggest reasons this happens is because the bestselling marketing books aren't tailored specifically for financial advisors. [04:13.6]
There are unique challenges financial advisors face that other industries simply do not, and when you have a niche, you can solve financial challenges and problems that other niches simply don't have, in the same way that I do the marketing help for financial advisors.
Number two, relying too heavily on cold outreach. I get it, I really do, cold calling and cold emailing, they seem like quick ways to drum up business. But let me tell you, it's like trying to win a marathon by sprinting the whole way. You'll burn out fast and you probably won't make it to the finish line.
Here's the thing about cold outreach, it is kind of a numbers game and the numbers aren't in your favor. I mean, think about it, when was the last time you were thrilled to receive a cold call? Or when was the last time you eagerly opened an unsolicited email from someone trying to sell you something? Probably never, right? That's what I thought. [05:08.0]
I get so many cold emails every single day. I don't understand, do these people really have this work for them? What do they think is going to happen? I have never, at least this year in 2024, and we're more than halfway done the year, I have never responded to a cold email. Just has not happened. I don't want to say never, in my entire life, because I think I have and I'm actually pretty sure I have, but at least not so far this year. It's like 0.001% of cold emails even get a response, and sometimes my response is “Leave me the F alone,” right?
I'm not saying cold outreach never works. It can work, but it's super inefficient and it often leaves people with a bad taste in their mouths, just like fishing with dynamite. You might catch some fish, but you're going to do a lot of damage in the process. I talk about cutting your lawn with scissors. That's exactly what this is. [05:57.8]
Most of your time and effort should be spent on warming up your market. This is done through inbound marketing and all the marketing strategies that I talk about on this podcast, where you pull people to you. Say, you write a blog post about five common retirement mistakes dentists make. See, we're tying it back to the niche here. You share that post on social media. Maybe you put a little bit of money behind it in the form of an online ad.
When dentists read that post, they are learning more about you before you've even spoken with them, before you meet with them. If they like what they read, they might sign up for your email list. They might check out more of your content. They might even set an appointment with you. Imagine that. By the time they reach out to you, though, they are coming to you warm, not cold, and that is very important. I might talk about that later in this podcast episode. If not, then I'm going to talk about it next week, because it's such an important concept.
Number three is using one-size-fits-all content. I also plan on talking about this more in a future podcast episode, and I hate to be the one to just constantly tease you and say, “Hey, I'm going to talk about this later. I'm going to talk about this later,” but it is what it is. [07:00.0]
I want to mention this here in this episode, because it ties into the first point of defining your target market. That is critical. If you're not tailoring your content to your target market, you are wasting your time. You don't want to have generic content, because, to use another analogy—I feel like I'm giving you a lot of analogies and similes and metaphors in this show—but generic marketing, I liken that to elevator music. Yes, it's there, but nobody is really paying attention to it. Nobody's ripping out their phone and Shazamming the elevator music and saying, “Wow, this thing is really hot. I need to add this to my playlist.”
Your content should speak directly to your ideal clients’ pain points and aspirations. Make them feel like you are reading their minds. This is where knowing your niche really pays off. This is one reason why having a niche is so important, because you can get to know them, and when you know them like the back of your hand, then you can make your marketing so much more powerful. [07:58.1]
Let's stick with the dentist example, because we're kind of on a roll with this. Instead of writing a generic article about the importance of saving for retirement, you could write something like, “How dentists balance--” or “--can balance student loan repayment with retirement savings.” See the difference? The second title speaks directly to a specific problem that dentists face, and will get them to perk up and pay attention to you.
But it's not just about the titles. The content itself needs to be tailored. Use examples that resonate with your target audience. Speak their language. What words do they use? How do they feel? What do they think? You should put that in your content, address their specific concerns. Really, there is no shortcut for this. You just have to know your market. When you do this, your content becomes more engaging. It becomes more effective.
Here's a bonus tip: don't be afraid to have an opinion. Generic content often tries to play it safe and appeal to everyone. If you have a content library or you're subscribed to one of these horrible services that just give you a couple hundred posts or whatever that you get to choose from. It's like a Rolodex of posts. Do people even know what a Rolodex is anymore? It's like a collection of posts, and you just choose one and you put it in your little scheduler. Stop, stop. Oh, for the love of all that is good and holy, please stop that and just make your content better. [09:11.5]
You're not trying to appeal to everyone. You're trying to appeal to a specific niche. Having a strong point of view can actually make your content more compelling to your target audience. That's one reason why I share opinions all the time. It is not accidental. If it didn't work, then I would keep my opinions to myself. I'm just telling you, I'm keeping it real.
Number four, ignoring email marketing. Ooh, financial advisors sabotage themselves all the time when they don't use email marketing. Email marketing is the unsung hero of the financial advisor world. It is like having a direct line to your prospects’ brains directly. You can go directly to their phone. They check their email first thing in the morning. They see you first thing in the morning. You set the tone for their entire day. It is just amazing. So many financial advisors either ignore email completely or they do it poorly, and it's so, so sad, because email is a game changer. [09:58.6]
Here's why it's so powerful. First, it is permission based. When someone signs up for your email list, that person is saying, “Yes, I want to hear from you. I'm opting into your email list. I am joining your world.” That is huge. You're not interrupting them like you are with cold outreach. They are inviting you in. You are a welcome guest, not an unwanted pest.
Second, it is highly targeted. I'm not big on segmentation, I mean, because I think segmentation should happen at the beginning, not in your email list itself, meaning, the only people who should subscribe in the first place are people in your target market. But that's an advanced strategy. I don't have time for this right now, to discuss this. But you are talking to a specific group of people, right? So, it’s super targeted.
Third, it is measurable. You can see exactly who is opening your emails. You can see exactly who is clicking. You can see exactly who is engaging. This gives you valuable insights that you can use to improve your marketing over time, because if Email No. 2 is just blowing everything else out of the water, then you can study what the heck Email No. 2 is doing and do more of that. [10:57.6]
Fourth, it is scalable. Email is amazing because it's scalable. It takes the same amount of effort, and I guess that's leverage. It takes the same amount of effort to send to 500 people as it does to five people, so that is leverage. Scale would actually be you can set up a machine to just constantly email and email an email. You can set up a machine to collect email, and you can reach 10, 20, 30, 40, and more people over time. That is scale.
Sometimes people will try to get clicks and attention by claiming that email marketing is dead. Let me tell you, email marketing is far from dead. In fact, according to a study by McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and X combined, formerly Twitter. But here's the catch, you need to do email marketing the right way.
This means having emails that do what? Tell stories, engage people that stay in the prospect’s world, not just, quote-unquote, “teaching,” or quote-unquote, “providing value” or pitching your services. It means having actually good emails that actually get people to set appointments. [12:00.2]
If you want to learn more about that, then I suggest going to TheAdvisorCoach.com/products, and checking out Appointments on Autopilot. It is my email marketing system. It has been absolutely dominating since 2019, so I guess I have a little bit of a track record by now, and plus, I've been doing email marketing for years before that anyway. Email marketing is such an untapped opportunity for financial advisors. I can't stress that enough.
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
Number five, complicating your messaging. This is another huge way financial advisors sabotage themselves. Prospective clients don't care about the intricacies of modern portfolio theory or the finer points of tax-loss harvesting. They care about this: how you can help them achieve their goals.
Stop trying to sound smart. Stop trying to make yourself seem like you're better than you actually are, that you have all this jargon. Focus on being clear. Your Prospects should understand what you do and how you can help them within seconds of engaging with your marketing materials. This means within seconds of landing on your website, within seconds of landing on your landing page, within seconds of opening a direct mail piece from you. [14:07.0]
I see it all the time. Advisors fill their websites and marketing materials with all this jargon and complex concepts, and they think, I'm guessing they think it makes them look knowledgeable. But here's the truth, it doesn't make them look smart. It makes them look out of touch, because prospective clients are not financial experts. That's why they're looking for a financial advisor in the first place, because they want financial advice. They want a financial plan. They don't want to feel confused and they darn sure don't want to feel intimidated. They want to feel understood and supported.
So, how do you simplify your messaging without dumbing it down? Because that might be a worry. You don't want to dumb down your messaging. Here are a few tips for you. First, focus on benefits, not features. In the copywriting world, this is a little bit of a secret for people who want to learn how to write better emails and website copy, and just copy in general. [14:54.8]
When you talk about features, you open yourself up to sounding too complex and too complicated, and you just talk a lot about things that your prospective clients don't understand. But when you talk about benefits, then they start to see how your services, and how your goods and products—whatever it is, right? It's not just financial services. It's everywhere—how whatever is being described in the copy applies directly to them.
A couple episodes ago, I talked about how I bought a new washing machine, so talking about features would be “This has a turbo wash feature and it has 360-degree wash with this special jet thing that does this and the special balance,” and all of those features, and I don't really care about that. The benefit would be “Because we have this technology, your clothes are cleaner faster, your whites are whiter, and you use less energy.” That is the benefit and people can talk about whiter clothes, cleaner clothes, less energy, without making it super complicated.
Another tip I have for you is to use analogies and metaphors. I take my own advice here. I use a lot of those, especially in this episode. I like to break things down into simple steps. That also helps quite a bit. [16:03.2]
I also like to use visuals and I tell financial advisors to use more visuals, especially when they're giving presentations. Don't put a bunch of text on the page. Show me, show me. Don't tell me. Show me. Sometimes a graph or an infographic or a picture can tell me about a concept much more than just a wall of text. Not sometimes, usually, almost all the time. Remember, the goal of your marketing isn't to show how much you know. It's to show how much you can help. Keep it simple, keep it clear, and you'll find your message resonates much more effectively.
Number six, the sixth way that financial advisors sabotage their marketing is not engaging with people on social media. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Social media is not just for sharing cat videos and giving political rants, giving your opinion about politics that nobody cares about. It's a powerful tool for building relationships and establishing your expertise. [16:55.0]
But so many advisors either avoid it altogether, just like a lot of things I'm talking about, or they use social media like a bullhorn to shout their services. They will put stuff in a scheduler. The content will go out automatically, and they never check the social media. What the heck are you doing? Imagine if everybody did that. Then if everybody else is scheduling their content like you are doing, then nobody is going to see your content. If everybody used a scheduler, then nobody would be on social media to see the content that is on the social media. Do you understand that?
I don't want to repeat myself too much, but this is so important. I even talked about this a couple podcast episodes ago, where you should be the prospective client you want to see in the world. If your prospective clients are all scheduling their content and never logging into social media and never engaging, then your marketing efforts would be worthless. So, be the person who you want to see as a client.
Here's a novel idea. Try actually being social on social media. Engage with others. Share valuable, quote-unquote, “valuable” content, and valuable could be handling objections. It could be shifting people's mindsets about things. It could be adjusting their beliefs, not just teaching. I want to make that clear, value does not equal teaching. Whatever I say, “Share valuable content,” some financial advisors think, Oh, I need to list 10 reasons why they should have an HSA. No, no, not that. [18:12.8]
But I'll move on, number seven, neglecting to track their marketing metrics. If you are not tracking your marketing efforts, you are basically flying blind. How do you know what's working if you're not measuring it? I see it all the time. Advisors will try a marketing strategy or a tactic. They'll decide it didn't work, and then they'll abandon it without ever really understanding why it didn't work or how they could improve it, or how they could have improved it, because they don't have the metrics.
Here's what I want to get across here. Marketing is not about gut feelings. It's about data. You need to be tracking the key metrics so you can make informed decisions about where you should focus your efforts, because if you don't have the data, you simply do not know.
So, what should you be tracking? Here are a few key metrics. First is website traffic. This seems obvious. How many people are visiting your site? Where are they coming from? What pages are they looking at? Then you have your email metrics if you're doing email marketing. What's your open rate, your click-through rate? How many people are unsubscribing? [19:09.2]
None of these things matter as much as clients. How many clients are you getting from email marketing? Because, truthfully, some of the most successful emails that I've ever seen have had the lowest open rates. Some of them have had the lowest click-through rates, and the reason that is is because those emails call out a specific type of person, and everybody else ignores them, but the right people click those emails. The right people open those emails and engage with them and set appointments. Take that with a grain of salt. Yes, all else being equal, better opens equals more clients. But don't ignore the “all else being equal” part, because usually it's not equal.
You also should track your social media engagement if you're doing stuff on social media. I mean, how many followers do you have? How many likes, comments and shares are your posts getting? Again, I want to repeat myself here. Don't get lost in the vanity metrics, but I want you to use them as a proxy for what you should be doing, because, again, all else being equal, on social media, you can get more clients by increasing your engagement. That is true. [20:07.0]
However, “all else being equal” truly is the most important part. It is usually not, which is why I think you should also track—now these are important, very important—your conversion rates. How many, for example, website visitors are signing up for your email list? That is a conversion rate. How many email subscribers are booking into appointments? That is a conversion rate. How many appointments are converting into clients for you? That is a conversion rate. That is some of the most important stuff that you can possibly track.
You also want to track your client-acquisition cost. How much are you spending to acquire each new client? Then you want to track your return on investment. For every dollar you're spending on marketing, how much are you getting back? That is your return on investment. [20:50.0]
I know looking at all of these numbers can feel overwhelming, but you don't need to be a data scientist to use metrics effectively. You can start small. You can pick a few key metrics that align with your goals, what's important to you, and then focus on those, just like financial planning. You can focus on your savings rate. You can focus on how much you're investing. You can focus on how much you need in retirement so you can reach that goal. You don't need to focus on the market volatility. You don't necessarily need to focus as much on the rate of return, assuming all of your numbers work. That is the same thing in marketing.
Number eight, inconsistent branding across platforms. Now, this is kind of a specific tip. I'm going to keep this one short, too. Your brand is more than just the logo. It is the entire experience people have when they interact with your business.
If your website looks completely different from your social media profiles, which look nothing like your email newsletter, then you are confusing your prospects. They don't know what the heck is going on, because everything looks different. Consistency builds trust. Make sure your brand message and your visual identity, whatever you want to call it, make sure they're cohesive across all platforms. [21:58.0]
Think about it this way, your brand is like your personal style. If you showed up to a client meeting one day in a suit, and at the next meeting you showed up in board shorts, and then in the next meeting with that same person you showed up in a tuxedo, that person would be very confused, right? The same principle applies to your brand.
I see advisors making this mistake relatively frequently. I will go to their LinkedIn profile and they will say absolutely nothing about a niche, and then I get to the website and the very first thing that I see is stuff about a niche. I love the stuff on the website, but I don't necessarily love the stuff on LinkedIn or vice versa, and it just looks completely different.
Number nine—I'm going to hurry up and wrap up this show, because I'm already past the 20-minute mark—is failing to follow up. This one drives me crazy. You work so hard to generate leads. You work so hard on all of your marketing, and then when someone comes through the metaphorical front door, you do nothing, right? You let those people sit there, gathering metaphorical dust in your CRM. [22:57.8]
Timely, persistent follow-up is crucial. You need to develop a follow-up system and you need to stick to it. The fortune is in the follow-up. I'm not going to say much more about that, because I'm working on a lot more content about follow-up for financial advisors.
Finally, number 10, the final way that financial advisors sabotage their marketing efforts is not building strategic relationships. One of the biggest missed opportunities I see among financial advisors is failing to build these relationships or these strategic partnerships, and I'm not just talking about the occasional referral from your golfing buddy who is an accountant. I'm talking about an intentional mutually-beneficial relationship with other professionals who also serve your target market.
Who else does your ideal client work with? Really think about this. My ideal client is Bob. He's aged 45. He's a dentist. He makes this much money per year. Bob has these people in his life. Bob has an accountant, an estate planner, an insurance agent, a real estate professional, and those are all professional partners, or potential partners, I should say, who could be sending clients your way. You could say, “Bob, who do you work with? Who is important? Who do I need to know in order to help you maximize the financial plan that I created for you?” [24:10.7]
These partnerships don't happen by accident, though. A lot of financial advisors just sit back and say, “I'm giving this accountant a bunch of referrals, but the accountant isn't giving any back to me.” What else are you doing? Are you giving the accountant a reason to give you the referrals? You need to be proactive about building these relationships, and I see a lot of advisors, quite frankly, just drop the ball.
Let me give you an example. I'm going to go back to the dentist niche. We'll assume you're an advisor who works with dentists. You could partner with a dental-practice management consultant, because that consultant is already working with dentists, is already building a network of them, already has relationships with them, probably already has them following him or her on social media, and you offering financial planning is a natural extension of practice management. [24:59.6]
You could offer to do a joint webinar. You could write a guest post or guest blog on that person's website. In return, that person could introduce you to his or her clients who need financial advice. The sky is the limit, right? But you have to think about who is in that person's life that you can network with. This takes a little legwork, but it is well worth the effort. Several of my Inner Circle members have used this concept and have been well rewarded.
That is all for this week, 10 specific ways that financial advisors sabotage their marketing. Until next time, I'm James Pollard, and this has been the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I will catch you next week.
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