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The pandemic disrupted marketing and growth plans for financial advisors.
As my favorite business-school professor would ask when we faced a marketing challenge in one of our case discussions, “How can we turn lemons into lemonade?”
Here are five growth opportunities that will help you advance your firm while the competition sits on the sidelines.
- Finally, a niche!!!
While studies show that firms that specialize in niches and specific target markets have higher-growth rates and profitability, many firms have been reluctant to embrace this concept.
You don’t have to commit to a single niche for life, but the pandemic offers the opportunity to pilot marketing and offerings to a specific target audience.
Use inexpensive digital marketing to add five to 10 clients who match your ideal client profile and also happen to be from a similar group.
Consider: Messages in these pilot marketing campaigns can be segmented from your general firm and client marketing to avoid confusing your existing contacts. Also, you will find it easy to track the progress of these nascent ventures.
For example, an advisor client of mine picked one of his archetype ideal clients to embark on this path of “riches from niches.”
- Address the front office technology quagmire
Firms spend most of their technology energy and budget on practice management and back-office systems.
The fact that surveys reveal that the most popular CRM system for advisors is Outlook shows you that there is much work to be done in areas such as sales management, marketing automation, websites and content management systems, social media management, etc.
After all, if you have no way of scaling or managing your communications with your marketing and sales prospects, opportunities will be lost. Tracking new initiatives will become an exercise in frustration.
- Exploit new digital and content marketing opportunities
No, I am not going to tell you here to update your website. If it needs it, you have probably heard this from others.
An opportunity for many, though, is developing and marketing content unique to your practice.
Think evergreen when it comes to your core-content marketing strategy: create it once and attract results year after year.
A client, for example, created a special report focused on retirement planning, his specialty. Forty-two new prospects requested the report in the first month alone!
- Get beyond Zoom fatigue with virtual events and marketing videos
Yes, you can hold virtual meetings with your team, clients, and prospects. But to grow you must reach prospects in bunches.
Leverage the technologies and skills you have mastered these last six months by hosting or speaking at virtual conferences and webinars and leveraging online video.
For instance, a client filled the demand in their niche by speaking at many of the new virtual-event series that cropped up in their area of specialty.
Sponsor a virtual conference or webinar series or consider starting your own.
If you speak to different groups and audiences, you won’t have to create a new talk every time but will be able to adapt and leverage one or two practiced presentations.
- Add a key resource to support your growth
Larger firms may hire a head of business development to execute inorganic growth strategies such as practice acquisitions and strategic hires.
Smaller firms could hire a part-time social media assistant to build a targeted list of prospects in your niche and start to cultivate this audience by sharing content.
For example, a client developed an annual social media intern program for a college student who could work remotely and also gain a valuable introduction to the advisory industry.
Or the hire could be your first full-time marketing director.
One firm took advantage of the recession and brought in a recently laid-off client, a marketing rock star in another industry with transferable skills.
Will you sit on the sidelines and use the pandemic as an excuse to tread water?
Or will you embrace the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade and boost your practice to the next level?
Bob Hanson is a fractional marketer and author of Marketing Power for Financial Advisors. Get his checklist, Nine Questions Advisors Must Ask Before They Hire a Marketing Agency, Fractional or Full-Time Marketer, click here.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.