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Building relationships with the next generation can help ensure the long-term success of your practice.
When wealth changes hands, it also changes advisors. Ninety percent of heirs will move assets to a new advisor after the death of their parent. Wealth transfers pose considerable risks for financial advisors – but they also provide opportunities to extend client relationships across generations. By taking heirs into account when developing your marketing strategy, you can create multigenerational relationships that ensure the long-term success of your firm.
Marketing to the next generation
Many advisors target their messaging to baby boomers – after all, they have amassed significant wealth and are poised to inherit more. However, boomers will leave an even heftier amount to their heirs – meaning that establishing a meaningful connection with the next generation will be crucial to a wealth management firm’s success.
Because boomers have longer life spans, their children will be older when they inherit wealth and more likely to have already found a financial advisor of their own. Don’t wait. Start building relationships with clients’ children and grandchildren as early as possible.
- Engage in social media. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are essential tools for financial advisors looking to recruit the next generation of clients. The importance of establishing an online presence can’t be over-emphasized. According to Pew Research Center, 90% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 are active on social media, as well as 78% of users between 30 and 49. If you wait five more years to starting building a social-media presence, you risk “coming late to the party” and losing younger clients to advisors who started engaging earlier.
