The Painful Truth about Your Marketing Budget

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There’s nothing worse than the feeling of throwing money down the drain. Unfortunately this is the experience that most advisors have with marketing. If you haven’t gotten the results you wanted in 2018, here is where you went wrong and how you should change your marketing budget in September to fix the problem.

What the budget should include

Here’s the short and simple version of what you need to be successful in marketing, in order of decreasing importance:

  • Brand. A brand is the mark that makes your client have a different experience with you than with anyone else. This is where most advisors go wrong, because they have no brand. It’s all cliché – a predictable, copy-cat hodgepodge of images and slogans that offer no differentiation.
  • Audience reach. This is the ability of your marketing assets to be seen by enough people. It’s no use having the perfect brand if you don’t get it in front of enough people. How much is enough? Aim for 2,000 views on your content per month as a starting point. Anything less than that and you are not going to get anywhere. This is the most common mistake I see advisors making.
  • Selling to the close. Once you get people interested, you have to close the transaction. This entails a large amount of follow up because the sales cycle for advisory services is long, years in some cases. However most advisors don’t follow up more than once or twice. Also, this process involves professional sales skills. Asking over and over, “Have you made a decision yet?” is an example of unskilled follow up.

How do you map these three components into your budget?

Brand – Do a one-time analysis and get your story right. This doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Pay somebody who knows how to figure out the right message to use and be done with it. Expect to pay $3,000 to $10,000 as a flat fee. On an ongoing basis, you will need some content that expresses your brand: blogs, podcasts and videos. Expect to pay $500 to $1,000 per month.