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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.
Audience reach – This is where most advisors fail: not getting enough eyeballs on their content. Just posting to your social media is not going to work if you have a following of less than 5,000 people.
Raise your hand if you identify with this scenario: You just wrote a 1,000-word blog of the most intelligent financial wisdom ever known to mankind and you get three likes: your husband or wife, a random woman in Milwaukee who sells porcelain turtles, and your IT support firm.
Get the right attention for your content. If you don’t, there is no point in producing any content in the first place.
Do this through distribution platforms such as sponsored advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn (pay per click), Google Adwords, newsletters, speaking engagements, cold calls, guest articles, podcasts and collaborations.
Here’s another place many advisors are missing the mark. I love industry comradery, but if your content is getting viewed by the CFP group, the RIA group, and the wealth management group on LinkedIn, how can you expect any leads to come? Just because you are allowed to be a member of those groups doesn’t mean it’s the right audience. Spend $1,000 to $3,000 per month to get the right attention from people who can and will buy your services.
Selling to the close – Most advisors say, “All we need to do is get in front of people – once we sit down and talk we always close the deal.” If every advisor says this, then how can it be true, unless prospects shop only one advisor? It’s wishful thinking. And even if it were true, it would mean you have a pretty narrow pipeline consisting of a few deals here and there. There’s no way you’re closing one deal a week without any rejection.
Invest the time to train your salespeople on how to move prospects through the funnel and close the deal. Spend up to $5,000 on this – a one-time fee. You may want to use a mystery shopper once in a while to test and see how well they’re doing from the buyer’s standpoint. I’ve done this for clients and the results can be pretty jolting for the boss to see what the buyer experiences with their sales team.
Include your personal time
I frequently see advisors spend their money and then fail to invest the time it takes to make the marketing happen. It makes no sense.
Many advisors think they can just hire a marketing person and they are exonerated of the responsibility of committing their time. In fact, it is the opposite. The marketer can express the brand, but the advisor is the brand. The marketer is the voice, and the advisor is the idea behind the voice.
The more money you invest, the more of your personal time you will need to commit along with it. Do this or you will have no brand.
Include in your budget the cost of your personal time to the business. Do this or it won’t happen. This way you know what it may cost you to pay someone else to do what you don’t have time to do yourself.
Convert budget to revenue
A budget isn’t an Excel exercise; it’s a strategy that guides your actions. Schedule a marketing meeting once a month with all involved parties and see how your spend lines up with your productivity. There should be a revenue target each month.
Use the revenue and results each month to figure out where your budget went wrong.
- Did you not get enough views on the website? Reach
- Did you get views on the website that failed to convert to appointments? Brand
- Did you get leads in the door that your salespeople couldn’t convert? Selling
- Did you get enough content published? Brand
- Did you get a high number of views, but predominantly from competitors or vendors to your firm – and all this amounted to nothing? Reach
- Did you find prospects saying they couldn’t pay your fees? Selling
- Did you find your leads went “radio silent” after the first meeting? Selling
- Did you get people liking and sharing your content but no leads came of it? Brand
The budget process is dynamic. Make drastic changes until you get the results you want. Make a budget in three-month increments. You should have an overall budget for the year – know that number for sure – but adjustments should happen at a minimal quarterly and optimally once a month.
Sara’s upshot
The uncomfortable truth about your marketing budget is that it is going to cost at least $1,000 to $2,000 per month on an ongoing basis to create branded content and get at least 2,000 eyeballs on it. If not, there’s no point to doing marketing. If you have never done a marketing budget before, please get in touch with me and I will send you a copy of my marketing budget sheet in Excel. This sheet will make it very easy to assess what you spent versus what you earned.
For more creative marketing ideas that will give prospects something to bark about, follow my podcast here.
Sara Grillo, CFA, is a top financial writer with a focus on marketing and branding for investment management, financial planning, and RIA firms. Prior to launching her own firm, she was a financial advisor and worked at Lehman Brothers. Sara graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature and has an MBA from NYU Stern in quantitative finance.
Read more articles by Sara Grillo