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You could be the most thorough, competent financial advisor of all time, but if nobody knows, what difference does it make? To succeed in the financial advisory profession, advisors must get comfortable with marketing themselves and their services.
Now, as a financial advisor, you might be thinking, my specialties lie in numbers and investments, not website development and slogan copywriting. However, just like you create carefully thought-out strategies to help your clients achieve their financial goals, a marketing plan is a strategy to help you achieve business goals.
While putting together a marketing plan is more complex than reading an article, here are three important pieces of advice to get female solo practitioners started.
Choose your niche
Who is your ideal client? As the saying goes, you can't be everything to everybody, so determine who you would ideally like to work with and focus in on that audience. To determine potential niches for you to focus on, consider your passions. If you're especially interested in law, seek to help female lawyers. If you've always cherished the time you spend volunteering for the Special Olympics, maybe it's parents of children with special needs. Regardless of the niche you choose, homing in on a demographic narrows the competition and helps your firm stand out.
Tailor your digital presence to that niche
From optimizing your website to selecting imagery that you will share on social media, once you've determined which niche you will focus on, target them head-on. While initially you might feel like you are alienating yourself from other potential clients, focusing on a specific persona will enhance your expertise within that niche. Looking at the examples above, a female lawyer would be more likely to seek guidance from an advisor who specialized in advising other lawyers, just like parents of a child with special needs would feel more at ease with an advisor who was familiar with their unique circumstances.
Work smarter, not harder
The specifics of each advisor's marketing plan will look different based on their goals. One advisor might choose to write weekly blog posts supplemented with an occasional social media post. Others might prefer quarterly blogs with more frequent social media activity. While advisor preferences may differ, work smarter instead of harder by maximizing the reach of any marketing materials you create.
One way to do this is by utilizing the create once, publish everywhere (COPE) method, which is a technique that can be used to publish messages across multiple communication channels without doing a bunch of extra work. For example, an advisor might write a newsletter focused on the financial implications faced by female lawyers that reach equity partner status. Once the newsletter has been sent out, reformat the information to be shared as a blog post. Take it a step further and break the information down into pieces to be shared as social media posts. Instead of writing a newsletter, then writing a blog, and then coming up with a dozen social media posts, you will ultimately have done the work once, but repurposed it to expand its reach without overextending internal resources.
A financial network eases your marketing burden
Despite marketing being incredibly important for female financial advisors, we know from experience that it's easier said than done to incorporate a marketing plan into your day-to-day routine. After all, you have a business to run and clients to serve.
One of the best ways to fit marketing into your business plan is to join a financial network that supports members with marketing services. Whether it's marketing materials that you can repurpose or quarterly meetings with a marketing coach, the resources provided by financial networks are invaluable.
Bridget Grimes and Katie Burke co-founded Equita Financial Network out of a need to fuel business success while empowering other women in the financial services industry. Equita became the first platform solely focused on women-led financial planning firms, designed to encourage women to make the leap into launching their own practice and provide solutions to support them every step of the way. Equita is a way for like-minded women to not only share resources and run their business at an affordable cost, but to also share ideas on everything from best practices to help with questions regarding client issues.
Are you interested in joining a female financial network that will support your marketing efforts? Reach out to learn more about Equita!
Read more articles by Bridget Grimes, Katie Burke
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives
