New Year, New Marketing Plan
December is a great time to sit down and evaluate your marketing plan for the upcoming year. The right marketing can help you reach your ideal prospects and help further your clients' trust in you. But how do financial advisors do it? Learn Joe's method for how to create a marketing plan for the New Year in this month's FinPlan Friday conversation.
FinPlan Fridays
In our video blog series, FinPlan Fridays, Covisum® Founder and President, Joe Elsasser, CFP®, offers his take on the issues financial advisors see every day. Joe is a practicing financial planner with a unique perspective into the challenges for which Covisum provides technology solutions. Join us on the first Friday of every month for FinPlan Fridays, and get helpful tips to grow your financial planning practice.
Transcript
Hi, this is Joe Elsasser, CFP®, President and Founder of Covisum and also a practicing financial advisor. Welcome to another FinPlan Friday. Today, we're going to talk about being proactive in your marketing. Being proactive in your marketing means establishing a plan for the course of the year and executing that plan throughout the year. In order to do that, we've got to start with a communication calendar.
Communication Calendar
The communication calendar should set up a regular cadence for communications; this cadence is going to be different for every advisor's practice. So, for example, if you've got a huge client base and a lot of folks servicing them, it's going to take a lot more growth to reach your growth goals, but it's also going to take a lot more communication to current clients in order to equip them to market you as well.
For someone with a large or well-established practice, your communication calendar should probably be considerably more sophisticated than someone who needs fewer new clients in order to meet their growth goals. But most importantly, set a cadence that works for you and then build a plan to execute on it. Make sure to hold space for timely topics that naturally occur.
Identifying Timely Topics
So, in our practice, we work exclusively with people in retirement transition and beyond, and Social Security optimization has always been a core part of our practice. Well, we know that every October we're going to get a lot of Social Security announcements. We're going to get:
- Next year's cost of living adjustments
- The maximum taxable wage base
- The earnings test
Helping people understand these facts are perfect topics for regular marketing campaigns out to the marketplace and also to our current clients. So, that's automatically something that's going to be included each and every year in October.
Some of the other key elements of our practice are tax-related. And so as tax brackets are announced, and particularly in that period from February to April where people are really thinking about tax, that's a great opportunity to have recurring content around tax. Now, depending on your practice, there might be other very specific things that are going to align well with the cadence you set for communication. So, you'll want to identify and include those.
Creating Original Content
And then the third key element here is original content. And I can't stress enough how important original content is. And some of you may be thinking, "Gosh, that's just so hard to produce when I can simply buy it." But the fact is, through the years of your practice, with all the clients that you've worked with, you have expertise that no ghostwriter is going to have. And not only that, but you have a voice through which you communicate that expertise and finding a way to get that voice out in your marketing is absolutely critical for reaching consumers who are trying to determine which advisor they going to ultimately do business with. They're going to want to identify the advisor that's a thought leader when it comes to their specific challenges.
You've already built that expertise. It's really just a question of how do you get that expertise out into the public, and that can be doing something as simple as these videos. When you share your content on social media, you may not see a lot of see a lot of likes initially, but every month, there are thousands of people who watch these kinds of videos and over time that compounds. And that same thing can be true of your practice. So, it might take you an extra 20-30 minutes or an hour, maybe even five hours to produce some original content, but as long as that content is the sort of content that either stays evergreen or provides a base that you can build future content on, it's absolutely worth doing, because it puts your voice, the unique aspects of your practice out there in the marketplace for customers to evaluate before they make a decision. Because, of course, they are looking at you long before they make a decision about who to trust with their finances.
Three Starting Points for Proactively Marketing Your Financial Planning Practice
- Creating a cadence and making sure you execute on that cadence
- Identifying timely topics that align really well with what your practice does best
- Peppering in original content because that content carries your voice and your voice is what helped you build your business in the first place
Now, if you want to get a foot up on getting this done, one of the easy ways is to pick up our marketing kit for Income InSight®. The marketing kit includes an annual communications calendar to get you started in the right direction. Then, you can customize it for your own practice. It also includes a lot of useful content that you can pepper in alongside some of your original content. Those tools are going to get you a great start on the path. Thanks again for joining.
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