Relationship-Driven Marketing
In the wake of the Great Recession, it matters more than ever.
By PETER MONTOYA
These days, representatives need to change their marketing approach to be more "relationship" driven. What does that mean? I’ll tell you.
It means making a constant, personalized connection with your clients. Think monthly, biweekly or even weekly using email. Think quarterly on a face-to-face basis, assuming the client appreciates meetings or reviews at that frequency.
Why is it necessary? Just look back to fall 2008. During that extraordinary market downturn, people wanted and needed to make contact with their financial advisor – someone who would empathize with them and share their concern, someone who would be proactive and available rather than invisible when they had a concern. How available were you during that time? Did you dread responding to some of your clients? Or did you strengthen some of your client relationships as a result of the challenge the market threw at you?
Your clients have trusted you with a part of their financial future, perhaps a large part – so they really deserve to have an ongoing relationship with you.
Unfortunately, most representatives aren’t trained to build relationships. They are trained to sell products. They sell products before they sell themselves … believing that what the client or prospects really wants is a financial product, and that “the facts” are all a prospect or client wants.
Your client can buy a financial product anywhere, so what is the attraction to you? Advisors who position themselves as "product experts" are poised to become an endangered species. Yet there are some things about financial advisors that never become obsolete: their expertise, their level of service, and their personal connections with their clients.
In the financial services industry, you are actually the product. A client or prospect is ultimately choosing you, not simply a fund or an annuity. Many advisors don’t understand that they can be the attraction.
Most advisors are taught to focus only on selling, and some are afraid they'll "turn off" prospects by using creative marketing tools that have to be navigated through compliance. At Peter Montoya Inc., we understand this, and that’s why we’ve spent the last two years focusing on the development, implementation and effectiveness of our popular MarketingLibrary and MarketingPro client communication systems. At the basic level, MarketingLibrary provides an advisor with more than 1,800 compliance-approved, professionally written letters, articles, emails and campaign messages for distribution to clients – it saves advisors writing time, and the messages can be distributed via email, mail or the Web. MarketingPro automatically sends the messages for the representative via email or direct mail. (We even have holiday messages, birthday messages and greeting cards.)
By marketing yourself as an advocate, ally and knowledge provider for your clients, you create an image as a knowledgeable professional who brings more than a roster of products to the table, and also a person who has some experiences and goals in common. This approach appeals more to emotion than to numbers, though the idea of financial security and prosperous investing is always an undercurrent. Considering that 75% of buying decisions are based on emotion, not logic, that's a strong appeal.
The marketing of an advisor’s personal strengths - a carefully crafted “brand identity” – can help to create a person-to-person (instead of advisor-to-client) rapport. Asset- and performance-based fee-structured services dovetail nicely with this marketing philosophy, which stresses individual attention, client education and the development of a long-term relationship where advice is the primary product. After all, you want to build a practice based on lasting personal relationships rather than temporary market peaks.
It’s a fact that people do business with people they like, and sophisticated investors like advisors who give them more than the latest money market fund chosen from a brochure.
Relationship-driven marketing requires a paradigm shift from reliance on the broker/dealer’s image and the strength of products to reliance on a professional marketing strategy and personal “brand.” Even the most charismatic advisor will never communicate his abilities to prospects via a boilerplate corporate brochure.
Some advisors find this approach a difficult leap. It’s more costly than corporate marketing, demands more time and commits you to a higher level of service. The good news is that programs such as MarketingLibrary (and its brethren) are making it remarkably cheaper and remarkably easier for the motivated representative.
Peter Montoya is President of Peter Montoya Inc. - the only advertising agency in the country that specializes in financial advisors. Check out MarketingLibrary.net for unlimited access to 1,800+ marketing articles, letters and invitations for only $25 or $50 per month. Learn more at www.MarketingLibrary.net or by calling (888) 730-5300.