Written by Karim Rashwan
At the heart of financial advice is relationships. However, building a meaningful relationship can be challenging for a number of reasons, including busy schedules, life events, administrative processes, and even the structure of the investments. The key to creating a meaningful relationship with prospects, and ultimately converting them into clients, is establishing trust and demonstrating value.
There are many ways to accomplish this, but the following are three effective strategies to effectively demonstrate value and make it painless for prospects to choose you.
1. Determine your communication strategy
With digital adoption at an all time high, now is the time to assess how you communicate with prospects and clients. You will want to start by establishing how you are going to effectively connect with your network. You will need to find scalable methods that ensure you stay top of mind while also providing value through your communications.
Start by assessing how you currently follow-up with prospects and what you send to engage them. Next outline how you can best stay in contact with each prospect. Determine which digital communication channels (newsletters, email, social media, blog) might work best for you, and look for ways in which you can scale the process through automation. This will ensure your communication strategy remains efficient and realistic to your workload while deepening each relationship over time.
TIP:
Launch a weekly client newsletter that shares insightful content and news that helps prospects/clients understand the context of what is happening in the markets or world around them. Not only does this demonstrate value to prospects, it also is a great opportunity to generate leads and stay top of mind with investors who may not be ready to immediately start using your services.
A newsletter supported with social media posts lets you effectively scale communications to a broad audience, and with the right technology, both can be automated. The goal is to keep in regular contact, while demonstrating value and ensuring that your name stays top of mind.
2. Keep in touch digitally & frequently
It takes at least 7 touchpoints before you enter a prospect’s consciousness, according to marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Prospective clients are bombarded with so many other offerings that it’s now more important than ever to continue the conversation online, so that you can keep in frequent touch with them.
One way to do this is to offer the prospect something of value - an ebook or email newsletter are both offerings that will allow you to transition an offline conversation into a regular online touchpoint.
By bringing your prospects online, you will also be able to more easily track and nurture all new leads that you have met from conferences, meetings or word-of-mouth referrals. Marketing platforms today have robust contact list systems that let you segment and automate the process of sending prospects frequent and consistent touchpoints from you.
TIP:
Invite prospects to subscribe to your email newsletter, which gives you a perfect opportunity to collect their contact details and demonstrate value on a weekly, monthly and annual basis.
In addition to regular touchpoints, most email platforms will even show you who’s interacting with your emails, but some can even identify what topics that contact is specifically interested in. By using this data, you can tailor your outreach to them to spark conversations related to the topics that matter most to them.
3. Get personal with content
More than ever, investors are turning to their financial adviser for information and guidance. Advisers are now expected to understand the needs, wants, interests, fears, hopes, and life goals of each investor individually. So, how do you deliver this new level of value and demonstrate this to your prospects? The answer comes in the form of content.
If done right, providing investors with content that is timely, relevant, and personalised is a key way to inject yourself into a prospective client’s life. However, this strategy requires an assortment of content that goes beyond what content advisers have traditionally sent to investors.
By including lifestyle content such as health and wellness, food, cooking, fitness, and even home and gardening, you can connect on a deeper level beyond finances. The goal here is to demonstrate how you understand the individual interests and needs of each prospective investor and spark conversations relevant to them that keep you top of mind for years to come.
TIP:
Be sure to note any interests, hobbies or financial concepts a prospect or client mentions on a call or in meeting with them. These can provide you a valuable opportunity in the future to share content or information on these topics to demonstrate you understand and listen to them.
For example, if a client recently became a parent, you may wish to send them content on planning for their child’s education, which could spark additional investment opportunities. Remember to go beyond just financial content, and include materials on lifestyle, well-being and other content targeted to their interests.
Don’t leave your communications to chance
If you’re ready to get better results from your client engagement and marketing efforts, learn how AdvisorStream’s automated marketing platform can help you get more clients without the extra workload.