Now that you’ve established a message and proven your depth, your next important step is sharing this brand with your audience.
The most efficient way to share that message is through your digital network. Emails, blogs and social media are the best way to stay in touch with everyone, says Kirk Lowe, founder of TactiBrand in Toronto.
Lowe shares four steps to share your message effectively:
1. Create professional and complete profiles
Before communicating through LinkedIn or Twitter, ensure that your various online profiles look professional and are consistent with your brand.
Let’s say, for example, that your website declares you to be an expert in financial planning for small-business owners, yet your LinkedIn profile summary makes no mention of this specialization. Be sure to make that addition. You must send the same message across all your profiles so that regardless of how people connect with you, they are aware of your expertise.
One detail advisors overlook when creating their profiles is the importance of titles, Lowe says.
The way in which you refer to yourself online should reflect the way you are most commonly known. If you’ve decided to get creative and call yourself an “investment guru,” that will work only if you have spent considerable time and money branding that title and it is easily recognizable.
Whichever title you use, make sure it is consistent throughout all your online platforms.
2. Expand your online connections
Have you invited all of your clients, prospects, centres of influence and other contacts to connect with you on LinkedIn or be a “friend” through Facebook?
Use your address book to its full potential and tell your contacts how they can find you online.
When inviting people you know, explain why they should pay attention to your online profiles. Inform them that you plan on sharing your expertise on a regular basis and that this information will be helpful to them.
3. Always refer to your website
Whether you prefer connecting with others through social media or through conventional media such as your local newspaper, having a website and placing your web address on all your marketing materials are non-negotiable.
Although people can learn your name and areas of specialization through social media or a direct mail piece, they can learn about your expertise in detail through your website.
“Once they have gone to your site and experienced your brand,” Lowe says, “that’s when you have a chance to influence them.”
4. Be generous with content
The old adage “never spill your candy in the foyer” — don’t give away free advice until the prospect has signed on as a client — no longer holds true.
The fear once was that a prospect would take your free advice and repeat it to his or her existing advisor to be implemented. That mindset makes some advisors cautious about posting detailed white papers and blogs imparting financial planning tips. But you must get over this fear, Lowe says.
Instead, he says, “You want to be known as the person who was always generous and who knows more.”
This is the final installment in a four-part series on branding for advisors.