“Coach’s Forum” is a place in which you can ask your questions, tell your stories or give your opinions on any aspect of practice management. For each column, George selects the most interesting and relevant comments from readers and offers his advice. Our objective is to build a community of people with a common interest in making their financial advisory practices as effective as possible.

Advisor says: You recently wrote about an advisor who wanted to start asking for referrals after a long time of not doing so. His book of business was growing primarily because of market gains. However, he realized that he wasn’t adding new clients to replace those who were leaving him for reasons such as death and transfer of assets to their children.

I am in a similar boat. My practice levelled off a year or so ago, and I decided to try to regain some momentum by re-instituting some of the marketing methods I used to build my business in the first place. It seemed to me that the old saying “It worked so well, I stopped doing it” applied to me.

I have, however, been frustrated with the results. I have tried everything – asking for referrals, seminars and client appreciation events – even cold-calling (which I actually enjoyed and was pretty good at). I am not sure if I have lost my touch completely, but I am not having the success I hoped for. Heck, I easily used to get 40 to 50 people out to a seminar; now, I am lucky to get four or five. What could I be doing so wrong?

Coach says: If it has been a year of trying and, assuming that you didn’t play hopscotch (jumping from one method to another), chances are that you aren’t doing much wrong. You are probably experiencing the reality that the traditional ways in which advisors have built their businesses simply don’t work as well anymore.

Traditional advisor marketing could be described as “interruption marketing,” in that we send a message out to our target audience in the hope that we can interrupt everything else that’s on their minds.

Let’s look at the most popular business-building activities advisors have used in the past and gauge their effectiveness today:

Cold-calling. This is the way so many veteran advisors got started in our business. Ask yourself, however: “Do I answer my telephone at home, in the evening, from an unidentified caller?” Most of us don’t. Add to this the National Do Not Call List legislation and it is easy to see why cold calls are less productive in today’s world.

Email campaigns. Similar to cold-calling, we now are inundated with emails and have defences in place, such as spam filters, firewalls and automatic deletions. Add in the harsher anti-spam legislation about to hit in Canada and emailing is another tough go.

Seminars. There was a time when seminars reigned supreme as a client-development activity. Attendance could be counted in the hundreds and many advisors used to complain that they didn’t have time to follow up on all the leads they’d receive. Today, as your experience shows, people have become “seminared out.” It still is possible to have a much smaller event with a targeted group and a specific topic; however, when everything is considered, the return on your investment is often less than hoped.

Client events. Like seminars, many clients have been overexposed to client- appreciation events. In fact, in surveys that we’ve done with advisors’ clients, we found that while some clients enjoy such events socially, they don’t attach the value to them you’d probably like them to, considering the costs and energy you put into them. Besides, how many of your clients actually bring a friend to your “bring a friend” events?

Newsletters. Some clients look forward to their advisors’ newsletters, but research shows that the “open rate” for most e-newsletters is not high. The percentage of clients who actually read printed newsletters is similarly disappointing, particularly given the effort required to produce a good newsletter.

All of these methods still can work, and they do for some advisors. In general, however, these methods are not generating the results they used to. In today’s lingo, traditional marketing is described as “outbound” – in that you go looking for business. The new and better way is to complement outbound activities with “inbound” marketing – in which prospective clients come looking for you.

Many advisors have incorrectly concluded that this simply means having a website so that potential clients can search for information about you on the Internet. Of course, you must have an online presence. In fact, in the minds of many potential clients, if they can’t find you online, you don’t exist!

So, how does this play into the most highly recommended way to meet potential new clients – referrals? In our workshops and discussions with individual advisors, when I ask how they are building their businesses today, nine out of 10 advisors will say “through referrals.” Yet, the very nature of referrals also has changed as a result of the availability of information about advisors on the Internet.

In the old days, clients or centres of influence (COIs) would be speaking to someone they knew who expressed the need for financial advice, at which time they would recommend and, perhaps, introduce that person directly to you, their advisor of choice. Today, your clients or COIs are more likely to say something like “Go to Robert’s website and check him out.”

We all know that many clients are reluctant to provide referrals because if the referral doesn’t work out, it might reflect badly on their relationship with both parties. The advantage of the “check out his website” approach is that it significantly reduces that risk because it transfers the responsibility for the relationship to the person being referred.

Let’s go even further. The day is not far away, in my opinion, when prospective clients will increasingly bypass that initial conversation with their friend and surf the web directly, either to find the answer to their question or to identify an advisor who appears to have the credentials and experience to assist them. As that trend accelerates, you must not only have an online presence; it must be one that helps you stand out from the crowd. That means being active in social media, publishing, offering downloadable information, providing calculators – anything that will position you as a subject-matter expert.

This approach is called “content” marketing. The guiding principle is to give members of your target market information that will help them to solve a problem or further their buying decision, but without talking about how you specifically can fulfil that need. Because your content will be available for the entire world to see online, the better or more narrowly you are able to define your specialty and focus your content – for example, “planning for divorcees and widows” – the more likely you are to be found by people who fit your preferred-client profile.

Before you launch a content-marketing initiative, create a plan that answers the following questions:

1. What is the goal (educate, promote, communicate, etc.)?

2. How often will I publish content?

3. How will I publish content (website, blog, videos, podcasts, etc.)?

4. How will I generate content?

5. What topics do I want to cover?

6. How will I measure success?

You can generate content by creating it yourself, purchasing it from a service or hiring someone to produce it for you.

Most successful marketing activities are not passive; you have to work at them. That certainly applies to Internet-based and social media marketing. Fresh, relevant and timely content is the fuel that will power your promotional strategy.

George Hartman is managing partner with Elite Advisors Canada Inc. in Toronto. Send your questions and comments to ghartman@eliteadvisors.ca.

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