Posts

What do you Measure in your Financial Advice Business?

/in , , /by

At the end of the day for most advisers, there’s one measure that stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of importance – profitability.

Until recently, many firms actually didn’t view profitability as their key metric; their main focus was on income. This was usually backwards looking, i.e. examining income in the last 12 months, or sometimes also looking out at the next 12 months. Many firms have now switched this focus to looking further forwards – based on their increasing trail commission and fee incomes, what is income forecasted to be next year / in 5 years time / in 10 years time? This now gives a real sense of the future health of the business.

While income is a very important metric, profitability tells a truer story of the health of the firm as it takes account of the expenses of the firm, and helps to better determine the future value of the business. Now this is what you (or other shareholders) are really interested in!

However there are so many factors that can impact your profitability, most firms will look to dig a little deeper to examine some of those factors that are impacting their profitability. Set out below are just some of the metrics used currently by different advice firms, that help them to determine the performance of key inputs to their profitability. Which ones might it make sense for you to start tracking?

 

Client metrics

There is a range of metrics that can be used to measure the success of your client activities. These include;

  • Number of clients: this can be measured at an overall level and also within segments of your target client groups.
  • Average revenue per client: this will give you a sense of whether you are building greater value into your propositions and whether you are reaching your ideal clients. Again this may be carried out at a segment level.
  • Average recurring revenue per client: this will give you a good sense of the future health of your business.
  • Number of new clients: always a good measure of whether you are growing as a business or not!
  • Client satisfaction: this will give you a sense of your likelihood to hang onto your clients into the future. Again this can be carried out at a segment level. The Net Promoter Score is a very simple but useful measure of client satisfaction.
  • Risk register: Are there problem cases that need to be monitored? If so, a firm oversight needs to be maintained, both in relation to the number of cases and progress of these cases towards a solution.

 

Staff measures

Again, there is a range of measures that you can use to ensure your staff are performing to their maximum potential;

  • Sales Performance: This may be based on volume, margin or other relevant measures.
  • Activity: This may be the number of new clients secured, first meetings secured, financial plans completed etc. It is always useful to get a good sense of the activity levels of each of your sales team.
  • Staff satisfaction: Similar to client satisfaction, this is important too! Are your staff happy and committed to the long term health of your business or are they just waiting for an opportunity to jump ship? Staff satisfaction measures can help you uncover these insights.

 

Marketing Metrics

Yes, most marketing activities can actually be measured! Here are a few that will help inform your marketing activities;

  • Contact data quality: This might be as simple initially as tracking the number of client email addresses you have secured. Email offers you a no cost method of getting marketing messages out to your clients.
  • Numbers and source of leads: Tracking the numbers and source of new lead is one of the best inputs into decision making around future marketing activities. If it worked before, it might be worth repeating!
  • Website analytics: Google analytics will give you a wealth of data in relation to your online marketing activities. For more detailed information in relation to how Google Analytics can help financial advisers, check out our previous article here. Google analytics can tell you;
    • The number of people finding your website
    • Where website visitors came from – Search terms, social media, directly accessing your website.
    • The content that attracts people to your site…. and also drives them away.
  • Social media interactions: Likes, +1’s, comments, Retweets! These terms are “Double Dutch” to some people, highly valued endorsements of your content to others!

There are of course many other measures available to be used within your business, these are just a few that are available to you. However the list is also potentially endless! For most advisers, the starting point is to identify a few metrics that you feel will make a real difference to your business, and then track them diligently.

There are many metrics that people use that are not listed above. Which ones do you find particularly useful? All your comments are welcome below.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/glitch_nitch/

What can Google Analytics tell Financial Advisers?

/in , , , /by

Online marketing tools have changed the game in relation to marketing by financial advisers. These tools offer a number of benefits; immediacy, better targeting, cost effectiveness and fantastic insights through the analytics available.

 

Most advisers are pretty clear about these advantages, however many still run online marketing campaigns without really leveraging the power of the analytics available. Now there’s no doubt that Google Analytics is a bit of a monster, there’s a huge amount of data available, to the point of it being a bit overwhelming! So here are some of the most useful measures available to you, to help you really maximise the potential of your online campaigns.

 

Some basic trends

The following measures can give you a good sense overall as to whether recent marketing activities are working or not, when you look at the trends over the period of the campaign and compare them to previous periods.

 

  • Number of visits: This gives you a good sense of whether your activities are increasing traffic to the site or not. The number of page views is another measure of this.
  • Number of visitors: Are your activities driving lots of visitors, or are the same people tending to return on multiple occasions.
  • New v Returning Visitors: Are you attracting high numbers of new visitors to your site for the first time, or are you mainly only attracting existing users back? This might suggest your marketing efforts are not reaching new audiences and need to be reviewed.
  • Pages per visit: Once people are landing on your site, are they having a good poke around (as you want them to do), or are they leaving quickly?
  • Time spent on site: Similar to the last one – is your content actually engaging the user to spend time reading the content or are they leaving quickly?
  • Bounce Rate: The big baddie… are people leaving the site from the page they entered without bothering to check out any other content?
  • Number of views on devices: This is becoming more and more important. Where are people viewing your website and as the number of views increase on phones and tablets, how does you site appear on these devices?

 

Once you get a handle on these, you’ll start to get a sense of whether your efforts are moving in the right direction or not. And then you can start to get into some really useful analytics…

 

Where visitors are coming from

The acquisition section gives you great insights into the sources of your traffic. Are most people arriving directly by typing in your URL, is your website address memorable? Or are they searching for your site in Google and if so, what keywords are they searching for to end up on your site? Once you know the keywords that people are searching, you can make sure that they are included in your website content and in any blogs that you write.

 

If your traffic is coming from social media, you can drill down and see which channels are delivering traffic. Is it the post that you are sharing on LinkedIn or is it your Twitter feed that’s driving your traffic?

 

And then when they get there…

The Behaviour section in your analytics gives you great insights into what people are actually doing when they land on your site. Apart from some of the trends mentioned earlier, there are other really useful insights to be gained in this section.

 

You can identify which pages people are entering your site on. This will help you analyse the traction your blog posts are achieving (or not). You can also see which are the most frequently viewed pages; this will give you a sense of the areas of main interest to the readers. Of course when you then overlay the time spent on each page and from where people are exiting the site, you start to get a real sense of where content is strong and where it is weak. You can then ensure that you have crystal clear “Calls to Action” on these high performing pages, giving you the best chance of turning these readers into enquirers and hopefully customers!

 

You can then run the reports across multiple dimensions for some really useful insights – find out where your traffic is coming from and also where it is landing. This might demonstrate the success of your blog for example, and the channels through which people are finding your content.

 

You can also set goals for your site – for example how many people are signing up for your newsletter or are downloading your brochure, and keep track of your progress against these goals.

 

Check out the spikes

The spikes in activity, either in visitor numbers or page views can be very revealing. When you dig into these, you will usually find that a marketing activity or other event is behind these spikes. This can give you really useful direction for future marketing activities – a campaign that you are thinking of running, where to attract future traffic to the site or the type of content to be writing. At a minimum, it may well give you some confidence that your existing approach is the correct one!

 

These are just some of the insights that can be gained from Google Analytics. I’d suggest you go in and poke around; you’ll be amazed at the valuable information that can be gained!

 

Are there any other particular analytics that you find useful? If so, let us know through the comments below.

5 zero cost marketing activities to complete this summer

/in , , /by

With the explosive growth of digital marketing in the last decade, one important dynamic has changed. Marketing has shifted from being a bottomless pit in relation to your financial resources to offering many low cost or even zero cost opportunities. However the flip side of this coin is that marketing now draws on another scarce resource…your time.

With business possibly being a bit quieter over the summer months, you now should have a bit of time to dedicate to some marketing activities that will set you in good stead for a strong finish to the year. So here are 5 marketing tasks to complete over the next 5 weeks that won’t actually cost you a cent.

Update your Website

As part of my work with financial advisers across the country, I too often see great work going into the development of new and exciting marketing activities while ignoring one of the business’s main marketing assets, the company website. Yes I know that updating your website is certainly not the most exciting work that you can be doing, but it is very important. Perceptions of your business will be built, based on your website and there is nothing worse than out of date and poorly written content. So go through your website page by page, make sure there is no out of date content and look for opportunities to make the content more engaging for the reader. This is your key online shop window.

 

Review your LinkedIn presence

In a similar vein to the above, your LinkedIn profile is your most important personal digital asset from a business perspective. To my mind, a presence on LinkedIn is not optional for financial advisers any more, it is too important a marketing opportunity to miss. And it doesn’t cost a red cent.

Starting in next month’s newsletter, I’m going to do a series of 3 in-depth articles in relation to LinkedIn, covering the following;

  • Building a winning profile on LinkedIn
  • Using LinkedIn to build a valuable network
  • Using LinkedIn to add value and build your business.

So for now, get to work on improving your LinkedIn presence and then hopefully over the rest of the year, you’ll pick up a few more tips from the 3 in-depth articles.

 

Tidy up your data

There are 2 specific areas in relation to data that can add significantly to your marketing efforts. The first is to simply (but religiously) record where every lead comes from, is it from a referral, from a specific marketing activity or from whatever source. The importance of this is that when you look back a year later at where your leads came from, this data can hugely influence where you put your marketing euros and hours in the future.

The second area is in relation to email addresses. Spend some time over the summer ringing clients to ensure you have their current email address. Email is still an extremely powerful marketing tool, but can’t be carried out without email addresses. Lack of this valuable data is the single biggest blockage I come across, preventing advisers from carrying out effective email campaigns. I might be stretching it a bit but the cost of these calls is covered under your phone package!

 

Develop an introducer’s presentation

So many advisers recognise the enormous opportunity that strong links with potential introducers such as accountants or tax advisers can offer them. However many don’t give themselves the best chance of building strong relationships with these introducers.

This starts at the very first meeting with the potential partner. This should never just be a chat. This is one of your most important business meetings, where you are trying to convince the potential partner to entrust you with their most valuable asset, their clients. At the end of the day, the main reason many accountants don’t enter into partnerships with financial advisers is because they are afraid that as a result of having recommended you to their clients, that this will reflect back badly on them if something goes wrong between you and the client.

So you must be able to clearly articulate why you are the only adviser that they should consider working with and how you are going to actually enhance the partner’s relationship with their client, rather than potentially damaging it. The starting point for this is a professional, engaging presentation that clearly articulates your value proposition to both the introducer and to their clients. Work on this over the summer.

 

Hone your referral approach

Referrals sit at the heart of many advisers’ client acquisition strategies. Many “just do it”, without any thought to method or process. While this is fine if it works, there are ways to support your natural talent to improve your success rate. One way is to use the likes of LinkedIn to research your client’s network. Now rather than asking your client to refer “someone” to you, and pushing the work on to them to think of who and how you might help, instead you can suggest actual contacts that you would like to meet. This keeps you in the driving seat.

Also develop a series of case studies of innovative solutions you have designed for clients, portraying your value. Make your clients aware of these, with the aim of helping to trigger in their mind some contacts that your solutions / approaches might suit.

 

And one more…

Finally, if you want help with these or any other activities, I’d be delighted to talk through your challenges with you. And I’ll buy the coffee!

 

I hope these ideas help. Put a bit of time into your marketing activities over the summer, and reap the rewards over the remainder of the year.

Is email finished as a marketing tool for financial advisers?

/in , , /by

When working with financial advice firms on their marketing plans, the value of email marketing always raises its head. Is it effective? Is it being replaced by social media? Is email passé?

I firmly believe that email marketing is a really important element of the overall marketing mix for financial advisers. It can be extremely effective if done well and can offer you a very targeted approach to reach your clients. It’s not a case of either / or in relation to social media, it’s a case of both! And it’s certainly not passé, it’s still probably the most essential communications tool for businesses today. Finally, if you go down the road of email newsletters, they offer you unparalleled feedback in relation to the engagement of your audiences.

 

You reach the inbox

While people sometimes (not that often in truth) complain about email overload, the key feature of email marketing is that you do actually land in the inboxes of your database. And generally as a result, at a minimum your subject line will be read. Even better, if your audience saw value in your previous content, the chances are that they will actually open and read your message. This is a big difference between it and social media, which is undoubtedly also an extremely valuable medium, but one where a lot of your messages can be missed due to the constant stream of messages being delivered.

You have an existing relationship

If you (legitimately) have the email addresses for your database, you already have a relationship at some level with the recipients. Therefore your messages won’t be viewed like a cold call approach; instead they will be seen as coming from a trusted source. However this proximity of your relationship brings an added challenge. If you consistently issue poor quality content, your email recipients will no longer want to receive your emails. This obviously may actually damage your overall relationship.

So a key point is that you don’t start spamming your database with irrelevant messages, as this practise will really undermine your relationship.

It’s another audience to reach

You want your marketing messages to reach as many people as possible. You deliver the messages verbally in person, potentially display them in and around your office, post them on your website to display to people who land on your site and share them out to your social media connections. Your email database is another audience, yes there is overlap with some of the other groups mentioned above, but this is another really important audience for you.

It’s low / no cost

While email newsletters delivered through your normal email platform are free, email newsletters delivered through reputable platforms (such as this one) do incur charges. However the charges are low when you consider all the benefits, particularly the feedback available, which is covered below.

You get unparalleled feedback

Email newsletters offer amazing feedback on the success or otherwise of your marketing campaigns. With advertising, direct mail and PR activities, it is notoriously difficult to measure your success at all. With online advertising, search and links to your website via social media, you get better information. With these media, you can see at least if your activities are driving people to your website.

However email newsletters deliver incredibly revealing feedback. Listed below are some of the metrics you can receive and how these are of use to you. One critical point to note is that these metrics can be tracked for your email list as a whole, but more importantly, you can look at these measures for each individual recipient too.

  • Delivery rates: You can see how many of your emails actually landed in the intended inboxes, revealing among other things the quality of your data.
  • Open rates: You can track how many people actually opened your email. This gives you a sense of whether recipients view your content as worthwhile / important to open.
  • Click Rates: You can then track how many people actually clicked on one or more articles. This reveals whether recipients were interested enough to actually read your content.
  • Individual article performance: You can see the open & click performance for each individual article. This gives you information on the type of content that resonates best with your audience.
  • Time spent: You can also see how long people are reading your content. Are they just scanning it or really spending time over your content?
  • Social interaction: You can see comments that people leave, if they “liked” your content and indeed if they shared any of your content.

This is extremely revealing information, particularly when examined at an individual subscriber level.

One adviser I’m working with had a protection client who opened 3 separate articles on investment topics a total of 14 times over the space of a few months. The adviser as a result focused his next review meeting on his investment expertise… and ended up securing a significant investment mandate with this client. Without the insights gained from his email newsletters, the adviser would not have known that this was an opportune button to press.

Also, as you review the statistics over time, the trends tell a very interesting story too – is your audience becoming more or less engaged, what sort of content should you focus on etc.?

 

Email marketing is still a really valuable and effective tool. It provides a level of certainty of the messages reaching the target market and exceptional feedback. Do you use email marketing? If so, what are your experiences? Please feel free to leave any comments below.

Building a Rock Star Sales Team!

/in , /by

A number of businesses that I’ve been dealing with have identified clearly the value of having really excellent people in their sales team. They’ve seen quite significant differences in the performance of their most successful people as opposed to their weaker people. They’ve also noticed that these performances tend to get repeated, pretty much year after year. So what can you do to build a rock star sales team that will help you exceed your sales goals, year after year?

Know your team – scientifically!

Yes, I know it sounds very obvious but how well do you really know your sales team and do you judge them fairly? Or are your “best” sales people seen as such by reputation only, or as a result of long held beliefs that you’ve had in relation to their talent? Yes, reputations and your own gut feeling count for a lot, but on their own they are not enough.

If you are going to trust your brand to your sales team, you’ve got to make sure that they have the competencies and attributes to carry this out, every bit as well as you would do it yourself. So spend time working out what are these attributes (drive, professionalism, integrity, resilience etc.) and competencies (relationship building skills, advice approach, technical knowledge, writing / presentation skills etc.) that you value.

Once you have these identified, score all your sales team against these factors. In addition, you cannot ignore both their previous results and also the quality of their clientbase / territory – these should be brought into your analysis too.

Finally and most importantly, seek out the views of others. Get colleagues who also know the team well to score them too. Also, if possible, talk to some of your key customers. It’s quite probable that both of these other insights will throw up some surprises for you. Maybe they’ll uncover a “blind spot” you’ve had, which has resulted in you consistently under-rating / over-rating some individuals and maybe, just maybe it’s you who has to change!

Once you’ve done this exercise, you can be pretty confident that you’ve a solid view of your team and can recognise its strong and weak points.

Increase the number of winners

Winners need to be rewarded and with more than just money. Yes, money is very important but is usually not enough on it’s own. Winners like recognition; they like to be celebrated, both inside and outside your company. They also like to be listened to – properly. They’re successful for a reason so their views and insights should be heeded and where appropriate, acted upon. Winners also like to see where their success is going to take them over the longer term. So think about their career paths and future opportunities – before they take this decision out of your hands….

There will be quite a large group of people “in the middle” who are doing a competent job but probably not consistently shooting the lights out. These are the people that you need to challenge to move into the top tier. A mixture of setting appropriate goals for them, creating personal development plans that will increase their skills and driving the team harder in some cases will achieve this! Also let your stars demonstrate to these people how they are getting their great results. Your stars may help you raise the performance of some of these middle tier players.

Unfortunately you’ve got to be equally assertive in dealing with the serial under-performers who are also lacking in the attributes and competencies that you require. Remember when it comes to sales, “bad breath is worse than no breath” as these people run the risk of irreparably damaging relationships with some of your clients. So find new roles for these people or move them on. Get them out of your sales team. You’ll also gain more respect from the wider sales team for your willingness to act in relation to underperformance.

What happens when a rock star leaves the band?

That dreaded moment. Your best sales person comes to you saying, “Can I just have a minute” and you know what’s coming… So what do you do?

Do you try and stop them leaving? Yes unless the price is too high, you’re going to be a hostage to them in the future, their head is already gone out the door or by clinging on to them, you will completely unsettle the rest of the team to try a similar move!

You then need to consider how replaceable they actually are – internally or externally. If you have a strong “bench” of support people waiting for a sales opportunity, then maybe you just wish your star performer well. Also if you have a clear external recruitment plan for this very scenario ready to go, well then maybe it’s time to implement this now.

And of course, don’t forget your clients in all of this. Make sure you reassure them completely that your organisation will continue to meet and exceed their needs going forwards, even without this important sales person.

So, get really clear on the strengths and weaknesses of your team, have different approaches for your different players and remember, when the star leaves, it’s not necessarily the end of the world!

 

Have you any more thoughts on how to build an excellent sales team… or even what’s your favourite ACDC song! All comments welcome below.

Is inbound (or content) marketing relevant for financial advisers?

/in , , , /by

You bet it is!! In fact inbound marketing, often called content marketing has become one of the key elements of the marketing mix for financial advisers today.

First of all, to explain what is meant by inbound or content marketing… Most importantly it is not about selling, instead it is about creating engagement with your target audiences. Marketing has evolved, the days are over of only trying to hit people over the head with a constant stream of sales messages through advertising, sales campaigns and other traditional sales methods. While these methods still have a place, consumers today want to be engaged, to be warmed up and to be made aware of why they should deal with you. This is where inbound marketing comes in.

The aim of this engagement is that your audiences will view you as someone worth listening to and in time, will ultimately seek you out for your professional expertise. This is done through inbound marketing – providing your target audiences with insights, ideas, tips and commentary in relation to personal finance matters. In time, this will make them far more open to your sales messages that will follow at the appropriate time.

This approach delivers a number of benefits for financial advisers. First of all, it enables you to stay in touch with existing clients by putting interesting insights in front of them and keeping them aware of the breadth of the product range that you can advise them about. It also helps you to establish yourself as a thought leader and someone to be listened to, among both prospective clients and the wider public at large. Finally fresh content on your website is a critical component of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

So what are some of the elements of a great content marketing strategy?

 

Know your audience

Know who your target audience is. Is it local business owners, particular occupations or particular age groups? Who are you actually writing that new website page, blog or email newsletter for? Write for this audience about topics of interest to them. Try to put yourself in their shoes and think about what they will want to read. If your audience find it interesting, they’ll view you as someone to listen to and will seek out your content…and hopefully in time your advice in relation to their personal finances.

 

Make sure it looks good

First of all, your content has to look engaging. Use a solid design and layout. I always tell financial advisers to “Think Apple”. For any of you who have bought an Apple product, you’ll know what I mean – the excellent quality, yet simple packaging that really impresses you as you unpack your phone or iPad. Your blog / newsletter should have the same impact. It should look very professional, enticing people to read it. At the end of the day, you want to portray the professionalism of your business in every single touch point with your clients, both online and offline.

 

Have a plan

I know from talking to some advisers (and from my own experience too) that lack of time to update the website or write a newsletter is often just an excuse for a lack of structure or ideas. There’s nothing worse than relying on your brain kicking into action every month or so when you’ve no idea what you’re going to write about! So what happens is you find something else to do and satisfy yourself that you’re just too busy to write the content.

The way to deal with this is to develop a content calendar for the year. Spend a few hours at the start of the year brainstorming ideas that you’ll write about, either as new pages on your website or as newsletter articles. Once you get a few ideas down, I promise that the creative juices will start to flow and more topics will come to mind. As potential topics come to mind now and at a later stage too, drop them into the calendar with a few bullet points of what the article might cover.

Now you’ll have a structure to ensure you don’t lose potential content ideas as you go along and it will also give you a starting point every time you sit down to write that article. You’ll actually find after a while that you’ve too much content and now can actually start being selective in what you write about.

 

What do you write about?

You’ll be glad to know that everyone sees this as one of the biggest hurdles! However, with a bit of thought, you will quickly realise how relatively easy it is to overcome this particular challenge. You absolutely need a helping hand to come up with the topics to write about. So here are a few sources that will help prompt some ideas for you.

First of all, listen to your clients. Probe them about areas of interest to them and areas where they they’d like more information. Are there particular challenges they face in relation to their personal finances where they would like some general advice? If you ask a number of customers, I’m confident that themes will start to emerge for you.

Secondly, keep your content schedule at the back of your mind when you go to a presentation, read the newspapers or indeed just go online.  These are each great sources of ideas, which can be used by you as prompts for you to develop your thoughts and position on – not to copy and paste but for you to set out your viewpoint and flavour on these topics.

Some financial advisers take a short cut and rather than writing their own content, they only share out links to other websites through LinkedIn and Twitter. This type of shared content has its place, however I think it can only sit alongside some original content that you are writing yourself. It’s great to share content that is of interest to your audience but they also want to know what you think! Using the content of other people, while better than doing nothing, is not enough on its own.

So yes, content marketing needs to be an integral part of the marketing plans of financial advisers today. Once you start to really engage your prospective and existing clients, they will soon realise your expertise and the added value you offer. In time, some of your audience will hopefully want to talk to you about their wider financial affairs…and their product needs.

Have you any thoughts in relation to content marketing? If you do, please leave them below.