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Double your impact through co-marketing your financial advice business

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You may be putting a lot of effort into a number of marketing activities but still wishing that you could reach out to a wider audience than that currently available to you. So how do you do this? Well one of the ways may be through co-marketing.

Co-marketing is where you find a business that provides a complimentary service to your own, one that is aimed at a similar target market. For financial advisers, this more than likely will be an accountant, a tax consultant, a legal firm or some other form of business consultancy. You then agree a programme of shared marketing activities that will be aimed at both of your client bases, promoting both of your brands. The ultimate aim is to increase each partner’s sales opportunities with the other’s clients.

How is this different to how many advisers currently work with, let’s say accountants? Well from my experience, most existing relationships currently operate in a one-way direction. The accountant refers a client; the financial adviser sells a product and may compensate the accountant. Co-marketing is different. It is shared activities.

So why would you do it? As stated in the title of this article, you can first of all significantly increase the reach of your marketing efforts by opening up your marketing activities to your co-marketing partner’s clients. This shared activity also gets both you and your partner onto the radar of a whole new group of clients. Also by partnering with another strong brand, this will reflect positively on your business and give you added credibility. So obviously it is important to find the right co-marketing partner!

Once you find the right partner, what sort of activities can you roll out together? There is a wide range of potential activities and here are some that might be the easiest and quickest for you to implement together.

Shared content

The first area to collaborate on is sharing content. We all know the effort that goes into writing newsletters, blog articles or other expert pieces. Co-marketing is a great way to get this content to a wider audience. Post each other’s content on your website & in your blogs as guest posts. Give each other a “guest corner” on your newsletters, increasing your exposure. This will make each of your website blogs or newsletters more engaging, will reduce the struggle for new content for both of you and will hopefully also result in some new client enquiries from your partner’s clients.

Videos

If you use video on your website, co-marketing offers a great opportunity to move away from the monologues that so often feature on sites. Pick a topic that is relevant to both organisations’ propositions and have a discussion about it. Apart from being a different and more engaging format, this approach will also increase the breadth in which a topic can be covered, hopefully resulting in some enquiries from clients.

Seminars

Client seminars are a great form of co-marketing as they offer a whole range of benefits. First of all, you can examine a topic from different angles. For example, an accountant might talk about pensions as one important strand of tax planning while you might discuss different pension investment strategies. One topic can very seamlessly segue into another.

Seminars also offer the opportunity to actually meet your partner’s clients, as you will both invite clients to the event. Both of you get exposure to new potential clients with the opportunity to present to them…and impress them.

Of course another benefit is that you’ll share the cost of the seminar!

A joint brochure

A number of advisers that I’ve worked with have developed corporate brochures and then try and encourage any accountants who refer business to them to hand out the brochures to their clients. While this makes sense of course, unfortunately the brochures are unlikely to stay right at hand in the accountant’s office…. However if the brochures have a shared message and feature your co-marketing partner equally prominently, they have a good chance of gaining pride of place in their office too.

Co-branded sales propositions

While this one will definitively take a little bit more work, the potential rewards are very significant. This is where you develop an actual sales / advice proposition, delivered by both parties and demonstrably packaged as a single proposition. For example, it might be a wealth transfer proposition in which the partner would bring their tax / legal expertise and combine this with your advice in relation to life cover for inheritance tax purposes, ARFs etc. This offers a very clear demonstration of your partnership in actual practise and can directly result in actual revenue for both parties.

These are a few ways in which you can co-market successfully. Are there other activities that you’ve carried out that have worked well for you, maybe an event or a particular campaign? Please share your thoughts below!

Good data = more sales for financial advisers

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Financial brokers and advisers today are becoming very aware of the role good customer data plays in generating sales. It provides excellent insights into their customers, enables robust decision making and provides the necessary foundation for successful marketing activities.

Good data of course is central to your service and ongoing advice to clients. You need to have access to the information contained in the customer fact find and also your client’s existing policy information to enable you to provide robust financial advice. However I’m going to focus here on how having good data will really help your marketing efforts.

I’ll start with an obvious one. Do you have email addresses for all of your clients? Many advisers don’t and this is quite understandable. Email has only emerged as the default communication method in the last decade or so and many client relationships go back much further than that. However most clients have email addresses today and email offers a no-cost means of communicating with your clients on an ongoing basis. So what should you do? Well obviously you can write to all clients asking them for their email addresses – this may yield some results but if you’ve lots of clients, it may be an expensive exercise. At a minimum though, I would suggest that you introduce a business process that ensures that before anyone in your company finishes a conversation with a client, they check with the client have you got their current email address. Everyone has a role here, every single time, every conversation. This will refresh and enrich your data, allowing you regularly reach your clients at no cost.

The second area is in relation to the source of leads and customers. If you capture this religiously, it can provide excellent insights when deciding where to apply your (usually limited) marketing budget in the future. This will tell you which activities worked in the past and should be carried out again or maybe tweaked, and which ones bombed and shouldn’t be repeated!

Data also provides the foundation for successful client segmentation. While this can be quite a complex area and will be covered in detail in a future article, there are many ways that you can segment your clients and then target them with specific campaigns or offerings. Examples of segmentation dimensions at a client level include;

  • policy type
  • income levels
  • earnings per client
  • premiums being paid
  • funds under management
  • age
  • occupation etc.

There are many potential dimensions and indeed as businesses become more comfortable with segmenting their clients, they begin to use multiple dimensions.  This enables you to focus your offerings to make them as relevant as possible to your target clients. Good data helps you to make better decisions in relation to your marketing activities and can really enhance those activities through enabling you to provide relevant campaigns aimed at carefully identified groups of clients. The quality of your data is key – remember the old saying; “Garbage in, garbage out!”

As a result of more targeted marketing efforts, greater confidence and expectations can be placed in relation to your sales return as you move from a scattergun approach to carefully crafted and targeted campaigns.

Managing your data however comes with real responsibilities, both in relation to how you use this data and also in relation to keeping this data secure. You need to understand your requirements under the Consumer Protection Code and also your data protection obligations; how and when you can contact your clients and also the permission you need to send further sales messages to them. In relation to security, I’m sometimes concerned about how lax some businesses are particularly in relation to the easy access to data on smartphones and tablets. Is access to confidential data within some of your emails only a 4 digit iPhone password away from someone who could make trouble for you? This is also exacerbated now with the explosive growth of cloud computing. If you use cloud computing on your phone or tablet, is your data constantly accessible on your device, potentially giving someone full access to all of your client files?

Your data is hugely valuable. It is central to your planning, your decision making in relation to your activities and can really enhance your sales effort. Give your data the attention it deserves, make sure that your whole organisation is constantly focused on improving your data. And finally, manage your data securely.

I hope this article was of interest. If you’ve any comments or further observations, I’d love to hear them!

Good Referrals = Great Business

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Finding new clients is a difficult challenge for independent Financial Advisers today, without the large client bases of direct writers or indeed the rich information available to the bancassurers. Many advisers are using new methods through digital marketing channels to meet new clients, however many are also successfully using traditional client acquisition methods such as seeking referrals from existing contacts.

I’m often asked for tips on how to increase the number of referrals so here are a few thoughts that might help you.

Referrals are not just part of the Sales Cycle

When asked, a number of advisers have told me that they only seek referrals after a product sale! Why is this? Yes, this is a real milestone in the relationship with a client, however it may not be the time that the client appreciates what you do the most! This may be after the financial planning phase of your relationship or indeed after easing their mind with a mid-year review, hastened by another fall in the markets. This is the time to ask for referrals, when the value of what you do is most obvious to your client.

Know your Clients who refer

We all know the value of focusing on your target market. The same applies to seeking referrals. Keep good records of which of your clients have provided you with good referrals in the past. Maybe there are more people that they can refer to you? Or maybe you can spot a common characteristic that is shared among clients who refer. Do you have other such clients that you should be seeking referrals from?

Develop some Case Studies

Case studies of innovative solutions that you’ve developed for clients can fulfil a number of purposes. One of these is helping you get referrals. Make your clients aware of these case studies as they may just trigger a thought of a contact of theirs who could benefit from your expertise.

Be very Specific

The approach of saying to a client, “Do you know anyone who would benefit from our unique and wonderful approach” just won’t wash in my view! This puts the ball squarely in your client’s court and leaves all the work up to them. Inevitably they’re likely to mumble some positive response and promptly forget about it!

Instead, carry out some research before seeking the referral and know who your target referral is from your client; either an individual or a company and ask for an introduction to them. This is possible (see also the section below about LinkedIn)! You might suggest a cup of coffee with the three of you or at least an email of introduction from your client to the referral. Then it is clear to your client exactly what you want from them….

Use LinkedIn……properly!

LinkedIn is a very rich source for referrals but must be treated with respect. It offers super networking opportunities and indeed can be a great source for referrals. Examine the connections of your LinkedIn contacts to see who you might like to be introduced to. If you spot a “target”, now is the time to take care!

There is a best practice protocol with LinkedIn in relation to seeking introductions. The key to it is to go through your connection in common, seeking an introduction. There’s a process built into LinkedIn to facilitate this. Do not blindly reach out directly to your target. First of all, you are reducing your chances of success, as well as being potentially treated as spam by LinkedIn. This is a very damaging place to end up in as it will make it far more difficult for you to connect with anyone into the future.

Thank your clients who refer

This is a bugbear of mine from one particular bitter experience (not I hasten to add in relation to any financial adviser)! I think it is so important to acknowledge the referral, irrespective of whether it is successful or not.

Referring someone is an action that takes a level of personal risk as there is always a level of hesitancy that the person being referred may not appreciate it! There’s sometimes also a (hopefully small) amount of doubt that your own service may not actually meet the expectations of the referral. So acknowledge this perfectly justifiable uncertainly of the person giving you the referral with thanks for that personal commitment to you.

These are a few thoughts that I hope will help you approach the seeking of referrals in a more structured and ultimately more successful way. Best of luck with them!

I welcome any comments that you’d like to leave in the comments section below.