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Bowl your Clients over with your Content!

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One of the main marketing challenges faced by many of the financial advice businesses that I meet, is around the production of good quality content that will really help them engage their clients. Here are a few thoughts to help you overcome this challenge.

Be Organised & Committed

The secret ingredient! We’ve all faced that looming deadline for “my turn” to produce that article we’d promised to go into a newsletter or as an update on the website. It’s tough when you’ve no idea what you’re going to write about! The good news is that you’re not alone, this is the single biggest challenge faced by everyone tasked with writing content.

To avoid this, set up a “Content Calendar” for the year. Get all the potential contributors into a room for an hour or so and brainstorm loads of article topics. As potential subject areas come to mind, drop them into the calendar with a few bullet points of what the article might cover.

What will this achieve? First of all, it gets you started each month – you know what you’re going to be writing about. Secondly and as important, as new ideas come along over the year, they get inserted ahead of other articles that mightn’t be as strong. So now you’re driving up the quality of your topics. You’ll actually find after a while that you’ve too much content and now can actually start being selective about what you write. Hard to believe but it happens, every time you have a Content Calendar.

And once you start, stay committed to the process. Don’t stop now!

Be Relevant

Your audience are far more likely to engage with your content if it is relevant to them. So as you develop out your content topics, spend some time thinking about them from your audience’s perspective. The latest developments in investment software or some obscure technical point about pensions might be of interest to you. But your clients probably won’t give a hoot!

They want to know about topics that will impact their lives, so put yourself in their shoes and develop your content with them in mind. Of course you need to know who your audience is before you can do this. Are they business owners, professionals or are you focused on personal protection etc. for families? If you have very diverse audiences, you might need to target specific content at specific people. All pretty straightforward to do with the wonders of modern technology!

Be an Educator, not a Salesman

Your audience will switch off if you spend your time pushing sales messages at them. At the end of the day, they will see your content as simply an ongoing sales campaign and will disengage.  Add value by writing about financial issues or challenges that affect them in their lives, in which you can exhibit your expertise. Aim to be seen as an expert, an educator, someone with valuable insights that will help your clients, rather than a salesperson.

To make this easier for yourself, write about topics you know. This means that you won’t have to spend loads of time researching topics, and this familiarity with the subject will help you write better content too!

You see the world of marketing has changed. Rather than trying to constantly interrupt people with messages to sell, sell, sell; successful advice businesses are establishing themselves as thought leaders, as educators and as experts. So then when potential clients at their own time of choosing have a financial need, they will naturally gravitate towards these advice firms that they already see as valuable.

Be Alert

Great topics to write about will emerge from a range of sources. Presentations you attend, conversations you have, comments from other clients. Once your antenna is up, you’ll start to identify nuggets from what other people say – their challenges, their areas of interest, the issues they want to read about. So write about these!

Also when reading a newspaper or surfing the web, you’ll come across loads of topics of potential interest to your audience. Put your own spin on these topics and write about them too.

Be Brief

Be expert but also be brief. The purpose of your content is to engage your audience, not to demonstrate that you know every intimate detail of a topic. Typically an article of 750 to 1,000 words can be read (and written!) quickly and will perform well in search results. If you only have 500 (good) words though, go with that – don’t pad it out to get to 750 words.

Make your content easy to read too. Use headings and/or bullet points to make it easier for the reader. If the topic is just not capable of being explained in anything close to 1,000 words, break it out into a series of articles. And now the challenge next month has just got easier…

Be Found

What has this got to do with Content? Well, one of the key drivers of strong performance in Google search results is original, good quality content. While this might not have been a driver behind your efforts to produce a regular stream of good content, it’s a very valuable bonus!

At the end of the day, I reckon the initial thought of producing a lot of content is far more daunting than the reality! I hope these thoughts help you with your challenge.






image courtesy of Flickr / Mohammad ALNajdi

Be the Hub of your Client’s Financial Affairs

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I was recently helping a very progressive financial advice firm in Cork with their marketing planning. As part of the conversation, we discussed value added services that advisers can offer today and indeed I got talking about my relationship with my own financial adviser.

I see my financial adviser as the hub of my financial affairs. My accountant does a very solid job in terms of the production of accounts and ensuring I pay my taxes on time and basically don’t break the law! But I really see him in a transactional / compliance capacity.

On the other hand, my financial adviser provides a broader range of value to me. Yes, he has of course developed my financial plan and ensured I have the right investments, retirement planning and protections in place – I’d expect no less! But he also guides me in relation to much broader financial-related issues and I’ve found this a bit unexpected and extremely valuable. He’s now the go-to guy for me in relation to my broader financial affairs – he’s the hub of my financial world.

Having been the beneficiary of such value-added services, I’ve identified below a few areas in which you can add value to your clients beyond the preparation of traditional financial plans and beyond the products that you recommend to your clients. Why bother with these? To build your client’s appreciation of the value that you can bring and to make you the first port of call when changes in their circumstances arise.

Budgeting

I’m starting with an easy one that is often overlooked by financial advisers as not needed by clients because “everyone does it”. I disagree! People tend to do personal budgeting in a very unstructured fashion, usually in their heads. The opportunity is here for financial advisers to bring templates to their clients and help them structure their budgeting and examine all of their day-to-day spending.

Apart from the value that the exercise brings, for married clients it is a great way of engaging the spouse too in the overall process, as their spending is equally important in the overall picture.

Future Cashflow Planning

I refer to this a lot, but only because I see it as such as a valuable service offered by some financial advisers. It certainly isn’t appropriate for every client, but is hugely valuable to those who are suitable. The reason for this is simple. Traditional financial planning focuses on the starting point (as identified within the factfind – where you stand financially today) and the end event (death, investment maturity date, retirement date).

Future cashflow planning focuses on every year between now and your death, highlighting times of particular financial challenge to you in the future. Knowing the challenges that you will face, gives you an opportunity to plan to overcome them.

Tax Advice for Individuals

Business owners and professionals will usually have an accountant. Most PAYE workers probably don’t. That doesn’t mean that they can’t benefit from tax advice; some want help in completing their tax returns, some want general tax advice. There’s a growing trend internationally of financial advisers moving into this space, in fact some financial advice firms are now employing accountants or tax advisers to provide this service and other tax advice to clients.

Now this approach is not going to be for everyone. At a minimum though, you should have a relationship with a good tax expert that you can plug your client into. The benefit for you is that it’s another demonstration of your value, as you are the catalyst for your client receiving the broader solutions needed.

Financial advisers also play a very valuable role in helping clients prepare for later in life and indeed end of life through retirement planning and life assurance solutions. However there are a number of other ways that you can help your clients prepare for these latter years, again helping to position you as the hub of their financial affairs. Some of these areas can also potentially bring you into contact with your client’s adult children, an important target market for many advisers.

Advice about Bank Accounts

Neither my bank manager nor my accountant spoke to me about having multiple signatories on my bank accounts, both personal and business accounts. But my financial adviser did. This is very practical advice, ensuring that in the event of my death or loss of capacity, that my wife would be able to access my money without jumping through all types of legal hoops…

Enduring Power of Attorney

This is a legal document that can be set up by a person during their life when in good mental health. It allows another specially appointed person to take actions on their behalf should they become incapacitated through illness in the future. This prevents assets being frozen and going under the control of the courts and allows the person acting on your behalf to make a range of personal care decisions on your behalf.

Anyone who has been through this situation, needing to access the assets of a relative who has lost their mental capacity (e.g. to pay for their care) will know the value of having an enduring power of attorney in place. It can be incredibly frustrating being unable to carry out simple actions on the person’s behalf without it.

At the same time, many people also draw up a “Living Will” which captures their preferences in relation to areas such as end of life care, their preferences in terms of resuscitation etc. when close to death.

A financial adviser won’t set this up. However they can be the catalyst for it happening through setting out the benefits of it to their clients and guiding them to put it in place. The adviser may even be able to refer them to a solicitor who will carry out this work with the client.

A Will

Again this is an area where financial advisers can guide their clients to ensure that they have a will in place to ensure their assets are distributed as they intend on their death. A simple process usually carried out with a solicitor.

These are some areas that financial advisers can help or guide their clients through. They add real value to your relationships; way beyond the product solutions you advise clients about and put you firmly at the hub of your client’s financial affairs.

Are there any other areas beyond products in which you advise your clients?




image courtesy of Flickr / David Hunter

Why do clients leave you?

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We’ve all cheerily picked up the phone at one stage or another when a client calls, only to suffer that sinking feeling as the client goes on to explain that they are in fact moving their business to another adviser. Often you don’t even get a call, the business just quietly moves. So why do clients actually move their business and put themselves through the hassle of agency transfer letters, bringing a new adviser up to date with their affairs etc.

It’s not about price, or at least very rarely.

The management consultancy firm Bain carried out research some time ago among a large group of accountants, 360 of them in fact. While I know they are not financial advisers, it’s a relevant survey as accountants are service providers in the financial space with SME’s and professional clients. When asked, 80% of the accountants felt they delivered above average service. The researchers also asked the same question of 360 clients, one from each accountant. Just 8% of them felt they got above average service. What a perception gap!

They also asked the accountants why clients leave them. The number one reason given was price. This was number 8 on the list of clients. Their number one reason was they just “didn’t treat me right”.

So what’s the lesson in this for all of us service providers? Worry about your proposition more so than your price, and work on effectively communicating your proposition to your clients so that they never forget the value that you are adding. Make your clients feel loved by you!

While we all might go through a short period of reflection when we lose a single client, it may be necessary to take a bit of a deeper look if you find that a steady stream of clients are heading out the door. So what are some of the questions you might ask yourself?

 

How good is your proposition?

Picking up on the Bain findings above, how good really is your proposition? Has it actually kept pace with developments in the marketplace and are you competing with the best advisers out there who may be wooing your clients away? As clients experience the benefits of structured budgeting support and the really valuable insights that future cashflow planning delivers to them, how are you competing with this? At the end of the day, are you really offering true financial planning rather than just a transactional product focused service?

 

How good are you at keeping your clients engaged?

Your clients receive great advice from you at the commencement of your relationship and receive the benefit of a review each year. But what value do they get from you in the other 11.5 months of the year? More and more advisers are making great strides at improving their communication with clients, enabling them to add value to clients throughout the year. However, they also target these communications at prospective clients too – and these might be your clients currently….

Are you satisfied that your ongoing engagement of your existing clients will keep these threats at bay? Do your clients see you as the important cog in their financial affairs?

 

What are your competitors doing differently?

There may be other areas that are influencing your clients to move to a competitor. Are your competitors more active than you at networking locally, or seen as a valued support within the business community? Have they just developed a bigger and better (and more influential) brand presence than you that is swaying clients to move? Are they very clever in the marketing of their business? While their proposition may be no better than yours, does your client as a result of their greater presence perceive them as a better proposition? It might be time for you to revisit your marketing activities and bring more structure and focus to them.

 

Is price a factor?

While price is not the usual reason for clients leaving you, it can be a contributory factor if you are way out of line. You need to satisfy yourself that your price is in the ballpark. If it’s higher than the norm, can you back this up by demonstrating that your proposition is better than the norm? After all, clients will only pay a premium for a premium service.

 

These are just some of the reasons why clients walk. If possible, talk to clients who are leaving you and try and get to the nub of why they are going. They may at first be slow to give the real reason in order not to hurt your feelings. However, if you persist with professional questions asked with grace, you might just uncover some nuggets that will help you avoid the loss of clients in the future.

Will Clients Pay Annual Fees?

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The whole area of fees sends a chill down the spine of lots of financial advisers. How much do you charge? Will clients pay? Will they pay every year? These are some of the questions I’m asked all the time.

Yes we’ve seen moves towards fees in other markets, with a lot of focus on the changes in the UK in particular. But that doesn’t mean that we’re moving to a fee only environment in Ireland. In any event, I think the question of commission v fee is the wrong question… To my mind, it’s all about what you’re being paid for, rather than how you are paid.

Maybe let’s start with some of the reasons that clients won’t pay annual fees, whether this is paid by an annual fee, a monthly retainer or as a trail commission.

 

They can’t afford them

There’s no doubt, there are many clients out there who just are not in the position to write you an additional cheque every year. Their income may be low, their outgoings may be high and these clients are seeking the minimum number of financial products to meet lender requirements and to provide basic levels of protection for their families. These clients are not going to pay fees.

 

They don’t see why they should

This is a more interesting group… These people can afford fees, have multiple financial advice and product needs but don’t see why they should pay for it each year. Whose fault is this? Well it’s theirs if they think that they can get your services for nothing. But maybe it’s your fault if they just don’t place enough value on what you do? You need to consider;

  • How much value are you providing beyond setting up products?
  • How robust and valuable is your planning and advice model?
  • How well do you communicate this to clients?
  • How well do you link this value proposition with your charging basis?

Get these right and you’ve a better chance of convincing this group to pay your fee each year.

 

They know another adviser who won’t charge a fee

There is always another adviser who will undercut you on price, indeed there are execution-only options out there for clients. However this is where the focus is solely on the product implementation. If you can demonstrate to the client that the fee is for the excellent and valuable advice that you give and that this will positively impact their outcomes, they are more likely to decide based on value gained rather than the price paid.

This group is a tricky one for advisers who hate to see a client go elsewhere. But if you’re not being paid a fair price for the value that you bring, it sometimes makes sense to walk away…

 

So what are the main activities that you need to undertake in order to give yourself the best chance of convincing your clients that the annual fee is worth paying?

 

Develop a compelling advice proposition that clients value

I know that there is a huge amount of talk at the moment about the need for a clear value proposition… But it really is a basic requirement if you hope to convince people to base their purchase decision on value rather than price.

Your value proposition needs to demonstrate to clients and potential clients, what you do, where you add value, why this is important to them and the positive impact that you will have on helping them achieve their financial objectives and better outcomes. Think this through from the client’s perspective – if they can’t connect with the value for them, you’re going to find it more difficult to justify your fee.

 

Make sure clients value your advice, not the product purchase

Move the conversation away from choosing the right product and then implementing it. At the end of the day, the clients don’t place much store on this. Advisers who are today receiving large portions of their income from fees focus more on helping the client really understand their life and financial objectives and then develop a plan for the clients to help them achieve these objectives. The products merely become vehicles to help them get there.

 

Deliver a great service and review process

If you’re going to look to charge your clients each year, you’re going to need an ongoing service that clients believe is second to none and worth the price paid. This will mean being available, adding value throughout the year and communicating regularly with clients.

Central to this is developing a really powerful review meeting. This is not just about communicating updated values (even though you do this too), but it is about really demonstrating to the client how they are progressing towards their financial objectives, and why continuing on this journey with you offers them the best opportunity of achieving their desired outcomes. So broaden this meeting out, bring in all of your undoubted experience and expertise and package it, so that your clients will seek out these value meetings with you, year after year! And it makes it easier for you to justify your fee.

 

What experiences have you of charging fees? What are the main hurdles that you encounter? Please feel free to leave your comments below

 

 

Photo credit:www.LendingMemo.com

Beat your competition all ends up!

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You’ve been approached to pitch for the opportunity to advise a really great prospective client, maybe a wealthy individual with a lot of assets to manage or a pension scheme for a local company. However you also know that another adviser has been given the same opportunity….

So what do you do? One route obviously is to go in “as cheap as chips”, provide your advice for free and cut your transaction price to a level that just about makes it worth your while. Yes, you’ll win some clients this way, but not the ones you really want. Because every future conversation will result in a haggle over your price – no surprise really as you started it!

The alternative is to beat the socks off your competitors and demonstrate to the prospective client that you’re the only game in town for them to consider. Your challenge is to have demonstrated this by the end of your first meeting (your pitch) with them. Here are 5 ways you might achieve this;

 

Know the customer better than your competitor

Today there are so many ways to learn lots of really valuable information about your prospect before you meet them. This can give you a real edge, enabling you to anticipate questions or issues and to chat knowledgeably about areas of interest to them. At the very least, it shows your interest in them and their business.

Starting with their company website, you can learn about their business, getting a sense of their markets, their size and what is important to them. The prospect that you’re about to meet might feature in the “About Us” section so check this out too.

Check out their social media profiles. In particular LinkedIn may give you very rich information about the person. You can learn a lot about the person professionally, as well as their interests etc. You can also see if you have connections in common – this can be useful for the social chitchat at the start of the meeting.

 

Focus on their objectives and outcomes, not yours!

At the meeting, your initial goal needs to be to connect with the person and build trust before you can get into problem solving. To do this, you need to find out what their problem or challenge is and fully understand what their actual objectives and goals are. What will success look like for them? What will they consider a good result?

Your questioning style is very important here. The key is to use lots of Open questions; “what is your biggest challenge”, “why is that challenge so significant for you”, “how have you addressed this so far”, “when are you expecting a result” etc. Questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no!

This initial stage is all about getting the client talking. Once they are talking, their issues will become clear and then you can start to think about demonstrating how you can address the actual challenges that they are facing!

Hopefully at the same time, your competitor will dive in and start setting out their credentials and their approach to solving the client’s problem – quite probably not the right problem at all!

 

Then demonstrate your credentials

Once the client’s problem is clear to you, now is the time to set out why you are the answer to their prayers! This is a critical step – after this the client will decide who he is appointing to look after his affairs!

First of all, you can demonstrate your professional approach easily and effectively by walking your client through your planning and advice approach. This will give the client comfort that you are a professional with a robust approach, helping to build that all-important trust. I believe that this is best delivered using a short presentation on an iPad or similar device.

Case studies (anonymous) are another effective way to demonstrate your credentials. They allow you to showcase innovative approaches that you might have used in the past. They also demonstrate your experience in dealing with challenges similar to that posed by the prospective client.

Finally testimonials are a great endorsement of your capabilities. I always encourage financial advisers to seek permission to use the full name of the person giving the testimonial, as it gives it credibility – does “John T, Dublin 6” really exist?

Hopefully your competitor has just been having a chat with the prospect, saying how good they are but not really backing it up at all…

 

Practice – it’s not easy!

These last two areas of questioning the prospect effectively and then demonstrating your credentials are not easy. Road test them on your staff, friends and family. Get people to critically appraise your approach. Like all similar tasks, it’s going to take a few goes before you get it spot on. The last thing you want is to be trying it out for the first time on the best prospect you’ve had in a long time!

 

Start delivering value long before your pitch

This point should probably have been made at the start but I kept it to the end as not all advisers are in a position to deliver it at the moment. Providing ongoing content to clients is so important, deepening the relationship, demonstrating expertise and adding value. This might be in the form of an email newsletter or other such communication. If you do this, add your prospect to the list as soon as the first contact is made (get any necessary permission to do) and start sharing your content with them straightaway.

This will immediately set you apart from your competitor, giving the prospect a taste of what they can expect from you – a valuable, professional, robust approach to all that you do!

At this stage, hopefully you see the other guy’s white flag!

Why updating your website blog is worth the effort

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A frequent question I’m asked by financial brokers when they are updating their website is; “Do I really need a blog section?” They know what lies ahead of them… the pressure to regularly post new content fills them with dread!

Well first of all, it shouldn’t! It’s not as difficult as it seems, once you are organised! But that is a topic for another day – the purpose of this piece is to set out why it is actually worth the effort.

 

Fresh content is key for SEO

Google keep changing the rules in relation to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and for a very good reason. They want to ensure that their search engine stays well ahead of their competition and to achieve this, they need to ensure that the most relevant results are displayed when a user searches for something.

There is a whole load of factors that make websites relevant, and as a result these sites appear high up in the search results. These factors include (among a number of other factors) the likes of;

  • The structure of the web pages, titles, names etc.
  • Links to the site
  • The amount and recency of content on a website
  • The external references to the content – what others are saying about it.

The last two points are the relevant ones for us here. Posting fresh content to your website is key and the easiest place to do this is through your blog as there are any number of topics that you can write about. Once you write the content, then the aim is to share it with the world via social media and hopefully get people commenting on it – all of this will help your SEO efforts.

 

It helps your own knowledge

This might sound a bit strange but bear with me… Committing to completing a blog (say once a month even) is a challenge. You have to identify topics and then write about them. To do so, you’ll often look for ideas, inspiration or new angles and you’ll do this by researching the topic on the web. This inevitably opens you up to reading new content and gaining a deeper understanding of the topics.

This is a huge benefit of regular writing. If you are regularly researching, you start to find really useful reference points that help to keep your knowledge bang up to date in relation to your areas of expertise.

 

It gives you a voice

Completing your blog gives you an outlet to demonstrate your expertise to the world! It gives you an opportunity to identify a topic of potential interest to your audience, write knowledgeably about it, post it to your blog and then share it out through your various channels (email, newsletters, social media).

While the chances are that at that very point in time, your audience may have no immediate requirement for the product or area of expertise in question (even though this does happen sometimes!), what you’re trying to do is to plant a seed so that when the topic comes on their radar, you become a natural choice for advice on the matter. In any event, regularly posting and sharing content keeps you on your clients and prospects’ radars in relation to all financial advice matters. And let’s face it, that’s a challenge for all financial advisers today – how to provide ongoing value and justify ongoing remuneration. Well this is one part of doing that.

 

It helps you identify “hot topics”

Regular updates to your company blog help you here in two ways. First of all, also as a result of your research before writing, you’ll begin to identify emerging themes about which you can begin to lead your audience.

Secondly as you post content to your site, your website analytics give you some tremendous insights into the particular subjects of interest. You can zero in on the types of topics that are driving traffic, where this traffic is coming from and how engaged reader are by the subjects. You start to get a sense of what your audiences want to hear about from you and this of course should then find it’s way through to your client proposition.

 

It demonstrates that you’re up to date

As potential clients research financial adviser websites, one of the biggest turn-offs is out of date content and websites that are obviously not kept up to date. What does this say about the adviser? Are they up to date in their knowledge? Will their service reflect the lack of care taken with the website?

On the other hand, a consistently updated blog demonstrates the opposite. It shows you have an opinion, the latest knowledge and your finger on the pulse. They’re more likely to pick up the phone to you!

So make it a goal in 2014 to keep your blog updated. It will pay dividends in many ways!