Five Best Practices for Powerful Financial Advisor Marketing

Financial advisor marketing can be challenging for several reasons. Selecting a financial advisor is a significant decision for investors, involving trust over their livelihood, retirement, children's education, and major purchases. Emotions often play a large role in these decisions, sometimes more than factual considerations.

While word-of-mouth and referrals can help grow your business, you typically can't use them in your own marketing materials, limiting an otherwise effective prospecting avenue. Additionally, some people are reluctant to discuss money, so you must both encourage them to talk and convince them you are the right person to talk to.

The first step in developing an effective marketing strategy is understanding your current position. Assess your strengths and weaknesses: Do you have a strong social media presence but lack email marketing? Is your website outdated? Have you succeeded with webcasts but not translated that content into a blog? Understanding your current state helps identify what's working, what isn't, and where you can improve.

Next, identify your roadblocks. Most financial advisors face three main barriers to successful marketing: time, experience, and resources. Daily operational tasks and client relationship management often leave little time for marketing. Without the capital to hire a marketing team or outsource to an agency, you may find yourself piecing together a marketing strategy between client appointments, which is not ideal for building a robust, continuously updated program.

During the development of our marketing solution for financial advisors, we focused on several key principles:

• ​Data tells all: Data should drive every marketing decision. Access to reporting and analytics is essential.
• ​Personal touch matters: Campaigns should be customizable to reflect your firm's brand voice, personality, and value proposition.
• ​Experience counts: Trial and error helps determine what works, but access to experienced marketing consultants can improve outcomes.
• ​There’s a formula for everything: While not always straightforward, there is a right way to approach financial advisor marketing.
• ​Creative, unique content is king: Standing out requires telling your story in a unique way.

Following these five best practices will help you make the most of your marketing efforts:

Market*r Best Practices

1. Set Your Profile

Begin by setting up your profile with key branding elements such as your logo, contact information, and social media profiles. This information will automatically populate your marketing assets.

2. Connect to Orion Planning

If you use Orion’s planning tool, populate workflow campaign links to serve as Calls-to-Action. This allows clients or prospects to engage with your campaigns, participate in self-directed planning workflows, identify financial goals, connect accounts, and view projections. They can also request or schedule appointments with you.

3. Streamline Your Marketing Tech Stack

Less is more. Streamline your marketing tools to create a seamless, intuitive experience. Managing your content from one place provides a holistic view of your marketing success and reduces the need to juggle multiple tools.

4. Take Advantage of Customization Capabilities

Customize campaigns to best tell your story. While campaigns may be pre-written and designed, they are built for customization so you can highlight your unique brand and value proposition.

5. Try New Things

Marketing strategies are dynamic and should adapt to changes in the industry, media, stock market, and economy. Use new campaigns, try different assets, focus on various channels, and use data to determine when to pivot your strategy.