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Anything you want to be the best at requires hard work, consistency, and good habits. You know that.
Plus, as an advisor, you’ve likely learned how easily prospects go from being within your reach to being slippery fish that slide right out of your hands.
But that’s not something you have (or should) get used to.
A major part of your business relies on discoverability, right? To both find people within your niche and have your profile appear in their network, you’ve got to form effective daily marketing habits.
Because if you don’t work on closing new clients every day, another advisor will gobble up your leads and dominate your niche. However, that doesn’t mean you have to spend every waking second marketing yourself to avoid flaky prospects and a reduced prospect pool.
Instead, just follow the advice I share in this article. With these five marketing habits in your daily routine, there’s no going anywhere but up. It’s never too late to pick up new, business-building habits, especially when they’re as easy as the ones I’m about to share with you...
1. Engage With Prospects On LinkedIn, Authentically.
This is one of those marketing habits that seem so simple, yet advisors just don’t do it — or they do it poorly.
Think about it: Never in the history of the world has it been such a cakewalk to connect with people and turn them into clients (read: make money). We have social networks, messaging tools, email, and more, and all you have to do is find people in your niche and put your beautiful face in front of them.
I love marketing automation tools as much as the next person, but they don’t build your business or help you stand out as much as (too) many financial advisors think.
Do you know what does? Being an authentic human on social media. It’s like adding gasoline to a fire 🔥.
Rather than relying on automation or paying thousands of dollars to overpriced lead generation companies, start making real connections — you know, ones that aren’t based on sentiments you can copy and paste.
Engaging prospective clients on LinkedIn should be a cornerstone marketing activity for all financial advisors. And it’s so easy, there’s no good reason why you can’t do this consistently. To foster a relationship with people in your niche, all you have to do is scan the activity section of their profiles and leave comments on posts they engage with.
I once gave an advisor this advice, and he asked, “Isn’t that a little stalker-ish?” And sure, you can see it that way. 🔑 Or you can see it as an opportunity to stand out among all the other people chasing that same prospect.
Now, let’s make this actionable. To do that, I’m going to get a little personal, but we’re all adults here, so work with me.
Every day, engage with at least five people on LinkedIn. Just leave a thoughtful comment on five posts you noticed on prospect’s profiles.
Feel free to do more or none at all. But five comments per day adds up to 150 in a month, and since you’re going to be there anyway, it doesn’t cost you any additional time. There’s virtually no downside to this marketing habit.
2. Add A Personal Touch With Handwritten Notes.
In an increasingly digitized world, you can bet sending clients and prospects handwritten notes will definitely make you stand out. Why? Because it shows you care.
Nearly everything we do is online, especially when it comes to communication — much of which we automate these days. Heck, I’m guilty of it, too. But while everyone else zigs, here’s how you can zag.
I know a lot of financial advisors who get complacent with clients, then act surprised when they leave. No curiosity necessary, folks — clients leave because you’re not nurturing them.
According to a recent PriceMetrix study, financial advisors lose an average of 10% of their clients every year. It also noted that households with $100,000 in assets fare even worse because they have a 13% chance of leaving their advisors. The reason why? You guessed it: They don’t feel appreciated, and communication is inconsistent.
Handwritten notes can impact your clients and lead to huge payoffs. Plus, the best part about this marketing habit is you don’t have to make any large time or financial commitments.
✨ It’s as simple as this: The next time you're on vacation, grab a stack of postcards in your hotel’s lobby or from the CVS or Walgreens nearby. Write a personalized message for each client and fire them off.
Your personal touch doesn’t have to be an Amazon Kindle (like the one my accountant sent me, along with a serving tray…), because small, thoughtful touches always go a long way.
Do you know how rare it is to receive a postcard these days? Most people just share vacation photos on social media, so your clients will feel appreciated knowing you especially thought of them and said hello in a classic, thoughtful way.
3. Test One Marketing Tactic.
Just one — every day.
If you have a smaller business with a smaller client base, fewer resources to access and people to delegate to, it might be more realistic to test one marketing outreach effort every one or two weeks.
Otherwise, larger financial advisor businesses with millions in revenue should just throw it all at the wall. What do you have to lose?
A few tactics you can test:
- Email subject lines.
- Email signatures.
- Direct mail pieces.
- Voicemail messages.
- LinkedIn connection requests.
Or you can try a new marketing strategy entirely.
However, the trick is not to give up after one or two weeks or even a month — you want to stick with any new marketing strategy long enough to see significant results.
Slowly but surely, you’ll start to learn what works for your business and which approaches lead to more growth.
More experiments = more opportunities to grow. So, EXPERIMENT MORE!
4. Update Your CRM.
Good records are critical.
Don’t sleep on your CRM, advisors. In a recent issue of my Inner Circle newsletter, I talked about the importance of good record-keeping and using your notes as a reliable follow-up tool.
You simply won’t remember every important detail about each prospect and client without some help, so don’t force yourself to go it alone when technology already solves the problem.
Hear me out: We have cloud-based CRMs we can update from anywhere and apps on our phones that automatically log calls and emails. You can easily forward an email to your CRM, and it’ll automatically tag it to your client. Plus, it tags and keeps records of text messages, and that’s not even the end of it.
Despite all this access and automation, I still see financial advisors failing to keep detailed records of their prospect and client activity.
It’s mind-blowing because business management theorist Peter Drucker was spot on: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That means you can’t grow your bottom line without this marketing habit.
The way I see it, if you don’t use a CRM to keep track of business activity and operations still run smoothly, you're not making a big enough impact.
Now, I know some advisors might take offense to that, but it’s true — you simply don't have enough business activity if you can manage it all without a tool.
Pro-tip: I like to keep things simple and strategic for financial advisors, but I know CRMs can be intimidating and complicated if you’re not used to them. If you want my recommendation for which CRM to use, I wrote an entire article about it: The Best CRM For Financial Advisors (CRM Software for Financial Services).
5. Always Look For Opportunities.
I mean for this advice to be vague because opportunities are vague — they’re everywhere.
If you find yourself out of ideas about what to write in your blogs and marketing emails, ask yourself if you really look for opportunities. For example, do you:
- Regularly read the blogs people in your niche read.
- Follow people in your niche on social media?
- Follow the people they follow?
- Subscribe to YouTube channels your audience subscribes to?
- Listen to the podcasts they listen to?
- Regularly connect with people in your niche.
- Take notes when reading articles like these or listening to podcasts?
No? Hmmm… could there be a connection there?
The more you make a habit of these kinds of tactics, the more you’ll learn what your audience wants to read and learn about, and the easier it’ll be to align your content ideas with their interests.
Say you’re a financial advisor who specializes in serving physicians. You can find physician YouTube channels, sort the videos by the number of views, check out the five most popular ones, and use their titles as an idea minefield 💣.
If the most popular video is about how to interpret a chest X-Ray, now you've got an idea you can use for an email. It really can be that simple, folks.
But the only way it won’t feel like a chore is if you love your niche — when you do, these kinds of marketing habits seamlessly integrate into the work you naturally want to do.
The Bottom Line: Step Up Your Marketing Game
See how easy developing marketing habits can be?
I run into financial advisors all the time who think marketing is intimidating, but all it takes is a thoughtful, human approach. That, and the willingness to put in the work, take calculated risks and keep careful track of your business activity.
As always, I’m here for you. Feel free to connect with me here on LinkedIn, and make sure you subscribe to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast.
Related: 4 Things I've Learned From Sending 3.2 Million Financial Advisor Emails