How Advisors Can Integrate Their Investment Philosophy in a Social Selling Strategy

Most successful financial advisors and small business owners that I have interacted with over the past decades have had an investment and business strategy predicated upon residual growth. They aren’t ‘one shot, one kill’ experts looking for the big score. Why is it then that so many of them seem to change when it comes to marketing their business on social media?

My thoughts: they have never been taught how to integrate how they invest with how they market.

Greg McKeown, the best selling author of “Essentialism” has a follow up book “Effortless” that came out recently. They are both, forgive me, essential. All of my clients, at any level are required to read “Essentialism” and I just added “Effortless” to the list.

In “Effortless”, Greg has a section in which he points out the difference between linear and residual effort. The first time I read it I was struck silent at the simplicity and power of how he explained it.

Linear effort, like cold calling for example, are separate expenditures of effort and resources to achieve one result. This is not bad, per se, but to achieve results you and/or your small business need to repeat the same amount of effort each time hoping to get the same result. This is where scaling and quality of life hit a hard ceiling, or, become very expensive and personally costly. This is why advertising, email marketing and cold calling are incredibly weak marketing ideas for financial advisors and financial planners.

Would you ever invest this way? Maybe.

Realistically, you are looking to make good investments and then reap residual effect. Spend one unit of effort for continuing results. That is the power of residual. In the analog and digital worlds referrals are the king of the hill when it comes to residual marketing results. Your interactions with one person result in them telling another and another…

How do we make it work? How do we get residual effect from our social media efforts?

There are two general areas you need to be consistently working on and developing yourself within if you want to harness the massive power of residual effect online:

1. Content marketing: You must be creating original content that is client centric (what they want to read/listen/watch) on a consistent basis. There is a system and process for this that turns it into ‘effortless’ in execution and a ton of fun! Blogs, for example, can produce prospects and new clients for years and decades. One of the best examples is this blog post from River Pools & Spas: How River Pools Made $2.5 Million In Sales From a Single Article. Note: just sharing corporate spam (even yours) won’t work. You need to understand how to write content correctly.
2. Relationship development: You must be growing and deepening your personal network and if you own a company you need to be encouraging every single employee to do the same. There is a reason Nike pays LeBron…and not the other way around. Personal brands rule. Growing your network is NOT paying an outside vendor to spam the crap out of your target market looking to build a huge connection list. Friends, that is an email marketing tactic and is not how you build a network if you want to get residual effect. Instead, you need to be personally inviting your target prospects to connect, after you have build a relationship with them. This is not hard. It does take effort and strategy, but, that is why we get paid right?

One way to look at those two concepts above is passive and active.

Content marketing, done well, is one of the greatest ‘evergreen’ passive marketing things I have ever seen. It is always available (online) for your ideal clients to discover and interact with and will bring them closer to you. This is a massive residual effect versus an advertising that spams out to a large audience in a linear fashion. To get the results again…you have to pay to run the ad again. Maybe not a really good investment philosophy?!?

Relationship development is the active component: meetings on and offline, commenting on client posts, getting into conversations of all different sorts. That is active! What makes it effortless is that your content is going to create the opportunities for you to get actively in conversation.

If you are still reading here is the summary: You have to build a mindset for your business around residual effect instead of linear.

The vast majority of ‘trainers’ out there for social media (and referrals sadly) are focused on linear effect because they have never really done social offline. They don’t know how to build relationships in person and that really hurts their ability to teach others how to do it online. (Hint: the rules are the same)

I hope this was of value to you. If you want to talk to a coach that co-wrote a bestseller on networking and referrals before social media and knows how to help you get more introductions on and offline, reach out to me via comments or direct messages. I love talking with folks like you. Coming soon we will have a community for people like you at our website Values Based Mindset.

No matter what, get Greg’s books “Essentialism” and “Effortless” and read them. There is no way it doesn’t massively improve your results on and offline.

Be Social, Be Human & Be Effortless

Related: How Can Financial Advisors Scale Their Business Using Social Media