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The other day I was speaking to one of my private advisor clients and he said something to me that made me cringe.
When I asked him how much money he was spending on marketing, he said “I’ve spent $80k on marketing this year”. But that wasn’t the worst part. When I asked him how many clients he acquired for that eighty thousand dollars he said, “None”.
That’s a lot of money to spend on marketing with zero measurable return on investment.
After digging a bit deeper, it turned out that he was spending his money on something that I call “presence marketing”, otherwise known as brand awareness marketing.
Presence marketing or brand awareness marketing is a concept that hails from around the mid-20th century, Madison Avenue New York to be precise.
The hit TV show Mad Men (short for Madison Avenue Men) depicting slick ad executives closing multi-million dollar advertising deals for large brand name corporations like Hilton, Kellogg’s, General Motors and the like, epitomized that era.
The idea behind presence marketing was that if you gained enough exposure in the general marketplace by being seen and heard everywhere - through billboards, TV spots, and radio ads – then your company could occupy mental real-estate in the general public’s mind, so that next time they needed let’s say ‘financial advice’, they would automatically think of you.
This type of exposure-based marketing is so engrained in our cultural mindset that when we attempt marketing for our own businesses, it’s what we automatically think we are required to do.
But most of the time, as is the case with my coaching client mentioned above, it fails to generate consistent high net worth clients to justify the cost, yet we continue spending because we don’t know what else we should do.
If that’s you, then let me tell you what I told this client: stop doing presence marketing.
The problem with presence marketing in the 21st century is threefold:
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People are too busy and overloaded with information now than they were 70 years ago. There’s little space in their minds that you can occupy for long enough, simply by advertising your presence in the marketplace. Your presence is instantly forgotten.
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Presence marketing does not work for low-volume/high-margin business models (which you are in as a professional advisor). It only works for high-volume/low-margin business models, and large brand-name corporations dominate that space.
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In the long run it will commoditize you and lower your position in the marketplace as an advisor.
Here’s what I told him:
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Don’t spend another cent on presence marketing or brand awareness marketing. Stop it cold.
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Identify your niche or “lane” containing your most ideal prospects and market to them through their issues, not by advertising your business.
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Develop a “trust asset” that directly and specifically speaks to their issues.
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Create your own inbound lead flow system so you can throw out the middle-man lead generation providers who are giving you unqualified leads.
I call this becoming a “Trusted Authority” to your ideal client.
Merely advertising your presence in the general marketplace is too vague and unspecific. It fails to project authority and generate trust.
But what does generate authority and trust, is selectively targeting your most ideal potential clients only, and directly addressing their no.1 problem and its urgency, so that you become the authority on their problem and they see you as the one they can trust to solve it.
This is the only way to cut through the clutter of the oversaturated marketplace and ensure your marketing isn’t wasted, but instead, generates new clients consistently.
Related: Is Your Marketing System a Revolving Door?
Get your Free copy of Ari’s best-selling book "Trust In A Split Second!" here and you’ll also receive a Complimentary Sales and Lead Generation Consultation (value $995.00). Ari Galper is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and is the most sought-after high-net-worth new client acquisition expert for financial advisors. His latest book, “Trust In A Split Second!” has become an instant best-seller among financial advisors worldwide.