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We’ve reached the fourth and final issue in our series on Critical Issues Facing Financial Advisors Right Now—Staying Top-of-Mind with Your Clients. Of the four critical issues presented, developing top-of-mind awareness is perhaps the most crucial because it is paramount to your ultimate success. If you are not the first person your clients think of when good or bad things happen to them, things that impact their financial lives or the lives of their friends and family, you could have a long, slow slog to the next level.
I’ve written on the importance of top-of-mind-awareness in past posts, along with the strategies you can use to develop it among your clients. The key to remember is creating top-of-mind awareness is not about pestering your clients with calls and emails just to keep your name in front of them. You don’t want to annoy your clients.
The key is reaching them in a way that heightens their perception of you as someone who’s not a typical advisor but rather as a genuine authority in their field. Authorities have influence. Some even develop a kind of star power that gets people’s attention. What makes an authority? Content.
Content is your most powerful differentiator.
Your clients spend, on average, six hours a day consuming digital media. Why? They’re looking for information, new insights, a unique perspective, entertainment, ways to improve their lives, anything beyond the mundane. That’s why on the internet, content is king. In a digitally wired world, the only way to be visible and engage with your target audience is through content that has a unique voice, counters conventional wisdom, and has something compelling to communicate.
However, it’s what you do with your content that creates the conditions for building your authority. We’ve written in the past about using blogs to build thought leadership. We’ve also written about how email can still be your most effective communication channel. When you add social media to the mix, you create a powerful digital apparatus that can amplify your content to ensure it gets noticed.
It works like this:
- You write an article for your blog and post it.
- Simultaneously you post a link to your blog post on your social media with an attention-getting lead-in and graphic.
- That will drive traffic to your blog, where you also have an offer for a free download—an ebook, report, or white paper on a critical issue of the day.
- That will enable you to capture additional emails from people visiting your site for the first time.
- You feature your article in your next email newsletter, encouraging your audience to share it with others. Your email newsletter also includes the invitation to download more free content and an invitation to connect on social media.
- You repurpose the content into a video that you post on your blog and social media. That’s for the people who prefer watching videos over reading content—and there are a lot of them.
- Rinse and repeat once a month or more.
The great thing about this process is most of it can be automated using content management software.
Amplify your authority through PR.
The next step is to add a public relations element to the process—that is, getting your content published in the digital media. Financial and investment sites like Kiplinger, Forbes, Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool, CNN/Money, and others invite non-journalist experts to submit content.
When you get published, even in a local paper or media site, you can repurpose that content once again by including copies or links to the content in your social media posts and email newsletters. This time, you get a byline in a published article, which sends your authority needle flying.
If you need help improving your communication style and skills so prospects and clients always get (and understand!) your message, check out our workshop, Become the Obvious Choice – designed to teach financial professionals why it’s important to Become the Obvious Choice and how to do it in order to open new accounts, attract unsolicited referrals from clients, and influence their behavior so they make informed and better decisions.
Add video messaging to the mix.
To put you over the top, I would add one more tactic to this strategy. For your best clients and prospects, or the ones you want to develop into your best clients, create a short, 20-second video message using Loom or Bombbomb that can be embedded in an email. In the video, you will greet your clients by name warmly and let them know that you’ve included something that will be of interest to them in the email.
If you are targeting 20 or 30 people, you’re talking about maybe two hours of work to create the short videos and send them in an email, with a personalized subject line along the lines of “Something that will be of interest to you.”
Incorporating brief Loom calls into your daily practice will also create top-of-mind awareness. After speaking with a client on the phone or in person, make a short video message thanking them for their time and summarizing the next steps. It will take just slightly more time than creating and sending off an email. You can do the same with your top prospects. Using video messages allows you to showcase your personality and let people know you are different.