Establishing a client base as a financial advisor can be challenging, especially in a very competitive market. But because you operate in the service industry, you cannot afford to rely on just your existing client base. You need to be constantly growing your client list.
For financial advisors, referrals are often one of the most important sources of new clients. However, you cannot rely on word of mouth alone. Here are five things you need to do to grow your client base for your financial advisor services.
1. Identify Your Niche
The first step before selling or marketing anything is knowing your niche. Marketing to a general audience with vastly different interests will be more expensive and inefficient. Instead, you’d want your clients to have something in common so that it’s easier to market to them. It will also allow you to tailor your services to the health and lifestyle of that niche.
Having a niche will allow you to identify common pain points, plus similarities in culture and behaviour. When your marketing appeals to a specific niche, these efforts will resonate at a more personal level. After all, that’s what financial advisors do – create a financial plan devoted to helping individuals live their best lives.
Let’s say you’ve identified your niche as working fathers that provide for their families. You can tailor your marketing to incorporate messaging such as, “You look out for your family. But who looks out for you?” which speaks more to breadwinners than it would to students or college graduates.
Knowing your niche also helps you create relevant content for them. But you should also assess your growth model if your content marketing will generate returns on these efforts.
Besides the marketing, your investment plan should also be well-suited to your niche. If you’re marketing to breadwinners, your offers should include benefits for their beneficiaries and retirement pension. You’ll grow your client base much easier this way.
2. Use Lead Magnets To Collect Prospects’ Emails
Email marketing is a powerful tool that nurtures your contacts with valuable information and insights. You may leverage your email marketing content to nudge your email list into sharing your newsletters with others or even to upgrade their services.
But how would you get your prospects’ emails? Outside of the conventional “lunch and learns”, you can use lead magnets to get prospects’ emails. That is called lead generation.
Source: NextPittsburgh
A lead magnet is free content that you share with potential prospects in exchange for their emails. They opt in to access your free value through this lead magnet. You may have a dedicated page for your lead magnet or it may even be a webinar on parenting and work hacks or a free PDF on the most convenient passive income streams for the breadwinning fathers niche.
You may also send your new opt-ins meeting request emails and package them as free consultations.
An essential tip to remember is that your lead magnet should generate interest for your product – in this case, a personal financial advisor’s services. Raise some pain points in your lead magnet and the email marketing newsletters that follow. Then, show your services as the solution.
If you’re using email software, you may want to segment your email list into prospects who have availed of your financial advisor services already and those who haven’t. You can then send targeted email campaigns to those segmented email lists.
3. Build Strong Customer Relationships
You want to have a solid connection with your clients. As a financial advisor, your service provides your target audience with a better quality of life. They would likely support you and credit you for those improvements to their financial wellbeing. It will grow your client base by first establishing strong bonds with your existing customers who will then gladly recommend your services to others.
Have a social call or two with your leads. Check up on them now and then, maybe ask how the kids are. Don’t just message them when their payment doesn’t get processed.
A solid circle of clients may even be interested in opting into your referral program. We’ll look at this in detail next.
Think of these solid connections as the foundation of growing your client base. When your existing clients have a good experience with you, they’ll be encouraged to tell their friends, their friends will tell their friends, and eventually, this will snowball into massive growth for your firm.
However, like any business connection, see to it that you and your client(s) have mutual respect for each others’ business hours. But if you can and are willing to, give them a hand during emergencies.
4. Create A Referral Program
Once you have a solid client base, you may use this existing group to grow the company. The idea behind a referral program is that you incentivize anyone who successfully gets another person to access your services. It’s another effective way to grow your client base, but remember to connect with your compliance officer beforehand to ensure all regulations are being followed.
Here are some ideas for a referral program:
- Reward referrers with free financial analyses in the same way you offer free value with your lead magnet.
- Your program may also allow for discounts to clients who bring in new customers.
- Hold a give away. For example, whoever brings in the most referrals within a specific timeframe will win a BBQ set, or a gift card.
It’s important to note that what you’re going to be giving should be proportionate to what you’re getting in return. Small items, such as gift cards, are fine, but you will need more substantial rewards for larger referrals.
5. Tap Into Automation
As a financial advisor, there are many other things that require your attention besides building lead magnets, forming strong client connections, and building out referral programs. Your main focus is to manage your client's accounts and guide each client on the most effective financial journey for their needs. Perhaps you even have some administrative duties to fill in as well, such as managing your team.
In this case, you would need to automate the tasks you can’t entirely focus on because you’re busy growing your client base. Automating, however, doesn’t mean replacing every single task with a robot or program. You wouldn’t want canned email responses to your clients’ queries.
Source: Software Advice
Automation is used for specific, repetitive communication processes to ensure the proper client management procedures are occurring in the background while you can focus on what can't be automated. Here are things you can automate and the steps you can take to automate them:
- Have prospects come to you instead of you coming to them. An effective evergreen social media ad campaign will save you a lot of time from sending cold emails. That will allow you to turn your attention from prospecting to simply checking the metrics of your campaign once a week. That, in return, will give you more time for other duties.
- Automate sending emails to your leads. Leads generated via your opt-in should be sent a string of personalized emails welcoming their onboarding. Use an email tool such as Campaigns to nurture your leads.
- You may also automate payment collection from your clients. Coordinate with your clients to set up regular payments from their bank into your company’s account as agreed upon on the contract. You should get involved only when a client is late on their payment.
By automating your processes to save valuable time, you can effectively manage your client accounts while also being more hands-on in your approach to grow your client base.
Key Takeaways
A huge established client base is great for any financial firm, including yours, of course. To grow your client base, you can start by first defining your niche. That allows you to better craft a plan according to the lifestyle of this niche. It also helps with marketing.
Use opt-ins to get the emails of prospects. You may convert these prospects into clients by running an effective marketing campaign. Build your relationships with your clients. You’d want a personal relationship with them for the best customer experience. Have a referral program set up that effectively grows your client base and further benefits your existing clients.
Finally, automate other crucial processes, such as sending drip emails to opt-ins, booking appointments online or receiving payments from existing clients. That way, you have the time and energy you need to grow your client base, skyrocketing your financial advisor career.
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