When you start marketing your financial services business, you have two options:
- Dive straight into tactics
- Develop a detailed strategy/plan.
One of these options is:
- More cost-effective
- Quicker
- Useful in focusing your efforts and avoid “shiny” new things
- Beneficial in helping you to monitor ROI
- What you do for your clients!
Unfortunately, many advisers and planners often go for option one, diving straight into tactics like launching a social media or Google AdWords campaign and seeing what works.
This trial-and-error strategy can be expensive and inefficient, meaning you might be missing out on potentially better options.
So, in today’s blog, we explain exactly how to write an effective marketing strategy for your business.
The 5 things your strategy should include
- Objectives
- Target market
- A data-led review of your current marketing
- The plan
- Measurements of success
Objectives
Before you plan the best way to get there, you need to know where you’re going. You need a clear idea of:
- What you’re aiming to achieve with your marketing strategy (the vision)
- How you plan to do that in a broad sense (the mission)
- The milestones you need to achieve to help you get there (the objectives).
Your objectives need to be well thought out to accomplish your goals. They need to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-orientated.
The mission and objectives of financial advice and planning firms generally fall into one of three categories: acquiring clients, building a team, or acquiring businesses.
Looking to acquire new clients? Your strategy should produce detailed client personas. If you’re aiming to build a team, you need to plan how to attract them.
Target market
You cannot market your business until you know exactly who you want to work with, their motivations, key challenges, and their aspirations for the future.
Build a picture of your ideal clients by creating a client persona detailing these things. That way, you’ll always keep in mind who you are looking to attract and how you can position your services and business to appeal to them.
Your target market could be wide – people at each life stage who need financial advice – or you could have a niche, such as doctors who need financial advice.
Though it may seem counter–intuitive to narrow your prospect pool, it may actually be more effective.
It is easier to target your marketing to a niche because you can get specific about your specialisms and how you can help those individuals, leading to sustainable growth for your business.
Yardstick is a testament to that – we only support the financial services profession.
Data-led review of your current marketing
A data-led review helps you to understand what’s working and what’s not.
For example, if you have many new enquiries, but your conversion rates are low, your marketing may be attracting wrong-fit prospects. This essentially translates to wasted time and money.
The only way to know if you are attracting wrong-fit prospects is with the right data, helping you exclude other possibilities for a low conversion rate.
Data should be harvested from multiple sources so you can confidently identify the root cause of your successes or losses. It is important to record and analyse sufficient data so that you can make evidence-led decisions.
There are 12 data points we recommend recording for each new enquiry.
Build a plan
A marketing plan should include the tactics you will use to build (or rebuild) your marketing foundations to drive growth and achieve the objectives established in the first place.
In a webinar we delivered last year, we take a deeper dive into how to develop your marketing plan.
Measurements of success
If you’ve followed our advice and your objectives are time-orientated, you can measure your progress to make sure you’re on track for achieving them.
A marketing KPI dashboard keeps things all in one place and helps you keep track in an organised way. Click here to request our template.
Develop this dashboard, complete it on a monthly basis, and then review the data to make evidence-led decisions about how you might improve your marketing in the future.
The dashboard provides focus and clarity so you can stay consistent and meet your objectives.
It all starts with developing a strategy
Over the years, we have put in the time and effort to know what works and have created award-winning marketing strategies for businesses within the financial services profession.
Writing and implementing a stellar marketing strategy takes time and dedication that you may not have to spare.
So, to discuss how we can help your business, email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965 300.
Phil Bray, Founder & Director at The Yardstick Agency
Via
Emily Lang, Marketing & Operations Assistant at The Yardstick Agency