Tags: client acquisition

It is not uncommon for a press release or two or three to cross the wire each and every day noting for posterity and for self-promotion that this or that advisor has just been named to this or that “best” list.

Case in point is what happened today. Below are two releases that crossed the transom:

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-          The Medical Economics Journal has recently named Daniel W. Wilson, CFP® and Robert T. Dignan, CFP® of CedarPoint Investment Advisors, Inc. to the 2012 List of the Best Financial Advisers for Doctors. For a third year in a row, they join an elite list of financial advisors providing the best holistic wealth management services for physicians in Wisconsin. According to Wilson, the recognition by Medical Economics is the culmination of CedarPoint’s ongoing efforts to build its business model around the idea of being a full service “Personal CFO” for clients that have too little time to properly research the strategies that their individual situations require.

-          Robert L. Omohundro, CFP of Atlanta, GA has been honored with a recognition by Atlanta Magazine in its selection of "2012 Atlanta Select Wealth Managers."

And that got me thinking. What do advisors think of these sorts of awards and the advisors who issue these chest-thumping press releases? Do they view these releases as helpful for marketing purposes? Do they think these kinds of awards speak to an advisor’s competence, or service quality, or anything that a prospect should consider when searching for an advisor or that a client should consider when deciding to stay with one? Do advisors seek out these awards?

Well, if the award is deserved, advisors seemed ok with such press releases. But in the main, almost to a person, advisors were critical of these sorts of awards.

“If an advisor/financial planner has an expertise in working with a certain type of client, such as doctors or dentists and they get recognized by that professional group I can see some value,” says Richard Salmen, CFP, CFA, EA, a senior vice president and senior advisor with GTRUST Financial Partners. “It is a third party recognition of their expertise with that niche market.

Interestingly enough, Salmen says his financial planning business partner and he each got an offer in the mail the same day to “’buy’ ourselves a recognition plaque or crystal bowl attesting to the fact that we were a ‘Top Financial Planner.’ It is sad to me that this going on because they would not be marketing this kind of fluff to us if there was not a demand.”

 Other advisors confirm that magazines see these lists as sources of revenue ever eager to appeal to the vanity and the marketing budgets of advisors. “In my experience, most of the magazines that publish top or “select” financial advisor lists do so on a pay-to-play basis,” says Eric Toya, CFP, a vice president with Trovena, LLC. “We receive many solicitations for inclusion in similar listings for a fee.”

And given that, Toya says he wouldn’t advise a prospect to place any weight on that type of “award.”

To be sure it’s understandable why financial advisors might fall for these offers to promote themselves.  “Unfortunately, in an industry that disallows testimonials, consumers are limited in the reviews or information that they can learn about a firm prior to meeting with them,” says Toya.  “Nowadays, consumers jump straight to Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes or Amazon before selecting a restaurant, movie or book.  Students even have ratemyprofessor.com to help them select their classes.  A similar site for financial advisors would reduce or eliminate the desirability of these lists.”

Like Toya and Salmen, George Papadopoulos, CPA/PFS, CFP also gets solicitations from these companies wanting to recognize him for his excellence. “I just don’t buy it,” he says. “I think it is just a way for these companies to make money and for advisors to self gloat and use this for marketing purposes to unsuspecting prospects. I steer clear from such solicitations and prospects should do too.”

Papadopoulus says that for an award to be legitimate it must have a clearly defined way to measure competence and service quality. “To do that it takes a lot of effort and money,” he says. “Therefore, to gain some legitimacy, some companies allow the convenience of having nominations for such honor. It becomes a popularity contest in most cases. If anyone wants to nominate me I could not prevent them from doing so. I definitely do not see these or lose any sleep over it; I am too busy serving my clients and keeping them happy!”

Other advisers piled on as well.

“My reaction is that this is not even a thin veil for competence,” says John P. Napolitano CFP®, CPA, PFS, MST of U.S. Wealth Management. “It is merely another PR/advertising scheme that the public may or may not believe.”

By way of background, Napolitano received last year a five-star advisor award from Boston magazine, but it was “complete BS… nothing more than another sales gimmick from the ad starved publishing industry to a group of small business owners who are generally clueless when it comes to marketing.”

This year, however, he doesn’t want anything to do with Boston magazine’s award. And the feeling might be mutual. “They probably wanted little or nothing to do with me because I didn’t buy any of the add on services/stuff that they try to sell advisors to promote the award… from use of the logo for the award to reprints and adds in the magazine itself.”

Tags: marketing

The subject line of the email was eye-catching. “If you're not measuring marketing, you're not marketing.” And in the body of the email, the folks at the Harvard Business Review posed this question: “Can you explain the impact of your marketing to your board of directors?”

Naturally, that got me wondering whether financial advisors could answer that question, whether financial advisors measure their marketing. And what I found is this: Small firms are marketing, but not measuring the way Harvard might recommend. And, larger firms are marketing and measuring.

“It would certainly BE worthwhile to measure marketing however, in our type and size of business it is not very easy,” says Stephen Csenge, CFP, AIF, a partner with Csenge Advisory Group.

Unlike many larger companies where you can do traditional marketing, such as a direct mail or email campaign, and measure the responses, ours, says Csenge, is not so straight forward.

Csenge says he conducts several “marketing” efforts (client events, newsletter, website/Facebook, networking, and the like). But there’s typically a lag time between generating

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 a lead and acquiring a client. It could be weeks, months or years in between meeting a prospect and converting that prospect to an actual client, he says.

“So, it is not a direct action/response system,” says Csenge.  “What we do, do is on an annual basis track our overall marketing costs vs. our new revenue (excluding market ups and downs).  As long as that is around 1:3 ($1 marketing expense to $3 new revenue) or better we are happy.”

Meanwhile, Roy Ames, a senior investment advisor with The Mutual Fund Store, reports that most of the marketing analysis is done at the corporate level. "They do track cost per lead, cost per client and ROI," says Ames . "I am not sure of other metrics, but I use a CRM to track each lead to either becoming a client, or added to a list for additional marketing in the future." 

As for Harvard, well, it’s hawking something called Measuring Marketing Performance, “an in-depth, interactive CD-ROM presentation that will show you how to create a marketing dashboard that will reveal the true performance of your company's marketing activities.”

According to the pitch letter, Professors John Quelch and Gail J. McGovern, both of the Harvard Business School faculty, explain and illustrate each step along the way toward keeping senior management informed of how your marketing strategies are attracting, cultivating, and retaining customers. In addition, Harvard says buyers of the system will learn the fundamental principles of marketing excellence; determine what to measure and learn how to interpret the results; align marketing activities with corporate strategy; and ensure that marketing is driving growth.

What’s more, the system, which costs only $69, has been used – at least according to the pitch letter – by such firms as mutual fund giant Vanguard.

Wonder if the system can do for advisers what it’s done for Vanguard.

We wonder too whether you measure your firm’s marketing efforts or not. Share your tales with your peers in the comment field below.

Tags: marketing | niches | Search Engines

Tags: business strategy | marketing | niches | prospecting | Search Engines

Earlier this week, Bob Powell highlighted how advisors do a poor to average job of marketing. The problem, in practical terms, comes down to keywords.

Rarely do advisors have a strategic marketing vision, and an actual written plan is even more uncommon. Getting down to keywords is even more unlikely. Yet keywords are crucial because they are the substance of a strategic marketing plan, the end result of carefully designed marketing strategy.

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Keywords are the words and phrases people use to find you on the Web.

For example, say you are an advisor in Abilene, Texas who specializes in using options and ETFs. You would want to post content on your website and blog about options and ETFs and that mentions you’re in Abilene. The more content like that, the better.

Maybe you would write a blog post about how rare it is for an advisor in a small town like Abilene to be hedging ETFs with options. Or maybe you would post about how ranchers in west Texas understand and like to use options because of their ties to commodities markets.

Another example: an advisor in a suburb of Cincinnati who focuses on serving senior executives at Procter & Gamble might want to post about P&G’s deferred compensation plan, or maybe address the financial planning angles on an early retirement offer made by P&G to middle managers.

By writing content that is so specific, so directed to a particular market, your site will be more likely to get found on the Web by people searching for answers. The beauty of this is that people who find you that way are seeking exactly what you do. They are great prospects. 

Most advisors simply do not know that writing content targeted to well-defined niches  over the long run enables prospects to find them. I speak with advisors all day who do not know how this works or are unclear about how it works.

For the record, if you do not explain your specialties and what makes you different on the Web, you will sound like everyone else.

Writing content on your website that says “we personalize each client’s financial plan to their unique goals and risk tolerance,” guarantees that your site will not be found by prospects searching for answers to their personal financial problems.

It’s ironic that saying on your website that you provide personalized advice without being specific about the nature of the engagements ensures that the people who want personalized solutions will not find you.

Put another way, nobody searches for “personalized investment advice” and if they did they would not find you. Esoteric, highly specialized informaton about specific financial problems of people in your town is what works.

How do you know what your keywords are?  It takes some thinking. But it’s not rocket science. It’s common sense. While there is a lot of hype and nonsense being told and sold to advisors about search engine optimization, success is largely based on good strategic thinking.