How People Find a Financial Advisor
People search for financial advisors in various ways and via numerous channels. To ensure your appointment book is full, you need to identify where your potential clients are searching so you can focus your marketing efforts in these areas.
Potential clients often find a financial advisor in one (or more) of the following ways.
By referral
Word of mouth is very often the starting point for people when they are looking for a financial advisor. However, unless you’re an established advisor, this won’t happen overnight – it takes time and effort to prove you can consistently provide exemplary client service to your clients.
A good way to up your natural referrability over the longer term is by building a reputation for serving a particular niche. When searching for a new advisor, prospects will be especially interested in the views of people in the same position as them in terms of life stage and goals. If you’re the known specialist for helping young couples save enough for their children’s education, others with this demographic will seek you out.
To increase your chances of getting referred, you could also consider setting up a referral alliance with other professionals e.g. lawyers and estate attorneys.
On LinkedIn
Close to 90% of people with assets over $100k turn to social media to help them make important financial decisions. So social networks should form an important part of your marketing strategy when it comes to generating new leads. LinkedIn is an especially valuable resource for financial advisors – according to a recent survey, 73% of financial advisors questioned said they used LinkedIn (compared with 56% who use Facebook).
Make it easy to find you on LinkedIn by joining relevant groups and posting valuable content on a regular basis. By communicating regularly and sharing information you can not only grow your network on LinkedIn but increase the traffic to your website too, leading to a steady flow of new prospects.
When they’re searching LinkedIn, prospects will check out your profile, biography, hobbies as well as using advanced searches to identify your specialties. Make sure you include all relevant information and keep things up to date.
Seminars
People searching for financial advice are often interested in attending seminars and workshops to find out more about investing. So, giving educational seminars can be a great way of tapping into this audience, promoting yourself and generating leads.
When you’re speaking, people get a chance to see your personality and since everyone only wants to do business with someone they like and trust, this can be an effective way to forge a connection.
Make sure your seminars are interesting and offer something of real value in terms of ideas and inspiration. People aren’t there to be sold to, they’re there to learn something – and when they do, they’ll hopefully decide to take things further.
When you’re hosting a seminar, invite your current clients and ask them to bring their friends and colleagues along. Then show these prospects what it could be like to work with you.
The local community
Many people search for a financial advisor in their local vicinity so make sure you turn up in local searches on major search engines like Google and Bing. It may also pay to run advertisements in local newspapers or business directories.
You may also come across people in your local community who are thinking about hiring a financial advisor but haven’t yet begun a formal search. You could bump into prospective clients at the local golf club, church or maybe as part of a social circle.
It could pay to join a local business network so you can chat with owners, as they, also may be searching for the right financial advisor. Always be prepared to take advantage of chance encounters by having your elevator pitch at the ready and ideal client sheet to hand out.
By understanding how prospects go about their search for an advisor, you can plan to have a presence in all the right places. Otherwise good prospects for your business, will never find you – and you won’t have a chance to prospect to them.
Over time, you’ll find that more and more prospects come directly to you via referral – but even so you can’t afford to overlook good prospecting activities since they will ensure the long-term growth of your business.
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