Hey everyone, welcome to the informative piece on Financial Advisor Tips.
With this great article, we guarantee you’ll have a fuller knowledge of the tips needed by a new Financial Advisor, productivity tips, proven marketing tips, and every other relevant tip that will lead to success and improved productivity in your career.
Stay with us as we discuss:
Read on to find out just how far you can take your career with these pro tips.
Introduction
Are you a budding financial advisor with a burning desire to improve your craft? A yearning to take your career to the next level?
If your response is yes, you are at the right place as I share with you some Financial Advisor Tips.
Tips for New Financial Advisors
The journey to a full-fledged financial advisor profession is challenging to say the list.
Hence, as one hops into this career path, there are a few pointers that could hopefully set them up for success.
Set SMART Goals
Starting out as a new advisor requires one to have a clear picture of where they want to be and what they’ll do to reach there.
Why is that?
The industry is quite competitive.
Without goals, there are high chances of an advisor quitting since there’s really nothing tangible one will be working towards.
Thus, setting specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals is the key to advancing a financial advisor career.
A SMART goal like reaching out to 25 small business owners with a retirement plan proposition.
This can be done every day for the next one month to help a new financial planner to expand their client base and increase their earnings in the long term.
With measurable goals, an advisor can assess if they’ve reached their target or not by the end of a specific period.
From there, they can adjust accordingly.
Build Rapport with Clients
In this digital age, building personal client relationships is important for an advisor’s success.
It’s what will set a young advisor apart from the automated investment platforms.
Since the best Robo advisor services are already changing the financial advisory industry with its combination of humans and automated systems, differentiating oneself early in one’s career is crucial.
New advisors must strive to create a warm environment during meetings.
Instead of heading straight to the agenda of the day, maybe a light conversation about the client’s life, job, or family can help ease the atmosphere.
These meetings should be friendly as much as they are professional.
Getting to know a client better helps connect with them at a deeper level, which we all know is crucial to tailor financial advice that meets the client’s needs.
But more than that, building a strong bond makes the client trust the advisor more.
Another strategy to build a connection with clients is to keep tabs on the important dates in their lives.
Special occasions like birthdays, weddings, childbirth, or anniversary are opportunities for new advisors to show their clients that they have them in their thoughts.
Besides these special days, an advisor can be spontaneous and surprise their client on a public holiday or just a normal day.
How does a thank you for being my client note on a normal Tuesday sound?
Thoughtful and caring!
Simple gifts can be the key to repeat clients and referrals.
Bottom line?
At the core of a successful financial advisor’s career is clients.
Hence, nurturing those relationships from the get-go can help a new advisor in their career path in the long run.
Invest in Continuous Education
To help clients make up-to-date financial decisions, new advisors must commit to staying abreast with the ever-evolving financial market.
This might involve a continuous education requirement in the advisory industry, plus the dozen learning opportunities online and offline.
As advisors grow in the industry, they can take certified financial planner (CFP) certification to boost their credibility.
Not only that, but they can also choose other certifications and become wealth managers, financial analysts, or insurance counselors. The list is endless.
They can also enroll in short-term courses and polish their expertise in wealth management, estate planning, or retirement planning.
You can Subscribe to financial advisors’ publications, read books, attend seminars, volunteer with professional organizations, and read authoritative blogs in the industry.
These are all ways to stay in touch with the new developments in the industry.
Expanding one’s knowledge better allows an advisor to develop investment strategies and financial plans that match the shifts in the financial market.
Besides, technology in the industry keeps changing.
An advisor can only adopt the new softwares, and better help clients’ reach their financial goals if they understand their functionality.
Beyond the above learning instances, regulatory trends are updated often, and advisors must learn and comply with them.
Failure to uphold them can lead to penalties in the long run.
Lastly, new advisors can further seal their financial planning knowledge through mentoring younger advisors.
Mentorship is a great opportunity to build networks and master the knowledge the advisor has picked up over time.
Learn to Network
Networking is essential to find new clients.
For this reason, new financial advisors will be doing themselves a big favor if they reach out to family and friends from the beginning of their financial advisory career and make known their profession.
Family members, friends, and their networks are usually the first clients when starting out.
However, a new financial advisor must quickly learn to network beyond their cycle and build a book of business.
Networking events, in particular, are perfect spots to meet potential clients and share business cards.
Understand Clients Needs
Clients’ financial situations differ.
More than wanting to build wealth, there’s always a deeper goal.
It’s up to the advisor to unravel the real motivation for seeking financial planning services.
This will require establishing a deeper connection with the client, as we’ve discussed earlier.
The advisor might find out that their deeper motivation could be to secure their family’s future.
In that case, investment strategies that focus on saving for kids’ education, life insurance policy, and investment products that yield long-term returns may be exactly what the clients require to meet their goals.
Understanding clients’ needs also involve educating clients to better understand what they are looking for.
Productivity Tips for Financial Advisors
Busy and productive are two different things.
The financial advisory job description calls for productivity.
Let’s break down some pro tips on how financial advisors can increase their productivity.
Take Charge of Daily Schedules
There are many tasks an advisor would want to handle in a day.
But, there’s not enough time!
That’s why scheduling a day’s tasks prior, like the night before, can help make the most of the following day.
It’s equally crucial to outline the to-do list in order of importance, with an accompanying deadline for each task.
The next thing is to block any destructions that will eat up the time for important tasks of the day.
Things like emails or phone calls are not always urgent.
So, it helps to block them out and return those calls and emails at a designated time.
Another tactic is to make the most of a day is to block the free time between meetings.
So, instead of idling for 30 minutes waiting for the next meeting, perhaps returning those emails will prove more productive.
There are also many time management tools that advisors can tap into to know which tasks drain their time and adjust accordingly.
Let Go of Multitasking
The more tasks one can handle at a go, the better, right?
Wrong!
Multitasking is the thief of time.
Many financial advisors find themselves in a rabbit hole, trying to get everything done but accomplishing nothing in particular.
The key is handing one task at a time.
The best way to go about it is to split individual tasks into small, actionable steps.
Since research says that humans can only concentrate at a high level for 20 minutes, allocating each step 20 minutes with breaks before proceeding to the next stage can prove more fruitful.
There’s also the two minutes rule where any task that requires two minutes or less should be handled immediately to avoid build-up.
Select Networking Events
Every financial advisor will jump on their feet at an invitation to a networking event.
And who can blame them?
Networking events are an opportunity to reach out to potential clients.
However, it reaches a time when the focus shifts from attending any networking event to only those of value.
Because these events consume a lot of time, it helps to evaluate an invitation before giving a resounding yes.
So, an advisor should look at the quality of the event.
How long will the networking event take?
Will there be people that the advisor already knows that could introduce her to new networks?
It’s only worth attending networking events that will add more value to an advisor’s business.
Beyond networking events, there is also the center of influence where financial advisors seek partnerships with other professionals.
The same rule applies.
There is absolutely no need for an advisor to have a long list of partners without building a quality relationship.
All networking initiatives must be geared towards producing results.
Proven Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors
At the core of financial planning services is marketing those services to the right audience.
With the advent of digital marketing, advisors can do a lot more to reach the target market at a low cost.
Here are strategies to get started.
Targeting a Specific Market
When getting started as a new advisor, it makes sense to target everyone and anyone who shows interest.
However, as an advisor gains experience, it becomes imperative to target a specific market.
This is especially because the consumers of this day and age prefer specialists over jacks of all trade.
With the internet, they can shift through the many options in the market to find just the right personal financial adviser.
They are most likely to choose professional financial advisors who understand their problems and provide personalized financial services to help them reach their financial goals.
For that reason, having a niche helps an advisor to distinguish themselves from the pack.
They can tailor their marketing strategies to target the ideal client they want to work with.
These could be retirees, widows, executives, small business owners, and many more.
Moreover, advisors can take their specialization a notch higher and settle for specific services: estate planning, financial planning, retirement planning, divorce planning, asset management, or even wealth management.
With a niche, the next thing would be to highlight the value an advisor brings to the table.
The value proposition must be succinct and clearly articulated on the homepage.
Part of what can make an advisor stand out on their website is a certified financial planner (CFP) certification.
Furthermore, letting the ideal client know that they are fiduciary is particularly a good marketing move since the financial advisory industry is flooded with sales brokers driven by sales more than the clients’ interests.
When all is said and done, financial advisors must ensure that all their marketing materials communicate to their specific market.
Social Media Marketing
Social media has a lot to offer in the current digital age, yet not many financial advisors leverage the full potential of social media platforms.
Financial advisors can use social media to share snippets on budgeting tips, personal finance, or jokes that the target audience resonates with.
They can also share their advisory firm’s updates and videos with their existing and potential customers.
LinkedIn and Facebook have stood out in the financial advisory industry as platforms where advisors build and nurture meaningful client relationships.
Important to note is that apart from sharing relevant content with followers, advisors can use social media ads.
Facebook ads, in particular, make targeting the specific audience easy with their wide range of filters.
An advisor can reach out to a particular age group in a specific location. They can further filter their target market by gender, connection, interest, and workplace, among others.
Another way to build leads through social media marketing is by responding to queries in a timely fashion.
Beyond Facebook and LinkedIn, platforms like Quora and Twitter are the best in sharing expertise and reaching out to the demography that an advisor wants to work with by answering their questions.
When starting social media marketing, it is important to note that all these platforms have rules of engagement that an advisor must heed when interacting with the audience.
Advisors must also comply with Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regulations when posting content on social media.
Up-to-Task Website
According to research, online users expect websites to load in two seconds.
And so it goes without saying that more than being found online, it’s crucial that an adviser’s website loads at lightning speed.
Clearly, their audience doesn’t have the time.
When the loading speed is in check, the next important thing is responsiveness to mobile and tablet.
Additionally, it wouldn’t help if the website loads fast, yet it’s poorly designed with information scattered all over, would it?
A functional website that’s well designed and professionally organized is exactly what gives new clients the impression that the advisor is a professional.
An organized website should be accompanied by clear and easy-to-understand information about the advisors’ financial services.
And it shouldn’t stop there.
A clear call to action that guides potential clients on what to do next is a great way to convert them into leads.
Direct yet simple messages like “call us now,” or “fill the contact form below,” or “schedule an appointment with us” can be the difference between converting and losing a client.
Online Testimonials
Online reviews are at the center stage when it comes to online decision-making.
It’s one area advisors can take advantage of.
The best way to get started is for an advisor to ask the clients they have worked with for ages to write a review about their experience.
New advisors can request every client they work with to leave a review.
This can be on all the platforms, including Facebook, Yelp, and Google.
Financial advisors can also leverage top-rated local review sites within their locality that fit their financial service niche.
Online reviews are a classical case of an advisor’s work speaking for itself.
Nothing boosts an advisor’s credibility like a third party, confirming that truly their financial goals came to life because of their investment advice.
Having said that, it’s equally important for advisors to be on the lookout for negative reviews that might bring down their overall ratings.
The best strategy is to be proactive and respond to disgruntled clients with actionable solutions to their problems.
Content Marketing
It’s said that content is king and for a good reason.
Digital marketing revolves around writing relevant content and sharing the same with the right audience.
Whether it’s social media, newsletter, blog posts, white papers, ad campaigns, podcasts, or video, content is important.
Consistency in producing the right content increases a financial advisor’s eligibility among their audience.
But then again, a solid content marketing strategy requires an advisor to know what works best for their target audience and tailor their content to meet their needs.
Blog posts are a great way to showcase expertise and appear on the search engine result page for the keywords potential clients use to find investment management services online.
Pay-per-click (PPC) can also help an advisor target individuals who are ready to convert.
The key to making the most of PPC is to bid for targeted keywords and ensuring the ad copy is clear and search engine optimized, and the landing page that the ad leads to has a powerful call to action.
Make Use of Automated Systems
There’s a lot that goes into digital marketing.
There are high chances that financial advisors may be overwhelmed if they manage everything themselves.
That’s why it’s important to use automated systems for customer relationship management, social media, and email marketing.
Since these tools come at a fee, it would help if an advisor goes for a multifaceted tool that takes care of several functions.
These tools also allow advisors to monitor how their posts and campaigns are performing.
They can adjust and better meet their audience’s needs.
Referrals
Referrals are powerful tools in marketing personal finance services.
Why?
People are always guarded when it comes to financial matters.
Hence, it’s easy for someone to hire an investment advisor if they are referred by a friend, a family member, or a colleague.
To get started, an advisor can directly request their clients to refer their network, especially if the client has communicated that they are impressed with the financial advice received.
Another strategy to help get those referrals coming is to give incentives to clients who refer new clients.
The incentive should be within the marketing budget and be something that’s of value to the client.
That small gesture can be the key to increasing the client base seven-fold.
Online and Offline Events
The good thing about online and offline events is that an advisor doesn’t have to be part of the organizing team to attend.
These events are great when it comes to increasing business visibility and even getting clients.
But it’s important to be tactical.
Instead of going straight into sales, how about giving productive input about financial planning tips first?
Or perhaps financial advice to business owners.
The goal is to help others while low-key, letting the audience know they can get personalized financial planning services.
When people find insightful information from an advisor during these events, there are high chances that they’ll reach out at an opportune time.
