Advisors are reluctant to lean into marketing, even though they’re often natural storytellers. At SYNERGY24, a panel discussed how RIAs can improve their marketing plans in their effort to build sustainable organic growth.
Advisors know that their clients’ success includes a purposeful plan and intentional actions. Ironically, it can be a challenge to take those same lessons and apply them within an advisor’s own practice — especially when it comes to marketing.
Marketing isn’t always easy for the wealth management industry. Just one in five advisors has a marketing strategy, according to a recent survey, even though getting a plan in place helps advisors feel more confident about meeting their practice goals and boosting their business.1
To help advisors boost their RIA marketing plans, TradePMR convened a panel of marketing experts at the SYNERGY24 conference to share tips for improving advisors’ tactics and building stronger businesses.
Led by TradePMR Marketing Director Jessica Shores, the cohort included Susan Quinn, CEO of circle S studio; Ryan Frankel, Founder and President at Frankel; Anthony Stich, Executive Managing Director at MarketCounsel Consulting; and John Mackowiak, Chief Revenue Officer at Advyzon.* They talked about what success looks like, how to build a winning strategy, and why technology is often the secret behind powerful marketing strategies.
Defining Success
The line between success and failure in marketing can be frustratingly difficult to find. To help advisors, the panelists laid out a template for how they evaluate their own marketing efforts.
Panelists agreed that successful organic growth marketing strategies have these characteristics in common:
- Converted leads are of high quality, reflecting the carefully crafted messages shared with prospects.
- Clients you’ve marketed to tend to work with you for years or decades.**
- Your marketing process is clear and produces regular results.
- You’re empowering your marketing personnel and giving the marketing ecosystem sufficient time to flourish.
- You embrace change and aren’t afraid to make mistakes, as long as you learn from the miscues.
Once equipped with a vision of success, it’s time to start building a blueprint.
A Strong Strategy Starts with a Plan
When working with advisors who are initiating a marketing strategy, Ryan Frankel said he sometimes sees business owners getting ahead of themselves.
“I think about marketing like building a house,” he said. “First you might hire an architect and an interior designer. An engineer will review plans. And then you’ll start construction.”
Marketing follows a similar process of planning before construction.
But too often, advisors will start a marketing mission with a proverbial trip to the home improvement store and a counterproductive shopping spree. It’s tempting to jump straight to the building phase without conducting the crucial first steps of planning and preparation, he said.
A solid go-to-market plan needs to be focused on your people, processes, and technology, added Anthony Stich.
Technology is a good place to start for those building a plan from scratch, he said. While it will ultimately end up augmenting the people you’ve hired and the processes you have in place, technology is the easiest aspect to implement and the quickest to change, if needed.
Focusing on technology can also help you define your brand and employee experience, and uncover techniques for impressing your clients, noted Susan Quinn.
Get to Know Your Ideal Sales Cycle – and Your Ideal Client
As firms begin executing their plans, they’ll need to continuously dig into their results, said Stich. While individuals may be able to find success based on their personalities, a growing business will need to replicate winning strategies across many different employees in order to continue expanding.
Selling is key. Advisors should establish a sales process and evaluate the time and steps involved in a typical sales cycle, said Jessica Shores. If advisors haven’t built those pieces, or can’t pin down what’s “typical,” business owners need to take the time to systematize their techniques.
One way of doing so is to think about their brand as a person, suggested Frankel. Advisors might brainstorm what their brand sounds like, how it looks, and what its sense of humor and purchasing habits are like. “Think about how you would introduce your brand to a room of strangers,” he explained.
In undertaking these exercises, advisors are essentially defining their specialization, said John Mackowiak. He encouraged advisors to iterate and track which techniques work the best.
Tell a Better Story, Win a Better Client
Marketing is deeply connected with telling better stories and winning better clients. Our brains are designed to engage with stories and the people who tell them2. We’re better at retaining information when it’s woven into a story, especially when it touches on our emotions.3
The best stories, replicated at scale, originate in the rich matrix of solid technology, well-planned processes, and talented storytellers.
At TradePMR, we provide top-tier technology, strive to deliver unparalleled client service, and offer advisors a growth accelerator plan designed to help them reach and exceed their organic growth goals. We’re here to help advisors tell better stories, build better businesses, win better clients, and provide the best financial advice in the industry.
About TradePMR
For more than two decades, TradePMR has worked with growth-minded independent registered investment advisors (RIAs), providing innovative technology tools and support designed to transform their businesses. The privately-held brokerage and custodian services provider (Member FINRA/SIPC), based in Gainesville, Fla., works to streamline investment advisors' operations through comprehensive custodial, operational, and trading support. For more information, visit www.TradePMR.com.
Follow TradePMR on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn for the latest news, updates, and event information.
1 https://www.broadridge.com/press-release/2024/fifth-annual-broadridge-survey
2 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008662107
3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6781149/
Disclosures:
*Susan Quinn, CEO of circle S studio; Ryan Frankel, Founder and President at Frankel; Anthony Stich, Executive Managing Director at MarketCounsel Consulting; and John Mackowiak, Chief Revenue Officer at Advyzon are not affiliates of TradePMR.
** The opinions expressed herein are those of the panelists, are as of the publication date; they are not necessarily statements of facts which may or may not be accurate over the long term and may not necessary reflect the opinion of TradePMR. The material has been curated solely for information purposes and is not a solicitation or an offer to buy any security or instrument or to participate in any trading strategy.
TradePMR, member FINRA/SIPC
