The Six-Step Financial Advisor Marketing Plan

For financial advisors, it may be tough to accept that today’s consumers have plenty of options when it comes to managing their finances. Certainly, more options than they had a decade ago. These days, automated investing apps, robo-advisors and DIY investment tools are all cutting into your pool of clients. 

However, while these tools excel in general, automated investing, they lack personalization. This creates an opportunity for traditional advisors to stand out from the alternatives. But to do so — to really sell the value you provide your clients — financial advisors need a marketing plan. 

But what does a marketing plan for financial advisors look like? In this post, we’ll go over what that could look like for your firm. 

Six Steps in a Financial Advisor Marketing Plan

1. Identify Your Market

Before you can create a financial advisor marketing plan, you first need to determine who exactly it is that you’re targeting. While this might sound obvious, it’s actually the most important step. Without having a specific idea of your target customer, all of your marketing efforts will fall on deaf ears. 

Simply put, your market, or target audience, are the people that you are offering your financial services to. You can get an idea of your target audience by answering questions like these:

• Which customers do you most enjoy working with?
• Where do they live?
• How do they spend their time?
• What unique financial needs do they have?
• What are their financial goals

The more you know about your clients, the easier it is to create tailored messaging that will appeal to them. There are plenty of resources online that can help you define your ideal customer profile and buyer personas — we recommend starting with Hubspot’s free resources.‍‍

2. Define Your Offer

Once you’ve identified your market, you need to determine your offer. In other words, how are you uniquely positioned to help your dream client? Again, the more specific you can be, the better:

• I help millennials with young families structure their student loan payments so they can start saving for the future
• I help late-career individuals position themselves for a comfortable retirement with minimal risk to their portfolios
• I help values-driven investors build sustainable portfolios and manage charitable donations in a way that reflects their priorities

Each of these examples starts with a specific individual — your ideal customer — and explains how your services help them. Even if you don’t run your business with this level of specificity, building out a financial advisor marketing plan that’s centered around an ideal customer/service will help target your efforts, and attract the types of clients you most enjoy working with. 

3. Choose Your Channels

Now that you have identified your ideal client and come up with a clear offer, it’s time to get your message in front of them. At this point, it’s important to take the time to research which online/offline channels are most utilized by your target audience. A few examples of channels that you can use to reach your target audience include: 

• Direct advertising (print, outdoor, event sponsorships, trade shows, radio/TV)
• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok)
• Paid media (online advertising through Google, LinkedIn or other platforms)
• Organic search engine optimization (SEO) 
• Referrals from existing clients

Understanding how your ideal clients consume content is a key part of your financial advisor marketing plan. This helps you allocate resources where they’ll be most effective, and translate your brand’s message to your dream client and their specific financial goals. 

How to build out effective campaigns for any of the above channels is its own topic — one that’s beyond the scope of this post. Here, again, Hubspot is your go-to resource, as they have one of the most comprehensive (and least spammy) marketing blogs on the internet. Be sure to keep an eye on the Hubly blog, too, as we’ll be rolling out more resources specifically about financial advisor marketing planning in the weeks to come.  

4. Engage Your Leads

Once you’ve started actively reaching out to your ideal customer on their preferred channels, you’ll start to generate leads. Lead generation involves first attracting the interest of your potential customers, enticing them to learn more, and finally converting them into paying clients. Ideally, your marketing outreach will solve the first part of this equation. From there, you need to bring them in. 

One of the best ways to do this is to offer them something of value for free. This could be a short consultation or intro call, but that can be a hard sell both for prospects that are just beginning to explore their options, and for advisors who need to dedicate their time to paying customers. 

Instead, try putting together an ebook or planning worksheet you can share for free. You’ll be able to tell based on their engagement with this content who is most likely to become a customer, and can provide more personalized outreach from there. 

5. Close Your Deals

Now that you have your growing list of leads, it’s time to begin the sales process. For most RIAs, this is the part of financial advisor marketing planning that comes most naturally. You already know how to speak to your clients and deliver exceptional service — selling yourself to new prospects is no different. 

As you meet with prospects, try to identify the following:

• What their financial goals are, or what specifically they want to do with their finances
• What’s holding them back from getting to these specific goals 
• How your services can bridge this gap

6. Onboard Your Clients

Congratulations — you’ve closed a new client. But your work isn’t done yet. Determining and communicating how you onboard new clients is a key part of marketing planning for financial advisors.  After all, the more you can wow them out of the gate, the more likely they are to refer friends and family to you. 

Check out this short video for a preview of how Hubly can help with this:

Bonus: Testing, Measuring and Tweaking Your Financial Advisor Marketing Plan

A good marketing strategy isn’t like passive ETF investing. You don’t want to just “set it and forget it.” Instead, you should constantly be testing new marketing ideas, measuring results and tweaking your strategy. This includes things like:

• Updating your landing page
• Testing different hooks or calls to action in your ads
• Optimizing sales funnels 
• Trying new channels to get your messaging in front of potential clients 

The key is to keep improving any and all parts of your marketing funnel. It may sound like a lot of work, but an effective financial advisor marketing plan will keep new clients flowing into your firm, allowing you to grow your business and build on your previous success.

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