Your website should be designed and built to guide your visitors to the most important elements first. Most visitors to financial firm websites will visit the team page, so have a link in the navigation and in a prominent space on the homepage. A good website will blend what visitors want with what the firm wants them to know.

The metrics and measurements of a successful website will depend on your company and your needs. What’s most important to you?

We know most clients often only start a relationship with a small part of their assets – whether that’s a single account or one specific financial need. This might not be intentional, but perhaps just a subconscious way to spread risk. For many clients, they see most financial professionals as the same with identical or similar enough services. Some clients may choose to diversify not by portfolio construction, but by working with multiple financial professionals. There are a multitude of reasons why clients hold assets away from you and your firm.

According to a study, it is about five times less expensive to retain existing customers as compared to acquiring new ones.¹ The concept of wallet share helps businesses focus on retaining and cultivating those customers who show promising growth. In many cases, increasing your wallet share is considered simpler and less expensive than increasing your market share.

Focus on the Target Audience

Use these steps to continue increasing your wallet share through focusing on your target audience:

• Segment your clients
• Define your communication strategy by client segments
• Work to understand held away assets
• Have a detailed client discovery and needs-based conversation at onboarding
• Stay top-of-mind with a digital marketing strategy

Tools and resources, like AdviceWorks, help improve your clients’ experience by providing help with document sharing, account aggregation, interactive discovery, planning and goal collaboration.

Through AdviceWorks, you’ll stay in control of your business while cultivating strong client engagement and working to better serve your clients.

Using AdviceWork’s digital platform, you can collaborate with your clients to set goals and measure their progress. This convenient and secure solution helps you engage your clients and makes the most of the cutting-edge technology you can use through MarketingCentral. Your clients will be able to feel and experience the difference of working with you from whenever and wherever you are.

See Success in:

• Enhancing client engagement and collaboration with digital file sharing, secure document storage, e-signature, account aggregation and learning modules
• Using online account opening and management for a faster process and digital disclosure deliveries
• Showing your clients your value firsthand through the no-strings-attached collaboration tool
• Customizing AdviceWorks with your personal branding
• Setting and tracks clients’ goals

As a financial professional, you want to make the most of your time. Helping clients and attracting prospects take up most of your work hours, which leaves very little time for administrative work and growing your practice. But by embracing technology, you can continue attracting new leads, giving your existing clients the time and care they deserve, all while growing your business and making the time you spend in the office more efficient.

And the use of technology isn’t just for making your job easier. You can also use technology to provide a better experience for your clients. Yes, those in the older generations may lean toward having in-person interactions, but those in the younger generations expect their financial professionals to use cutting-edge technology to provide a better experience.

As all generations become more reliant and comfortable with using technology, more people are expecting to use technology in every aspect of their lives, including in how they find financial professionals and how their financial professionals create strategies.

Technology can be a great way to streamline the buyer journey for your prospects, moving them from initial awareness to client status. The main goal of any website is obtaining contact information of visitors you don’t already know, while sharing your value proposition and branding.

MarketingCentral is Cetera’s multi-channel digital marketing platform built to help you boost lead magnets like whitepapers, eBooks, lead generation quizzes, financial content, email and events. There is a wide variety of pre-approved material to choose from to make creating and customizing content easier. A lead magnet is a free item or service that is provided to your prospect or client in exchange for their contact information.

Included in MarketingCentral:

Whitepapers and EBooks: Whitepapers and eBooks are great lead magnets, as are free consultations.

Lead Generation Quizzes: Lead generation quizzes are short surveys or quizzes that provide information to prospects. Quiz topics can include a prospect’s “investment personality,” or test their knowledge about life insurance or annuity products. These quizzes provide insights to those taking them, while subtly reminding them that you can help with their financial or other needs. Lead generation quizzes are typically offered through social media platforms or can be sent to your prospects via email.

Content: Well-crafted, pre-approved content is always a great way to generate leads. Such content can include blogs, articles, emails, short videos and infographics. This does two things – it is a “soft sell” for your prospect and it demonstrates your industry and thought leadership. If you offer subscriptions to newsletters, this also helps you acquire contact information.

Events: Developing and delivering free online webinars, podcasts or town halls can also be a good way to generate and maintain leads. Such events can provide information to prospects and interested parties, while demonstrating your knowledge, brand and personality.

Learn More about MarketingCentral >

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to gain attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

How does SEO work?

Search engines, such as Google and Bing, use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and cataloging them on an index. Think of the index like a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to help you find exactly what you’re looking for at any given time.

Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every single book in the library and can tell you exactly which one will have the answers to your questions.

Many people become financial professionals because they like working with and helping people achieve their goals. There can be a tremendous sense of pride and satisfaction in helping clients and their families reach their financial goals.

We all know how much people are tied to their money and helping them through the sales journey gives them a better picture of what their client experience could be like. The sales process can help both the prospective client and the financial professional understand the goals and create a strategy that is wise and meets expectations.

Using a thorough and step-by-step sales process can help you attract more prospects and eventually turn them into clients.

Adding a sales process to your efforts gives you the following:

A roadmap: Your sales process gives you a plan for how you are going to reach prospects and what you will communicate.

A possible income boost: Following a step-by-step structure leads you through attracting prospects, gathering new leads and pitching to prospective clients which can help you gain more clients.

Reduced service calls: Having a defined process, including next steps and follow-up actions, can reduce how many service calls you have to make in the future.

A sales process should guide your prospect engagement along every stage of the prospect’s sales journey in a way that’s effective and efficient.

Automating Follow-up — Life can get busy, but technology, like a CRM, can take some of the prospecting duties off your plate. Entering a prospect’s information in a CRM, like Redtail, can help you send thank you notes after calls, reach out with automated messages and send meeting invitations. These invites might:

• Set a calendar reminder in a software like Outlook
• Set up an account in the AdviceWorks® client portal
• Ask them to take the Decipher® emotion recognition assessment
• Register for compliant texting using MyRepChat.

Growing your client base is not just about satisfying your current clients’ needs and hoping they share the word. Satisfying their needs is only part of the equation in expanding your clientele. Instead, it’s about using your current resources to widen your circle of influence. This can begin through utilizing your current clientele in order to gain referrals for potential new clients.

Referrals are a foundational element of business growth and act as an opportunity to interact and engage with your clients. Without referrals, businesses can become stagnant in their practice.

Obtaining referrals is one of the highest compliments a professional can receive. It means that one of your existing clients trusts and your company enough that they highly recommend you to people they know.

Use referrals to challenge yourself. Optimize your business deals and put some time into thinking and planning how you could better your business and increase the number of existing clients who trust you.

• Identify your top clients and determine if they would be good advocates for your business.
• Assure you’re catering toward current clients and make sure they are receiving the best possible care, attention and work from your company.
• Keep your email list updated regularly so the content you send out reminds clients of your positive work.
• Educate your clients on what you are doing for them so they tell their friends.
• Set company-wide goals and values to assure that every client receives the best possible experience from your team.
• Establish your values system for employees both inside and outside the office, especially on social media.

Think about the last referral you gave. Why did you give it? Was there any hesitation? The best way to get referrals is to give them. When you give a referral you are demonstrating confidence in your client and building trust.

Most likely you are working with other professionals like doctors, lawyers and business executives and each of them is able to solve different challenges for your clients. Giving referrals helps show you care and are helping others with their needs.

Work on your client list to understand who might be a trusted professional and someone you can confidently refer in a specific industry or profession. Curate your list and then be on the lookout for opportunities to serve your clients’ needs whether you see something on social media or a conversation you have in your office. When you provide a referral, the natural inclination for them is to return the favor.

Niche groups are clients or companies that are composed of certain key similarities among their members. Establishing your business in one assures alignment in your practice. Generating a positive experience with one member allows for exposure and referrals throughout the entire group, allowing you to work smarter, not harder. Explore your community to find your niche group. You could be engaging with your niche group already without even realizing it.

Conducting a case study is a simple process that can ensure positive and controlled exposure for your company.

These studies act as business testimonials, rather than customer testimonials, to exemplify solutions and strategies relevant to past clients. Case studies give a real-life example of your unique solutions, and can be a huge part in developing your portfolio and drawing in new clients from past experience.

Conducting case studies can help:

• Establish credibility and experience
• Help activate niche segments with your knowledge
• Act as custom content
• Enforce a positive brand image
• Generate new leads and examples for customers, and yourself, to use in referrals

Both clients and prospects want the same thing. They want to know that they are making wise decisions for their future. Events are efficient in their ability to be effective for both clients and prospects at the same time. A good event with quality information conveys your desire to educate and inform the attendees about their situations or what’s going on around them. This builds confidence – in themselves and your firm, which helps you retain existing clients and attract new ones.

Perhaps you’re looking to boost your industry credibility, care for clients, convert some leads to clients or want to establish network connections with industry partners. In-person or online events offer the opportunity for potential customers to get to know and relate to your brand through exposure to like-minded people, personalized teaching, seminars or information. Events can generate positive exposure for your business, bring together clients and prospects and relay the opportunity for your team to network with target customers.

Turnkey quarterly events, the emails and everything you need to host an amazing event for your clients and prospects.

Whether you decide to host an in-person event, online event or a combination event that is both in-person and shared online, there are a number of benefits. Here are some of the ways your business could benefit from hosting events.

• Network: Events are huge opportunities for your employees to network with potential or existing customers. Direct interactions lead to more personable network connections that can be hugely beneficial for your business and customer relations. This can be challenging with online events, but there are still opportunities to network through message boards and online forums.
• Build, connect with and understand your target audience: Going a step further than the simple benefit of networking, events also enable your team to build further or new relationships with your target audience. By meeting them directly, you can converse with them about their needs and wants, gain a better understanding of the same and learn how to more effectively serve and market to them in the future.
• Boost conversion: Events, either in-person or online, are great places to market your products and/or services since those in attendance already demonstrate a vested interest just by showing up. Make sure to invite prospects so they can learn more about you and the company and be more likely to convert to a lead. These personable, direct marketing opportunities can significantly boost conversion rates for your business.
• Develop personalized content for your brand/event: Events enable your business to really come forward with its branded content. Branded content allows your business to truly relate to consumers and create products and/or services that are unique to your brand and that are geared toward your target audience.
• Build industry credibility: Usually, events are hosted by established companies that have trusted products and services to back up their approaches and provide credibility for an event. Hosting an event helps establish credibility and brand awareness for your business and can improve your business’ overall reputation in the industry.
• Introduce new products and/or services: Events are a great place to introduce innovative, new or unique products or services from your business. This enables your audience to link these services to your brand and get excited about other upcoming events and launches. Consider pairing these events with social media campaigns for even greater exposure

Email is an easy way to effectively communicate and market your business. At its base, email is a digital message delivery system that can send customized, private messages or content to individuals or groups. In present-day marketing terms, email can enable your business to directly reach and send messages to target prospects and help you communicate with your clients.

If you don’t already, it’s a good idea to add a way to collect email addresses to your website. It could be through a contact form on your website or you could create content where prospective and existing clients have to share their email addresses to gain access to valuable information.

Once you have these email addresses, keep them organized and updated using a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Customize the Message to the Reader

Through work with your team, customized email content such as newsletters, service updates, birthday celebrations, holidays, financial dates, market news and promotional content can be created and sent to prospects and clients to help your messaging appear more personalized to your clients’ needs. Tailored messaging is easier to accomplish through email, so your company can use email to push your marketing agenda through direct and consistent communication.

Stay Top-of-Mind

Top-of-mind awareness is a key driver in business development and growth. If you can effectively keep your company in front of your clients and prospects you will have more opportunities to engage with them. This is especially true if you create a schedule and stick to it. Create a strategy with correspondence your audience can rely on.

Through emails, you can build more trusting relationships with your clients and prospects by delivering personalized and valuable messages to a specific audience. Sending emails, whether they’re newsletters, service updates, promotional content or a holiday message, shows your audience that you’re being intentional about creating a personal relationship with them. Make sure your emails follow these best practices.

In an effort to earn your way into the elusive inbox, try using a variety of different types of emails. Below are three important types of email marketing that you can use to engage with different segments of your audience.

In partnering with Cetera, you will receive customized Cetera content aligned with your business to help automate your email marketing. This content contains newsletter articles on major events, market trends, economic overviews, and user-specific newsletters that relate to different segmented portions of your email list and holiday content creation layouts.

Each of these campaigns are provided by Cetera and can be automated based on your company’s data to send out to consumers.

Log in to MarketingCentral and choose from over 75 different proprietary content pieces to share automatically with your clients and prospects.

• Market Outlook (quarterly and annually)
• Recaps (weekly, monthly and quarterly)
• Financial Watch (monthly)
• Retire Wise (monthly)
• Commentaries (ad hoc)

With society becoming more and more dependent on technology and digital tools, it only seems natural that marketing would also follow this trend. Having a digital marketing strategy is just as important as your financial planning and sales process. It’s non-negotiable to be successful in the future.

It’s time to begin using digital marketing as the next step in your marketing strategy to gain influence with your client base and build your audience with prospective clients.

The digital marketing world is continually expanding; there’s always more to learn but that means there’s also the potential for you to use it to your advantage.

• Targeted messages for audiences
• Measurable results
• Strong ability to automate
• More cost-effective
• Scaling your business and clients

creating a customer journey, which outlines the way that a person interacts with a firm to reach their desired goals. Getting into the minds of your clients and prospects can be challenging, but doing so can help you close more new business and, more importantly, retain the business you have now.

A journey map is a visual diagram of the steps a person needs to take to get to “success” with your firm. Start with prospects and try to map all the way to them referring business or consolidating assets with your firm. Map out key events like getting the first lead, having initial discussions and opening new accounts. Use sticky notes or an Excel spreadsheet to track all the steps, getting input from your team along the way.

Once you have the process mapped out, add the person’s actions along the journey. What will they do? Who will they talk to? What are they feeling or experiencing at each point?

You can then use your journey map to develop your client experience model and segmentation strategy.

When you’re ready to go beyond sending regular emails to current and prospective clients, you can start to create lead nurturing workflows.

The source of a lead and their familiarity with your firm determines how difficult it will be to convert them into a client engagement or meeting. The number of contacts needed to convert them ranges from three to fifteen.

A prospective client that makes contact through a referral, website visit or other interaction need to be nurtured along the prospect portion of the journey map you created. Adding them into a specific lead workflow designed to nurture them over time can increase their odds of becoming a client. These specific email messages could answer questions you have heard others ask, provide information about your services or profile your team and certifications. Automated email workflows allow you to work many leads at the same time and maintain a personalized feel.

3 Easy Steps to Creating a Workflow

1. Set up a segment for new leads
2. Build your flow of emails and content
3. Build the automation to send to that segment in your CRM tool

Simply defined, the client experience is how your client perceives your services and brand throughout the buyer journey and beyond. Your goal is to ensure an ongoing positive client experience by anticipating how prospects and clients interact with you at every step along the buyer journey.

As such, your efforts should begin before you initiate first contact. A world class client experience starts well before first contact with a prospect and extends through every touchpoint the client makes. This doesn’t mean all clients get the same experience, but that each experience exceeds expectations.

Before we discuss why a brand is important, let’s first define what a brand is. A company’s brand conveys who the company is and what the company stands for. You might think your company’s logo is your brand, and you are correct. Your logo is a part of your brand, but it’s not the only part. Your brand is every single interaction that a person has where they identify you or your team in the work that you perform.

Pieces of your brand can include your name, building, brochures, anything with your logo, even you personally and how your team acts in and out of the office. A successful brand introduces the company and attracts the right kind of client for the company.

Prior to making any large decisions or alternations to your brand, you have to first identify and define your target audience.

Your core values are essentially behaviors – behaviors you want to see in your own organization and want others to hold you accountable to. The core values are non-negotiable. When you say certain behaviors are within your values, you have to stick by them. When you show your employees, fellow financial professionals, future clients and current clients what you believe in, you can create a sense of community and authenticity.

People want to work with and for companies that have the same values as they do. They will stay loyal to those companies who put those shared beliefs on display.

When you’re creating your core values, write them from a place of honesty and authenticity. Clients will be able to tell when you’re just saying what they want to hear. These values are helping improve your brand loyalty and relationships – make sure you’re building on a solid foundation.

As much as 89% of consumers relate to brands that share the same values as them.²

Your positioning statement or personal branding is your elevator pitch. It explains what makes your firm different from other firms and why yours is better.

Through these one or two sentences, you need to create a mental picture of your brand’s unique attributes and strengths.

This should answer the question, “Why should someone trust your company with their assets?”

This statement is also used to align your brand messaging so it’s consistent across every platform including all your social media accounts, your website, brochures, sales messaging, etc. Use your positioning statement to discuss your services, who would benefit from using them and how it fills a client’s needs better than other financial firms.

Writing Your Personal Branding

• Look at positioning statements from companies you admire.
• Write with empathy in mind.
• Keep it brief.
• Have your core values in mind when you write it.
• Remember your audience.
• Be authentic.

Fill-in-the-blank Positioning Statement

Brand messaging starts with what services you offer, but it builds to a value proposition. The value is what ultimately helps the client or prospect make a decision. “Is this valuable to me?”

Personalizing and tailoring your value proposition for each client provides more information about how your company can benefit each new client.

We know you don’t take these topics lightly. You want what’s best for your client. So remember, when you’re discussing your services with a client, you aren’t just talking about the services you offer. You’re talking about their future, what their retirement could look like, whether they can afford a new car or if they can pay for college for their kids.

Mapping your services, values, and emotions in the mountain chart on the right. Emotions are usually the key driver in any decision and aligning your services to an emotion, like safety or confidence, can help you help your clients.

Growing a client base is no longer just about who you know personally. It’s about widening your circle of influence through the resources at your disposal, such as social media.

Use social media to engage with both prospective and existing clients as a strategy to grow your book of business.

No matter who you are, there is a good chance your competitors are already present and involved on social media. This not only suggests there is an opportunity for your brand to do well on these channels, but it also means that some of your potential customers may already be talking with your competition.