Are you wasting your marketing dollar?

Venn Williams | Halogen Connect | August 15, 2011

When it comes to marketing for small financial advisers and broker’s technology has given us the ability to compete with the big boys. Unfortunately the financial professional these days does not know how to effectively take advantage of his niche. Now the new Buzz for small businesses is to understand what business we are in and our target clients. Yes we all have our unique selling proposition or USP. Sure!

All small independent operators can have a unique business. Rubbish! They can’t, is the answer but we continue to listen to marketing experts who tell us we need a unique value proposition or UVP. They sound important and sort of make sense. Do we really need them? Do potential clients need to know your USP or UVP to do business? How are these 2 acronyms going to increase our revenue? OK, maybe I’m a little harsh, but you get my point. As a small business we want our marketing to increase revenue. We don’t have a massive marketing budget to develop a national brand. As advisers our marketing should be like throwing a dart to a dartboard. It must stick. However most think that more money and bigger marketing will do the trick. It won’t. That’s just throwing a brick at a dartboard the harder you throw the less effective it becomes. It just won’t stick.

There is only one reason people will do business with you. They trust you. And to trust you they must have a relationship with you. No, not necessarily a one –on- one close cosy relationship but relationships like say, you have with Gillette or Nike or even your favourite pair of jeans. You trust the brand you continue to do business and buy.

Quote“There is only one reason people will do business with you. They trust you. And to trust you they must have a relationship with you.”

Your job then is to build as many relationships as fast as possible and become known and trustworthy. So how does a small financial professional compete with big brands and build relationships and become efficient in marketing? In a nutshell communicate with as many people as possible.

Simple, you build a data base a list of names of your target market as fast as possible and communicate with them educate them and engage them and they will do business with you This is where technology and the internet can be a great marketing weapon. Sound easy? it is. Before I show you how lets understand that some of the most valuable companies created over the last 10 years are just data bases. Think face book. It’s just a database it doesn’t make anything, consult, construct or manufacture. It’s one of the most valuable companies on the planet and it wasn’t here 10 years ago.

Let’s look at some opportunities for data base marketing and how it can work for your small financial business.

Case study:Let’s say you have a data base of 1000 home owners who have a mortgage that you have collected over some time. (These are not your clients these are a different list) You stay intouch with your data base through a financial educational newsletter each month which builds your credibility and trust .You educate all these potential clients each month with your publication featuring your brand your name your company details. Now industry statistics tell me that a loan will refinance every 7 years (some tell me that it’s even shorter now) So of your 1000 database of home owners there is a potential 140 new loan/refinance opportunities every year. As long as you are communicating and top of mind to your database when it comes to refinancing you have a great chance to secure the business. With old technology of phone calls mail and flyers and faxes how much work would it take to rustle up 140 new loans in a year? Now a personal email to your database can do the trick… and you can send thousands to: Dear first name,

What other opportunities are there in this database?

How else can we maximise our data base. Insurance? Consulting? Maybe a seminar? Maybe send a survey to your list? Send the survey results to the media? Get some free PR. There are numerous opportunities and campaigns once you build and communicate with your database. Data base marketing is the future for professional advisers of the future. As advisers in the financial area we can be generalists or specialists. Even if we are specialist we can refer to other financial professionals in the areas we don’t practice. This way we can also build and nurture our professional networks. There are so many opportunities for us to create revenue for our businesses but we leave so much revenue on the table because of bad marketing

How do you build a database of your target market quickly?

We specialise in getting you set up to build your target market database no matter what financial service you provide. We understand that writing, creating, and managing a personalised publication requires quite a bit of effort and a skill set you may not have or the time to develop. We will show you how it will take you 15 mins a month to have a professional on line publication relentlessly gathering subscribers and automatically building your data base each month. Have you been thinking of social media but don’t know how it can help your business? We will also show you how to combine using Facebook, Linked In and other social media to build your target database fast.

 

Next month: Some marketing myths and why you will never be on the first page of Google search results and why you shouldn’t care.

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