Financial advisor marketing can be elusive as you likely have no marketing training.  The good news is that a great education abounds for those who seek it.

I was reading the interview with Dan Kennedy in Insurancenewsnet and he says something I have known but he says it profoundly:

"I  don't buy anything from anybody who doesn't do good follow up before the sale because that tells me what life is going to be like after the sale."

Financial Advisor Marketing Tip #1

Treat prospects as they will be treated when they become clients

This reminded me of the financial advisor marketing advice I give concerning drip marketing - it must be done at minimum every 30 days. The consistency of the prospect seeing your communication tells the prospect the following:

1. I will hear from this advisor/agent frequently if I hire him
2. I hear from this advisor/agent more than I hear from my existing advisor/agent
3. The consistency from this advisor/agent shows me that they have "staying power" and are not in it for one sale
4. The consistency from this advisor/agent indicates he is a professional who has a real business, not just a sales effort

If you do that drip marketing with a newsletter and NOT sales literature, you communicate the following messages to prospects and clients:

1. This advisor/agent is knowledgeable (the #1 criteria that consumers use to select a financial professional)
2. This advisor/agent stays on top of events in the financial markets and that's good for me
3. This advisor/agent seems to know about a lot of financial issues and can be of assistance to me in several ways

Let me segue to another profound idea from a smart guy, Bill Good. You might know that Bill has been training financial advisors to be better marketers for the last 30+ years. He runs a very expensive financial advisor marketing program and most advisors that go through it are producing at the seven-figure level.

I recall Bill saying something like, "If you have 300 clients, you never know who will be your most lucrative client this year." He went on to state that your most lucrative client changes from year to year and so the people who fit into your A, B and C clients will change from year to year. Is there a way to profit from this observation?

Financial Advisor Marketing Tip #2

You don't know who will be your most lucrative clients in the next 12 months

Because you don't know if Mrs. Smith or Mr. Jones will be this year's most lucrative client, you need to treat them both very well. Of course, you can't treat all clients equally.

For example, your tactic may be to make a phone call to your A clients every month. You likely don't have time to call all of your clients every month. But can you automate an equal and high level of treatment?

Yes. There are services that will send holiday cards for four major holidays every year to every one of your clients. They will send birthday cards and anniversary cards as long as you can provide those dates. Of course, you can do this in-house if you have an assistant and a CRM system that can produce a report of each week's cards to mail.

Next, every client should get a newsletter from you - an absolute essential for professional financial advisor marketing . You cannot send the newsletter less frequently than every 30 days or it will lose the impact the frequency. The key to a newsletter that pays off and being able to measure the payoff is for the newsletter to generate direct responses (direct response newsletter example here).

And last, there needs to be a calling schedule. Of course your A clients you may want to call once per month. Maybe you call your B clients once per quarter. But then you should not ignore your C clients. Either have your assistant or outside telemarketer call your C clients once every quarter with this simple script:

"Hello, Mrs. Jones?"
"This is Pam calling from Big Producer's office and Big Producer wanted me to make sure that everything we are doing for you is going okay. Can I ask you just a few questions?"

• "The statements you receive from us- are they clear and easy to understand?"
• "Did you have any specific questions from those statements?"
• "About the investments/policies you have with us - are you comfortable with them or is there anything you might like to change?"
• "Last, do you foresee any financial changes in your situation in the next 3 to 12 months?"

If anything comes up in the answers to the above questions, the telemarketer will make notes and you can call back. In 90% of the cases, you won't need to do anything but your C clients will feel well tended by receiving a call from your office every three months. So that the call is not the same every three months, you may want to vary the questions asked at each three-month interval.

And if you want to go the extra mile with your financial advisor marketing, you can of course have one or two client appreciation functions each year such as a Christmas party or dinner. But just having the three-pronged approach of sending

1. holiday birthday and anniversary cards (which you delegate)
2. sending a monthly newsletter (which you delegate)
3. and calling all clients on a regular basis (80% you delegate)

will ensure that you don't miss out on this year's best client becoming your best client.