People 60 and over control the majority of the assets in America, but these wealthy people won’t respond to the tactics used by most financial advisors. In fact, the more you chase them, the more you repel them. Here are three ways to become a magnet and have wealthy seniors come to you.
Get Interviewed in the Newspaper
Many advisors forget how newspapers work. The people working for newspapers are journalists. They don’t have a financial background. So where do they get the information to write articles in the business section? They interview people like you! So why shouldn’t it be you? You have opinions and ideas just like the next advisor.
But how do you get them to interview you? You get attention from the press by sending them a continuous stream of your ideas in the form of articles or press releases. “I’m not a writer,” you say. You don’t even have to write a single word. It is possible to have others to do the writing for you and many writers are set up to provide this service to advisors (e.g. www.guru.com). You provide the idea and they do the writing.
Once you have the article or press release written, send it to the business editor. Sometimes you get a response immediately but don’t panic if you don’t. Most reporters will file your article for future reference. Keep sending new ideas at regular intervals and eventually, the editor will realize that you may have some useful ideas and will call you for an interview or request an article from you.
One mention in the newspaper won’t make you rich. In fact, hardly anyone will see your name mentioned on page 16 that particular afternoon. The true power of getting published is that when you send prospects and clients copies, they quickly deduce that you must be an expert because your name is in print. Seniors think that the newspaper is a source of truth and unbiased information (during the formative years of today’s seniors, the newspaper and radio were the only sources of information and thus are relied on as gospel). They will wonder why their current advisor has never been mentioned in the paper and you immediately seem superior.
Send copies to senior groups and associations as this may help to get you invited to be a speaker. Go ahead and send your article to a rented list of affluent seniors in your community (every library has a copy of SRDS list source for any list you ever need). You will get calls as many seniors seek someone they can trust, and fewer people in the financial services industry seem worthy of their trust these days.
Write a Book
An even better way to establish yourself as the trusted expert is to write a book. To seniors, authors are the ultimate experts. You can accomplish this without writing a single word. Just as you can hire someone to express your ideas in a written article, you can also hire a writer to put them into book form. In fact, as little as 8 hours of dictating your ideas into an audio recorder can supply a financial writer with enough content to write your book. That’s basically how all busy people write books. Do you think Donald Trump or Hillary Rodham took 12 months off to write their books themselves?
Send your senior-oriented book to the CPAs and estate attorneys in town and to the press. Then follow up with your monthly senior-oriented newsletter. Before long, you will get unsolicited referrals from these professionals and calls form the press for interviews. (Of course, you don’t have to write the newsletter either as plenty of firms will be happy to supply it).
Get your book into Barnes and Noble and then call each Barnes and Noble location area and offer to do a talk in the local store. For each date you have a talk scheduled, rent a list of wealthy seniors in the nearby zip codes and invite them (enclose an order form to purchase your book in case they cannot attend). You now have an interested audience of great prospects who get the chance to check you out in a non-threatening environment.
Seminars
Seminars do work when done correctly. Seniors love to attend seminars because they:
• Like to learn about new alternatives to increase shrinking investment income
• Have time to attend
• Can sit in the back anonymously and check you out
In order to be successful with seminar marketing you must obey some very specific rules. While the rules are beyond the scope of this article, the primary reason seminars fail is a poor invitation. You cannot send the same invitation to a senior that you use to attract a 40-year-old. Their priorities and hot buttons are different. And if you use the typical invitation created by most financial services firms, it will most likely fail, as the “left-brained” logical approach used by the 40-year-old marketing director, won’t work with a “right-brained” senior recipient.
Medical research shows that as we age, the left brain, which processes logical conclusions and processes factual information, declines in capacity. However, the right brain, the source of intuitive judgment and emotional reasoning, increases in capacity. For this reason, the following invitation title won’t work if you wish to attract a senior audience:
How to Beat Rates on the Treasury Curve
But this title will:
How to Take the Grandchildren to Disneyland with Your Higher Income
Seniors are more interested in the emotional, relationship side of life—not a bunch of statistics, facts or figures.
Advertising that will work with seniors
Does your schedule allow you to read the newspaper everyday? Do you get the chance to read the entire newspaper? Seniors, people who are mostly retired, often make it a ritual to read the paper daily. They are the ones who see your ads and if you offer a free booklet on a senior sensitive topic (increasing income, reducing taxes, preserving financial independence, etc.), they will call for your free booklet. Again, you don’t need to write anything as you can hire writers to do that for you.
They phone for the booklet and you send it. The booklet has your name, credentials, photo, biography and contact information. You follow up in a few days with a call and you can get appointments with as many as 50% because the booklet has already established you as an expert—not a sales person.
[...] study concludes that young and affluent investors may not be a very good market for financial advisors. However, where there’s a challenge, there is also opportunity. Because so many of the young [...]
[...] study concludes that young and affluent investors may not be a very good market for financial advisors. However, where there’s a challenge, there is also opportunity. Because so many of the young [...]