In their initial conversation, a “high earner, not rich yet,” prospective client (a HENRY in industry parlance) sounded like one of planner Nate Hoskin’s ideal customers.
Processing Content
He “had a very cool call” with the prospect, who is a social media content producer generating about $120,000 per month in income, Hoskin recalled. Unfortunately, this person was only 17 years old, which is too young, in most cases, to legally sign a contract.
Hoskins came to two important realizations after that meeting and speaking with other prospects he couldn’t serve: his registered investment advisory firm, Lakewood, Colorado-based Hoskin Capital, doesn’t operate outside the U.S., prohibiting him from working with foreign citizens, and he needed to head off the age issue. So he inserted a note on the link to book an introductory meeting on his website that told prospects that the service is “only available for U.S. citizens and permanent residents with domestic phone numbers who are over the age of 21,” he said.
“I did not add this note in because I wanted to add friction to my funnel,” Hoskin, who is also the CEO of advisor video marketing company N2 Content Marketing, said in a National Association of Personal Financial Advisors webinar on digital growth funnels last week. “I did it based on data, and that is the No. 1 recommendation I have for you, is do not add any presumptive friction, meaning don’t add something in there that says, ‘Hey, if you have less than $2 million, don’t contact me.’ It is far better to hold those conversations, understand where you are running into problems, and only then do you go back in and add friction. I have seen this happen far too often with advisors, where they automatically think they will have a bad lead problem, but they don’t even have any leads. So it’s like, well, let’s maybe solve the lead problem first.”
READ MORE: Investors want ‘peace of mind’ from financial advisors. But what is that?
Getting clients in the door
Hoskin’s presentation included a lot of notable data for any financial advisors seeking to build what marketers call a “sales funnel” — a lead-conversion process that begins when a business identifies itself to a prospective customer, nurtures the potential relationship through outreach and any type of content, and ultimately adds them to their client base.
For instance, Hoskin has hosted roughly 500 sales calls and onboarded 172 clients through his current booking link for nearly a 40% conversion rate. In January, his social media accounts spanning 250,000 followers across the various sites generated 611 clicks on a link in his biography to learn more, 109 subscriptions to enroll in his five-day email course, four prospect meetings and two new clients.
That type of data tracking represents the kind of trial and error and continuing commitment to the funnel that marketing experts say is essential for advisors constructing one. However, they also point out that what works for one advisor may not be as effective for another across an industry with firms of many sizes and accompanying resources and any number of client niches.
Finding the right approach across awareness, consideration and conversion requires “having a really clear understanding of your ideal clients,” figuring out where they are in real life and online and “then making sure you’re showing up in all of those places thoughtfully,” said Megan Carpenter, founder and CEO of wealth management growth marketing firm Ficomm Partners. In fact, her firm calls that process a “flywheel” rather than a “funnel,” in light of all the changes to how people connect with each other these days.
“It’s different today, and so we coach our clients on, ‘how are you showing up in all of the different places and having a lot of opportunities for touchpoints?'” Carpenter said. “They might not hit your flywheel where you expected them to, but, if they hit your flywheel, you want to capture their attention.”
READ MORE: New project aims to translate client reviews into ‘relationship alpha’
Getting specific and creating a system
And those efforts fall short when advisors make some common mistakes along the way. Many fail to exercise “the patience of giving yourself a year to work through the kinks and get this engine running,” or display “a lack of confidence or framework or structure around the budget piece of it,” according to Joe Anthony, CEO and owner advisor public relations and marketing firm Gregory. Or they speak in too many generalities to get the right prospects to notice them.
Gregory
“The biggest stumbling block is that there isn’t enough attention paid to the differentiation — it should be more and more specific and more and more toned to what you’ve learned about the prospect through the process,” Anthony said. “It’s a matter of creativity. It’s a matter of finding different ways to remain relevant in the conversation and also not spamming their inbox. … There’s way more complexity and way more tools that come into play here than could be feasibly expected to be handled by one person.”
To that point, Hoskin noted that his firm has heads of financial and tax planning and an operations manager. So, while he’s a certified financial planner who is the founder and CEO of the RIA, he views his role as “really chief marketing officer, more than anything else,” tasked with the job “to drive new clients into this digital funnel,” he said.
And that revolves around methods such as a landing page explaining that he works with HENRYs, a “very clear call to action, which is to grab time on my calendar,” a three- to five-minute video he calls a “video sales letter” explaining why clients would hire him and a form at the bottom that the website’s visitors could use to sign up for emails. If they do, Hoskin’s firm sends them what he referred to as a “lead magnet,” or an “email nurture,” which includes a five-day tutorial of daily emails and five more in a “sales sequence” in the subsequent five days.
While he acknowledged that 10 emails in as many days “sounds like a lot,” he noted that email marketing experts often suggest sending 14 daily messages over two weeks.
At the same time, he warned advisors not to send any generic, spammy messages. Rather, he sends client case studies, testimonials, a direct response to a potential objection and other outreach that speak directly to his advisory practice’s client base. And he specifically cautioned against putting out summaries of the Wall Street indices in a given day or week.
“You are not a news reporter,” Hoskin said. “You do not need to be sending market updates. Market updates, in my opinion, go directly against the behavior we try to cultivate in our clients, which is, do not be reactive to market movements. But if we are sending them a weekly update talking about how the market moved, we’re kind of going against ourselves, right? We’re kind of talking out of both sides of our mouths. So don’t pass through that information, and don’t use AI or a ‘just get it done’ mentality. This is something that you only have to build once, and it deserves your full attention.”
READ MORE: RIAs that don’t invest in marketing aren’t growing organically, study says
Avoiding the pitfalls
The most effective conversion processes are “about bringing everything together in the business” across marketing, sales and service, according to Carpenter. And that also includes tapping into some “low-hanging growth opportunities” that advisors may be missing or not applying to an overarching strategy or system with measurable results, she noted. For example, they could reap big gains from simply doubling, say, the five clients who frequently refer prospects to 10 of them out of a base of 105 customers. Or they could rethink their approach to the so-called centers of influence among other professionals to ensure they have current lists with metrics documenting the amount of qualified leads from each one of them.
FiComm Partners
Regardless, many RIAs run into the fundamental challenge that they are small compared to the rapidly expanding aggregators that have much more infrastructure and internal marketing resources, Carpenter noted. “We know that those firms are large-scale enterprise businesses, and they therefore have large enterprise teams across functions like marketing.”
That’s where her firm often works with advisors who are seeking to grow organically through marketing on their answers to questions such as, “Do I have the capacity to think about going from never having done marketing to doing marketing, and what does that require, and who should be leading and accountable for these efforts?” she added, describing that as the biggest barrier to success with creating a funnel. “Capacity is one, and paired very tightly with that is internal resources. Those are usually the two biggest constraints that we see.”
Other common pitfalls emerge when advisors don’t craft strategies for their online reviews or client testimonials, or if they haven’t boosted their web searchability for the age of AI, according to Anthony.
Overall, the biggest problems stem from advisors expecting a podcast episode or two, updating the website or some one-off idea to deliver a lot of incoming clients “because they don’t have a strong track record of investing in marketing and staying invested in a holistic way,” Anthony said. “They need to build a system around those things to really understand how this could make a difference.”
