Clients have become increasingly vigilant and selective when seeking a financial advisor. With the growing competition in the industry, making yourself stand out from the rest is crucial, and will take some work. However, it's entirely possible to make it happen and grow your business in the process.
There are several strategies many successful financial advisors swear by when looking to grow their client base. In this article, I’ll talk you through a few ideas that you can easily implement to grow as a financial advisor and expand your reach.
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7 Ways to Get More Clients as a Financial Advisor
Here are 7 strategies you can use to attract new clients as a financial advisor.
1. Narrow Your Focus
Narrowing the focus of your business might seem like something that reduces your options rather than widening them. However, this will help you stand out from all the other financial advisors out there, as you’ll appear as more of an expert in your particular niche.
Honing in on a specialization will also help you define your ideal client. This can help you tailor some of the other steps I’ve outlined in this guide to the type of client you want to be targeting, and provide a service that resonates with them on a more personal level.
2. Refine Your Pitch
One of the best ways to attract new clients is to polish your pitch. Try to think about how you would succinctly and engagingly summarize what exactly it is that sets you apart from other financial advisors.
A good way to do this is to practice your “elevator pitch” – a pitch you’d give to a client if you only had a minute with them. In this type of pitch, there’s no time for fluff. You need to quickly articulate the key reasons why a client should choose you over your competition.
Depending on what fits your situation best, you could choose to focus on your experience, education, achievements, values – or a combination of all of these. Most importantly, try to highlight what value you can bring to the client and what they can gain from working with you instead of with one of your competitors.
Once you’ve settled on the aspects you want to focus on in your pitch, create a proposal package with all the information you want your clients to know. Don’t forget to include your company logos and branding. Having a thorough, yet succinct proposal package will go a long way, since you can use this to support your other marketing efforts.
3. Boost Your Online Presence
There are many ways to boost your online presence. Two of the most effective strategies are boosting the visibility of your website and leveraging social media platforms to spread the word about your business.
Boosting your website’s visibility is all about optimizing it for search engines, helping you organically drive more traffic to it. SEO optimization can help a lot more of your prospective clients find your website, particularly if you hone in on some search terms specific to your chosen target audience.
Social media is a powerful tool that you can use to your advantage to try and reach new potential clients.
LinkedIn, in particular, is one that many successful financial advisors swear by for its effectiveness in targeting prospective clients and reaching out to them. It’s also a great platform to use to publish occasional free content relevant to your niche of financial advisory – it may just go viral and give your business some fantastic exposure.
Additionally, you could consider partnering with content creators who discuss similar topics but don’t offer a competing service – for example, appearing as a guest on a personal finance podcast, covering tax strategies, or investing tips. Strategically partnering with influencers, and creating mutual value for both your brands can help organically attract some new potential clients.
4. Create Free Content
Creating free content to draw in potential clients is similar to the point above, but it takes things a step further. Your free content could be anything from blog posts or PDF reports you can send as email attachments, to YouTube videos and free webinars you can host.
Running webinars and regularly creating content can help you directly target the audience you’re interested in. For example, you could make a YouTube video series about how to optimize your finances during inflationary times, host a webinar about saving money during a pandemic, or regularly publish blog posts about all things related to being financially prudent.
By offering free insights to people within your target audience, you're building a reputation as someone who knows their stuff on the topic, and someone whose advice is worth listening to.
Make sure you include a few clear mentions of your financial advisory business and make it easy for potential clients to contact you for any inquiries they may have about it.
5. Build Relationships with Centers of Influence
“Center of influence” is a term used to refer to influential individuals like accountants, attorneys, IT professionals, and other management professionals. These professionals have strong networks and are seen as experts in their field.
To seek out these influential professionals, see if you can get your clients or people from your personal network to refer you to their accountants, lawyers, etc. You can also utilize LinkedIn to forge these relationships yourself.
When you reach out to them, let them know about your mutual client or mutual interests, and offer to refer some of your clients to them – by offering this to them first, they’re likely to be more receptive and willing to do the same for you.
Forming strong relationships with professionals can be mutually beneficial. By establishing these types of relationships, your business is likely to see a positive impact on its word-of-mouth reputation and be on its way to organically finding new clients who are well-suited to your services.
6. Accept More Payment Methods
These days, more and more individuals and businesses appreciate the flexibility and convenience of paying with credit cards. If your business doesn’t accept them yet, here’s a simple way to get started.
Pay.com makes it easy for you to accept a wide variety of payment methods, whether or not you have a website for your business.You can start accepting card payments in no time, both online and over the phone. In addition, you can accept online payments from mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Click here to get started with Pay.com now!
7. Utilize Paid Advertising
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand your client base, paid marketing campaigns can be a powerful tool to help you achieve these goals.
Digital advertising in particular is a strong way to reach members of your target audience. You can target potential clients based on their demographics, location, purchase history, and even their browsing history. Understanding your target audience is essential to maximizing the effectiveness of your ads.
The channels you choose to run paid advertising will depend on the type of audience you want to reach. For example, if you’re aiming to reach a more seasoned and professional audience, you might choose to go with paid ads on LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you’re hoping to reach families or college students, you may instead choose other platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
Doing some research into which media channels are popular with your target audience will help you make this decision. Here are a few forms of paid advertising you could consider using:
- Social media ads: Consider running ads on popular social media platforms, particularly LinkedIn, but also others like Facebook and Instagram.
- Search engine ads: Major search engines like Google offer paid ads that are displayed above organic search results. This can help boost your business's online visibility.
- Newspaper/magazine ads: Print media advertising can be a great tool to improve your visibility. However, these can be expensive, so make sure you’re choosing publications that your target audience is likely to use.
What's the Best Way to Accept Payments as a Financial Advisor?
In today’s fast-moving world, clients appreciate the convenience of paying with a variety of methods.
By using Pay.com as your payment service provider, you can accept client card payments from all the major card brands, both online and over the phone. In addition, you can accept online payments from mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Getting set up with Pay.com is a simple and straightforward process, and once you’re up and running, the Pay Dashboard gives you complete oversight of all your payments and their fees in a single place.
Click here to create your Pay.com account now!
The Bottom Line: How Should You Market Yourself as a Financial Advisor?
As a financial advisor, using a variety of methods to try and attract new clients is the key to success. Prospective clients are increasingly discerning, so it’s important to try and reach them on a personal level. The best way to do this is to make them feel like you understand their issues, that you’re trustworthy, and that you’re an expert at what you do.
Narrowing your focus, doing some research on your target audience, and tailoring your pitch toward them will help you understand them better. Putting out regular content and creating strategic partnerships, both with content creators and centers of influence, will help build your reputation as an expert in your field, and someone worth trusting.
By accepting more payment methods, you can give your potential clients the convenience they’re looking for. When you sign up for Pay.com, you can easily set up your own payment system and generate Pay Links to send your new clients.
