Learn Tips to Get Clients as a Financial Advisor and Scale Your Revenue
As a financial advisor, finding new clients feels the same way a market crash does: dreadful.
You might not like to admit it but your main job if you operate a wealth-management firm is to sell.
If you can’t acquire enough net-new clients on a recurring basis, you’re capping your firm’s revenue potential. At best you’ll incur an opportunity cost and won’t scale. At worst you’ll over-rely on too few existing clients, a huge risk if you churn more clients than you gain.
Maybe you feel more comfortable designing custom portfolio strategies, studying markets and making educated investment decisions, but how do you market yourself as a financial advisor to increase sales?
When pitching financial services to expand your clientele, the right marketing & sales tactics will maximize your returns.
In this article, we’ll share proven tips on how to build an effective strategy to capture high-quality leads and increase sales in financial services.
How to Develop a Sales Strategy to Get Clients as a Financial Advisor
How do you currently find clients? Passing out business cards at networking events? Buying bus ads? Asking current clients or friends & family for referrals? Do these tactics work for you still?
Or how often does the thought of cold-calling send a shiver down your spine?
Today’s buyers respond best online. That’s where they spend a lot of their time, so LinkedIn, digital ads, social media, websites and more are key channels for growth.
Focus on building awareness around your brand and services, improving lead generation and honing in on more best-fit leads. Digital marketing and outreach campaigns can effectively and efficiently drive brand awareness and increase sales for financial advisors.
You need to modernize outreach methods and enable potential clients to assess you. For instance, use technology to get more clients at scale & improve your conversion rate of leads to clients, develop a great reputation on social media and share content that shows your expertise.
9 Tips to Get More Sales in Financial Services
Here are nine tips to help you build a solid sales-growth strategy to achieve your goals.
Whether improving researching & prospecting techniques to discover more leads, leveraging sales-enablement technology for financial services or enhancing your online reputation, these tips are excellent starting points to increase sales as a financial advisor.
- Understand your target market.
- Conduct successful research.
- Develop a social-media strategy.
- Join social groups.
- Explore "fan marketing."
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile.
- Write blogs posts.
- Get noticed by search engines.
- Use artificial intelligence.
1. Understand Your Target Market
Outreaching to potential clients is an age-old way to grow. But your efforts could generate higher returns if you reach out to the right people. So how do you go about prospecting as a financial advisor to find more people who’ll benefit from your services?
Analyze your current client base and look at who your best clients are. Now you can develop an ideal client profile (ICP) with factors like age group and job sector to use as yardsticks while looking for new clients.
Going narrow is also smart. Don’t just message any wealthy individual; developing niche target audiences for financial advisors will help you scale.
Focusing outreach efforts on ICPs will deliver the best results because you laser your outreach efforts on people you know are likely to benefit from your services instead of simply taking a shot in the dark.
2. Conduct Successful Outreach
Once you’ve zeroed in on your target audience, take time to get to know them. Understand their aspirations, financial goals and pain points.
Listening is a vital part of your outreach campaign because it shows you how to pitch your services in line with your target audience’s needs to make a successful sale.
Instead of simply selling your services, personalize your approach and speak about how you can solve an individual’s problems.
You should also consider sales-enablement software to make your prospecting more efficient. For example, automation tools in sales enablement save time and optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns.
3. Develop a Social-Media Strategy
The more people know about your financial services, the more clients you are likely to win.
Using social media to publish relevant and high-quality information establishes yourself as a thought leader in financial services.
It also helps potential clients know and trust you better. Publishing content, valuable tips and anecdotes displays expertise in the field, empowering financial advisors to strengthen their reputation with social media.
Sharing content on social platforms like LinkedIn to address common financial concerns that most people relate to, like how to save for a luxury vacation or plan for retirement, enables you to showcase your knowledge and educate your target audience to earn their trust.
For instance, you can promote customer-success stories, inform your audience about changing industry trends and share investment tips.
4. Join Social Groups
You can also leverage social media by joining relevant groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. Staying active in these groups and adding valuable insights builds your reputation as a financial advisor.
Groups where wealthy individuals share tips or ask for financial advice are plentiful on LinkedIn & Facebook and a prime opportunity to put your firm’s brand in front of potential clients.
As you interact with people in social groups and share your portfolio-management knowledge, you can nurture fruitful connections with people who may become clients or refer your financial services to someone they know.
5. Explore "Fan Marketing"
Let your existing clients speak for you. Nothing says more about your credibility and skills than the success stories of people who have benefitted from your services.
When clients trust you and have positive experiences working with you, they’ll become "fans" of your business, providing testimonials and positive comments on social media—and prospective clients notice, becoming easier to sell to.
Such types of online-based passive referrals make fan marketing for financial advisors a winning strategy.
For example, ask existing clients for reviews on Google or Facebook to strengthen your social credibility and attract new clients through word-of-mouth advertising.
Plus, client reviews help you rank better on search engines to improve your online visibility. You can also share reviews on your website & social media to efficiently increase sales and create more revenue for your financial services.
6. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn is a great channel to reach potential clients and cement your brand online. You can use LinkedIn to post informative content about financial services, establish expertise in your field, generate leads and connect with prospects.
But LinkedIn can only be a powerful selling tool if your profile makes a strong first impression about you as a financial advisor.
Before you reach out to people on LinkedIn, complete your profile by updating your work experiences & recent accomplishments and pay attention to best practices for LinkedIn summaries.
Ensure your LinkedIn profile conveys your experience, professionalism and values per a LinkedIn lead-generation guide to channel high-quality leads for your financial-services business.
7. Write Blog Posts
As a sales professional, storytelling through blog posts and articles is a great way to increase website and social-media traffic. Regularly posting high-quality blog posts will improve search-engine rankings and your visibility to people looking for financial services.
Plus, you can use strongly written articles that provide value to readers as sales collateral. Examples include as a hook to introduce people to your brand via Google Search or LinkedIn, or to reassert your expertise or handle objections when trying to close a potential client.
Tell stories through your blogs that speak to your experiences in the finance industry and evoke interest. Create relatable and value-adding content for your readers and study top blogs for sales professionals for inspiration.
8. Get Noticed by Search Engines
Google processes about 40,000 searches on average every second. That's more than 3.7 billion queries every day from searchers looking for a product, a service or information.
If you want to get noticed by those in your area considering a financial advisor, you need strong SEO (search-engine optimization) so your website appears high for lots of search results.
While there are hundreds of factors that determine search-engine rankings, here are some simple steps you can implement for great SEO:
- Make sure your website is secure;
- Optimize your website for mobile;
- Increase your website speed by deleting ghost pages and compressing images;
- Improve the quality of content on your website; and
- Include on-page SEO elements like links, keywords and metadescriptions.
9. Use Artificial Intelligence
Once you’ve figured out a lead-generation strategy that works for your financial-services business, you’ll want to implement this strategy on a larger scale.
The aim is to target both a higher overall volume of potential clients with high net worths and a larger proportion from that volume of quality leads who fit your ICP—without spending too much time.
Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to help scale your lead-generation process enables you to improve efficiency and increase close rates at the same time.
Typical features often include lead scoring to better hone in on people likely to respond to your outreach messages, copy suggestions to respond to objections and personalized insights to customize your approach.
Increase Sales in Financial Services With AI and Sales-Enablement Tools
Getting more clients in financial services can be daunting, but with the right strategies, tactics and tools, you can increase sales to start growing your firm.
Software that provides AI functionality to scale lead generation for financial advisors can help you focus on your ideal target audience, reach out to qualified leads and manage your LinkedIn-outreach campaigns.
