Don’t make these marketing mistakes

Selling insurance, financial planning or investments are some of the first and biggest marketing mistakes financial advisors can make. When you sell these, it means you’re selling the tools and not the results your prospects and clients want.

When someone goes to the hardware store to buy a drill, he doesn’t need a drill. He needs to make a hole. Selling the drill’s features won’t work as well as selling the way to make a perfect hole.

Stop selling drills.

Sell the results people want:

• Protecting their families from financial ruin
• Having a worry-free retirement
• Having a way to make money without all the hard work
• Having a way to pay less in taxes in retirement

Be specific

Another big marketing mistake is having a vague niche that encompasses everyone and everything. “I work with families and businesses to help them with all their financial needs,” is not a niche. It will not make you appear to be different than every other financial advisor in your community.

Yet, when I look at advisors’ LinkedIn profiles, I see some variation of this from hundreds of them who think they’re differentiating themselves from other advisors.

People want a specific solution, designed for them, to their specific problem. They want an expert. And, interestingly enough, there’s a great deal of proof out there that suggests you become more attractive to people who are not in your niche when they perceive you as an expert for someone else.

Determine your easy yes offer

Another marketing mistake is not having an easy yes offer that sets you apart. “Helping people plan for their future” is not an offer. Talking about infinite banking or being a CFP is not going to win you enough of the clients you want.

You need to create an offer that makes the right prospect feel unwise if he turns you down. Here’s an example:

“If, like me, you’re concerned that your children might be stuck paying for your care if you end up in an assisted living facility and run out of money, let’s set up a time to talk.”

If you’re talking with someone who is concerned about that, how foolish would they feel to say, “No, I don’t want to talk about solving this problem.”

If you’re talking with someone who is concerned about the taxes they’ll be paying in retirement, you might say something like this:

“If you believe, as I do, that paying more taxes in retirement than you pay while you’re working is a likely but unhappy possibility, let’s set up a time to talk so that I can show you a way to prevent that, using the Internal Revenue Service’s own rules.”

Could you see someone with that concern saying, “No thanks. I’ll just deal with it when the time comes.” That’s not likely to happen.

This means, of course, that some people won’t be a good fit:

“I don’t mind paying taxes, whatever they are. It’s my civic duty.”

That’s not a fit.

Have an ideal client and a result you can offer them. The tool might be financial planning or insurance, but what you sell is the result they want. And know how to tell them why you are the only one they should be talking to about this.

Sandy Schussel is a performance acceleration coach who has been working with financial advisors for more than 20 years, helping them break through to higher production levels. If you’d like to learn how he can help you, contact him about how to make selling the least of your concerns. For more from Schussel, read “Are you asking yourself the right questions to succeed?”

 For more marketing ideas:

• Read “Lessons from a marketing whiz”
• Read “Turn your raving clients into fans”