Marketing is an important area of consideration when it comes to creating awareness of your advisory services. The key word here is awareness. Awareness will let your current clients know what you can do for them, and it will let potential future clients know what you are about.
Having a website is Marketing 101, and it doesn't need to be super complex or expensively set up. Making sure your services are clearly stated or easily found, with a blurb about the team and your mission and vision are the basics that should be included here. So if you haven't gotten this set up (or updated appropriately) yet, this is the perfect time to do so. You can get an external company to do this, or you can research online for some of the many free resources available to do so.
When in doubt, keep it simple and streamlined and easy to navigate with clear labeling of tabs and drop-downs. You can always expand and evolve as needed.
Then comes the marketing plan of action:
If you are reluctant to hire an external marketing company, you can easily put together an internally driven plan of action to ensure that your clients - both existing and future - are hearing and learning about what value you have available for them. We have included a marketing plan template (designed by our own internal marketing team) that you can download and use to get started.
Items to consider when building this plan:
- What kind of channels will you use - emails, client meetings, direct phone calls, webinars, social media posts, advertising?
- And within each channel what media / medium should be used - videos, text, visuals snapshots, bullet point messaging?
Use the marketing plan template to map out your ideas and thoughts, and use this as a living document that is updated as you go. You may find in your area something works well - maybe you are in a smaller town that responds well to community events and direct face to face contact, or you may live in a larger city where a quick loom video in an email is preferred by your clients. Your marketing plan should be unique for your firm, your clients and your style.
Pro Tip:
- Think about what captures YOUR interest when receiving an email, scrolling social media, or reading an advert... What subject heading grabs your attention, and do you prefer reading or watching, or even listening? We tend to live in a visual, minimal attention world so this needs to be considered when building your marketing plan.
When it comes to the actual deployment of your plan consider your team - someone that is apt and comfortable on social media could be the one to manage that aspect. Someone eloquent with wording and communication could be the right fit to put newsletters or video scripts together. Someone comfortable on video could be recording short looms or micro webinars. Great organizational skills could be the right fit to put a community event together.
The idea of marketing can feel overwhelming, but just like anything keeping it simple, authentic and true to you (your firms) values is a good place to start. Anything you do will make a difference so remember this is a learning process and you can pivot and adjust as you go.
