When you’re young and someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, you probably start listing off professions that focus on helping people – teacher, nurse, firefighter. When you get a little older, you might focus on jobs that make lots of money – doctor, lawyer, scientist. What if we told you that you could do both in your career as a financial advisor?
Being a financial advisor can be lucrative, but you have to have a strong client base. Read on to discover some of the best client acquisition tips that can help you make more money as a financial advisor.
How Much Do Financial Advisors Make?
How much you make as a financial advisor will depend on a number of factors. Of course, the more experience you have, the more you’re likely to make, and your location can also have an impact on your salary. What sort of clientele you work with can also make a difference; people with more money to invest can afford to pay you more for your services.
As of 2019, the median salary for a financial advisor in the United States was $87,850 per year. This is more than double the median salary for all jobs in the United States, $34,248. But with the right experience and clientele, you could make as much as $208,000 a year or more.
Why Growing Your Client Base Helps
If you want to increase your salary as a financial advisor, it’s important that you grow your client base. Because financial advising is a service, not a product, you don’t get a direct profit as soon as a new client signs up. It takes time for your clients to generate enough revenue to cover the initial costs of marketing to and providing service for them.
The good news is you can divide some of those initial marketing and service costs among multiple clients. The more clients you have, the faster your business will be able to recover its initial costs and start generating profit. And once you get past that initial profit threshold, more clients will mean a larger salary for you at the end of the day.
1. Set Up a Referral Program
One of the best things you can do to grow your client base is to set up a referral program. When you start cold with a new prospect, you have to rely entirely on your sales pitch to capture their attention. But if they come to you from a referral, they already have a reason to trust you and listen to what you have to say.
Set up a program that rewards existing clients or network connections for referring new clients to you. One popular option is to provide a permanent service discount each time someone refers a lead who signs up for your services. You can also run contests in which the person who generates the most new leads or clients for you wins a prize.
2. Build a Strong Website
When you’re developing a marketing plan for your financial advisor business, your website should be at the core of it. Your website will be the hub of all your operations – where potential clients can learn more about your business, where you can establish your brand, and where your sales funnel can kick into gear. It’s critical that you have a website that’s beautiful, easy to navigate, and fast.
Nearly half of viewers will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, so you need to keep things light. Make sure your website is visually pleasing and incorporates your branding throughout. Your website must also be simple and intuitive to navigate; if clients have to hunt for the information they need, they’ll turn to other sources.
3. Focus on SEO
When you’re building your website, you need to focus on making it search engine optimized. As of this writing, there are more than 1.8 billion websites on the internet. SEO can help your website stand out from the crowd and improve its ranking in relevant search results.
Make sure you’re using keywords throughout your website that get a high volume of searches. Link to reputable non-competitor sites to establish yourself as a reliable authority in your field. And make sure your site is light and easy to read; no one wants to stare down a wall of solid text.
4. Start a Blog
One of the best ways to reinforce SEO on your site and improve your marketing at the same time is to start a blog. In each blog post, you can link to reliable websites, use strong keywords, and increase the scope of your website’s relevance to different searches. You can also establish yourself as an expert in your field and grow clients’ trust in you.
Write blog posts giving top tips for making smart investing decisions and providing other basic financial advice. Discuss why hiring a financial advisor is important and common mistakes people make when they try to go it on their own. Keep these posts focused on educating your client base, not giving a hardline sales pitch, but do include a specific CTA at the end.
5. Use Social Media
Nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults have a Facebook page, and another 37 percent use Instagram. There are few other platforms where such a large segment of your customer base will be gathered. You need to make sure you’re using social media to grow your business’s reputation and client base.
Set up and maintain accounts on all the primary relevant social media platforms. This may include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and even Snapchat and TikTok. Make sure you’re staying active on these accounts, posting links to your blog, updates from your business, and links to articles from non-competitors that will interest your clientele.
6. Create Video Content
When you’re creating content for your social media pages, try to focus on creating as many videos as you can. Videos get a much higher rate of engagement across nearly all main social media platforms, and for good reason. With a video, it’s easier to connect to your viewers and make them feel as though they’re hearing what you have to say face-to-face.
Have some of your financial advisors create videos giving their top tips for growing your wealth. Create videos walking viewers through each step of your investment process so they know what to expect when they sign up for your services. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your content, always focusing on what will deliver the most value for your followers.
7. Grow Your Network
It should come as no surprise that building a strong network is one of the best ways to grow your client base. Having a good professional network can increase overall awareness of your brand and get you more referrals. It can also get you some name recognition that may be helpful in converting leads to clients.
Join any business associations or organizations in your area, as well as some professional organizations. Make it a point to attend group events, volunteer to speak at seminars and conferences, and hand out business cards to everyone you meet. You could even host your own virtual event to strengthen your network connections and establish yourself as an expert in the industry.
8. Run Webinars
On the subject of hosting virtual events, running webinars is another fantastic way to bring in more clients. During a webinar, you’ll have time to go into more detailed financial advice than you do in a blog or social media post. You can charge a fee for the webinar, meaning you’ll still turn a profit, but that really isn’t the point.
When you host a webinar, you give interested potential clients a chance to get a taste of what it would be like to have you as their financial advisor. They can see your expertise first-hand and discover how the advice you give makes their lives easier and more abundant. This can convince them that they would benefit from having personalized guidance in the rest of their financial lives.
9. Run Radio and Podcast Ads
Of course, traditional advertising techniques still play an important role in helping to spread the word about your business. Television ad spots can be prohibitively expensive, but radio ads offer a much better return on investment. Talk to your local business and news stations about getting ad spots in their programming.
Podcasts also offer an affordable way to get your name out into the world. More than half of Americans over the age of 12 have listened to a podcast, and the audience of 144 million can bring you some amazing opportunities. Find a podcast that’s popular with your target demographic and buy an ad spot with them – or consider starting your own!
Discover More Client Acquisition Tips
Growing your client base can be the key to making your financial advisor business successful and profitable. Put together a strong website, create quality content, and keep an active social media presence. Also, focus on growing your network, and don’t be afraid to think outside the box when it comes to advertising.
If you’d like to discover more great client acquisition tips, check out the rest of our site at Stephen Oliver’s Advisor Wealth Mastery. We can help you get your business off its plateau and break through to the next level. Contact us today to start creating the business you deserve.
