Define Your Audience. Your audience is your ideal clients. If you don't have an ideal client, then you need to get one. You need to take a strategic step back and write a marketing plan. Tweeting or writing a blog without defining your ideal client and audience is a waste of time and effort. Advisors create marketing information all the time without ever going through the strategic process of determining who their ideal client is. But that's like getting in a car and driving without setting a destination.
Take a few hours to segment your client base into A, B and C clients based on how valuable each is to you. Valuable clients are those most profitable and who you enjoy working with most.
Now, take it a step further by segmenting your most valued clients based on key demographics. Sorting them based on demographics means determining whether your most valued clients are in their 40s, 50s or 60s. Are many of them local? Are they spread out across the country? Are they gay? In the military? From your church? Do three or four of your most valued clients work in the same company? Are they physicians with a particular specialty? In the same mega-group? Examining your client base from this perspective lets you find niches you did not realize you were serving. You have something these people want.
Define Your Keywords. Your niche audiences need specialized information. That's why they pay you. In fact, specializing pays a premium. You tell business owners about Roth IRAs or advise plan sponsors on fiduciary issues. You know what tax deductions doctors with home offices can take without risking an audit and how business owners can create a 401(k) plan that will optimize benefits to owners while also helping them satisfy their employees. You may work with real estate developers with liability and asset protection concerns or diamond dealers that manage cash businesses and carry an inventory in jewels. Whatever your specialty, each niche has its own lexicon. Your social stream must address the needs of three or four niches.
To do it right, you need to go a step further to reach your audience by identifying the concepts most important to them and defining the words they use to describe their problems. You must come up with a list of keywords for each niche and regularly post content using these keywords. The titles of blog posts must contain numbers referencing private letter rulings and U.S. Tax Court decisions. Top executives in Silicon Valley may be concerned about specific alternative minimum tax issues and many college professors might right now be concerned about recharacterizing Roth IRA conversions.
By writing, tweeting, videoing and using other social media to communicate your ideas, you make it easy for people to find you on the Web. Almost everybody uses the Web to find answers. If you are a salesperson, you might search for information about travel deductions. If you are a real estate developer in Billings, Montana, you might want to know about state estate tax rules. You will probably go to a search engine for help. By posting content to the Web using keywords your audiences will use in searching the Web, you will draw your audience. But keywords must be targeted to a very specific group, and you must produce a library of content for them for months. That will boost your rankings.
Budget Time. We've already established that you're spending time keeping up with news and researching the ideas necessary to advise people on wealth management, and that this is the hardest part of your social media effort. But that does not mean producing content and streaming it requires no effort or time. Social media requires you to spend time daily communicating your knowledge. Writing and sending six tweets a day takes about 60 minutes.
That's a reasonable amount of time to expect to spend every day if you're primarily using status updates to engage your audience. Writing a post for your blog may take you two hours twice a week. Making a video once a week-after planning exactly what you want to say and getting the lighting and sounds right-may take you a couple of hours. Posting it on YouTube may take another 15 minutes.
Experiment. Budget time to keep up with social media issues and try different tools. For example, you may find that you're great at creating PowerPoint presentations and posting them to SlideShare. You may find that Facebook is a far better place for your blogs for plumbers. The only way you'll learn is by taking the time to experiment.
Measure Your Success. Determine how you will measure success. Success does not only mean converting clicks to clients. In fact, focusing solely on converting content to clients can be discouraging, especially when you're just starting out with your social media effort. Success must also be measured by Facebook likes, leads generated and the number of visitors to your content. It's measured in the number of comments you receive to a blog post and by the number of people you speak with that mention your content.
Editor-at-large Andrew Gluck, a veteran financial writer, owns Advisor Products Inc., a marketing technology company serving 1,800 advisory firms.