Today, successful independent financial advisors understand that in order to compete with other RIA’s and larger firms, win deals, and retain clients, one of the major things they must do is innovate their brand experience.
A brand is more than just your logo, your website, a pamphlet or any single physically tangible item. The way your clients feel after leaving their first interaction with you, that’s your brand.
The way they feel the 50th time they interact with you is simply a deeper experience of your brand, and generally speaking, your brand is your client facing communication, your onboarding process, the way clients receive digital information, it’s the conversation with the advisor, and the smell of your office. Your brand is an experience and should be treated as such if advisors wish to understand how to build legacy.
Marketing is everywhere. Obviously it’s in your advertising and other prepared communications, but it’s also in your demeanor, in how you answer the phone — and most decidedly in all the subtle, interrelated aspects of the overall experience you provide your clients and prospects.
That’s a view Eric Clarke, CEO of Orion Advisor Services, expressed at a recent Chalice-sponsored discussion panel. He cited the need to provide “an incredible client experience” as “an extension of your brand” as the second most important aspect — after “a well-defined value proposition” — to achieving success in wealth management.
Make Your Brand an Experience
Giving clients an exceptional overall brand experience — another way of saying you’re being good, kind and considerate to people you rely to make a living — is a sturdy foundation from which to innovate. It’s a pivot point that keeps you comfortably close to home at times when you feel compelled to stretch to bring new ideas to realization. It’s a shelter in times of trouble and uncertainty.
Most of all, says Clarke, it’s an incentive to make the effort to see things from your clients’ perspective.
See Through Your Clients’ Eyes
When you take the time to understand your clients on that level, you quickly realize that consumers are awash in generally positive, and sometimes quite sophisticated, client experiences. This is especially in the realm of consumer-tech. In this view, the experience you provide clients as an RIA representative should match in quality, and perhaps in delivery mode, anything on offer by the likes of Amazon or Netflix, which consistently provide “best-in-class experiences,” according to Clarke.
Have a Modern Client Portal
With the rise of algorithm-fueled financial planning, “robo” advice, and the inexorable march of digitalization across almost all facets of business, wealth-management clients expect interfaces that are intuitive, informative, and interactive, along with access to alternative strategies for everything from wealth preservation to making sense of crypto currencies.
Stay Educated
In turn, advisors must continue their education to understand and effectively respond to their clients’ shifting needs. Humanity is still humanity, but technology has changed the way we interact with each other and with things, and at root, it’s all a function of communication. Just consider the different ways clients consume B2C communication. Besides face-to-face and phone, there’s print, email-delivered blog posts, text updates, social-media posts, and the audio-visual components of sign-up pages and, of course, websites.
Is there an easy and efficient way for your clients to request information and provide feedback? Is there, in other words, a way to optimize communication? In terms of one single thing you can do now and forever, no. But in aggregate, the effective client communications you conduct now, along with strategic improvements you make along the way, can get you much closer to the mark.