Editor’s Note: This article is based on Steve Sanduski’s podcast interview with Lisa Salvi of Charles Schwab and Bill Keen of Keen Wealth Advisors. To access more than 100 interviews with industry leaders, subscribe for free to Steve’s podcast, Between Now and Success by clicking here.
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced financial advisors to shift the way you market your services. In person marketing and networking is severely restricted for the near future and if you want to succeed in this new world, you have to adapt to the new virtual reality.
Even before the pandemic, our industry was already making a shift towards digital marketing combined with digital events. Things like pay-per-click advertising, newsletters, podcasts, video and virtual events like webinars, panels and summits have been gaining steam for years. But now, the pandemic has accelerated that trend to light speed.
The most successful firms have jumped all over the virtual marketing trend and are crushing those firms who haven’t.
To help you succeed in virtual marketing, I hosted a virtual panel with two experts. Bill Keen is the founder and CEO of Keen Wealth Advisors, which is an RIA in the greater Kansas City area with half a billion dollars in assets under management. Lisa Salvi is vice president, business consulting and field experience at Charles Schwab, where she oversees the advisor consulting group and produces the industry’s gold standard annual benchmarking report.
As we talked, Bill, Lisa and I zeroed in on five steps that will help you become a virtual marketing leader.
1. Codify what you know to be true. One mistake I often see advisors make is they jump into marketing tactics before really clarifying what they stand for. By putting tactics before your truth, your marketing will lack a coherent spine that gives force and generates attraction to your message.
Bill framed it this way:
“What do you believe? We cannot be a chameleon in this business. And it’s very tempting to be a chameleon when you’re first starting out because you want to attract clients. And in my case, I started at Dean Witter in the early ‘90s and I had to get a certain amount of clients and revenue and assets, or else I was out of there.
“So it was difficult to not be a chameleon back in the early parts of your career. But finding what you believe and then not being afraid to share what you believe with your clients first and then your prospective clients, that’s where it starts. Because if you don’t have your message in your voice, or you’re afraid to demonstrate it, then we can’t create any marketing materials in my opinion.”
Few people have truly thought long and hard about what they believe and then oriented their marketing—and their life—around their beliefs. But when you do this, you’ll have an unusual level of clarity that will make marketing your business and living your life so much easier.
To codify what you know to be true, many of my coaching clients have completed the “Your Truth” exercise.