• The last section is the “reason to choose you.” In this case, you offer another narrative to express why people choose you and the essence of how they feel: “People come to us when they feel out of control and tell us that a weight comes off their shoulders from having a clear plan and a much more organized financial life.”

Once you’ve created your message brief and tested it out in conversations, take the one-pager to a print shop and make hard cards for all your staff. You’ll be surprised how helpful it is to pull this out when you are writing a prospect letter or explaining your value to new team members.

Step 2: Your Creative Identity

Your brand has a name, a look and feel, a voice and tone and all kinds of associated tangible and emotional elements. Your goal should be to ensure that these factors support what you are saying in your message brief and allow people to quickly understand your personality (the embodiment of your brand) and remember it over time. For this step, you will need a creative person or agency to help you, and by giving them your message brief as a guideline you will save time, money and improve the chances of success.

• Consider the name of your firm and think about how it connects to the “why” of your business. If your firm bears your name, talk about how important that is to you. If there’s history, share it. If you made up the name, explain the roots and why the name fits. Changing names is expensive, so try to make yours work.

• What’s your visual identity? Colors, graphics, photos and other creative styles say a lot about who you are. This is one area that needs refreshing from time to time—just like interior decorating styles, what’s appealing in visual identity changes over the years. What’s out: columns, compasses, sailboats and dense layouts. What’s in: photography, icons, simple graphics and white space.

The deliverable is a set of brand guidelines to document everything from logos to colors to fonts and other approved images. Your agency should build this for you, and your job is to vigilantly support the brand standards over time.

Step 3: Setting Marketing Priorities

To keep it simple, there are four critical elements of a marketing system for an advisory practice that will require help from your internal team or creative agency:

1.  A website