Business strategists spend a lot of time understanding the target audience for their clients and making sure that the strategies are aligned fully with the clients’ goals so there’s no disconnect between marketing and reality. We all know how empty promises can backfire, so attention to your offering is critical. But once you are confident in your strategy and it’s time to go to market, you want the best possible marketing system for your firm.

I’ve summarized my approach for helping clients build their marketing materials.

Step One: The Messaging Brief

Creating a messaging brief is the most important thing you can do to sharpen your message for both your marketing and sales efforts. Essentially, the brief is a one-page form that documents:

• Your business objective (say, that you will grow by adding $100 million a year in assets);

• Your target client, which is described in demographics (by age, assets or profession) and by attitude or persona (say, people who want to feel organized);

• Your value proposition: What do you do? Why do you do what you do? Who do you serve? How does that benefit people? What are your proof points?

The idea of “proof points” may feel new to you, but wishy-washy value propositions are so rampant in our industry that this is a critical step. For example, saying that you provide “comprehensive wealth management” is too vague, so the proof points would be the specific deliverables clients can count on.

• The next part of the one-page brief is the competition—people you are compared to when clients consider you. Typically, I pick three comparisons: You are “unlike brokers,” “unlike discount firms” or “unlike other RIAs”; then you create narratives. For example, “Unlike Schwab, we customize what we do for every client and build deeper relationships.”

• 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

2. A pitch deck

3.  Templates

4. A brochure

Your website is how people check you out after hearing your name, and it can help you or harm you. Your clients will rarely visit here, so your audience for the site is prospects. My approach is to use the message brief as the core of how to build the site, which makes it easier for the agency when it comes to developing the flow and the copy. I’ve talked to advisors who have great, simple sites built by young freelancers for under $10,000, while other firms spend up to $250,000 for a more robust and engaging digital experience.

Think of your pitch deck as a voice-over for your website. You want to be repeating the same themes you do in your message brief and your website, but in each stage you may go into more detail. Assume the message brief is a skeleton; the website adds some muscle and the pitch deck lets you add more meat on the bone.

When working with firms that like to share a lot about the investment process, I make that a separate presentation. A pitch deck should be like storytelling and no more than a dozen pages.

In the digital age, templates are low-hanging fruit to vastly improve how your brand comes across. Your agency should be able to take the branded look and feel from the website and create templates for company social media, letters, e-mails, newsletters and any other standard communication you have. To increase the effectiveness of your e-mails, focus on interesting headlines (good openers start with words like “How to … ” and “Why …” or offer a list, like “Three Tips ...”). Have a branded banner and make the e-mail crisp, using bullets and charts instead of heavy text. Take the same approach with the investment letters—long-winded text in black and white turns off readers.

Rather than a long, costly brochure, consider a one-page trifold that fits nicely into an envelope. Again, use the message brief, and add in some facts about your firm. We can’t use testimonials, but you can include a short story of “how we help our clients.” Build off the reason to choose part of the message brief for your story in this way, “Mary and John came to us when their financial life felt out of control … ” Using this approach, you can express how it feels to do business with you and the benefits, from the voice of an imaginary client, and that creates connection with your prospect.

Your Marketing Makeover

Good marketing is simple, clear and repetitive. Everything in my process starts with the message brief, which is an exercise you can begin on your own or with some help from a consultant or creative agency. Don’t be surprised if that step takes weeks for you and your team as you hash out ideas and argue over every word. You will find the rest flows from there, and the consistency is what will make your brand and your story memorable.

Your marketing makeover aims to improve your business and help you grow, so approach it with the same discipline you apply to investments and planning. The returns are worth it.    
 

Gail Graham is CEO of Graham Strategy, dedicated to helping wealth managers build brands people love. She will be a featured speaker at Financial Advisor's Inside Retirement conference in Las Vegas on September 27. As the former CMO of United Capital, she created an industry-leading marketing platform. Previously, she spent a decade at Fidelity Investments.