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Reaching Advisors by Addressing Their Urgent, Visible Problems

These are words every marketer should tattoo on their foreheads:

“It’s not about us – it’s about them.”

Too often, those of us in marketing reach out to the market by touting our companies’ capabilities. In other words, we talk about ourselves – what we do, how we do it, why we’re better at it than our competitors. But just because we do it doesn’t make it effective. In fact, we all stand to benefit by recognizing that the best marketing isn’t about us; instead, it’s about our prospects’ needs and pain points.

By looking resolutely at everything from our prospects’ point-of-view, we put ourselves in a better position to accomplish our goals.

What does this mean?

It means understanding where our prospects are in their buyer journey and communicating with them in a human way. We need to deliver content and messaging through coordinated campaigns that focus on their most urgent, visible problems. “Urgent” suggests that the need is important and immediate; “visible” assumes it’s close to the surface or can be raised through provocative messages.

The idea of urgent, visible problems is a key concept in effective advisor marketing.

Unfortunately, marketers too often neglect it in favor of self-centered messaging.

It’s easy to get caught up in inflated rhetoric that actually may be irrelevant to the typical advisor with specific, tactical problems to solve. This person simply doesn’t have the time or inclination to think in terms of grandiose concepts—not when they’re facing the pressure of addressing such challenges as their need to:

  • Enhance their relationships with current clients
  • Justify their fees and defend active management
  • Reach out to a broader demographic of potential clients like women and Millennials

Not only do you need to show how you offer valuable insights that can help advisors address these challenges. You also need to demonstrate conclusively why it’s in their best interests to engage with your company in particular.

Inspire the next step.

Your content and messaging needs to focus on getting your prospect to engage – download, register, view a video or Webinar or otherwise raise his or her hand.

Relevancy is all-important here. Give your target audience information they judge to be less than pertinent to them, and they’ll quickly close their browser tabs. But give them a compelling reason to engage by making them an offer of content that promises useful insights on the business problems being solved, and you’ll be able to effectively move them to the next stage in their buy cycle.

Again, don’t lose sight of the singular objective of your efforts – generating inquiries and sustaining interest throughout the buying process. That’s how you’ll convert them to the point of sale-readiness. Continuously motivate them to take the next step, with as much content as is required to whet their appetites and keep them hungry for more.

Trying to persuade? Just answer the questions advisors are asking.

Understand what advisors are asking at each stage of their journey. And remember, prospective buyers’ questions are not linear. Rather, they can come in virtually any order.

  • They may be wondering what they can do to bring the next generation of investors into the fold.
  • They may be challenged by the need to be more digitally adept and looking for a solution set.
  • They may have concerns about market volatility or heightened P/E ratios and wonder what steps they can take to minimize the consequences.
  • They may simply want easy-to-digest literature they can share with their clients.

A good rule of thumb is simply to assume that the questions will probably be associated with the pains and challenges your prospects face.

What better opportunity for you to provide worthwhile solutions?

Next Up: Now that you understand your advisors, you can dive in and understand their challenges so that you can earn their business.

Note: the author of this post is indebted to the work of Keith Sullivan in his comprehensive guidebook, “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing and the deep insights he provides into the 9 principles of buyer engagement.

Mapping Your Way to Greater Advisor Engagement

“The failure to follow a well-established development process is causing many organizations to miss the mark when it comes to designing content and campaigns that resonate strongest with their customers and prospects.” -Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy & Marketing Office, Corporate Visions

Everyone will agree that building demand is one of the primary goals of marketing. In fact, it may well be Goal #1. The question is, what can asset managers do to create stronger demand for their products with advisors?

In the world of demand-generation marketing, we hold that creating Message Maps centered on a Pain-Empathy-Insights approach is a critical step in the process.

Building Message Maps is a great way to bring structure to the development of communications assets designed to escort prospects through the buying cycle.

Before we describe them in more detail, let’s consider a serious challenge Simon Sinek issued to conventional thinking about prospect engagement.

Simon got it right.

For those of you who haven’t read his books or seen his Ted Talks, Simon Sinek is a highly regarded marketing consultant and educator who has inspired tens of thousands of people to turn his concepts into action.

Simon says companies that do marketing right create overtures that focus on why they do what they do rather than on what they produce.

This only stands to reason, he says, because it corresponds with how people behave in the marketplace. They buy based on why they need not on what they get.

How does this apply to you and the messaging you create?

Relevance is the answer.

Focusing on the why allows you to speak to your ideal audiences in their own voice and to create communications that are specific and pertinent. That’s the way to maximize your impact and fulfill one of today’s marketing’s most important missions – relevance.

To develop high impact, content-driven demand marketing and persuasive selling, start by focusing on the buyer’s pain, offer up empathy by describing and understanding their individual role, then provide insights in the form of thought-leadership content.

Here’s an example of what this looks like in a Message Map model:

Engagement Persona: Time Strapped Independent Advisor

Message Maps 3

Before you begin any coordinated communications campaign, we suggest that you build Message Maps targeting your ideal advisors.

Remember, a Message Map approach is designed to get your prospects to take the next step. You want to incent them to deepen a dialogue with you.

That’s how true engagement is created.

Next Up: How to create content that advisors will engage with.

Note: the author of this post is indebted to the work of Keith Sullivan in his comprehensive guidebook, “Exposed: The False Promises of Revenue Marketing and the deep insights he provides into the 9 principles of buyer engagement.