Traditional methods of advice marketing and like newsletters and emailing lists are achieving less and less cut through with clients, according to advice marketing specialists, and should be balanced out with more contemporary methods of communication.
Advisers need to spend time where the generation of pre-retirees hang out if they are going to engage with them, says Naomi Christopher, marketing and communications manager at Implemented Portfolios.
“Your clients are already on social media, so meeting them there is one less obstacle to getting in front of them,” Christopher says.
While a section of any advisers’ client book will respond to email blasts of newsletters and periodic communications, she reckons the proportion is dwindling.
“Check how many unopened emails you have in a day, and how many promotional emails you delete,” she says. “I talk to people that get some much joy from unsubscribing from promotional emails, but they won’t delete facebook or Instagram. That’s why I think social media is so much more effective than email – people aren’t checking their email during their down time, they’re turning it off.”
Advice marketer Peter Bowman says the trusty old monthly newsletter “won’t cut it anymore”. While sending out email ‘blasts’ in the same old format may not lose you clients, he questions whether it’s the best use of a firm’s marketing budget.
Clients have different needs and personalities, he explains, and want to hear different things.
“Instead of being ‘one to many’ it needs to be ‘one to one’,” Bowman says.
Advisers know the needs of accumulators, pre-retirees and retirees are different, but they often fail to appreciate the that their communication preferences differ as well. He suggests at least segmenting clients into accumulators and retirees and tailoring communications accordingly.
“It all comes down to how you talk to them,” he adds.
Christopher agrees on the importance of segmentation. The audience has to see themselves in what you’re producing, she says – a scattergun approach won’t work.
“Look at a HENRYS,” she says. “A High-Income-Not-Rich-Yet couple that sees a picture of a middle-aged couple with kids and a dog rolling around is not going to think ‘that’s me’.”
You’ve got less than a second to catch a consumer’s attention, Christopher continues, so take a “brutal approach” with who you’re targeting and don’t waste it with junk ads.
“People are wary of promotional material, they aren’t idiots and they know when people are paying to be in their feeds,” she says.
Christopher reveals the three rules of content that advice principals should keep in mind before they post on social media: What you’re sharing needs to either be valuable, shareable or help promote discussion?
“If it’s not nailing one of these,” she adds, “you’ve lost your one second.”
