Claire Akin's Blog, page 32

Your Comprehensive Webinar Creation Workbook (Download Now)

Are you thinking about hosting a webinar?

In this final installment of our series about how financial advisors can use webinars to grow their business, I’ve created a comprehensive Webinar Creation Workbook. The exclusive guide for financial advisors contains step-by-step instructions with examples for:

Choosing the best webinar topic for your firm
Naming your webinar
Creating your presentation
Designing your slides
Recording your webinar
Automating your webinar
Promoting your webinar
Following up with webinar leads



This workbook is action-packed and gives away everything I’ve learned about creating webinars. Download it now and don’t forget to watch my webinar on how to create your first webinar here!

 

Download Your Webinar Workbook

Do you want to learn more about webinars?

Watch our webinar on webinars for financial advisors here.

Watch Now

Want Help Getting Started On Your Webinar?

If you need help getting started on your first webinar, contact us today. 

Get Started Now

The post Your Comprehensive Webinar Creation Workbook (Download Now) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

Download Your Free Webinar Workbook Today!

Are you thinking about hosting a webinar?

If you are thinking about marketing your business using a webinar, download my free workbook that walks you through the process of building a successful webinar.

Download Webinar Workbook Here

The post Download Your Free Webinar Workbook Today! appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

The Ultimate Guide To Creating Your First Webinar (For Financial Advisors)

What if every visitor to your website spent 30 minutes with you to understand your background, what makes your firm different, and how you can help them? How would that impact your lead conversion rate? This is where webinar marketing lends a hand.

Most of the advisors I work with have rock-solid value propositions that convert at 70% to 90% when they actually get a chance to sit down with a prospect. The problem is that their value propositions tend to be complex and tough to explain through text on a website.

That’s where webinars can revolutionize a financial advisor’s marketing. Webinars can quadruple your conversion rate when compared to email marketing. And today, new technologies make webinars easier than ever to create.

Selecting Your Topic

The topic of your webinar is critically important. It’s worthwhile to do some research or run some tests when you’re deciding what to cover for your first webinar. You’ll want to focus on an urgent problem facing a specific group of people.

The best topics are laser-focused and give away a ton of specific value. Don’t be tempted to go too broad here or your webinar will blend into all of the noise out there. Some top-performing webinars my clients have done include:

How Intel Employees Can Prepare for the Next Round of Layoffs
What Should Bristol-Myers Squibb Employees Do About the Pension Buyout?
How Divorced and Widowed Women Can Maximize Their Social Security Benefits
How Doctors Can Catch Up for Retirement in a Hurry

Here are some ways to decide what’s the best fit for your firm.

1. Check Out Your Google Analytics

If you have Google Analytics set up for your website, it’s easy to see which pages are the most popular. Just go to Behavior, then Overview to see your top 10 pages. Make sure you change the date range to the last year or so to get a wide range of visitors.

For my website, my recent post on How to Get New Clients During a Market Decline has the most views. This is a good indication that a webinar on how to use market volatility in your marketing strategy would be alluring to my visitors.

2. Test Ideas Using Facebook Ads

Every time I create a new webinar, I test out the topic and title using Facebook ads. It’s easy to set up an ad that goes to my main webinar library and run it using different titles of topics I might want to cover. Then I compare and go with the lowest cost per click, which indicates the most people clicking on that title.

3. Ask Your Clients

It’s easy to do a quick survey to your clients to ask them what they’d most like you to cover in a webinar. Using Google Forms or Survey Monkey, ask your clients to select between three to five options. When I did this for my email list, the feedback was overwhelming that advisors wanted me to do a webinar on Facebook ads next. If you don’t want to be that formal, simply ask a few trusted clients for their feedback.

Naming Your Webinar

The title of your webinar is also really important. I’ve seen great webinars fail because the title is boring. Put on your marketing hat and name your webinar something exciting. You can test out the titles to see which one performs best. Here are some examples of great webinar titles:

Social Security: The Choice of a Lifetime
The Truth About Your Intel Benefits Package
6 Unexpected Risks to Your Retirement
Demystifying the Bristol Myers Squibb Pension Plan Closure

Titles that include “the truth”, “the biggest mistakes”, and “demystifying” do really well.

Creating Your Presentation

Once you’ve selected a topic, it’s time to get started mapping out your presentation. At Indigo Marketing Agency, we always use the same formula, which is based on research by NASA. The smart folks at NASA scientifically proved that presentations around 17 to 20 minutes are ideal to help viewers retain information. This means about 18 slides for your presentation.

Keep in mind that while you’re creating your presentation, you’ll just need slides with text. There’s no need to worry about design, fonts, or formatting at this point. If you have relevant graphics, you can include them, but don’t spend any energy on the design of your presentation. I typically open up a blank presentation and simply add one short sentence to each slide.

Slide 1: Title and Subtitle

Ex: What Should You Do About the Bristol-Myers Squibb Pension Buyout?

How BMS Employees Can Plan to Maximize Their Benefits

Slide 2: Your Credentials

This slide should include your background, education, licenses, and firm affiliation. This answers the question “Why am I uniquely suited to teach this course?”

Ex: I’ve been working with BMS employees for two decades and am personally familiar with the pension plan.

Slide 3: Your Mission

This slide should capture why you became a financial advisor and why you’re passionate about it. Until people understand what motivates you, they can’t begin to trust you.

Ex: My wife works at BMS and I understand how confused and worried employees are about their benefits. I’m here to help you feel confident about selecting the best option for you so you can get back to work.

Slide 4: About Them

This is your opportunity to communicate how well you understand the viewer. Relate to the challenges facing them, their background, why they face urgency now, and their fears.

Ex: You’ve likely worked at BMS for decades and always thought the pension plan would be there for you. Now it’s closing and you face a critical decision that you must make within 90 days.

Slide 5: The Urgent Problem

Here you’ll review the important choice they’ll have to make—whether that’s retirement planning, Social Security, or financial planning—and how it will impact them.

Ex: This is your only chance to choose a lump-sum payout to receive cash for your pension benefits. This represents an incredible opportunity, but with considerable risk. It’s critical to choose the best option for your specific situation, and if you do take the lump sum option, invest the money in line with your risk tolerance.

Slides 6-14: The Details

Here’s where you’ll go through the meat of the presentation and your expertise on the topic.

Ex: The history of the pension plan, the options available, potential scenarios, critical points to consider, etc.

Slide 15: Emotional Confrontation

This is the key slide of your presentation. Confront the viewer with an uncomfortable emotional reality if they fail to take action.

Ex: If you do not take the lump-sum payout option, you will likely never get another opportunity to access your retirement benefits and invest them in a way that aligns with your best interests.

This could potentially leave you with a drastically reduced standard of living in retirement.

Slide 16: A Powerful Solution

Here’s where you offer an easy action for them to take to alleviate the emotional discomfort you caused in the last slide.

Ex: Schedule your complimentary one-on-one consultation with our team and we’ll review your specific situation, answer your questions, and provide recommendations to maximize your pension benefits.

Slide 17: Call to Action

Urge viewers to take action now by scheduling a call, signing up for a meeting, or filling out a “Get Started Now” form.

Ex: Click below to schedule your meeting today. Remember, you only have 90 days to choose your payout option, so reserve your space now to make sure you are fully informed and confident in your decision.

Slide 18: How to Learn More

This slide is for people who are not ready to make the big jump and complete your call to action. Give them a way to learn more about the topic and keep in touch with you.

Ex: Download our free report on how to make the most of your pension plan options and join our newsletter for up-to-the-minute updates and news.

Designing Your Presentation

We have an amazing PowerPoint graphic designer on our team that creates beautiful presentations for our clients. It’s important to work with a trained designer so that each slide is well-branded, easy to read, and consistent.

To get your presentation designed on your own, I recommend using Upwork.com and searching for a PowerPoint designer. Take a look at their reviews, samples of their work, and their rate. Aim to pay about $100 to $200 to design your presentation.

Make sure you give the designer the following to help them create a beautiful presentation:

Your logo
Your headshot
Your color scheme
Any graphs or charts
A photography theme (beaches, golf, business owners)

Once you get your designed presentation back, you’ll want to send it through compliance. Make any compliance required changes, and then you’re ready to record.

Recording Your Webinar

This is the point where most advisors get stuck. You’ve already done 80% of the work, but many people get paralyzed by perfection and never record their webinar.

My best advice to overcome this is to schedule a time on your calendar to record and commit to yourself to get it done. Then, the day before you plan to record, do a complete run-through of your presentation.

When the time comes to record, accept no excuses and record as if it were live. You can always update your recording later, but it is critical to get your first webinar out and start collecting feedback to make it better.

Automating Your Webinar

I recommend always running automated webinars. There are a few reasons for this:

You can get your full webinar approved by compliance in advance.
There is no risk of technical difficulties.
People think automated webinars are live.
Data shows that twice as many people watch an automated webinar as a live one, since about half of people watch the replay.

My favorite webinar automation tool is EasyWebinar. It’s pretty robust and can be overwhelming, so if you’re not tech-savvy, you’ll want to outsource this piece of the puzzle. Our team can help upload and automate your webinar for you, which includes:

Uploading your logo and headshot
Creating your presenter bio section
Creating your registration page
Configuring the dates and times your webinar will be available
Creating the automatic reminders to go out one day and one hour before it starts
Adding your “offer” pop-up and countdown timer to get people to take action
Adding your links, notes, and offer to the event page
Adding the presentation video to the event page
Adding an invitation video to the registration page

Once you’ve automated your webinar, sign up to watch it and make sure everything is configured properly.

Promoting Your Webinar

Now that your webinar is up and running and you have a registration page to share, it’s time to promote your webinar. You worked hard to create a valuable presentation, so don’t be shy about inviting everyone you know to watch.

Invite Your Network By Email

First, I recommend emailing out several promotional emails to your list. This should include a quick video inviting them to attend the webinar and explaining what you’ll cover and why it’s so important. Schedule at least four emails inviting them to watch:

Save the Date for Our Upcoming Webinar
Register Now for Our Webinar
Last Chance to Register for Our Webinar
Watch the Replay of Our Webinar

Leverage LinkedIn

Especially for employer-specific webinars, LinkedIn is the way to get your presentation in front of people you don’t already know. Have your assistant send messages to everyone who fits your target demographic inviting them to attend. If you don’t hear back, send a follow-up message with a link to the replay. You can even use an automated LinkedIn tool to invite people in bulk with automatic messages.

Consider Facebook Ads

If your target audience isn’t on LinkedIn but you still want to get in front of people you don’t already know, Facebook ads could be an option. You can create ads to target by location, age, gender, and interests. For example, you could target friends of people who have liked your page, presuming that the ads would be displayed to your clients’ friends. Get creative with your Facebook ads to target your ideal prospects.

Share With Referral Partners

The best way to get your webinar in front of more qualified prospects is to ask referral partners to share it with their clients. If you work with a lawyer, CPA, or other professional who serves the same demographic, they may agree to invite their clients to attend your webinar as a value add for people in their network.

Following Up To Convert Viewers

Only a small percentage of webinar viewers will take action on the day they watch your webinar. In fact, the average time between when someone views a webinar and becomes a client is about one year.

This means that you need to regularly follow up with viewers to make sure you’re top of mind when they finally get around to making a move. I recommend a 4-6 email follow-up series inviting them to take action. Here are some examples from top-performing follow-up email automations:

Thanks for Watching Our Webinar—What Did You Think?
Do You Have Questions About Your Specific Situation?
Schedule Your Free One-on-One Consultation Today
Why I Became a Financial Advisor
What We Do & How We Can Help
Do You Know Someone Who Needs Our Help
Did You Know You Can Make an Appointment Online?
Let’s Get Coffee and Get to Know Each Other

Once your email series has completed, make sure all webinar viewers are on your regular email list so they’ll see your updates. You can also have your assistant connect with them on LinkedIn so they’ll see your posts and be able to get in touch with you there.

I know this all may seem like a lot of work, but webinars are incredibly powerful. When you consider setting up an automated webinar or hosting a dinner seminar, the costs and work involved don’t compare.

If you were to do a seminar, you would need to do all the work to prepare and give a presentation—and pay for everyone’s dinner. Yet a webinar will run forever, twenty-four hours a day.

You can continue to promote your webinar and get more and more viewers, which will grow your email list and put new appointments on your calendar. You can use it as a foot in the door with cold leads or send it as a follow-up once you’ve met with prospects.

Add it to the end of each blog post or email that you send. Share on your social media profiles so people can watch to learn more about you. Add it front and center to your website’s home page to provide a dynamic way to introduce yourself to new people. Investing in your first webinar can go a long way in supporting the rest of your marketing strategy and growing your firm now and into the future.

Do you want to learn more about webinars? Watch our webinar on webinars for financial advisors here.

If you need help getting started on your first webinar, contact us today.

The post The Ultimate Guide To Creating Your First Webinar (For Financial Advisors) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

Save $300 On The Advisor Thought Leader Summit In Kansas City

Two of my favorite financial advisor marketing experts are Maribeth Kuzmeski (Red Zone Marketing) and Marie Swift (Impact Communications). In fact, I first met Maribeth way back when I was a financial advisor with LPL Financial. I was so impressed with her branding that I modeled my own firm after hers. Instead of the name Red Zone Marketing and wearing red as my professional uniform, I chose Indigo Marketing and to wear blue.

Both Marie and Maribeth have been supportive mentors during my career. That’s why I’m excited to highlight an exciting event they’re teaming up to produce, The Advisor Thought Leader Summit on August 12th and 13th in Kansas City!

If you’re interested in learning the latest PR, media, and marketing strategies from the pros, as well as how to shoot custom videos for your website, consider attending the event this summer. Use code PARTNER300 to save $300 on your registration!

The event is not only a seminar focused on learning the latest in digital marketing, but also a workshop designed to help you walk away with your own videos and new content for your marketing plan.

Advisors who attend will:

Learn how to improve your personal presence and presentation skills—including what to wear and how to act while on camera
Learn how to communicate—verbally and in writing—in a more powerful and compelling way
Assess the benefits of writing a book or building a credibility platform based on a thought leadership blog, podcast, or video series
Hear from other advisors who have built their own celebrity platforms and what made the difference in standing out
Record your very own Thought Leader interview with television personality Pam Krueger of PBS fame

Learn more and register today at www.AdvisorThoughtLeaderSummit.com.  

The post Save $300 On The Advisor Thought Leader Summit In Kansas City appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

How People Really Choose a Financial Advisor

There’s a lot of confusion out there about how independent financial advisors get new clients. Marketers and business coaches may tell you that top advisors are raking in new clients with radio shows or Facebook ads. But the reality is that with all the technology in the world today, people are still choosing an advisor the same way they always have: by asking for a referral.

I was looking for concrete data on this topic for an upcoming webinar I’m creating. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of statistics out there on the subject. It took me a minute to realize that I actually have access to the data I was looking for!

Each year, we run client surveys for our advisors to help them understand what their clients care about the most. One of the questions on our survey is “Why did you decide to work with our firm?” We know the answer to this question is critical to hone their specialty.

I did a quick sample of the latest surveys we’ve run and began organizing the responses into broad groups. I was surprised that every single answer actually fit into one of just six categories. According to our data, here are the main ways people choose an advisor.

Referral

About half of respondents said that they chose to work with their advisor because they had been referred to them, typically by a friend or family member.

Networking

About 20% of people chose their advisor because they had actually met them at an event or personally, for example, through church, friends, or a cycling group.

401(k) Participants

About 10% of clients chose their advisor after working with them through their employer-sponsored 401(k) plan.

Tax Client Conversion

About 10% of clients used their advisor after they began working with the firm to prepare their taxes. For advisors who offer tax services, this model is a great way to bring on new assets.

Seminar or Event

About 10% of new clients came on board after hearing the advisor speak at a seminar, including one event on college planning and another on alternative investments.

Internet Search

Only one new client was the result of an Internet search, which supports the idea that people do not type “financial advisor” into Google and hand over their life savings.

How to Get More Referrals

What does this mean for advisors trying to grow their business? Referrals have got to be at the core of your marketing strategy. And how do you get more referrals?

First, you have to be referable by embracing a specialty. What one urgent problem do you solve for a specific group?

Next, you have to stay top-of-mind and remind people what you do and how you can help with content marketing.

Finally, you must remind people that you’re taking on new clients and ask for referrals on a regular basis.
To learn more, watch my latest webinar, The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors.

The post How People Really Choose a Financial Advisor appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

The Advisory Practice of the Future

Please join us to learn from financial advisor and technology consultant to advisors, Arielle Minicozzi!

In this exclusive webinar, we’ll share her secrets of The Advisory Practice of the Future. 

Arielle will share how she helps top advisors create their technology systems to run their firms seamlessly and efficiently.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed or behind when it comes to technology for your practice? Many advisors I work with are looking to upgrade their technology but don’t know where to start.    

1. Which technologies do advisors really need?
2. What are the top 5 technologies Arielle recommends?
3. What are the biggest mistakes advisors are making?
4. What’s the ONE TECHNOLOGY advisors should embrace today?
5. How does The Advisory Practice of the Future save time and money?  

Be sure to stick around until the end to get your free 30-minute technology strategy call with Arielle! Reserve your spot now.

Register Now

The post The Advisory Practice of the Future appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

The Truth About Marketing For Financial Advisors

Every day, I make a point to spend at least an hour on the phone with independent financial advisors talking about their marketing. We review what they’ve tried in the past, what has worked, and what was a waste of money. Through these conversations, I uncover a fundamental misunderstanding that advisors often share: that marketing should be easy.

Marketing can be easy, depending on what you’re selling. It’s easy to get people to order a cheap new gadget on Amazon. It’s easy to get people to sign up for a free webinar. It’s even easy to get people to come to a free steak dinner to learn about annuities. But let me tell you the truth about marketing for financial advisors: finding qualified prospects who are in a position to hire you now is not that easy.

How Many Qualified Prospects Are There?

Let’s say that as an independent financial advisor, you’re looking for clients in their 50s or 60s who have $500,000 or more in investable assets. While you probably hear all the time that there are 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring every day, that doesn’t mean that they’re all qualified prospects.

Many of them have no savings and plenty of debt. According to Money.com, one in three Americans have nothing saved for retirement. Data from a 2013 U.S. Census survey shows that of the 59% of 65-year-olds that have saved anything for retirement, the median nest egg is only about $104,000.

How Often Do People Hire A Financial Advisor?

Choosing someone to manage your money is different than purchasing a handbag or even a car, in that most people only make the decision to hire a trusted financial advisor once in their lifetimes. Many people will purchase a house more often than they will hire a financial advisor.

Let’s consider that of the small fraction of those Baby Boomers who have at least $500,000 in investable assets, over 35% of those folks are already working with a financial advisor (according to a 2016 Harris Poll).

For the remaining fraction who have saved at least a half a million dollars without a financial advisor, let’s think about their buying process. The obvious option is that they continue to run their finances on their own. Another option is to hire a financial advisor.

How Do People Choose A Financial Advisor?

There are an estimated 300,000 financial advisors in the United States. We know that most people choose a financial advisor who is near their physical location. They could choose a robo-advisor or hire someone at the Edward Jones office down the street. So for the fraction of Baby Boomers with money to invest who are looking for a financial advisor in your area, how do you stand out?

That’s the reality of finding new clients as an independent financial advisor. There’s a small number of qualified prospects who will likely only make the choice to buy once in their lives. And how do they choose an advisor? The most common way is by asking for a referral. Who do they ask? Friends, family, and coworkers who they perceive to be successful.

The Truth About Marketing For Financial Advisors

The next time a marketer tells you that it’s easy to get 12 new leads a week using Facebook ads, ask yourself if there are hundreds of qualified prospects in your area choosing to work with a financial advisor because they see an ad in their Facebook feed. Unfortunately, that’s just not realistic.

The reality is that marketing for financial advisors involves a lot more strategy and a lot more work. Give yourself a break if you feel like you’re the only advisor out there not getting new clients banging down your door after finding you on Google.

Even top advisors have to think long and hard about how to find qualified prospects and spend time and money to create marketing strategies that work. The first step is realizing that choosing a financial advisor is an important decision that people don’t (and shouldn’t) take lightly.

To learn more about the truth about marketing for financial advisors and what’s really working for advisors today, watch my exclusive webinar here.

The post The Truth About Marketing For Financial Advisors appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

Important Updates to Your Marketing Package (Video)

Fill Our Your Topic Survey

Please take a few minutes to fill out your topic survey here so we can keep you on schedule!

Get Started on Facebook Ads

Take a look at our sample Facebook ad landing pages below. To get started, please commit to $100 per month in Facebook ad spend for at least a year. Email claire@indigomarketingagency.com and we’ll get you started!

Social Security

Market Volatility

Second Opinion

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Case Study: Search Traffic 90 Days After SEO Project

After completing our SEO projects, we like to go back and learn how we did and consider what we might improve on. Here are the questions that we ask about each project.

How much traffic is being driven by search?
How does that compare to our previous search volume?
Should we make adjustments to SEO strategy?





SEARCH VOLUME

Let’s start by looking at data from Google Search Console to see Impressions and Clicks from a recent project that we completed. Let’s compare two date ranges. This takes us back to the start of our project and the most current 30 day period that we have data for

For organic search results, we’re seeing an upward trend in both search impressions and clicks to the site.

Approximately 12% increase in search impressions. Approximately 25% increase in clicks to the site via search.
Clicks are increasing at a rate faster than impressions. This could be due to better rankings on each of the keywords.


Google Search Console

Google Search Console gives us a view of how our site is appearing in search. It shows which terms are being searched and how many clicks to our site.

These are only screenshots of much broader data, but what we saw in the most recent searches was an increase in impressions and clicks from terms that we targeted. This is a sign that we’re moving in the right direction. 

Search Rankings Results

When we checked the rankings we could see that this client had gone from the 3rd page on Google to the 1st page on Google in two categories that we targeted in less than 90 days. This helps explain why we’re seeing a higher percentage of clicks to the site.

What Are Next Steps?

SEO can take time and in this case, results are starting to show. Should we take more action and target more search terms? Perhaps, but we should also not forget that SEO is just part of the funnel. What is the percent of visitors that we are converting to leads? Converting traffic on your site is as important as getting the visitor there in the first place.

Possible lead generation options may include a webinar, a free report download or a free audit of their current plan. The goal would be to try an capture an email address or some way to communicate with this visitor in the future.

The post Case Study: Search Traffic 90 Days After SEO Project appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

How to Get New Clients During a Market Decline

Never let a good crisis go to waste – or in this case, a dip in the stock market. Market volatility is a powerful marketing opportunity for two reasons. First, your campaign about volatility is likely to get twice as many views and shares as your other campaigns, as we can see in this example from back in 2016. Second, prospects have unprecedented urgency to act during an uncomfortable market dip.

As a financial advisor, you know that market declines are a normal part of investing. But your clients are likely nervous about the recent market volatility and may want to hear from you. It’s your job to keep them calm and informed during volatility. But what’s the best way to communicate about the recent market events? And can you take advantage of the volatility as marketing opportunity?

Why You Should Communicate During Volatility

Proactively communication is good client service. Your clients hire you to not only help plan for their financial future, but to educate them in good times and in bad. They are eager to hear from you to get an explanation of what’s going on and receive some guidance on what they should (or shouldn’t) do about it.

It’s your job to keep clients from selling when the market is down. We all know that behavior is an important component to long-term investment success and when clients are feeling the urge to sell when the market is low, it’s your place to remind them of their long-term plan.

Staying in touch results in fewer phone calls and panicked clients. If you’re able to act quickly, clients are more likely to trust that you’re prepared for the volatility and they’ll feel they’re in good hands. This results in less time spent educating and calming individual skittish clients.

What Should You Say About Market Volatility?

I think that most advisors wait too long to communicate during market swings because they know that each event is different and they’re waiting to fill in the specifics. And we know that the markets may correct after a big decline. But no matter the specific situation, your key messaging will be the same. You’ll want to communicate the following key points to clients:

This is expected. Explain that you have been anticipating volatility and that it’s a normal and healthy part of market cycles. Point to historical data that shows the frequency of similar events.

Their portfolio is not down as much as the market. Remind your clients that while the S&P 500 may be down X% percent, their accounts are not invested in the index and have therefore declined less than the market. Urge them to call you if they have questions about their individual accounts.

Now is not the time to sell. Explain that no one can consistently predict the right time to get in or out of the market. It’s human nature to lose patience and sell at or near the bottom of a downturn. Even if you were able to get out early in a decline, you’d still have to guess when to get back into the market and you’d likely guess wrong.

They have not realized any losses yet. It’s normal to feel uncomfortable when the market is down, especially if you’re approaching retirement. However, each time in history that the market has gone down, it has come back up again. Average downturns of 10% are likely to return to normal within about 115 days, based on historical data.

Stay focused on the long-term. Remind clients that you’ve built their financial plan and investment strategy for the long-term, with short-term volatility in mind. While a correction can be upsetting, there’s no reason to deviate from their long-term financial plan.

Call if they have questions. Encourage them to get in touch if they are feeling nervous or want to review their accounts.

How to Use Volatility to Get New Clients

Now that you’ve proactively communicated with your existing clients, it’s time to use the market downturn as an opportunity. Downturns bring precious urgency that we don’t find at any other time. Prospects who have put off financial planning for most of their lives are not easily pushed into action when times are good. But when times are bad, things get very uncomfortable and they’re more willing to talk. Here’s how to go after referrals when times are bad:

Include a deal for clients’ friends and family. Offer to provide a complimentary second opinion and recommendations to minimize losses.

Provide an easy action to take. Share a link to schedule a 15-minute investment review by phone. This way, even if prospects read your email after hours, they can take action when they’re feeling peak urgency and sleep better that night.

Remind clients that you are never too busy to help the people they care about. Reiterate that if they have friends, family, or coworkers who are nervous about the market volatility, you are here to help. Encourage them to forward your market update email to their network.

Bring up outside accounts. Make a point to mention to clients that while the accounts you manage are prepared for this correction, now is a good time to review old 401(k)s and other assets you do not currently manage to assess risk.

Get Your Free Customizable Template

If you need help creating a marketing campaign, email me at claire@indigomarketingagency.com and I’ll send you a free template you can customize.

About Claire

Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency a marketing firm serving top independent financial advisors. Claire is a former Investment Advisor Representative who holds her MBA in Marketing from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego as well as a BA in Economics from UC Davis. It’s her goal to help specialist advisors target their ideal prospects with content marketing.

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