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December 01, 2009 at 02:00 AM
When I started reading his marketing pitch, my heart sank. I wanted to like Larry Chambers’s new Attraction Marketing program for financial advisors, I really did. I’ve known Larry for about 15 years, as a colleague and a friend. He wrote more articles than I can count for me in my editing years, has been a columnist for this magazine,
and has been the publishing brains behind some of the industry’s leading figures, including John Bowen. And his Death in the Ashau Valley about his experiences in Special Forces in Vietnam is the best book about combat that I’ve ever read.
What’s more, I strongly believe in the precursor to Attraction Marketing, what Larry coined as “credibility marketing,” which is branding one’s expertise through publishing and mass media.
So when Larry’s “Eat, Be Eaten, or Become an Expert in 14 Days,” (available as a free download at attractionbuilder.com) started off with “If you’re not marketing, you may soon find yourself out of this business,” I tried to suppress the groan. Honest. But when he went on to say, “Nothing makes Wall Street firms smile more than hearing [advisors] say: ‘I don’t need to market; my clients send me all the prospects I need,’” I just had to put my head down on the desk.
But even though I thought the lead-in was off base, I suspected Larry was on to something here, so I kept reading.
This Time Is Different. Really.
Even though the markets have made a substantial recovery from their lows of nearly a year ago, independent advisors have not escaped the public’s loss of faith in everything financial services. To regain former asset levels–and take advantage of the virtual collapse of competing advisory options–I suspect independent advisors will have to do a better job of getting out their client-oriented message. Larry Chambers has created an incredibly comprehensive program to help them do that.
From personal experience, I can tell you that the irony of expert branding, or Attraction Marketing as Larry calls it, is that the firms that most need it can least afford it. Writing is labor intensive, as most any advisor who has attempted to do his own writing can tell you. These days, with firm revenues still down and client workload up, finding additional time to write a blog, a newspaper column, or heaven forbid, a book, is not realistic for many advisors.
A good writer who knows the financial industry can greatly shorten your time commitment, but they’re pretty rare, and consequently, not cheap. Less expensive writers aren’t hard to find, especially in this economic environment. But the extra time it takes to fully explain your points, and painstakingly review multiple drafts for errors, usually negates any upfront savings. What’s worse, poorly written pieces aren’t nearly as likely to produce the marketing results you’re looking for.
There’s the real rub: Writing is just like managing an investment portfolio: anyone can do it, and lots of people try, but the record shows that very few can do it effectively. Writing the right stuff, in the right way, and getting it published in the right publications is the key to attraction marketing, and to do it successfully, you have to know what you’re doing.
Enter Larry Chambers and his Attraction Marketing program. It’s by far the most comprehensive program ever developed to help financial advisors brand themselves as experts.
Beginning with the Attraction Marketing Workbook: Shifting from Pursuit to Pursued, Larry’s created a dozen workbooks, designed to take you, the advisor, through every step of branding yourself as an expert, from finding your value proposition, to turning your practice into a story, to creating the one graph that captures what you’re all about, to a game plan to get your book published. It’s literally a comprehensive and detailed collection of a career’s worth of wisdom about how to create financial books and articles, how to get them published, and how to maximize the marketing bang when you do.
Perhaps the best part is that Larry avoids the traditional publisher’s mistake of charging a mint because these are “professional books.” Most of the Attraction Marketing books run between $20 and $40, with a 50% discount for downloading electronic versions. If you want to do your own writing, it’s the best value you’ll find, anywhere.
