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October 28, 2010 at 08:00 PM
We have found over the years one of the most fun parts of our job as financial and estate planners is marketing. It’s almost like going fishing and throwing the line out to see what you can catch. But you can’t just throw the line out and expect to start reeling them in left and right. You must have a plan of attack to attract your target market and get them in front of you.
The fun part is using your creativity and ideas to test various approaches to see what works the best. We are constantly testing new ideas, and when we find something that works, we keep doing it until it stops working.
It all starts with creating a memorable brand. A few years ago, we realized we would be much more recognizable as “The Retirement Guys” than Clair Financial Services or Baker Financial Group. We asked ourselves, “ What ultimately do we want our target market to do?” The answer was: “Allow us to take over management of their IRAs, 401ks, 403bs, etc.” That is where most people have the majority of their financial assets.
Once we settled on a memorable name, we needed to make the brand visually identifiable by creating a logo. The logo created by the marketing division of our broker-dealer has been a home run for us. We now use it on every marketing piece we create. We feel it makes a big difference in the response rate of seminar mailings when the mail recipient receives the mail and recognizes the logo or the name as something they have heard or seen before.
Now that we have created a memorable brand, we need to communicate an awareness of us and our brand as the go-to guys in the area when it comes to retirement planning. We do this through various forms of media. For nine years, we’ve had a radio show that used to be called “Wealth Management Sunday.” How boring. It is now called “The Retirement Guys Radio Show.”
We also utilized a public relations company that has helped us get our message out through various media outlets, including a spot in our local newspaper as weekly columnists. We are periodically seen on TV as local experts on financial and estate planning matters.
