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Practice Management > Marketing and Communications > Social Media

How to Create Massive Awareness and Meaningful Connection

By Robert Sofia

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Stock image of marketing and strategy road signs pointing in different directions (Photo: Shutterstock)

Marketing success is paramount for sustainable advisory firm growth. Through the years, I’ve seen two camps of thought on how best to achieve that growth and rise to the top.

The first camp prefers heavy outsourcing. Prevalent among larger firms, the outsourced model lends itself to an ample volume of professional and informational content. But for the most part, it lacks a strong personality. The second camp has bought into the value of a unique voice. These advisors tend to create all marketing content themselves. And while this content is steeped in personality, creating it in-house is extremely time consuming.

So which camp is right? Neither! In fact, placing yourself in one or the other greatly limits your growth potential. For most advisors, a hybrid solution that marries scale and voice in one easy-to-implement strategy will maximize marketing effectiveness.

Lessons From Large Firms

Think about how your marketing looks different than the marketing of the largest firms, like wirehouses and robo advisors.

These large firms do two things well:

  • Lead with volume, which is essential for both awareness and to support the various stages of the sales funnel
  • Excel in top-of-funnel engagement (i.e. educational content focused on getting leads), where voice and personality are least important

This approach to advisor marketing is made possible through a reliance on professional writers who can easily churn out content, albeit under a nondescript corporate tone. The problem is that voiceless content does little in the way of relationship building, which is a hallmark of great marketing.

To market at the same speed and quality as larger firms, you’re going to have to take a page out of their playbook. That means outsourcing (but with a twist). Outsourcing can provide access to the scale you need, without breaking the bank or straining your mental sanity from hours of writing, editing, and distributing content (a 2020 Orbit Media study found that the average blogger spends nearly four hours on a single blog post).

The good news is that you can bridge both worlds — scale and personality — to create efficient, cost effective, and engaging content for your business. Here’s how to outsource marketing without losing your voice.

Apply Marketing Scale to Your Firm

Busy advisors can follow three steps to leverage outsourcing and continue to include their own unique voice:

1. Lead your marketing strategy

There’s nothing more frustrating for an investor than getting a tone-deaf and irrelevant marketing message. No one knows your business or the people you serve as well as you do. Use that knowledge to guide the overarching marketing strategy. By being a steward of your audience, you’ll be setting yourself up for success from the beginning.

2. Add your voice to outsourced communications

Just as content volume is key to enabling growth, content relevance and relatability is key to building meaningful relationships. Here’s how that works:

  • Blogs and Articles: An outsourced marketing partner should be able to deliver content that will interest and educate your investors. You can maximize that insight for your business — without spending a lot of time — by adding a paragraph or two of your own that brings your brand to life.
  • Emails: To optimize emails for your firm that are written by someone else, localize the email for your specific market. Add a section about your community involvement, or find imagery that reflects your region. By fine tuning the email with your audience’s environment in mind, you’ll better resonate with them and increase engagement.
  • Social Posts: Success on social media is highly dependent upon frequent, consistent posting. Lean on a marketing partner to fill volume with insightful, educational, and brand-building posts. But, to take your social media presence to the next level, regularly add content that reflects you. Post updates about your team, share pictures from a family vacation, and comment on community events. Social media is, by name, social. Engaging your audience with personal content humanizes your brand and fosters engagement.

3. Own a channel

Your personal story is deeply ingrained in your business. The last thing you will want to do is downplay it. A great strategy to pay homage to your insight, while still enabling scale, is to pick a single channel to own. This can be a blog, a video series, or podcast. By concentrating your efforts on one channel, you’ll create a more manageable process that doesn’t get in the way of your core advisory functions.

It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the importance of a solid digital marketing strategy. Investors are looking for answers, and advisors can give them the direction they need in these unpredictable times.

By leveraging advisor marketing services to help you build a scalable marketing strategy tailored to your style, you can be the one to reach the investors who need to hear from you.

At the same time, you’ve got a unique voice that people need to hear and you shouldn’t hold back from using it. Just don’t allow yourself to get buried in so many marketing tasks that you lose focus on your most important work of serving clients.

By combining outsourced marketing with authentic marketing, you truly can have the best of both worlds — massive awareness and meaningful connection.

Robert Sofia is one of three co-founders and the CEO of Snappy Kraken, a marketing solution that helps financial professionals build connections with current and prospective clients through content and a turnkey process.

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