Financial advisor is also referred to as insurance advisor. He is a professional who offers financial advice to clients on retirement planning, investing and safeguarding against risks.
Financial advisors use their knowledge, expertise and skills to offer clients information on an ideal insurance plan. They study, evaluate, recommend and sell insurance plans to clients based on the needs of the clients.
Difference between a Financial Advisor and an Insurance Agent:
A financial advisor takes an overall view of your needs and guides you with advice which suits and protects your requirements and finances. While an insurance agent is more focused on selling the product of an insurance company to you. A financial advisor treats you as the client while for an insurance agent, it is the insurance company which is the client and you are a customer.
Marketing Ideas:
The opportunities and avenues ahead of a financial advisor are limitless. At the same time, he also faces several challenges and stiff competition. A financial advisors needs to be market savvy, well informed of the developments in his/her field and well aware of the goings on in his/her neighborhood.
What would be required of a financial advisor to survive and thrive? Here are a few ideas and strategies:
1. Social Media Presence
LinkedIn is considered an important social media platform for professionals. It helps you build connections and network with other professionals across the globe who share your interests and ideas. In much the same way, it can act as a powerful tool to promote your financial advisory skills among the residents in your local surroundings.
Networking through LinkedIn is also an effective way of building your insurance industry mailing list and insurance agents’ database.
Advisors could also leverage the beneficial aspects of other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for insurance and financial marketing.
2. Be Active Locally
- Speak at public events
An advisor needs to be pro-active and take any opportunity that is offered to speak at gatherings. This is a surefire way of building a reputation and persona in the nearby community.
- Network within your community
As an advisor, you need to take the lead to organize and host events. When you host events, any local organization or business would be interested to accept an offer to sponsor the event. So, your role is in conceptualizing the event, turn up, offer tips from your knowledge and expertise and make new connections.
- Be in touch with your neighborhood businessmen
A businessman is a prominent figure in a community and his network of friends and associates can be substantial. Being well acquainted with such an individual can give you easy access to his contacts.
- Connect with journalists
While you are making efforts to be a major role player in your community, keep the local journalists in the loop. They can be of immense value in providing news and coverage for your activities and make them reach far and wide.
- Reach out to local celebrities.
Local celebrities can also act as influencers. If you are being seen with them, your stock rises among the people in your locality and they are likely to endorse the preferences of their beloved celebrity. If you also get the celebrity to support you vocally, it’ll go a long way in building trust in you and converting potential clients.
There is a saying: “if you want something done, ask a busy person.” By making your presence felt among the people in your locality, it is easier to build trust and that encourages people in your community to start business contacts with you.
Be very visible in your immediate surroundings. Be noticed.
3. Bond with your existing clients
Never take your existing clients for granted. Always stay in touch with them and keep them within your network of communication. Existing client are the ones who lead you to new clients through recommendations and word-of-mouth publicity.
4. Start a blog
Blogs serve to educate your clients and prospects (potential clients) on matters of financial importance and would also serve as a reminder to them that they need to be doing business with you. Blogs are a highly effective way to convert your leads into clients.
An initiative along the same lines would be to start a fortnightly or monthly newsletter. This achieves the very same things as that would be done by a blog.
5. Email marketing
One very effective tool to implement in this marketing strategy is Email automation. Email automation is the procedure of sending a business or commercial message en masse. Through this step, you can reach out to the entire group of subscribers (existing and prospective clients) on your entire mailing list in one go.
For more info: How Email Automation Helps B2B Companies Generate More Leads
Email marketing can help you bolster your insurance industry mailing list and insurance agents’ database and extend the reach of your information significantly.
While we undertake email marketing, we need to pay heed to CCPA Compliance.
CCPA Compliance:
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) focuses on making sure organizations have a business purpose for why they need personal information while enabling Californians to readily request, delete, or protect their personal information (PI) collected and governed by a business.
For more info: What is CCPA Compliance?
6. Specialization
Specialization is about understanding one’s uniqueness. In other words, financial advisors need to focus on their strengths and highlight them when they communicate with their clients. Specialization makes one stand out from a crowd. Instead of spreading oneself thin going after a gamut of marketing strategies, advisors need to narrow down on their core ideas. In the long run, this is bound to yield stellar results.
Coda:
A financial advisor needs to adhere to old-fashioned virtues like honesty, transparency and straightforwardness. An advisor needs to be a man of many talents. If advisors play their roles well, they are bound to be rewarded handsomely. When dealing with clients, financial advisors need to highlight the aspects which are mutually beneficial to both the parties and create win-win situations.
