Maximize Advisor Success: 5 Essential Marketing Responsibilities to Delegate

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As an independent financial advisor, you’re likely responsible for many different aspects of your business—from sales to operations, to marketing and more. However, one key commonality we see with the most successful advisors and business owners that we work with is their ability to identify and focus all energy on their most essential two to three activities, then delegate the rest. For many, delegating the marketing responsibilities to an in-house marketing person(s) or an outsourced marketing team is one of the first areas to shift responsibilities. Freeing you up from these activities will help you to maximize the success of your marketing dollars and create more time to meet with clients.

Here are five critical marketing job functions that every financial planning practice needs to fulfill. Make sure you’re firm has a key point person (other than you) responsible for each initiative.

1. Lead Generation: From event marketing to digital lead generation, this job function is essentially in charge of filling your calendar. They need to be on top of what you’re doing, when you’re doing it and for how much. New business opportunities need to be coming in throughout the year, and they need to track how much was spent on each lead generation activity and the cost per lead. This critical data is essential to ensure your lead generation activities are consistently refined and improved so that you’re concentrating more on those things that produce the greatest amount of leads and the lowest cost per acquisition.
2. Public Image Development: Seeking out media opportunities for yourself is likely not one of your key functions; you should just be ready to accept an opportunity once it’s offered. This job function is in charge of getting your name out in the public—from media recognition of the firm, to resource opportunities allowing you to display your expertise on financial topics to local, national and industry media, to award nominations and more. There are many opportunities to elevate your status through media and organizations, and this point person is there to make sure you get the recognition you deserve.
3. Digital Communications: This person is in charge of your digital presence. This would include your website, its content and optimization; blog development, posting and optimization; growing your networks and posting to your social media accounts; enhancing your listing and search results and similar. In a nutshell, if there is an opportunity for you to be on the web, this job function is responsible for making it happen. Because of these efforts, when you Google your name, company name or even “financial advisor in <your city here>” your name will be one of the first to pop up.
4. Database Management & Outreach: By far the most overlooked job function by most financial advisory firms; your clients are someone else’s prospects and your prospects may have not moved forward with you yet… but chances will be much better that they do if you continue to communicate with them. This job function is in charge of maintaining your contact management system, developing email sequences to drip on new leads and long-term nurture sequences to continue to market to those who expressed interest in your firm in the past, but still haven’t move forward. This person would also be sure that your current clients are receiving regular communication from you and your firm, keeping you top of mind.
5. Trafficker: This job function is to keep all the aforementioned responsibilities organized, integrated and on track. If your PR person created an opportunity for you to be in the media, your database may be interested in learning about this. Your lead generation person may want to include this some of their activities, and your digital communications person certainly needs to leverage this on the website and social media channels. The key to making all this happen is having a centralized person in charge of overseeing all activities.
6. BONUS person: Yes, this could be a luxury, but easily outsourced. If you produce custom content, a copywriter is an integral part of the marketing job functions. Ideally, your copywriter is familiar with content development for all areas of marketing: advertising and lead generation, PR, content marketing, client communications and similar.

It’s all connected, it’s all critical and it’s all designed to get you, the advisor, doing what you do best—seeing and helping as many people as possible with their investment and financial plans. A team approach, whether in-house or outsourced, will get you closer to your win. And a winning team will lead you to your ultimate goal of success.