Marketers, how valuable are you to advisors?
July 25, 2013 by Blog by Kathran Martin
You know that connecting with advisors is essential to a growing business.
No connections = no growth. Period. End of story.
How do you cut through all the noise and build connections with the right advisors?
Michael Lazerow, a serial entrepreneur, is currently CMO for Salesforce Cloud. He knows a little about selling and marketing in today’s markets.
So, what is the new golden rule of selling? For Lazerow, it boils down to one word: engagement. Engagement is shaping up to be 2013’s business buzzword of the year. But what does it mean?
For Lazerow, the goal of engagement for a marketer is to figure out the answer to the question, “How do you, as a brand, get into the conversation?” The answer includes producing genuinely interesting content that people want to share on Facebook or talk about around the water cooler. Obviously, that is easier said than done.
Content? Is talking about your product features or technology bundle really a conversation starter?
When you lead with product or service, you find yourself having to shout to be heard above all the thousands of other product messages that flood into an advisor’s life.
When was the last time you had a conversation with a stranger who stood there yelling at you? If you are just blasting emails, webinars, ads and page-takeovers that talk about your product, aren’t you essentially yelling for attention?
You need a conversation starter.
“Game changing!” “The industry’s best!” “Revolutionary!”
None of these seems like the way you would start a conversation with a friend, do they? But these are the openers in emails from three different groups that we received in just the last week. So what’s interesting to advisors, right now? What’s on the mind of advisors? What are they talking about?
Competitive advantage.
Advisors are being challenged to differentiate themselves like never before. Schwab’s Investment Advisor Outlook recently reported that advisors felt differentiating themselves and promoting their brand were their two biggest concerns by a wide margin.
Smaller numbers of affluent clients, more competition, increasing costs — these are headwinds that advisors are facing, and they represent opportunity for you. Help them address their concerns and voilà, you’ll see a flood of connectivity!
The following questions are ones that we get all the time, and addressing them has really become a core of our business:
- • How do we turn the advisors’ challenge into our benefit? • What’s the narrative? • What’s value add we can offer that will motivate them? • How do we communicate with advisors so they hear our message?