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Written by: Mark Grandstaff
There has never been an easy way for financial advisors to describe what they do.
Marketers for financial advisory firms are circumscribed by regulations that limit what they can say, for a lot of very good reasons. You can’t tell people that you’re the only firm that gives its clients a Colgate smile and an eight foot vertical leap. You can’t make promises you might not be able to keep.
At the same time, the industry has decided on a series of designations as a shorthand for the educational rigor and integrity that an advisor possesses, and a roster of terms that attempt to describe the full breadth and depth of the client experience. Showcasing this language is one way to show prospects that you can be trusted with their financial futures, or so goes the thinking.
For a lot of very good, very understandable reasons, the language and brand identities of a lot of advisor firms often converges into a kind of mush that is difficult for a prospect to understand. I’ve seen this for a while, because I work at an integrated communications agency and get a front row seat to a lot of advisor branding. My employer Gregory recently quantified this sameness with its Cliche Crisis study. It’s worth a look, but the very short version is that we evaluated the websites of the CNBC Financial Advisor 100 and found nearly half of them used interchangeable language to describe themselves. Only six in the bunch stood out.
To be clear, these are measurably successful businesses. They are definitionally some of the best out there at what they do. So why is it so hard to avoid the same language as everyone else?
Like I said, marketers have real limits on what they’re allowed to say. But the discipline of formal marketing and brand-building is very new for an industry that is already fairly young, relative to other types of financial services. It is only very recently that firms have even had to think about standing out from the pack. When you were the only game in town, and financial advice consisted only of investment management for 100 basis points or more, there was no urgency. Indeed, we found that some of the oldest firms tended to wield brand language that could have come from any advisor firm on the planet.
The business looks quite different now, in ways that are self-evident for those of us inside it. Advisors have to justify their fees with a growing range of services. They need organic growth to either make a better case at the M&A deal table, or to build a moat of self sufficiency around their firms.
It’s hard to break out of the pack because a lot of marketers are still finding their sea legs in a space that has professionalized rapidly in the last six years. And to an extent, it is really impossible to escape the cliches.
For example, one of the words the Cliche Crisis Study surfaced again and again was “fiduciary.” Fiduciary status isn’t a bad thing. It is a pretty important area of distinction for an advisor! You don’t want to keep your fiduciary bona fides to yourself, because you need your prospects to know that your loyalties are with them, instead of the promise of a big commission if you sling a particular product their way.
But what do you do if everyone you compete with says they’re a fiduciary?
What if everyone in your market introduces themselves with stock images of rugged landscapes? What if you really, really mean it when you talk about providing comprehensive and holistic wealth planning, but so do your peers?
I think the value of a good marketing function right now is to pry at the answers to those questions. If you observe the advisor-client relationships and talk to the people who come to these businesses for financial guidance, you can start to see how those cliches are expressed. You see firsthand what your clients respond to and what advisor teams say they need. You get a sense for the way the firm culture is communicated. Good marketers can pick up these seeds of inspiration and cultivate them into a genuine brand footprint that shows you the people you’ll meet and the experience you will have as a client.
And the work never ends. Anyone who rolls a natural 20 and gets a genuine, stand-out brand with universal appeal will find themselves copied until they become a commodity. How many folks out there have wanted to be the Apple of their particular corner of professional services? I admit that adapting to the marketing meta feels like Sisyphus lugging his boulder up the hill, but when I’m fully rested and hydrated, it just feels like job security.
There is always going to be a need to evolve the way we present ourselves. The needs of clients will change over time. Business imperatives will change over time. There is always something new to try. I tend to find the best answer to the Cliche Crisis is one that is tailored to the individual business.
You want to speak directly to your ideal prospects, because you want to show them you understand their lives.
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