How financial advisors can build a brand

Financial advisors face challenges with marketing their brands effectively, but experts say simple strategies can grow their reach and attract new clients.

And that process for advisors should begin internally in the form of careful self-examination, according to a panel of experts speaking at this week’s Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago. They acknowledged that it can be tough to stand out in the competition for people’s attention while navigating their regulatory obligations and, in some cases, the complications with how to market themselves or the large wealth management firms that employ them.

Furthermore, there is the simple problem that “personal branding is very uncomfortable,” said Susan Reilly, the president and founder of Reilly Connect, a strategic communications firm that works with companies in the financial services and other industries. In the essential search for the authenticity that will win the attention of their target audience with the potential to unlock organic growth, advisors need to “be very careful not to project who you think you’d like to be, versus who you really are,” Reilly said. That means advisors should think about what makes them passionate for the work, recall their personal stories in their careers or life more generally and identify the prospective clients that will get the most benefit from their services.

“You really have to be very deliberate and measured with your planning and your process. It’s almost like yoga or soul-searching, where you look at it from a 360-degree point of view,” Reilly said. “You have to be relatable.”

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A case study and a new acronym

She shared the example of young associates at a midsize law firm who were befuddled over how to present their brands as part of their company’s ambitious expansion plans. One of them turned out to have an experience that was perfectly applicable to his career and passions for his role assisting business owners in the agricultural industry with their succession plans: His father died when he was 17 and he had to take over his family’s farm while juggling going to college and attending law school. The story and a message centered around an idea Reilly described as, “I love rural America and I want to preserve it,” quickly attracted new clients, she said.

Thinking about their services from a client’s point of view using a common marketing acronym, WIIFM — “What’s in it for me?” — could also prove beneficial to building an advisor’s brand, according to Jacquelyn Reardon, the head of U.S. marketing for Franklin Templeton. For advisors, the key revolves around providing clients with the responses in a way that tells possible customers, “Hey, I know you really well, and I understand the things that you’re really concerned about and the challenges that you have,” she said.

Too often, advisors may send out a deluge of information about their qualifications and their tenure in the industry rather than homing in on the specific problems that they could solve for a particular group of clients. And they must put themselves at the forefront of their branding, rather than focusing on a large wealth management firm that is their employer, since “your clients are your clients, and they do business with you,” Reardon said. Finding a brand strategy pays off in the form of business and as a kind of internal guidepost for wealth management firms to keep at the center of their plans for the future.

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Talk to your asset management firm

As for Franklin Templeton itself, the firm has received “so many requests and inquiries” from advisors about content for high net worth clients, Reardon said. Breaking into a new client base requires “a new value proposition” and “thinking about all the touchpoints, too,” she said, citing considerations about office layouts, the public presentation of the brand and referral networks.

“They see an opportunity to go after an untapped or perhaps a different type of market,” she said. “Maybe you’ve been really successful for a couple decades in a core market that you’re focused on, but now you’re shifting.”

There are more free or low-cost tools designed to help advisors refine and disseminate brand messages than they may think, said Elizabeth Durkee, the global head of marketing for wealth in Morningstar’s asset management arm, Morningstar Investment Management. In addition to citing other panelists’ suggestions to consider their free social media presences and paid tools for post-boosting and audience targeting, she suggested advisors reach out to asset management firms for help.

For instance, Morningstar produces compliance-friendly content that advisors can simply use in their own marketing outreach. After the panel, the company handed out a worksheet to aid advisors in figuring out their personal brands by answering five questions: “Which client group do I understand best? What professions or life stages am I most familiar with? Are there underserved markets within my reach? What unique challenges do these groups face that I am equipped to address?” And, “How can I align my passions with the needs of those groups?”

READ MORE: 5 lessons for financial advisors on how to become ‘finfluencers’

Investing for the future

Even a step as basic as journaling on those kinds of topics can lead advisors to answers about how to present themselves to prospective clients, Durkee said.

“When you get to that point that you’ve got the message, it’s amazing what a magnet it is to the client that you want to work with,” she said. “Just take time for reflection to think through who you want to be to your audience.”

Technology like robo advisors and artificial intelligence is raising the stakes for advisors to engage in that level of thinking for the long term, according to Sol Sender, a brand strategist who is the former head of brand strategy for Morningstar and the lead designer of the logo of former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. 

“For people to bank on what they’ve been is incredibly risky,” Sender said. “That AI disruption is very real, and it’s coming for who you were. So who you’re going to be is increasingly important.”