Financial advisors have never had more control over how they market their practice. From digital content to in-person events, you are in the driving seat of your business growth like never before – but that freedom can feel overwhelming.
Many advisors experience “analysis paralysis” when it comes to marketing. They feel unable to identify which channels or tactics to focus on, with the result that 85% never even develop a proper marketing strategy.
This article solves that problem by providing a proven framework to plan and implement effective marketing. In just three steps, you will be able to identify which activities to focus on and ensure there is plenty of time to put them into action.
1. Define Your Marketing Objectives
The foundation of any marketing strategy is a set of clear objectives that organize and drive your activity. But let’s be clear: “Growth” is not a useful objective. It is simply too vague to direct concrete action – which is what your objectives must do.
Instead, your objectives must help break marketing into manageable chunks. The easiest way to achieve this is to focus on statements that have two parts:
- An action: What you plan to do
- An outcome: What the action will achieve
Examples of this include:
- “We want to delight our clients so much that they talk to other clients about our services”
- “We want to deepen brand awareness within our community so that people proactively reach out to learn about our services”
These objectives immediately give you a target audience (existing clients, your community) and a concrete outcome (referrals, inbound leads). This means you can start taking active steps to achieve the objective – which brings us to our next step.
2. Tie Your Objectives to a Monthly Plan
Lots of advisors struggle to develop a marketing plan because they assume it needs to be perfect. They want to develop a 12-month masterplan that will answer all their questions and guarantee results – but that simply isn’t realistic.
Once again, our goal is to make things simpler and more concrete: what are you going to do this month to meet your objective? This gives you a clear, manageable timeline (one month) and a concrete aim (meet our objectives)
Schedule a monthly meeting to assess your objectives, measure the last month’s success, and determine which activities to focus on in the coming weeks. Every objective should have corresponding “coaching questions” to help you develop these action steps.
For example, let’s imagine your objective is to delight clients so they recommend your practice. Your coaching questions could be:
- Which clients should we surprise this month?
- Which clients have milestone events we can recognize this month?
- What expectations do our clients have – and how can we exceed them?
- What needs or wants have we noticed in recent client meetings – and how can we meet them without being asked?
Answering these questions will produce a set of action items that form your month's marketing plan – and must then be implemented systematically.
3. Time-Block Your Marketing
You now need to ensure your plan is consistently implemented, but this is the hurdle many advisors struggle with most. You have limited time and resources to focus on marketing, which often means marketing is pushed back or simply deprioritized. In fact, 85% of advisors say a “lack of time” is their biggest marketing obstacle.
You can overcome this problem by using a systematic approach:
- Put all marketing action items into your CRM
- Assign them to individuals within your team
- Instruct all team members to block out time to complete their action items
This ensures everybody can find space in their schedule ahead of time, as well as ensuring there is clear responsibility and accountability for specific activities. For example, your admin assistant may set aside 30 minutes every morning to send messages designed to delight existing clients – helping achieve your objective of increasing referrals. Similarly, you may block a few hours in your calendar to produce an FAQ on recent regulatory changes that will build brand awareness – and ultimately generate inbound leads.
A Complete System to Maximize Marketing Impact
The system outlined here is designed to eliminate analysis paralysis and make marketing feel manageable. It compromises three simple steps:
- Identify concrete objectives
- Turn them into action items
- Time-block action items on a monthly basis
But of course, there is plenty more to consider if you want to take your marketing to the next level – and that is why we created our Marketing Toolkit. Based on the most reliable sources, it distills the latest research on advisory marketing and over a decade’s experience into a simple, digestible guide to help you:
- Develop a powerful value statement
- Understand your audience better than other advisors
- Create a comprehensive communication strategy that covers the entire marketing funnel
It takes less than 10 minutes to read and features numerous exercises and templates to support your marketing process.
Want to acquire and retain more clients in 2025? Download the complete guide for free today.
