5 Uncomfortable Marketing Ideas to Try This Week

Happy Wednesday everybody. We are in I guess week four right now of this crisis, so I hope you all are hanging in there. Thank you for continuing to engage with me via these Wednesday wisdoms. I'm going to be doing a live webinar on Friday around digital prospecting and using LinkedIn and social platforms to generate business right now, maybe doing that with another consultant on Fridays. So register below. And likely next week I'm going to be doing my Wednesday wisdom live, so if you want to join me for lunch and interact with me and ask questions and hear me talk about best practices, I'd love to have you. The last thing I'm going to say before I get into the content is we are offering complimentary coaching sessions to the first couple of people who apply. It's with our incredible coach, Katie McKenna. Many of you may work with her. If you are struggling to really prioritize, to think about your powerful role during this time, to think about how to translate some of the best practices you're working on now into sort of your regular day to day when this goes back to normal, you will definitely benefit from having a conversation with Katie. So sign up in the link below.

Okay, so my content for today, I'm going to do something a little bit fun, a little bit different. I just want to give you five things that may have felt uncomfortable for you to try and maybe I've been talking to you about them for a while, during regular times. But because we're in such odd and uncertain times now, it would be the time to try them and feel a little bit uncomfortable. And I want you to get into the habit of doing a couple of things with your teams on a weekly basis. One of them is identifying the three to five activities that you're going to try this week, either via social media, either via a call to your top client or using digital channels and your website to reach the audience.

So something that you're going to commit to doing now that maybe you've procrastinated on or felt uncomfortable doing in the past. So here are the five things and these are ideas I've heard from other advisors that are working. The first is I want you to record one video talking about your firm and your perspective on wealth management. There's never been a better time than now to get used to speaking to people via your computer or your phone. Many advisors have been reluctant to do this, primarily because compliance has been so difficult to deal with at their firms. I predict that we are going to see a massive change in that over the next couple of weeks. As we grow accustomed to doing business virtually, firms and back offices are simply going to have to catch up to support advisors in dealing with clients and prospects this way. They have to, otherwise, they will see a lot of business fall off and their bottom lines will be impacted.

So getting used to engaging in prospecting via social media. Start now advisors by just recording one video. I use an app called Bomb Bomb, probably a compliance nightmare, but just use your iPhone. Record a quick video, use Zoom. Zoom is great for recording screens and videos. Just record one for two minutes with you talking about your firm and talking about your perspective on wealth management. And I would challenge you to have each of your team members do the same. And then you can use your Friday session to share those videos and see how aligned you are in terms of how you talk about the firm. And so you have the one purpose of using it to coalesce the team around the common purpose and make sure you're all talking about the firm the same way. But then you can hopefully get those videos compliance approved and actually use them on your website.

So that's the first thing. The second thing is, send a survey out to your clients. Many advisors talk about wanting to do this and wanting to engage their clients in conversations about their service, but they don't actually get around to doing it. Set up something on Brainshark or Survey Monkey. Super easy to use, with a couple of questions asking clients about how they're feeling right now, about how they feel your team has responded to the crisis, what they're most worried about, what they value the most from the relationship with you and what you could be doing to help them more during this time. Hopefully, you get in the habit of doing this on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind the consumer is used to receiving surveys and feedback forms through virtually every company that they interact with. We're constantly engaging with, let's say Google, and then receiving a quick survey that asks us a bunch of questions.

So the consumer has gotten used to that form of interacting with companies. Really powerful for you to do it right now. You can generate some really important information that you can use to inform the way in which you service these clients moving forward. The third thing is text with people connected to your clients. So for example, if you have a client and you have a pretty generic relationship with their kids, now may be a good time to just text one of their gen X or gen Y kids and say, hey, just checking in. I spoke to your mom and dad last week. Is there anything we can do for you? If you have a client who's brought a friend to a seminar or an event or you've gotten together and you never circled back to really solidifying that relationship or the relationship hasn't manifested, now might be a good time to just send a text and say, hey, just checking in.

Anything I could do for you? Your wife or your kids or your husband or your kids. Okay, so texting people who aren't in our usual, I'll call it, communication sphere. The fourth thing, approach a COI about offering a value add webinar or conference call for them. For those of you who work with accountants, estate attorneys, anyone who touches clients during a time of money in motion or during a time when clients are experiencing tremendous emotional turmoil. Offering to hold a free webinar where you get on for 30 minutes live, like I do with some of my client firms. And just simply offering some words of advice. What should you be sort of concerned with now? How do you filter through the noise? You know, what's the reality of what we don't know? I've been saying this since the beginning of this crisis. The one group of people who we can turn to as Americans and elsewhere. Can't forget my lovely Canadian clients. Who we can turn to, as Americans and Canadians, who are licensed and certified to help us navigate this, are financial advisors.

They're the only group uniquely positioned to help people manage this. And of course, we have doctors and stuff like that, but financial advisors as it relates to our livelihoods and our wealth, etcetera. So putting yourself out there to partner with a COI can help really solidify the relationship. Now the last thing I'll say, number five, so we have recorded just one video, and your team as well. Getting used to talking on camera. And I would do the first one, two minutes, talking about value proposition.

Second… By the way, for those of you who have advisors on your team, junior advisors, and you don't do any sort of sales training, here's a great way to start doing that. Send a survey to clients. Doesn't just have to be to top clients, text with people in your client's network who you otherwise wouldn't have any reason to communicate with and it would feel sort of inauthentic if you did. Number three, approach a COI about offering a value add service without it feeling like you want something in return, by the way. And then finally host a live session.

I've seen so many of my boomer and silent generation advisers on Facebook live, on Twitter live. Kudos to you for doing something that's uncomfortable to you and it's not something you've ever thought you would do. The biggest fear advisors have and salespeople in general have, myself included, was doing that, is that you'll schedule it and like no one will show up. And how will people notice, sign on. And tools like Zoom are incredibly easy to set up. You can blast out a link and what I'll tell you is you have absolutely nothing to lose during this time and everything to gain by putting yourself in a position of being a thought leader. I hope that was helpful. Feel free to reach out to me if I could help in any way. Otherwise, I will see you live next week, same place, same time. Take care.