How To Automate Your Financial Planner Marketing

In today’s Boost Your Business Blog, I want to give you a crash course in automating the marketing in your financial planning business.

There’s 2 ways you can do your marketing…

Number one – you can do things Manually.

Hands on.

One by one.

Sporadic.

Add hoc marketing that’s hard work and frankly – it’s too slow…

Or…. you can do things the automated way.

Use technology and just some smart marketing hacks to get the most out of your marketing and communication pieces.

That’s where we’re heading in todays training.

Stick around. Let’s do this together!

So it’s an ATTRACTION month inside Blackwing Profit and just to give give you a little bit of context.

In Coaching Club, we help financial planners make three strategic shifts.

The first one is to go from old-fashioned, manual prospecting to automated Authority marketing.

The second one is to switch from one-on-one advice to leveraged conversions

(one-to-many selling with webinars, seminars and workshops).

And the third shift is moving from time-for-money advising to a much more leveraged advice delivery model.

Today, I want to talk about the first of those shifts, which is to switch from manual prospecting…

You know the one…

The slow, hard, frustrating way of doing things…

To automated, ‘hands of’ type of prospect attraction that has people come to you – rather than you needing to push out and chase them.

See here’s the thing.

Manual prospecting is fine in terms of the leads that you generate.

One-on-one marketing typically has a higher propensity to convert and to do business with you.

That’s a fact.

If all you do is attract prospects one prospect at a time… then honestly, you’re conversion rate’s probably gonna be a little bit higher…!

The problem is that pretty soon, you run out of new people to meet and new people to bring in to your business and generate appointments!

You run out of opportunities… you run out of prospects.

And you lose momentum pretty quick.

So we need to ‘ramp’ things up a bit.

The other thing is that – the busier you get… – the more successful you get…

And the less time you’ve got to go around networking and finding new people to talk to.

To be honest, who wants to spend their knocking on doors, networking and handing out business cards right…?

So the alternative – instead of doing it the 1980’s way (manual, weird, pushy…) – is to switch into automated systems.

That’s what I want to give us a crash course on today.

If you think about all the things that you should be doing right in your biz right now…

There’s heaps that you need to be focused on right?

And even if you just take the marketing side of it…

I’m not asking you to make a list right now… but if you did that exercise around all the things you know you ‘should’ be doing marketing-wise, then the list’d look pretty lengthy wouldn’t it?

I need to be running webinars and workshops.

I need to be doing blogs and videos…

I need a way to get people to want to schedule appointments.

I need to follow up better with my existing leads.

I need a way to communicate – either daily or at least weekly or fortnightly or monthly with my list.

I need to be all over social media.

I need to be building more strategic alliance partners.

The list just goes on and on and on and on.

I need to be maximizing my LinkedIn, Facebook, email…

And if you actually make that list, pretty soon it’s a massive list of all the things you should be doing and like Tony Robbins says, “you end up shoulding all over yourself”.

You’re only one person.

You’re an amazing person – but you’re still only one person.

You can’t do it all manually.

So the challenge is you end up ‘shoulding’ all over yourself, and being inconsistent with your marketing.

It’s hard to be consistent doing it this way for three reasons:

Most financial planners don’t even know which strategies to work on.

It’s like – “I’m fine to build a system, but I don’t even know what strategies consistently work.”

They don’t have time to be putting these strategies in to

place.

They don’t have a system to install the strategies in – embed things into their business – so that they run every single day, every single week, every single month automatically.

Does that make sense?

So number one, don’t know what strategies work;

Number two, don’t have the time to run them every week and if we did want to automate, we’re not sure quite how.

And what’s the downside of all that?

Well, the downshot of all that is growing your financial planning business gets exhausting.

You get stressed out with a big, fat list of all the things you should be doing and you’re desperately always looking for that ‘one more client’.

I don’t know if that describes your journey so far, but if it even resonates a bit, I want to fix it right now today.

So the alternative to manual prospecting, which leaves you exhausted, stressed and overwhelmed, is…

Instead of hauling buckets of water into the jungle…, it’s to build a pipeline…

You’re gonna do a little bit of work up front to build a marketing system that consistently generates you leads and gets people warmed up and ready to work with you!!

The system you create works, so you don’t have to – because it’s run by either Robots or Elves…. and not not busy financial planners.

I read a great book called ‘Source Control’, where the guy said that, “systems are as reliable as people aren’t”.

There’s nothing wrong with YOU or your team or ME or my team.

But frankly, we’re all human and we drop the ball sometimes.

So, if we can have a system that works so you don’t have to, then it’s going to get done pretty much right every time.

When you have this system in place, it brings you leads and clients every single week and it’s the alternative to manual prospecting.

Its automated – hands-off consistency.

You don’t have to do your Education Based marketing… and your low-risk information offers every month….

Your seminar or webinar promotions, drip postcards, four-step e-mail campaigns, social media.

All that stuff is hard to do solo.

What we need to do is build an automated system that does this stuff for you. OK?

So I want to give you three principles right now for your carving out the time and making an automated system that works, and then I’m gonna recommend some of the systems to use and how to do it.

Principle #1: Work Hard Once

The first of our three hot principles today is work hard once.

A lot of people say, “Building these systems is gonna take time. It’s gonna be hard work.”

Well, yeah. It is gonna be some work!

But it’s certainly less hard work than running out of money and NOT having enough clients…

And it’s certainly less hard work than every single day having to crank out phone calls or be out there networking to find new people to talk to.

You’re going to work hard once – not every day, but just ONCE!!

If you think about marketing automation, the ideal time for you to have built an automated marketing system is a year ago, or two years ago, or when you first started your business….

But you didn’t because you were busy getting clients – which makes total sense.

The second best time to build an automated marketing system is today.

All I’m saying is that I want you to work hard once.

Just put in a little bit of time to build a system because once it’s built, it stays built and it generates new leads and enquiries every single week.

I’m really lucky. In the early days, I had no clue about any of this stuff.

To be honest, I sucked at IT and automation.

I was good at marketing, but I didn’t have a way to systemize this stuff.

I found myself running from one campaign to the next campaign…. with a series of patchy promotions. All just sporadically put together – no plan in sight.

But my coach Taki got me onto this idea that the solution was all in the automation.

I just built a series of simple systems. A couple of basic sequences (and I’ll walk you through a couple of them in a sec).

The upshot of that is that now, without me doing anything every single day – literally every day – I have people inquiring about joining our Coaching Club programs. Everyday!

And I’d love that to be the case for you too.

It’s only gonna happen if you go, “Well, this is worth doing and I’m gonna work hard once.”

It’s like a tree. You plant the seed, you look after it for a little bit and it grows and now you can sit under it in the shade forever.

So please, just do a little bit of hard work once.

Principle number two is to be the architect of your business.

Most financial planners are like the laborers in their business…

Running around doing all the marketing, the sales. The technical. The compliance. Too much admin, paperwork. All the back office stuff…

I don’t want you to DO the marketing.

I want you to BUILD the marketing!

When you’re the architect, you’re the one who’s got a sheet of paper out in front of you, mapping out how you want the sequence to go and then you can either install it yourself…

Or you can have someone help you with it – and they’re not as expensive as you think.

It just takes a little bit of time, a blank sheet of paper, and an idea about what you want your campaign to do step by step by step.

Honestly, I recommend mapping out these sequences with a pen & paper or a mind mapping tool or a flowchart tool if that’s how you like to do it.

But for me, it always starts on paper because it’s just easier that way and then someone can move it into a system for me later.

I personally work analog and then I go digital.

Be the architect.

I want you to design out your systems instead of just, “Oh, crap. I need another client.”

Principle #3: Lay Out A Path

What I want you to do with your automation is lay out their pathway.

Think about the journey that a prospect goes through all the way from when they first hear your name…

Maybe they opt in for something off your website…

They get followed up.

Gets invited to some kind of conversion tool.

Either proceeds with you or doesn’t (hopefully they do…) and then gets looked after as a client.

You need marketing and nurture systems for each of these three phases.

Number one, how you Attract – in other words, how you generate the leads.

Number two, how you Convert – you need a system for inviting people on to your conversion tool, making sure they show up…

You obviously need a system for actually converting them and turning that prospect into a fee-paying client…

And then you need a follow up system…

Thirdly, you need a system for delivering.

What I want to do right now in terms of helping you choose from manual prospecting to automated marketing is give you a quick road map of some simple campaigns you can put in place for market, convert and deliver.

If you’re following along, you can draw this out, too.

Obviously, in 10 minutes I haven’t got time to go in to everything in detail but I want to give you a framework.

You can decide if you need more help on the marketing side or on the sales side or the delivery side.

Let’s just label these.

We’ve got Market, Convert, and Deliver.

I’m going to give you the three first campaigns that I get my Blackwing Profit clients to install.

The first thing you need is a system for when somebody first makes contact.

We need a way to deliver great value and get people to engage with you while the emotions are hot.

That campaign is called an Engagement Campaign.

So when someone first opts in, it gives them maybe a series of free videos that they can watch over a period of four to six days…

Or it gets a conversation started…

Maybe it invites people to an event you’re doing…

Whatever you want your first interaction to be.

So we need an Engagement campaign.

The second thing that you need is a system for Nurture Campaign, which is a long-term nurture & ongoing education system.

A communication rhythm where you decide – every day or every week or every fortnight, I’m gonna be sending something useful to my guys and it’s gonna educate and it’s gonna invite.

It’s going to be highly value, really simple to access and it’ll have an invitation to a really simple next step every single time.

If you ever received some of my e-mails, they’re a lot of great stories with a little “P.S. here’s some options for us to do stuff together” at the end.

So nurture is the second piece you need.

So far, all we’ve done is broadcast it at people.

But one of the little tactics we use at Blackwing is that we connect with people personally.

You might send them a quick e-mail which says, “Hey. I saw you came by my site the other day. What’s the biggest challenge you’ve got around growing your super fund right now?”

People will reply back, and all of a sudden you’re in a conversation and you can move people through your process from there.

In terms of conversions, they go like this:

Attract – we’re going to know what our conversion tool is and attract.

Let’s say it’s to a workshop we’re hosting.

It might be a one-on-one appointment and that’s completely fine.

It might be a Webinar or a quick 15-minute call – and they’re fine too.

But we need a campaign for attracting, so you need some promotional e-mails and a Landing Page that we send people to, to register for your event or schedule a meeting or a call.

Once they’ve registered, there’s no guarantee that they’ll show up, so we need an automated campaign to get them to stick and make sure they arrive.

That’s the STICK follow up e-mails reminding them about the event and what’s gonna be awesome about it.

At the end of the event, they’re either gonna have proceeded, taken the next step – or not (or not even showed up at all), so we need a clean-up or a FOLLOW UP campaign to get them to take whatever the appropriate next step is.

When it comes to delivery, if you’re talking about a leveraged advice program and On-boarding, often it’s got a drip welcome sequence… which might be over a period of a couple of weeks before you meet.

In my case for Blackwing Profit members, it’s a First 100 Days automated sequence campaign.

You need a system for loving your clients’ customer-service-wise, some touches points (maybe some phone calls, some e-mails, some extra love)…

Does that make sense?

These are the marketing automation campaigns that we work on in Coaching Club and we’ve actually built some of those for people, so they can literally just click and install them in your XPlan or Active Campaign or whatever your marketing CRM is….

Mail Chimp if you’re looking for something basic.

But even if you don’t have an automated system, these are the processes you want to start with – even if you have to do them manually to get you going…!

Let’s do a quick recap.

To move from manual to Automated, there are three key principles:

Work hard once.

Be the architect – like put a little bit of time in at the start (maybe a half a day on Marketing Monday) to be the architect of what happens in your business and not just the builder all the time…

Pave their path around marketing, around conversions, around delivery like I just walked you through.

That puts you in a place to choose.

For your financial planning business, do you want to choose manual prospecting – and do it the slow, hard, tiring way…?

Or do you want to get smart, systemize a little bit and work on automated marketing? Free up time & capacity but also get a better result from your prospect attraction…!

In terms of next steps, here are the three things I’d suggest if I had to give you three action steps:

– Go find yourself a good Automation CRM.

Get yourself a good database program that you can use to send e-mails out.

** We use Ontraport, which is an amazing system, very sophisticated.

It runs just under $300 a month.

Or you can start with something like Mail Chimp – pretty basic but it’ll give you some of the functionality you need as a starting point.

I think that starts at US$10 bucks a month.

But do your research and get yourself a good CRM system.

– Put all of your clients & prospects in it and segment them well from a marketing and communications perspective…

If you haven’t’ already done this, it’s super basic.

You want to segment in at least four groups.

You want clients.

You want people who have been exposed to your conversion tool.

They’ve had a one-on-one session with you or they’ve attended your webinar or workshop and you’ll market to them a little bit differently.

Then you’ve got people who have maybe registered for that event but not showed up yet…

You want to have a group that are the untapped people who haven’t done anything at all with you yet.

At minimum, you want those four segments in your database.

Use a campaign checklist.

When it comes time to actually building some of the campaigns, there’s a checklist that you can use.

I’ll give you that and I’ll give you a download link underneath this video if you like.

It’s just an automation checklist.

It has a list of the different campaigns.

You should be doing some of the ones I’ve talked about and a couple of others and give yourself half a day a week to actually build these things out (or get them built out for you…).

Guys, in terms of marketing automation, remember, I used to suck at this.

In the early days, we hunted for clients one by one by one. Slow, hard & tiring.

Then I learned marketing and strategies that made things a ton easier.

We had some really good campaigns we could run with.

The challenge was that I always used to run out of time and I wasn’t consistent with it.

The missing piece for me was marketing automation.

Do that and it’ll set you up to win.

So that’s your Boost Your Business Marketing tip for this week.

Think about the next logical step for you.

Make a decision and get it finally sorted.

Reach out for help or even to ask a question if you like.

I’m totally happy to help or to point you in the right direction if I can.

Anyway, that’s it for this week.

Have a cracker of a week ahead.

If you got some value out of this video, do me a favour.

Hit the Like button.

Ask me a question in the Comments box…

Smash the Share button and share it with your LinkedIn or Facebook connections if you think it might help some other financial planners…

I’d love you to spead the love…

Have a great week this week.

Stay Awesome

And we’ll talk soon.