What DUCKS and Financial Planner Marketing Have in Common….

One of the complaints I hear most from financial planners is about the fact that they do some sort of marketing, Facebook ads, LinkedIn posts or even emails, or review reminder letters and they say to me, “Steve, this marketing caper just doesn’t work! It’s too hard and I’m not getting any traction…! I’m spending too much time and not enough ROE (Return On Effort).”

Have you ever felt like that before…?

The problem is that your marketing or client attraction content is trying to ‘get a new client’… or ‘get an appointment in the diary’…  or ‘get a client in for review’…!|

But when you think about it, that is NOT the function of marketing!That may be the ‘result’ you want, but it’s a massive leap for someone (especially someone you don’t know at all…) to say “I’m going to commit myself to an appointment with a scary financial planner that I don’t even know and who is probably going to rip me off or give me bad advice…. Yeah, sounds like a good idea! I might jump in and just do that…!”

Now that might sound a bit far-fetched, but that is the internal conversation going on in a prospects mind when they even ‘sniff’ any sort of marketing from you…

So you don’t want to ‘sell’ an appointment or a super rollover or an insurance policy (or anything else…).

Every step in your client attraction strategy is only going to ‘sell the next step’…!

That’s right; just make it safe to take the next step.

In fact I remember hearing this amazing guy, Justin Roth Marsh – who owns a company called Ballistix. They re-engineer sales processes for massive companies – large corporates. Maybe bigger than your FP business but the principle is the same….

He had this great quote and it goes something like:

“Every step in any sales process should only attempt to sell what it has a reasonable chance of selling…!”

And to me that makes sense, right?

But here’s what financial planners do all the time….

They market themselves to ‘suspects’ and straight away ask them to become clients.

They DON’T do it step by step by step….

The reason I have a Duck in this image is because when my kids were little – especially my eldest Brooke (who’s now 22…), we used to live near a park and she used to love feeding the ducks…!

And she’d heard that you could feed ducks.

So we went and bought the crappiest 2 dollar loaf of half stale bread we could find… and we went down to the park….

We looked over near the edge – near the water – and there was this big group of ducks! Which was great.

So what happened – she got really excited – she ripped open the bag, grabbed 3 or 4 pieces of this half stale bread in one hand… and she couldn’t wait – she ran down to the water as fast as she could, waving her hands around (well one hand really cos she had the bread in the other – but you get what I mean)…., and she was screaming out to the ducks “Here ducks! Come here Ducks! C’mon ducks, I’ve got the bread…!”

And she’s racing towards the ducks as fast as she can… she’s rushing towards them making all this noise….

Of course the ducks weren’t that keen on the bread and they scattered and freaked out and fled………….

And Brooke was really confused…

She was like “I’ve got the bread, I was calling for them, why’d they run away…?”

Well you know why (and it’s kind of obvious to us adults…).

I explained to Brooke the concept of ‘Stealth’ Marketing… (in 3 year old language of course J)

So we tried again…

What we did this time was that we found a park bench, just behind – they had like this war memorial statue there – and we went down to the water – like Hansel & Gretel and we laid down a ‘bread crumb trail’…!

We put some crumbs just near the ducks and we walked back a little bit and then we dropped some more crumbs and then again, a few more crumbs… all the way back, around the corner till eventually we got back to the bench, and 7 or 8 of these ducks had followed the trail. Then we dumped the rest of the bread right at our feet – almost like the ducks had ‘hit the jackpot’!

And sure enough, Brooke was so happy.

There were ducks everywhere, they were squawking around, ducks flying everywhere, feathers, all this noise, all the ducks getting stuck into this final jackpot of bread and even coming up to us at the end – when the bread had run out – wanting more and more and more….

And of course, that’s the way we did it every time we ever went back to the park to feed the ducks…!

Does that make sense?

So here’s why that worked!

Because we didn’t try to ‘jump’ straight to the end step….

We laid a breadcrumb trail – a cookie trail from where our prospects were initially to where we wanted them

See how that might work in your new prospect attraction…?

That’s what I want every single part of your marketing to attract new clients, to be like.

Suspects – we make them a low risk information offer (and that’s your Lead Magnet or your Money Magnet offer to get them to respond and become prospects).

Prospects – we make them a strategy session offer (or a quick chat on the phone or on Skype or Zoom).

Leads – that’s when they get to come in, meet with you and go thru your Conversion Conversation or your Meet & Greet or Discovery meeting (whatever you call your initial appointment).

Clients – in that Conversion meeting, we run the 3 x 3 grid – the 9 Box Conversion framework™ and we convert and engage from there….

But for now, I just want you to understand that in every step of your attraction process, we’re only selling the next logical step….

If you’d like to know a little bit more about the 9 Box Framework and how that fits into the process, just shoot me a rely or private message me and I’ll share it with you if you think it might help.

Don’t scare the ducks away…

Entice them in closer and engage with them ‘and you won’t get your fingers nipped!’ J.

Steve ‘buy fresh bread dad’ Salvia