Updated on: July 20, 2022

While it may not be everyone’s favorite task, we all know that marketing yourself and your financial planning business is essential to landing and keeping the clients you want. But how do you walk the line between educational marketing that engages clients and the type of self-promotion that sends them running in the other direction?

By answering the question every existing and potential client will ask themselves when engaging with your marketing: “What’s in it for me?” If you can answer that question—and get to the root of your clients’ needs—you will be able to create content that not only resonates with your clients but drives engagement and retention.

Understanding Client Needs: “What’s in It for Me?”

Your audience is diverse. Each client comes with their own particular set of needs. Since your set of services addresses those needs in different ways, your marketing content should do the same. To determine the type of content that fits each client, look to the personas you’ve built for your clients and think about what you know about each one. What matters to each of your clients? What are their life goals, financial wellness goals, expectations, or timelines?

Personalize Your Marketing Strategy

Once you have identified the different needs of your client based on their personas, it’s time to apply a personalized approach to your marketing strategy catered to each of these personas. Personalization can be challenging, but it is paramount to your marketing success as a financial professional. And believe it or not, personalization and scalability go hand in hand when building a marketing program focused on engagement, education, and adding value.

There are a few ways to personalize your marketing strategy:

• Segmentation: Breaking your overall client list into smaller groups you can market to based on demographic commonalities.
• Customization: Customized emails, online experiences, and product or service recommendations that automatically incorporate client data points like name, company name, and family member names.
• One-to-one Messaging: The ultimate form of customization, where your message is targeted to a specific person.

To improve scalability, review individual client journeys and standardize each approach with clients that have similar backgrounds, goals, and plans. Then, automate your processes using marketing automation tools that customize and automatically send marketing materials based on criteria and trigger points you’ve identified in the client journey. This will help you streamline your client engagement efforts and make scaling personalization easier.

From Educating Clients to Building Lasting Relationships

As financial professionals compete to deliver better client experiences, it’s important to remember that marketing is a crucial piece of that experience.

Personalized marketing with a focus on education ensures that every interaction with you meets or exceeds your clients’ expectations, which drives engagement, builds trust, helps improve satisfaction and retention, and builds your sales pipeline.

If you want to take a deeper dive on this topic, read our recent eBook Elevating Your Financial Planning Business: Improving Client Engagement and Experience Through Marketing.

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