Marketing success is paramount for sustainable advisory firm growth. Through the years, I've seen two camps of thought on how best to achieve that growth and rise to the top.
The first camp prefers heavy outsourcing. Prevalent among larger firms, the outsourced model lends itself to an ample volume of professional and informational content. But for the most part, it lacks a strong personality. The second camp has bought into the value of a unique voice. These advisors tend to create all marketing content themselves. And while this content is steeped in personality, creating it in-house is extremely time consuming.
So which camp is right? Neither! In fact, placing yourself in one or the other greatly limits your growth potential. For most advisors, a hybrid solution that marries scale and voice in one easy-to-implement strategy will maximize marketing effectiveness.
Lessons From Large Firms
Think about how your marketing looks different than the marketing of the largest firms, like wirehouses and robo advisors.
These large firms do two things well:
- Lead with volume, which is essential for both awareness and to support the various stages of the sales funnel
- Excel in top-of-funnel engagement (i.e. educational content focused on getting leads), where voice and personality are least important
This approach to advisor marketing is made possible through a reliance on professional writers who can easily churn out content, albeit under a nondescript corporate tone. The problem is that voiceless content does little in the way of relationship building, which is a hallmark of great marketing.
To market at the same speed and quality as larger firms, you're going to have to take a page out of their playbook. That means outsourcing (but with a twist). Outsourcing can provide access to the scale you need, without breaking the bank or straining your mental sanity from hours of writing, editing, and distributing content (a 2020 Orbit Media study found that the average blogger spends nearly four hours on a single blog post).
The good news is that you can bridge both worlds — scale and personality — to create efficient, cost effective, and engaging content for your business. Here's how to outsource marketing without losing your voice.
Apply Marketing Scale to Your Firm
Busy advisors can follow three steps to leverage outsourcing and continue to include their own unique voice: