Sam Turner, Head of Digital at ClientsFirst, shares a practical approach to help you achieve your business goals
In 2016, we surveyed local businesses to gauge how successful they felt their marketing was. Those businesses were asked whether they had a marketing strategy in place. Amazingly, even though respondents told us they were actively marketing themselves, 53% of businesses did not have a strategy in place.
A marketing strategy is a vital starting point for any firm engaged in marketing activity – including financial planning businesses. Working to a strategy forces you to consider whether your current actions are aligned to the business goals you want to achieve.
Starting points
Any effective marketing strategy must begin with your business goals. If it does not, then the strategy will essentially be ‘running blind’ and you will lose the ability to accurately assess the success or failure of the strategy when it reaches its conclusion.
This is particularly true of adviser firms. Some firms tell us, for example, that they are not particularly concerned with gaining a lot of new clients, which is a typical business objective used to underpin many marketing strategies. If not this, then what is your strategy striving for? Perhaps it is better client retention or engagement?  These objectives are very different to client acquisition, as are the strategies which support them, so make sure you’re clear on what you want your business to achieve over a defined timeframe.
Document this at the top of your marketing strategy as a ‘we’ statement, for example:…
Business objective – In the next 12 months, we are going to add 12 new clients who match our ideal client profile
Routes to market
Next your marketing strategy needs to consider routes to market. You will know some of these straightaway. Some will be less familiar to you.
The key here is balance. The old adage of ‘if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ applies, but don’t just select five routes to market that are new to you and expect to master them straight away. Choose a mix of familiar and successful routes which you’ve followed before and new ideas which you’d like to pursue. A typical selection could look like this…
- Referrals
- Local press
- Social media advertising
- Production of new market research
Each route to market that you choose to follow will need time, so be realistic. Large multinationals have teams dedicated to each route but, in the likelihood that this won’t be the case for you, you’ll need to prioritise. If you have no dedicated internal marketing resource then focus on just one or two routes. If you do have someone whose job title is ‘marketing’ then you could expand this to a maximum of perhaps six or seven.
Setting goals
Just like your business objectives, having goals within the routes to market you are pursuing will help to steer your strategy and provide you with a method of assessment.
Each goal needs to be related to your business objectives. This might seem simplistic, but it is a necessary step. For a start, you’ll soon get a feel for whether or not your objectives are achievable.
Here’s a good example:
Referrals – Obtain two new clients from referrals within the first six months of the year
Clearly, this is going to help with the business objective and it feels realistic. Here’s an example of a different type of goal you might find on a marketing strategy:
Social media – Reach 2,000 Twitter followers
OK, so this might give you a bigger audience, but are you confident this goal contributes to the business objectives as much as, say, the referral goal above? It seems less definite and, therefore, it’s probably not right for your strategy. Back to the drawing board on social media!
Creating action
Finally, the ‘doing’ part! Now you’ve got a vision of the end goal in mind, you can create actions underneath each of your route to market objectives. Each action must pass the following four tests:
- It must contribute to the goal for that route to market
- It must have a timescale
- It must have an owner
- You must be able to assess when it is complete
Let’s continue our example around referrals. So far we have the following:
Business objective – In the next 12 months, we are going to add 12 new clients who match our ideal client profile
Referrals – Obtain two new clients from referrals within the first six months of the year
The question becomes: ‘What can we do now to make this happen?’ This is the part that might require some reading of marketing blogs, especially when it comes to routes to market you’re less familiar with. For our example though, how about the following…
- Mary to build a list of all clients we consider ‘likely to refer us’ by Monday morning
- Jon to liaise with design agency to create a ‘referral scheme flyer; brief to be given to the design agency by Monday morning. Design to be back with us by Friday’
- Mary to send flyer out to all identified clients by a week on Monday
- Jon to ring five clients a day for ‘catch up calls’ during the week, commencing two weeks on Monday and gauge reaction to the flyer
Meet, assess, repeat
You’ve done it! You now have a marketing strategy that is working to help you achieve your objectives.
The final step is to create a ‘marketing group’. If you have internal marketing resource then this could just be your marketing person and one senior individual. In small advisory firms, it could be all of you and perhaps an external consultant.
The group should meet at least monthly to review the strategy. What worked and what didn’t? Which actions are complete and which are not? Which routes to market are the most successful? Can more time be pushed there?
As actions complete, try to add new actions. As you exhaust some routes to market, drop them, at least for the time being, and pursue new ones. An external view on your strategy at this point can be really valuable; how would your consultant assess your efforts so far? What would they change?
You’ll soon find that your marketing strategy document will become a constantly changing, vibrant hub for your activity, which all now pulls towards your business objectives!
Good luck!
Sam Turner is Head of Digital at ClientsFirst, a digital marketing agency specifically for professional services firms. Visit: www.clients-first.co.uk.
