There are a number of steps financial planners can take to both increase client acquisition and improve client engagement.
Establishing, building and maintaining a good reputation is one of the first and best things you can do. This gives you something to promote and will help you in many other ways when it comes to client acquisition and engagement.
Second, you need to position yourself as a professional expert, so that clients and potential clients will want to do business with you. Whether this is through newsletters, websites, newspaper columns or magazine articles, you can talk about tax changes, investment changes or trends as well as any other relevant, useful information that will help set you apart in the mind of a client or potential client.
Seminars are a particularly good way to help position yourself as an expert and local identity in your community. The good thing about seminars is that potential clients can come along, listen to you, get to know you and assess whether (or not) they would like to avail themselves of your services – without having to pay upfront for this process.
Third, be persistent. It takes time to position yourself as an expert and build your business, and it also takes time for potential clients to work out if they want to do business with you. It doesn’t happen overnight, so if potential clients see you are a long-established expert they know you’re not a fly by the night adviser who comes and goes.
Fourth, if you are part of a broader financial services business or an accounting-based group, make sure the rest of your business is supporting your financial planning business. If you have captive clients within other areas of the business that could be referred onto you with a bit of selling and promotion from the relevant parties in the broader business, take advantage of that. This is about entanglement, so the more existing services a client has with you, the more likely they are to do all their business with you.
Fifth, look to your inactive client base. They are your best prospects as future clients, because the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t. Sometimes you lose a client and they might think the grass is always greener on the other side – but often it’s browner. These clients are often very willing to come back to you, so you should continue to market to them as well as any relevant inactive clients if you’re part of a bigger organisation.
