The importance of branding for financial advisors is mostly important to the people who sell branding items – brochures, postcards, newsletters etc. Unless you are already one of the top 10% of producers in your community and you want to move beyond your 10% market share, branding won’t help you so don’t worry about it. Of much greater importance than branding is having superior direct response marketing. Financial advisor marketing often turns to issues of less-than- paramount importance (e.g. branding) to the sacrifice of the important (generating leads).
Branding is oft spoken about because it is important to larger organizations. Bank of America needs to have good branding. Cisco needs to have good branding. John A. Smith financial advisor or Ben Proctor, Insurance Agent, doesn’t need to have good branding. What John A. Smith and Ben Proctor need are an awesomely successful and productive lead generation/direct response system so that these professionals talking to plenty of prospects and get plenty of new clients. If you already have 10% of the available clients in your town, then you need to turn your attention to your branding and building an image. However, my bet is you don’t even have one percent of the financial services business in your town. Therefore focus on getting clients, not getting an image.
The problem with branding is you cannot control the result, it is a long-term process and the cause and effect is hard to measure. You may not see a payoff for years. Direct response marketing on the other hand will provide results this week. If you mail 1000 postcards and get 12 responses, you know what you have. You can calculate the ROI, your can make adjustments and tweak your mailings to success. Would you rather have a new client in 10 days or potentially, maybe many new clients in two years? My guess is you’re interested in more immediate results and branding is not the key to get there. That’s not to say branding is bad, it just costs money and takes time thereby taking resources away from the far more important direct response marketing. Money put into any of the following will produce far faster and far more identifiable results:
Direct mail
Seminars
Internet marketing (pay per click marketing)
Newspaper advertising
Radio advertising
TV advertising
All of the above must be used in a way that is not oriented toward building your image or building your name but rather getting people to respond i.e. pick up the phone, send back a card, attend a seminar or do something so that they take a step toward you to become your next client. If you do your direct response marketing actively and effectively, then in a couple years we can talk about how to do branding well.
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