The 1-Page Marketing Plan for Your Financial Advisory Practice

How much have you thought about marketing your practice? Do you have a plan for finding potential clients, building trust with them, and retaining them? Maybe you’ve resisted because you think a marketing plan is unimportant, takes a lot of time, and costs a lot of money.

Today’s guest not only understands why a marketing plan is critical to your business’ success, but he also has a simple framework for a 1-page marketing plan that you can create quickly and easily.

Joining the podcast today is Allan Dib. Allan is a serial entrepreneur, rebellious marketer, and best-selling author. Over the course of his career, Allan has founded and grown businesses across several industries, including IT and telecommunications.

His book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan, offers a simple, fast, and reliable way to implement a marketing plan that works for your business. Listen in to hear how the plan can work for you, a simple question to help you to identify your ideal target market, and how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  • Why Allan wrote The 1-Page Marketing Plan (5:25)
  • How the 1-page marketing plan works (8:05)
  • The “Before” phase: Finding and reaching your target market (10:15)
  • The “During” phase: Building trust with potential clients (19:00)
  • The “After” phase: Why marketing doesn’t end when you get the client (30:25)
  • The #1 mistake that small business owners make (39:40)
  • What you might not know about successfully implementing your marketing plan (44:00)

Links and Resources:

Allan Dib

The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd

How to Create a Sophisticated Marketing Plan in 9 Steps by Allan Dib

Successwise on Facebook

Download The 1-Page Marketing Plan Canvas for Free

Quotes by Allan:

“If you only ever got paid for getting results, who would you work with?”

“When your target market sees your ad or sees a message from you, you want the reaction from them to be, ‘Hey, that’s for me.’”

“You’re in the business of marketing financial services. You’re not in the business of just doing financial services… That mindset shift alone will be massively amazing for your business. It will make all the difference.”

After spending a decade figuring out how to market a business well, Allan decided to create something comprehensive that people could follow to market themselves. His book and plan are the holistic resources you can follow to take someone from never having heard of you to becoming a loyal fan of your business.

Below, we’re sharing three key ideas from this episode:

  • The #1 marketing mistake that small business owners make
  • Why marketing doesn’t end when you get the client
  • What you might not know about successfully implementing your marketing plan

For the rest of the episode (where we dive into the plan step by step), find the podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, or hit the link above.

The #1 marketing mistake that small business owners make

Following a one-page marketing plan isn’t necessarily complicated. In fact, the major mistake business owners make with marketing has nothing to do with the plan itself.

Rather, what they have is a mindset problem. It’s thinking, “Well, I’m a financial planner, so I’m just in the financial planning business.”

Sure, this mindset works for employees who just deliver a service and then go home to their lives at the end of the day; all they have to think about is the deliverable, and that’s fine.

But as a business owner, you need to think differently. The deliverable you provide is important, sure — you have people’s financial futures in your hands, after all. That’s a major responsibility and honour.

But your clients will never know how great your services are if they don’t know about you in the first place. Your marketing will lay out their path to finding you — it’s the critical first step to getting them through the door to begin with.

As Allan puts it, “You’re in the business of marketing financial services. You’re not in the business of just doing financial services.”

Why marketing doesn’t end when you get the client

If you’ve already taken a look at Allan’s 1-page marketing plan canvas, you might have noticed that a third of it focuses on steps you take after someone has become your client.

Many financial advisors believe that marketing ends once someone has signed the engagement letter — that all that’s left now is delivering the service.

But that’s just not the case. Here’s why marketing is important even once you’ve signed on clients:

You want to retain the client

Of course, part of the reason for this work is to retain the client; you don’t want them looking elsewhere because they’re not satisfied with your service.

You can use it to create loyal fans

Amazing marketing creates raving fans. And these fans are more likely to buy more services from you because they already trust that you have their best interests at heart. But more than that, happy loyal customers are less likely to complain, they’ll always pay on time… simply put, you can help create your own ideal clients.

You’ve already put in most of the effort

Think about it: by the time you’ve signed a client on, you’ve already done the most expensive and difficult parts of marketing. You created a plan, spent time (and likely money) putting yourself out there, and shown yourself to be the best person to meet your clients’ needs. Why waste all that hard work?

It takes just a little bit more effort to ensure your marketing continues to pay off. There’s maintaining regular communication with the client, showing them that you really care about them, and asking them for referrals. That’s what the marketing encompasses: everything outside of just straight delivering your service.

For example, this might mean spending a few minutes every month writing out handwritten cards for all of your clients who have birthdays coming up. It could mean making it easy for them to offer value to their network by referring you to friends and colleagues.

The key is to have all of these activities as part of your plan and systematically ensuring that they’re happening when they need to.

Hint: For a great example of an advisor who goes above and beyond for his clients, listen to our interview with Jamie List on successfully growing a practice with high service standards.

What you might not know about successfully implementing your marketing plan

Even with limiting your marketing plan to one page, you might feel overwhelmed by all the marketing activities you need to do to make your business thrive.

The thing is, you don’t have to do them all alone.

Allan explains that every business needs three types of people:

  • The entrepreneur (the visionary and risk-taker)
  • The specialist (the expert in the field)
  • The manager (the person who ensures the business runs smoothly)

If we had to guess, we’d say you’re the entrepreneur, the specialist, or both. That means that making sure the office runs efficiently every day — that clients are taken care of and marketing campaigns are happening — probably isn’t your favourite activity.

And by all means, focus on your strengths: coming up with great ideas and delivering an amazing service.

There are people who do love the systematic aspect of taking care of day-to-day tasks. Those are the people you want to hire to take care of your marketing (and other business tasks you may not love).

Implementing your marketing plan is key, but you don’t have to do it all yourself. Plan out what needs to get done every day, week, and month in terms of your marketing efforts, and then decide who can implement them for you.

Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear an in-depth explanation of the 1-page marketing plan and how you can apply it to your financial advisory practice — including how you can differentiate yourself from other financial advisors and what really drives referrals. You can find the show here on this page or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher so you don’t miss any episodes.

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