Use direct marketing to sell your products, services and tools to financial advisors

Getting your message to financial advisors

Even Google has trouble telling the difference between “marketing to financial advisors” and “marketing for financial advisors”.

Nearly 4,800 financial advisors work in the UK. It’s a competitive market place. Customers clearly value independence more, and the market is moving that direction.

Some financial advisors offer a general, all-round service to their clients and prospects, however many describe themselves as working in financial planning, as pension advisors, or investment advisors. These are the types of advisors we have listed on our database. 

If you are interested in reaching stockbrokers, insurance brokers, and mortgage brokers, they appear in a separate section of our wider UK business database.

On our marketing databases, we have the following:

• 4,733 senior decision maker names within UK firms of financial advisors,
• 3,358 financial advisor phone numbers,
• 2,843 financial advisor direct email addresses, and
• 3,802 website addresses

Two marketing techniques to reach financial advisors

Clients of More Than Words have access to a number of different marketing channels to reach decision-makers at financial advisor firms.

There are two types of approach – direct and online/digital. Using direct marketing, you contact financial advisors to introduce your products and services by email, phone, or direct mail.

Online/digital marketing focuses on creating search engine-optimised content for your website (and for third party sites) likely to be visited by your target audience. It also involves establishing a strong social media presence.

Let’s look at how marketing works and how it turns a potential client into a new client.

How B2B marketing works

Marketing and selling to financial advisors follow the same principles as marketing and selling to other B2B customers. It is incredibly rare for a business to buy a product, service, or solution without doing its due diligence first. 

There are elements you can add to your marketing strategy to attract prospective clients and to speed up the decision-making process.

The buying journey

A decision maker’s buying journey generally has three stages:

1. Awareness: the buyer recognises a problem,
2. Consideration: the buyer researches solutions and compares options, and
3. Decision: the buyer knows what they want and compares providers.

The more complex or business-critical the purchase, the longer the buying journey takes for a client.

Further, the more likely they are to involve others – especially managers and senior employees.

Client touchpoints

Prospects in the industry you’re targeting are exposed to your name, products, services, solutions, and tools through client touchpoints.

Potential clients need around seven exposures (or “touches”) before they contact the business. In fact, many B2B marketers think it’s around thirteen.

Furthermore, some touches are worth more than others.

A telemarketing call, an email newsletter, or a brochure sent through the mail will have far greater value than a social media post.

As buyers progress through their journey, the touch points you make with them have more impact near or at the point of decision than during the initial awareness phase.

This is why sometimes you can be convinced that a sale is imminent but then it is snatched away from you at the last minute.

In these cases, it’s likely that your competitor has presented them with content and/or an offer that’s just more appealing.

It is imperative that financial advisor firms see you as often as possible.

Engaging with them should always be valuable.

Demonstrate that you are well-equipped to help them overcome a problem they are facing or unlock an opportunity.

Decision-making structures

Every B2B target market has at least one senior decision maker.

Those decisions will be made with the input from senior managers and employees.

To help clients better market to particular audiences – like wealthy clients who may need investment advice and inheritance tax planning – you may offer consumer-targeted financial advisor marketing services.

Your marketing plan should cover all aspects of your service. For example:

• From the sales director’s perspective, will the marketing tools you’re offering lead to closed sales?
• Are the marketing opportunities you’re offering priced so that the sales director’s team will make a profit on each deal closed?
• As a managing director, are the financial services offered compliant and unlikely to cause reputational damage to the firm?

It’s to overcome the fear of messing up that each of your marketing items needs to cover the purchase of a product, service, or solution.

FOMU (fear of messing up)

Business relationships should be win-win. A wrong decision can be catastrophic for the financial, operational, and reputational health of a financial advisor business.

Choosing the wrong website designer or copywriter could dramatically reduce the number of online visitors and leads. Financial advisors need the right technology to protect the financial information they hold on clients and prospects.

Their existing client base will find it hard to trust them again if they get this decision wrong. Changes in recruitment firms may affect financial advisors’ ability to attract top quality talent. When financial advisors buy from your company, you become their expert.

Just as much as your unique selling points, your marketing agency should understand what stops advisors from buying from you. You won’t get the return on investment (ROI) you want from your ads unless you address both of these questions.

Direct marketing campaigns to financial advisors

Marketing to financial advisors by email, phone, or post doesn’t have to involve purchasing our entire database. In fact, you can be as selective as you like and only approach a prospective client based on their profile.

You can also use the following criteria to narrow down your search results to just the companies you’re looking for:

• number of employees
• number of branches/sites (and each office address)
• type of premises
• website address
• level of turnover (banded)
• year the original company began trading

For example, if you’re looking for firms with between 5 and 50 staff in a certain place, let your account manager know.

We’ll ensure that we limit your database to only those companies.

Email marketing to financial advisors

Our database has 2,843 financial advisor direct email addresses. Sending regular emails to your target audience delivers high-quality prospects, many of whom are ready to buy today.

Email marketing is the least expensive form of direct marketing, so it’s likely to fit the best into your marketing budget. As well as being the most affordable, it also generates the highest ROI – the average return on email spend is £42 for every £1 invested.

More Than Words note – do you have the staff, infrastructure, or expertise to run your own email marketing campaigns? If not, ask your account manager about our managed B2B email campaign services.

Telemarketing to financial advisors

Telemarketing is a highly effective way to market your products and services to financial advisors. According to the UK Data and Marketing Association, telemarketing generates £11 worth of turnover for every £1 spent on it,

With telephone marketing, you can open a two-way dialogue with decision makers within financial advisor firms. We can profile each firm we contact for you and identify prospects with the most immediate needs for your products and services.

As well as generating prospects for your sales team immediately, we can build a pipeline of prospects over the coming 12-24 months. You can also use B2B telemarketing to find out more about trends within the industry as a whole and within individual advisory firms.

We can identify the financial advisors most likely to need your products, services, solutions, and tools based upon an exploratory list of questions we ask prospects.

More Than Words note – we offer outsourced and managed B2B telemarketing campaigns to clients currently without their own in-house telesales team.

Finding new clients with direct mail marketing

One of the financial advisor marketing strategies growing in popularity with all B2B companies is direct mail.

Studies on direct mail marketing indicate that:

• 36% of business managers have responded to a direct mail campaign in the last month
• in the last six months, 22% of business managers have responded to a direct mail campaign
• 12% of the managers who responded to a direct mail campaign spent £200-£500 and 1% spent £5,000 to £10,000.

You can target specific prospects and clients by post using our database of financial advisors.

Creating a successful direct marketing plan

B2B marketing (including financial advisor marketing) is about staying visible and delivering relevant messages. About 2-4% of the recipients of your direct marketing efforts will be in the market for what you’re selling right now.

This is your chance to promote your products, services, solutions, and tools near the point of purchase. Every email, phone call, or letter further establishes your credibility and the value of what you’re offering in the minds of prospects.

The data generated by direct marketing campaigns will enable an experienced sales team to make meaningful contact with future customers.

Getting the most from your marketing strategy

You should prepare your marketing plan to include online, digital, and inbound marketing for maximum reach into your industry. 

With direct marketing, you have both clients ready to buy as well as a sales pipeline over the coming 12-24 months.

In addition you can also build an additional sales pipeline via your website and social media.

How do financial advisors choose products, services, and solutions?

Financial advisors need a wide range of products and services to provide them with a competitive edge.

Operational purchases

Financial advisors require the services of accountants, bookkeepers, solicitors, HR professionals, and more.

The nature of the data they hold on clients makes cybersecurity a priority, as does the provision of secure e-mail.

Purchases to gain competitive advantage

There is scope for financial service companies to approach advisors who they can incentivise to sell their products. As competition grows, many advisor firms are expanding the services they offer to include financial brokerage – loans, insurance, and so on.

Advisors can be approached using direct marketing to describe your financial products, how to sell them, and how to share commissions. Accounting firms may wish to build relationships with local financial advisors so that they can exchange leads.

With the growth of the internet, many investors and consumers are able to track their portfolios via web-based platforms or mobile applications. This information will likely become an important selling point for many financial advisors. Could your firm provide it?