How should you measure your firm’s marketing activities? All too often we look at what other more established or bigger firms are doing and get frustrated when we compare our efforts to theirs.
Recently my 8-year-old daughter began competitive swimming. It is a joy to watch her win a heat in the events she is competing in but that is not what my wife and I have focused on as the measure of success. If she comes in last in a heat but beats her last best previous time by 3 seconds that is a huge win for her. As a beginner, the measure of success is to continue to beat her last best time.
How are you measuring your firm’s marketing effort?
For a lot of RIAs between $250M and $2.5B in AUM, their marketing activities lack consistency making it hard for them to track and measure the progress of their marketing efforts. In a sea of day-to-day operational issues, marketing initiatives can easily get deprioritized and neglected. If your firm suffers from Marketing ADD (Attention Deficient Disorder), you’re not alone and there is a solution.
Pick a place to start and build on it
Don’t let the wirehouse firms with their massive media and marketing budgets keep you from getting focused. So you won’t be able to run commercials in the Super Bowl or dominate Youtube with digital video ads on retirement planning and wealth management services. So what? Don’t compare yourself with them because it’s not going to help you get your program off the ground and keep it off the ground. Pick one or two things you can do, put a 12-month marketing calendar together, execute and track your results each quarter.
Movement Creates Momentum
A cliché I know, but it’s true. If you want to see your firm thrive and prosper in the digital age, you’ve got to take action and begin your financial marketing efforts. Develop micro- campaigns that you can pilot within your RIA for 6 or 12 months. This will help you to organize your internal resources, identify talent gaps that may exist, source qualified partners and execute, test, measure and refine. The Morgan Stanley’s of the world did not build their marketing functions overnight. They are continually moving forward and learning from their efforts, building on what works and eliminating what doesn’t.
Get on the Blocks and Compete
A focus on consistent activity and continual improvement is the first step in growing your firm’s marketing capacity. Whether it’s starting a monthly blog on your firm’s website or developing a quarterly digital newsletter to clients and prospects, get your executive team together, set some target dates, assign responsible parties and go for it. Get your compliance officer involved early so that he or she is the loop from the beginning.
What do you need to be successful?
Please take a minute and send me an email if there is a topic you would like to see me cover. I am here to help you grow your firm’s marketing capacity so let me know what you would like to see more of in this blog.
