The best and easiest way financial advisors can start building their personal brand
You can’t build a financial services business just with advertising.
At least, not traditional advertising. If you aren’t producing blogs, podcasts, videos, articles or any other type of content, your signal is going to be lost in the noise.
There’s just too much content and choice for everyone now. Even if you’re targeting a relatively small market, it’s an established principle that customers need to see your message multiple times (the key number is 7) before they’ll take action and buy from you.
It isn’t always easy, but if you as a financial services entrepreneur want to start building your business – you need to start with your personal brand.
Why do you need a personal brand?
The internet has shifted towards transparency. People have the opportunity to research you thoroughly before stepping foot in your office, so they want to see who they’re dealing with.
But your personal brand can only really come through in the content you create. That content needs to hit your potential clients with the right message at the right time – and people looking for financial advice are desperate for it.
How can your financial services businesses start producing valuable content?
It takes a combination of self-awareness and strategy to start building out a content plan. These are the key steps you should take:
Step 1. Identify the mediums you feel most comfortable in
Are you a good writer, or do you feel more comfortable on camera? Would you prefer to do a podcast? Whatever your medium, pick the one you feel most comfortable in. That will be your “pillar” for creating content, by which you can replicate into other mediums. (More on that later.)
Step 2. Determine how often you can create content
Commit to at least one piece of content per month, (ideally two or three). You can begin to ramp up from there.
Step 3. Identify your personas
This is where the strategic work begins. Creating strategic content requires identifying your potential customers, what their touch points are, and the type of content they’re looking for. This informs your content strategy.
Take a look at the example below, which might be a typical demographic target for a financial services business:
- Prospective customer: young women aged 18-30
- Financial needs: paying off debt, boosting super, preparing to buy a house
- Challenges: not earning enough money, too much HECS-HELP debt, house prices too high
- Content needs: career advice, ways to earn more money, investment strategies for small super balances
That’s just a broad example, but you can see how a picture starts to form together. You could use a template like this one to start building out your personas:
| Persona #1 | Persona #2 | Persona #3 | Persona #4 | |
| Prospective customer | ||||
| Customer needs | ||||
| Challenges | ||||
| Potential content needs |
Step 4. Place every piece of content you create to one of those personas
This way, your content is strategic and targeted to potential customers instead of directionless. You might decide to target one persona for every piece of content, then cycle through each one.
Remember, focus on the customer’s challenges: that’s the best place to create content that will actually resonate.
Step 5. Replicate the content across mediums
For instance, transcribe your blog post and read it as a podcast, or even a video presentation. Turn a podcast into a written article, then publish it a week after the podcast. This means you can cover more ground with just one piece of content.
Step 6. Identify the best places to publish
Think about where your audiences are, and your personas. Young people may be easier to target on Instagram, while older personas may engage more on LinkedIn or Facebook. Not to mention all the material should directly be on your website.
Remember to make it about you
Financial services can often be a dry topic, so it’s all the more important to keep your personality at the centre. It needs to be under your name, and with you as the focus. That transparency will play a huge part in getting potential customers to trust you – and establish your expertise.
Over time, that effort will pay off.