We have broken down small business branding into a few distinct stages of growth. This framework suggests that there are different methods and goals for your branding efforts depending on where your practice lies along the growth continuum. In order to properly manage your corporate brand you must identify the stage of growth you are in and then utilize the appropriate techniques for that stage. Whether you’re in the pre-growth stage, the latent growth stage or in the recognized stage you can you can build upon your brand and get the most out of it.

Pre-growth

It may surprise you to learn that branding begins even before the business is officially started. The early stages of branding are more conceptual and are the building blocks for many future endeavors within the company. Cultural ideology is at its inception at this point in time. As the entrepreneur, your personal vision is most aligned with the actual brand and brand perception at this time. As the practice grows so grows the divergence between the owner’s vision and the company’s image. This is because more and more elements are affecting the inputs of the overall brand. Establishing those ideals early on, even as concept is imperative for forward brand growth to occur. There is nothing more destructive to a brand than starting over. Thus, starting over in later stages of brand construction becomes increasingly costly as growth goes on. The pre-growth stage consists of creating a company personality. How do you want employees to view your company? Clients? What is your brand vision? When people think of your brand, what types of associations do you want them to link to? What is your company name? Can you live with that name for the life of your practice? The most important brand establishments that need to occur are core values. Establishing a motto and a mission statement is crucial to the success of a company in future stages of growth. As your practice grows the more influencing factors come into play, especially your employees. This is why core values change over time. The company’s image is made or broken in interactions between management and employees, employees and clients and management and vendors. Collectively these interactions and their associated experiences mold the company’s identity.

Latent Growth

As the practice grows, abstract branding becomes less useful to the company overall. At this point setting in stone taglines and company policy is through trial as well as attention to employee feedback. Employees need to feel that they are somehow helping to mold the direction of the company in order for them to best fill the brand roles. It is at this point that testimonials start to become useful. Clients are willing to listen to other clients. However, they are not as influential as they will become in the final stage of brand growth because people are less likely to listen to their friends about something they’ve never heard of before than something that they have. At this stage corporate personality begins to take on it’s own identity. $14 million dollar a year producer Jack M. built his entire practice on a unique brand of company personality. When you listen to Jack M. talk about his practice you can gauge a bit about his corporate personality just by the way he talks. He’ll reference his office décor, the way he sits down with clients, and his ‘3lb Yorkie.’ Jack decorates his office with mafia posters and guitars signed by famous artists like Ozzy Osbourn. This type of unique atmosphere is a reflection to the client on how the company is perceived. In Jack’s office, the leisurely ambiance helps clients relax and be open and honest about their financial needs. This allows Jack to more appropriately build a financial solution for his clients. He even has Chase Bank refer clients to him!

Recognized Growth Stage

By this time, the majority of the market is saturated with the company’s brand. External stakeholders and clients have the majority of brand influence at this point through word of mouth, social media and blogs. Retaining brand equity is of the utmost importance because it is at this point where one can start to leverage their brand. The best way to do this is through public events. Special interest groups, communities and local sports teams are constantly in need of sponsorship and volunteer work. Sponsor local teams; hold special fund raising events for charity and other very public expressions of community service to add equity to your brand. Once the brand is strong enough to have

After speaking with a small group of our advisors I would like to address a common question that seems to be repeating itself throughout our ranks. How do you compete with broker dealers who would have your potential clients put their money into the market? There are two reasons why a client would make this choice. Their broker dealer has a better relationship with them than you do or their greed got the best of them because they don’t think they’ll lose that money in the market.

There are two ways to go about handling this. The best way is to build a better relationship and stay in front of the client more than the broker dealer. There are many ways to do this and you should use more than one. Become friends with your clients on social media. Interact with them often. Utilize drip email marketing campaigns to stay in front of them and remind them of your value proposition. Leverage testimonials that show successes in your annuity clients and failures in the market. We have slides to help you illustrate this.

The second way to handle this situation is to not go after the entire portfolio. Ask your client about their safe money options within their portfolio. A diversified portfolio will likely have bonds, which is the common balance to stocks. Few bonds are considered riskless and those that are offer low returns. Offer annuities as a safe money option that will lower the overall risk of their portfolio and still give a potential upside.

If you have any questions regarding safe money options as they apply to portfolios call 800 256-1696 and we’d be happy to help you.

There is one overwhelmingly powerful concept that email marketers need to understand and that is the value added concept. Emails that drip on clients or potential clients must always add some value to the client’s lives. This may include valuable information, unique service offers, discounts and the like.

There are three main points to email marketing: Staying in front of potential and existing clients, moving potential clients closer to the purchase decision and differentiating yourself from your competitors. They generally fall somewhere within the path of a welcome, categorized, education, why us, buy in decision and post purchase email.

The welcome is just that, it welcomes the client to your business, describes the services that you offer and so on. Keep these short and sweet with plenty of unique outlets that allow recipients to categorize themselves based on the specifics about your service that interests them the most.

The categorized emails are targeted to the specific needs or interests of the client. Look to mainstream retailers for the most advanced email marketing systems. Macy’s for example has a great website that allows you to browse their merchandise. Their website tracks what you’ve clicked on and then sends you emails for specific items that you appeared to be interested in. Your categorized emails don’t have to be so advanced, but they should involve some sort of fact finding.

Education is always important in email marketing. Knowledge is valuable and gives your clients a reason to read your emails. Education emails entail teaching your clients about their interests.

Why should your client do business with you specifically? This is the question your “Why Us” email/s should answer. What do you offer that your competition doesn’t?

Buy-in decision emails are the confirmation of purchase, an initial thank you and an offer of continued service and product support.

Post purchase emails include things like client satisfaction surveys and re-education for perhaps another sale. They also should from time to time include exclusive offers for those that have done past business with you.

Some helpful tips on starting off on the right track:
1) To avoid getting caught in spam filters, never use ALL CAPS
2) Send a test to see if it gets caught in your spam filter
3) More text, less pictures usually helps pass the spam filter
4) Consistent messaging helps keep in front of clients, minimize unsubscribes, and not trigger email blocking
5) Always include an unsubscribe option at the bottom of every email.

Email marketing is a great way to drip on clients that aren’t to making the buying decision yet. It also helps stay in front of past clients and increase your brand awareness. For questions with email marketing, contact Senior Advisory Group at 800 256 1696.

As we grow older our brains age with us. These changes are often seen in the way that seniors interact with modern and fast changing technology. Our ability to think quickly and adapt to changes in complex systems diminishes passed age 70 and is even more apparent passed age 80.

A common misconception is that it is complexity itself that seniors have trouble dealing with. Seniors can grasp complexity just as easily as anyone else. It is the ability to re-cognate changes in those complex systems that they have difficulty with. Through web design mechanics we know how to better avoid certain elements that make web surfing difficult for our mature friends.

There are two basic ways that the brain solves problems using memory. It is similar to the way a computer works. In a computer, there are two types of memory; a hard drive and RAM. The hard drive acts as a long-term storage device for saving information that doesn’t really change much over time. RAM (Random Access Memory) is for immediate use and allows the computer to quickly access smaller portions of memory for short-term functions. In seniors the ‘hard drive’ memory is working just fine but as we age, our RAM doesn’t work as well as it used to. This makes it harder for seniors to adapt quickly to changes made in technology (something that their ‘hard drive’ lacks large amounts of information on because it’s new).

There are different levels on which seniors use websites. Some rarely get on and when they do, it’s only to get specific information. Others get on frequently and are looking for social interaction or to contribute or receive information on multiple topics of interest.* This means you should design your website to serve the needs of both of these types of seniors. In order to do this, you need to know a bit more about seniors’ preferences when it comes to websites. Although it may come natural to us, seniors aren’t used to navigating multiple pages to find the information that they need. They prefer to have a single page with everything that they want to access. They also can’t process a large amount of new information quickly, so having that page scroll so that it segments that information into smaller more easily processed ‘bites’ is much easier for seniors to navigate.

Since new learning and changes to learned mediums of technology is difficult for people over 70, particular needs should be taken into consideration with regards to seniors. If changes are to be made to your website, they should be done in small increments or at least have the option of using the old website until the new site can be fully learned. If particular functions are to be added, an instructional video will help seniors better cope with changes in complex technologies. It can take over a month for seniors age 80+ to relearn websites that they were once used to* Seniors tend to prefer a flat structure with a scrolling feature to one with multiple pages for back and forth navigation. Research would also suggest that seniors would be better able to navigate sites that worked and were designed similarly to sites that they are already used to navigating.

*Burmeister, Oliver “Websites for Seniors: Cognitive Accessibility,” International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society Vol. 8, No. 2, 2010, pp: 99-113

Naming

A brand should fit you and your practice from the beginning. Changing your brand somewhere along the line can have long lasting and costly effects. All the work you’ve put into your brand will vanish and have to be restarted. That is why it’s so important to have a solid foothold and concept that you can be happy with from the beginning.

What is the motivator behind what you do? Are you a single character who’s mission is to help retirees have enough income to last the rest of their lives? Is your practice more of an idea in general where multiple employees are working towards getting the most out of your client’s IRAs? How do you plan on using your message to build your brand? What activities are you going to partake in in order to jump start yourself. Boil these concepts down to their most raw and primal form. Once you have established this, you can move on to the next step.

Identity

People need visual and/or audio imagery in order to associate your brand with the constructs you have put in place within the public realm. The second step is to come up with the graphics that will guide the look and feel of those constructs. Like with step one, you will need a solid footing that you are happy with for a long time. Changing the look and feel of your identity will ultimately take from your brand equity because it was established and recognized and would bring you back to square one. A couple huge controversies come to mind when exploring the headlines surrounding identity changes. Both Tropicana and Gap attempted to change their logo at one time. In both situations fan/customer outrage forced the giants to abandon their new look and revert back to their classic brand. This is because it wasn’t worth their established brand equity to make the switch.

Your identity should remain the same throughout all your marketing efforts. This ensures that your clients get the message right and aren’t confused when it comes to recognizing your brand. You’ll get the most for your efforts.

Identity System

These are the processes, automated or otherwise that occur with respects to your brand. How will your facebook fan page harness the power of your brand and identity? How do the products you offer resound with your promise? Whole Foods is a great example of a company who’s products resound with their promise. Think about it, almost everything they sell is sustainable, healthy and natural. Most importantly, they have great stories to go along with their products and services. Looking on their website you can check out their ‘how to cook a perfect chicken’ which entails a pdf that’s not just a how to but a story on backyard grilling for summer that places you, the griller, as a character in hosting the best summer bbq ever. The reason it’s the best relates directly back to their promise; it’s fresh, natural, and healthy. When you read their story you envision your version of the perfect summer bbq and cast you as the actor playing the part of the head griller. That is the essence of the consumer buy-in.

Many very successful advisors have a unique way that they go about getting in touch with clients. The best part about it is that it’s fun and includes their favorite hobby. Many advisors are participants in local events already. Without knowing it, you may have something that you do just for fun that can become a way for you to create new clients and advocates.

Create educational content regarding your event. This helps people join in the discussion and compel new comers to attend. Once people start utilizing your facebook event page, you have a one-stop shop for your entire event marketing needs. Listen to your followers. They will help you improve your events for the future and give you new clients. This is free publicity and feedback. Furthermore, if you are using the ‘event’ function to Facebook, you automatically get an RSVP list and can follow up with everyone with a simple click. This saves time and money. Although it may seem like a no brain-er to some, make sure to engage in conversations online through your facebook to encourage attendance and involvement. This will grab the attention of others and boost attendance. Don’t worry if some feedback is negative. If this happens, don’t get too defensive. Leave it up unless it’s offensive because it adds to the realistic nature of social media and shows that you aren’t worried about their comment. Encourage interaction surrounding the comment so that a negative can be turned into a positive.

Utilize ‘spring board’ topics that encourage socialites to engage in conversation. For example, you could post a picture of a hot rod you saw on the street and ask people to rate it or post something hotter. Give people a message to ‘share,’ ‘like,’ or ‘retweet.’ This will start the buzz about your event and get people talking.

After your event, have a ‘debriefing’ where you go over what worked and what can be improved for the next event. Set goals and objectives based on your feedback and self-analysis. Make sure that these goals are specific, measurable, accountable, realistic, and time based. Most importantly have fun! We hope you enjoyed learning about how to turn your favorite activities into a client-meeting tool. If you are looking for more information on how to plan events, contact Senior Advisory Group at 1(800) 256-1696 or visit our website at www.senioradvisorygroup.com

Even senior market advisors are open to the danger of negative digital feedback. I recently spoke with an advisor who had a particularly disgruntled client. This client created a blog posting online about how bad the service he had was and it quickly became the number one hitting article when you Googled the advisors’ company name. The advisor asked me if there was any way to get rid of that blog post and the answer is…No. This is why creating happy clients is so important as a preventative measure and why having a lot of positive feedback from clients for the public to see is so important.

A recent article from www.financial-planning.com states that, ‘80% of potential clients expect a call back regarding their interest in services within 12 hours.’ This makes sense because most people now come to expect immediate service upon expressing their interest. According to www.financial-planning.com, this is especially important with regards to wealthier clients. Wealthier clients are also much more likely to be tech savvy. This means that they have the ability to post feedback online regarding the services that they have received. Think of your annuity practice like a being at a party. When someone you don’t know starts talking to you; you wouldn’t walk away and expect to come back to talk to them in a couple days. As a consumer, you likely have called in to a store before to see if they carry a particular product you wanted to purchase. What if the person answering the phone said, “Thank you for your request. We’ll get back to you in a couple days. You’re still important to us?” You would likely call the next supply company and get your product from them. If anybody asked you about your experience, you would tell him or her about how slow he or she was and the horrible customer experience that you had. This is no different for financial advisors. Your competition is nearby and it’s easy for potential clients to get the same or a similar product and service from them.

The client experience is a continuing relationship. Keeping existing clients is just as important in the long term as is creating new clients. By keeping in touch with your existing clients, you can help create a positive PR image. Online forums are an up and coming way that existing clients can interact with you, other clients, and potential clients. By hosting it on your own website, you control inputs and outputs and can pick and or remove posts as you see fit.

Posture One: develop a strategy first. The social media scene is a make it or break it world. There is nothing you can do if a someone posts negative comments on their Facebook wall, or Tweets out the terrible service they had with your practice. It is an all encompassing medium that spans further than can easily be measured. In the social media world, slow and steady wins the race Meaning, long term commitment and daily activity is absolutely key. Participating in social media should be part of your daily routine like brushing your teeth. Develop a plan of social media action using the SMART goals technique so that you have a guideline for implementation.

Posture Two: This is something you will have to be active in everyday. We can help you get started and offer advise, but maintaining it is something that you and only you must train yourself in and make part of your daily practice and life. You must address any concerns immediately and with decisive action. If a client posts something on your wall and it is not addressed that day, it can easily lead to a negative impression. If you address it immediately and decisively, you’re actions will be rewarded with praise and positive advocacy because the whole world just saw the way you dealt with that situation.

Posture Three: Become a SME. Learning the ropes of social media tool isn’t going happen overnight. This will take time and dedication and by learning how these tools work, you will be rewarded. Your son, daughter, niece or nephews likely know quite a bit about social media as they have been using these tools for years. Have them show you basic navigation a how the interaction works -or- call us. We are always happy to walk you through the process.

Posture Four: To properly kick-off your social media strategy, you will need a platform from which you can draw up enough material to properly launch and get noticed without falling short. This means you have prepared posts, tweets, blogs, videos etc to be sent out everyday for at least two weeks. Bare minimum, this should include 14 posts, 80 tweets, 6 blogs, and 4 videos if you are planning on successfully navigating the social media galaxy of Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and Youtube. After your two weeks are up, you should be tweeting a bare minimum of four times a day and optimally, twenty two times per day. Your Facebook should include a daily post, a weekly post to your blog and one to two videos a month for your Youtube channel. People want to see activity, specifically interaction.

Posture Five: What makes a great post/tweet/blog/video? It A)actively took into account the social chatter for your niche industry and B) it addressed current situations/concerns and even interacts with specific clients. One way to think of it is to start off every post/tweet/… with this thought, “I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about _____ recently and I wanted to [set the record straight] [show you how it works] [take is a step further] [share my thoughts] [you get the idea, just pick one or make up your own]. You can start this off a number of ways such as, “I appreciate everyone’s response or feedback on [subject X]” -or- “I’ve been getting a lot of comments on [subject X], so I made this [post/tweet/blog/video].” Address key issues by actively listening to the chatter that is out there about your niche industry and then actively participate and interact with your potential clients.

Posture Six: Active listening is the most key component in your ability to react quickly and decisively within the social media galaxy. This means that half of your time spent within these realms should focus on research and actively listening for those product related, industry related, local news and industry specific legislative changes that cue you into action. As a stakeholder, you are part of this community, participate in it.

Posture Seven: Pay close attention to the impact of your social marketing. There are three things that will affect this, marketability, reach v frequency, and impressions. By paying close attention to these factors and constantly adjusting to fine tune your strategy, you can find achieve maximum effectiveness with the least amount of work.

Posture Eight: Embrace your social media galaxy. It is the future of peer-to-peer marketing and you are a part of it. Have fun and find your place within it that motivates and excites you and your practice. If you need some insight in to navigating your social media galaxy, simply give us a call or check out our social media sites on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube today!

Check out the latest offer from SAG on marketing, PR and client engagement! In the financial industry, it’s a great tool to get clients in front of you. It puts you on a stage and allows for you to create credibility and competence. Senior Advisory Group has developed a fool proof method for bringing in new clients while showing appreciation to your loyal existing clients. The key to seminars is engagement – engaging your existing clients, engaging new prospects, and your existing clients engaging your new prospects. The last form of engagement is one many advisors miss the boat on. The great thing about doing seminars is their return on investment. Your cost of a seminar is so little compared to what you get back in return. One of our top producing advisors in a town with a population of 40,000 started doing seminars 7 years ago – his first three seminars produced little results his fourth yielded $70,000 in commission and he has been doing a seminar a month for 7 years writing $14,000,000 annually since. With just doing seminars once a month, you can create a substantial increase in your client count and annual income.

Most of the marketplace is buying into the idea that seminars do not work because the crowds are not as big as they used to be. This could not be further from the truth – the only difference between today and yesterday is you must be much more creative and effective in your marketing pre and post seminar.

What day of the week are you doing seminars? What time of day? Are you setting them up during a busy holiday time of year? Any and all of these can make a huge difference. For example, we had an advisor contact us who had setup a seminar for the day before Christmas Eve. You can imagine how many people attended. During the holidays people are concerned about their money so his response was great but people are busy during this time of year getting last minute holiday preparations done. Think about the time of day you set seminars up. What time of day are your clients most likely to have dinner or be available to attend a seminar? What day of the week? Keep your eyes and ears out for any potential schedule conflicts that may occur to ensure maximum attendance.

Your geographic location and local demographic can have a huge impact on the way you need to do seminars in order to see the results you’re looking for. Call one of our marketers today and we can help you setup the perfect seminar for you and your practice.

There are three steps to converting your visitors to leads. Step one is to peak there interest. This means that you have to motivate people to become interested in what you have to offer. Second, is to give something to get something. People won’t just fill out a form and give you their information because it is on your website under ‘contact us.’ They want something, they need a reason to give you their information. This can be as simple as “Free Consultation” to an ebook giveaway that they get to download after inputting their information on a landing page. For any offer that captures information, you must have a landing page. There are a few key structures that differentiate a successful from an unsuccessful landing page.

Steer or limit navigation: This means that your page is simple and visually obvious as to it’s function. There also should not be buttons that navigate the user to other non-landing page websites. The only navigation button on a landing page should be a submit info button.

Form above content: This means that the form is easily visible and at the top of the page. User’s can be easily confused or simply not know that a form is even on the page if it is hidden below a large amount of content.

Call to Action: “Contact us” is not an acceptable call to action because it doesn’t incite the visitor to act. “Click here to Download your FREE copy of _____” tells what the visitor gets if they click. A true call to action incites the participant to do something for something and incites them strongly to do that by giving them a reason that is simple and easy.

Refer to Webinars or Seminars: Using these tools brings the visitor one step closer to a face-to-face meeting. It also allows for interaction to occur or for questions that they may have to be answered.

Can easily produce measurable ROI: This means that there is some sort of key or tag that identifies all your leads to be coming from your specific landing pages as a source. This way any sales incurred can be attributed to that specific campaign and landing page.

Think of most small business websites like a book on the back shelf of a metropolitan public library without no index. There are literally millions of other books in that library and nobody is going to read it because it doesn’t stand out at all. If you aren’t pointing traffic to your landing pages from external sources such as your SEO, PPC ads, or Social Media, there is only a very slim chance that any leads all at can be generated through your site.

In order to optimize or make the most of your potential clients online experience, you need to understand the mindset of the visitors. What is it that your ideal client’s are looking for? Identify those things and build your landing pages and giveaways around capturing potential clients. Where on your site are links to your landing pages? Do you blog about the latest giveaways or webinars? Do you have information on your homepage that would direct potential clients as to where they can get to those offers? Are you establishing trust through your giveaways and the methods employed to compel your visitors to dig deeper? How realistic does your offer sound? If it’s too good to be true it usually is and your clients know this. Is it easy? All your client wants to do is get to that ebook your giving away. Don’t frustrate them with pointless navigation or advertising. These concepts can be applied to your PPC or email ads as well. Here is a digital ad checklist for requirements that our digital media should meet:

· It has compelling information and a strong Call to Action

· It is specific, clean and simple.

· It pops, meaning it is visually appealing and prominent.

· All images and anchor text links users to your landing page

· Spam test you ad if it’s being sent through email to see what it looks like when opened from your junk or spam folder. This ensures that its appeal isn’t lost when it goes in the junk!
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