Being a successful financial planner, advisor, or wealth manager means delivering great results for your clients today. It also means spending time working on your business to attract new clients for tomorrow.
After all, without new business coming in, your firm can quickly stagnate.
New business prospects are often referred to as leads. Although some days it can feel like leads are dropping from the sky, there are other days you wonder if business has completely dried up.
If you want to avoid this feast or famine cycle, it’s important to put a plan in place that will steadily feed you with new leads over time.
In our last article, called Top 10 Lead Generation Tips for Financial Advisors in 2023, we looked at a variety of online lead generating ideas. Here, we continue the conversation with a deep dive into four offline-focused methods you can use to grow your financial planning business, and what to do with those leads once you’ve acquired them.
Let’s dive right in.
4 Ways to Get Leads for Your Financial Planning Practice
1. Become a Community Champion
Being a successful financial planner is all about building trust. And what better way to build a trustworthy reputation than to become a community leader?
Showing up consistently and repeatedly in your local community will help people recognize you as a reliable, involved, and committed member of the business community. Plus, you’ll be able to meet new people and expand your network.
There are many ways to get involved in your community and build goodwill. Some ideas include:
a. Sponsor a Local Sports Team
Local sports teams are an integral part of a community, and sponsoring one is a great way to get your name out there and demonstrate that you care about your community. This can take a little bit of investment but it’s well worth the effort.
Sponsoring youth sports teams, in particular, provides a great opportunity to expose your firm name to a new group of potential leads, while showing that you support the future generation. You can also feel good, knowing your sponsorship will help keep teams flourishing. And that’s a win for everyone.
b. Create a Presence at Local Festivals
With the nice weather comes local festivals of all types – from music festivals, to food festivals, to farmers’ markets. Festivals offer a great opportunity to get out into your community, meet new people, forge connections, and ultimately, generate leads.
Plus, since they’re local, they’re helpful for expanding your network for potential new clients and partners. This can pay off in spades.
To participate in local festivals, there are usually a variety of options for advertising, partnering, or sponsoring events at different price points. It’s always exciting to have your logo appear on a banner or brochure – fostering community awareness about your brand and ultimately new leads.
c. Donate to Charities and Causes
If you’ve never made a charitable donation, now is the time to begin. Not only does it feel good, it can also be great for your business. Again, it’s a way of building trust and demonstrating your commitment.
When choosing a cause to donate to, think about what organizations align with your business values or the interests of your clients. The best types of donations are ones that combine your passions with those of your clients. You could donate to one charity only, a variety of charities in the same space, or completely different charities each time.
After you make a donation, remember to talk about it on your website in a news post, or on social media. Try to stay humble, but also share how it aligns with your values. And don’t forget to keep your charitable donation receipt for tax time.
2. Teach and Connect Others
You’re an expert in your field and you have a wealth of experience and knowledge to offer. Why not share some of that information with others? Doing so will show your network that you value collaboration and knowledge sharing, and, if done strategically, generate new leads for your business.
Here are a few ways you can bring in leads by teaching others:
a. Conduct a Local Seminar or Educational Workshop
Holding a local seminar is a great way to give value to your community and help folks learn about finances, wealth management, or other topics you know a lot about. It’s also an opportunity to make new connections.
To organize the seminar, you could reach out to your local business bureau to see if they’re looking for instructors, or you could simply host it yourself. Choose a topic that interests you and aligns with the services your business offers. Make sure you give it a catchy name and write an intriguing description, listing why attendees should join and what they can expect to learn.
When it comes time to deliver your seminar, prepare a package for participants that include learning materials, information about you and your firm, and a way for them to connect with you. You may also want to include a special bonus offer for attending the webinar.
Finally, don’t forget to collect participants’ contact information and ask if they’d like to join your mailing list. That way, you can nurture these new leads and hopefully turn them into new clients.
b. Host Lunches, Dinners, or Happy Hours
We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again: financial planning is a profession built on trust and relationships. And what better way to build trust than to invite your prospects or network to an in-person event like a lunch, dinner, or happy hour?
Most people will come out to an event that promises free food and/or beverages. Hold it at an appealing location, provide some free swag or giveaways, and you’ll have a recipe for success.
When hosting lunches, dinners, or happy hours, make sure you come prepared with business cards, an email signup list to capture leads, and ideas in your head for icebreakers and conversation starters.
Remember, this is an opportunity for folks to get to know you and your firm, so it’s ok to get a little personal. Ask attendees about their kids, pets, hobbies, or travels. Conversely, get to know what their business challenges and needs are, so you can have better insight on how to help them.
c. Create a Community
Although we said this article would talk about offline approaches to lead generation, this one spans both the offline and online worlds.
In today’s world, community is becoming even more important than ever. People want to make meaningful connections with like-minded people, whether that’s in person or online. Creating a community around your firm can bring people together, facilitate new connections, bolster your authority, and, ideally, attract new leads to your business.
Through your community, you can engage with your audience with polls, conversation-starters, and encourage dialogue between participants in your online community. An online community also gives you the chance to showcase your various services (although do this sparingly as it may be off-putting to some people).
As a bonus, you can also offer exclusive workshops, seminars, downloadables like eBooks, and so on. This will encourage and reward your community members.
3. Get Published
There are many ways to get your firm’s name out there. Getting published is one of them.
Publications such as newspapers, magazines, journals, or online publications that your target audience is already reading are the places you want to focus your effort. This could be local or national in scope:
a. Get Published Locally
If your clients are mostly local, reach out to a variety of local publications (both in-print and online; most have a version of both) and offer to pen a short article on a financial issue that might be on everyone’s mind.
b. Get Published Nationally
Have your sights set on something bigger? Some financial planners and advisors might try to secure a regular column in a national (or even international) publication. If you have the bandwidth and expertise, this can go a long way in securing your authority and generating a steady stream of lucrative leads.
As an added bonus, if the publisher allows, you can also reshare this content within your own network using your newsletter and social accounts, as well as publish excerpts from it on your own blog.
4. Create Business Partnerships
Up until this point, we’ve focused on lead acquisition using B2C (business to customer) means. However, there are also B2B (business to business) approaches you can use too.
This typically involves reaching out to other businesses who offer different services but to a similar client base (like bookkeepers, accountants, business consultants, etc) to form partnerships or referral networks.
Here are two ideas you can use to generate leads for your financial practice using B2B approaches:
a. Host an In-Person Networking Event
Organize an industry networking event and invite other business leaders from your industry. These folks aren’t necessarily your competitors, but more like team members who can help you flourish through referrals (and vice versa).
Building this network can spread awareness of your firm and increase your network. In fact, some businesses rely on this type of growth strategy almost exclusively.
In-person networking events can also include some of your best clients. Invite them to bring friends, family, and colleagues for an even larger networking event.
At the end of the day, hosting an event like this requires money, but what you can gain from it can be well worth the investment.
b. Become a Keynote Speaker
Another idea is to offer your services as a keynote speaker at industry events. Stepping onto the stage can result in many benefits for your business.
These benefits include:
- Solidifying your position as an authority in your field
- Letting other business leaders get to know you in a memorable way
- Building brand awareness for your firm
If you leave a positive and memorable impression on attendees, you can be sure that at least a few of them will pick up the phone to call you the next time they’re looking for a business like yours to refer their clients to.
More exposure, done repeatedly and done well, will almost certainly result in a steady stream of new leads for your business.
You’ve Collected Leads – What’s Next?
Picture this: You’ve put in the work and now have a steady stream of leads flowing into your financial practice’s inbox.
So, what do you do next?
You could action all of these leads manually. Or, you could rely on a platform like Value Builder to help you win more business.
Value Builder is the only sales and marketing platform that’s purpose-built for financial planners. It helps cut down on the time it takes to action leads, and provides you with all the features you need to convert more prospects into clients, including:
- Smart Content lets you share useful content with your leads, without having to spend endless hours creating it.
- Nurture Cycle makes it easy for you to stay top of mind with leads by automating emails and personalized outreach.
- Discovery Questionnaires equip you with prebuilt questionnaires that help you quickly and easily learn more about your leads so you can tailor your services to them.
- Contact Management & Alerts provide a 360 view so you can see in real-time who’s engaging with your content, enabling you to strike while the iron’s hot.
In conclusion: Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been in business for years, generating leads is a critical part of growing a healthy financial planning business.
Want more tips like this? Check out our recent blog post, Top 10 Lead Generation Tips for Financial Advisors in 2023, or visit Value Builder today.
