Jan 15, 2021
A marketing expert that we’ve grown to know and appreciate is Mary Rose Maguire.
She’s the mind behind The Maverick Advisor and helps financial advisors and consultants reach better clients and strengthen their business. She also wrote a great book called THE MAVERICK ADVISOR: The New Rules of Marketing for Financial Advisors and Consultants - Get Great Clients, More Respect, and the Fees You Deserve, which we recommend you pick up after listening to the show.
So we asked her to join the podcast to discuss these new rules of marketing and share a little of her wisdom. One of Dan’s greatest frustrations in helping advisors is seeing the amount of money that is being wasted on bad marketing. This has been exacerbated during COVID as people panic and don’t make great decisions.
The goal of this episode is to help you ditch the things that aren’t working and focus on the tactics that are. Her principals are not exclusive to the financial services industry. She also brings a lot of great insights from outside of the industry, which is why they work.
We kick off the conversation talking about direct marketing. There’s an general definition that exists but we would suggest that direct marketing is a system where you only market to people that have contacted you first. That means it comes after you create a lead magnet that generates that lead. This goes against the idea that you can assume everyone in a specific zip code is a potential client. We’ll get into this in more detail on the show.
From there we move to one of her big passions, branding. This is a place where you can differentiate your business from others. What she’s learned through studying and researching branding is that financial advisors can take a lot of approaches to branding without spending a lot of money on it. She’ll share some of those.
A specific area of branding that advisors specifically struggle with is the Unique Selling Proposition or USP. This is the phrase or slogan that sets you apart. Domino’s ’Pizza in 30 minutes or less’ is a USP that became very well-known. What Maguire suggests for advisors is to sit down and figure out what you value. Determining that will help you create that USP and the service you’re going to provide. This USP idea also ties into finding your niche.
Regardless of what you decide, consistency is key. From your brand to your voice to your messaging, the marketing you decide to do needs to be consistent.
The next part of our discussion today will be about email marketing. Full disclosure, Mary Rose writes many of the emails that go out from our business so you’ve likely already seen some of her work. She’ll share a few of her strategies and techniques for crafting emails that actually get people to read them. A couple keys to remember are ask a question and tell a story. The question hooks them in and the story provides them with a personal touch.
The final topic we’ll get her thoughts on is direct mail. It’s a marketing technique that a lot of people are moving away from, but she’s still a big proponent of this strategy.
So as you go through the episode today, keep an ear out for some of these topics that we cover:
We’d encourage you to get her book to learn more about her strategies. You can find it here: http://themaverickadvisor.com/
For more on this topic and other strategies to growing your business, join us over at RenegadeAdvisor.net.
Where to find the topics in this episode:
0:39 – Setting up today’s conversation
1:57 – Interview begins
5:03 – What is ‘direct marketing’?
9:33 – Small businesses shouldn’t be spending a lot of money on branding
12:28 – Branding strategies
13:29 – The Unique Selling Proposition
18:42 – Finding your niche
21:57 – Using your voice
24:14 – Consistency is key
29:22 – Email Marketing
32:58 – How to write an engaging email
41:02 – How many emails should you send?
44:48 – Direct mail