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Time to Review Your Marketing Plan

Just as investment portfolios are not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise, neither is a financial advisor’s marketing plan. There are several good reasons why advisors should set aside time each year to review their marketing plan.

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    Time to Review Your Marketing Plan

    Time to Review Your Marketing Plan

    Just as investment portfolios are not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise, neither is a financial advisor’s marketing plan. There are several good reasons why advisors should set aside time each year to review their marketing plan, including:

    • Conditions on the ground change. There are few more fluid businesses than investment management. Markets turn on a dime, while investor interests and concerns never remain static. As a consequence, marketing plans drawn up six months ago that are not messaging inflation or higher interest rates, for example, may not be relevant to the current times.
    • Unrealistic expectations. Perhaps in an ambitious moment, a goal of two blog articles a week was part of the marketing plan. Later, the advisor discovers it’s difficult to write that frequently, especially with the time demands of other, more important activities.
    • Things aren’t working. A marketing review will often reveal when something is not working, especially when it’s measured against the goals set for that marketing activity. For instance, a social media campaign’s response rate is low and new client acquisition cost is high.

    Performing Your Marketing Plan Review

    The most effective approach for reviewing a marketing plan is to assess every initiative line by line. Look at each initiative’s budget against the outcomes of that activity. Distill that into a common denominator of “new assets per dollar spent” or “number of views per dollar spent” so that you can compare each activity with a common performance benchmark.

    There are multiple ways to market, several of which we’ve written about in the past: Press Releases: A Marketing Staple; Three Reasons to Use Video in Your Digital Marketing Campaign; and Simple Steps for Social Networking Success.  Prune the activities that have failed and/or been less effective and dedicate those financial resources toward more effective activities or to fund new marketing approaches.

    More importantly, question the plan. Success has always been a function of questioning the status quo, and that’s especially relevant to marketing.  Ask yourself, “Are there more effective ways to accomplish my goals?” and “Are there better target markets?”

    Don’t be afraid to admit failure. Admitting that some marketing activity did not work as anticipated is not a personal indictment, but rather an opportunity to be more successful in the future.

    Finally, learn about new technologies and services that may help your marketing efforts in the year ahead. It could be anything from a new CRM platform to outsourcing certain marketing functions.

     

    Please reference disclosures: https://blog.americanportfolios.com/disclosures/

    Contributor

     

    Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Communications 
    631.439.4600, ext. 108 

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